![]() We became comrades in our battle for equality and all the other stuff that was surging in politics. We just happened to arrive in King’s Cross at the same time and became friends. ![]() “What I was doing in a pop band was preposterous. Richard Coles and Jimmy Somerville in The Communards - "the boffin and the street urchin" Coles, a multi-instrumentalist, played with that group before the two formed The Communards. That journey inevitably calls to mind Smalltown Boy, the indestructibly moving single by Bronski Beat, Somerville’s first band. Later, the former choirboy moved to London and got caught up in the fecund music scene. He came out as gay to his mother when he was 16. Then I discovered through my Irish cousins that my father’s cousin was a hurler in Limerick.”Ĭoles was born to a middle-class family in Northampton. But they did and I got very interested in it. “Yes, I was watching this football game and I was really enjoying it and I thought: I’m sure they’re not meant to pick the ball up. I had read that his interest in Gaelic football stemmed from his enthusiasm for the TV series Normal People. ![]() I was watching this football game and I was really enjoying it and I thought: I’m sure they’re not meant to pick the ball up Which is why I am the only vicar of the Church of England to be a member of St Finbarr’s in Cork.” “It fascinated me that they were Church of Ireland, but they were greatly involved with the Celtic revival and the GAA. “I have ancestors in the Church of Ireland,” Coles says, going on to explain that his family were part of the O’Grady family that included the author Standish James O’Grady and the antiquarian Standish Hayes O’Grady. The Vicar of Dibley continued the movement. Derek Nimmo made a career out of playing funny vicars. Anthony Trollope did that in his Barchester novels. The book continues a long tradition of wrapping gentle comedy around the Church of England. A pungently, vividly verbal mother? I’ve got one of those. “One of the reasons I wanted to write it is because he’s not like me. Canon Daniel Clement, protagonist of Murder Before Evensong, has much in common with Coles. The frame has filled out since then, but the sense of near-archetypal Englishness remains. Tall and gangly, Coles offered a perfect physical complement to the taut, energetic Jimmy Somerville in The Communards. I went to buy some Solpadeine at the pharmacist and the pharmacist smiled at me and said: ‘Oh, you’re so-and-so, aren’t you?’ Maybe my national treasuredom is slightly more assured.” But I think, since then, I have graduated a little bit. “David used to call me a borderline national trinket,” says the Rev Richard Coles, mentioning his late former partner David Oldham.
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