Dan Morris: Divine news all round with clerics and Guinness kebabs
In the week that has welcomed the first female Archbishop of Canterbury and news of a Guinness kebab coming to the Midlands, it’s not such a bad time to be alive.
Dame Sarah Mullally was officially confirmed as the 106th incumbent of St Augustine’s chair on Wednesday in a ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral.
Following the resignation of previous archbishop, Justin Welby, following accusations that he did not do enough with information he had about a prolific abuser in the Church to prevent further abuse from taking place, Dame Sarah has taken up her new mantle with a pledge to do more on safeguarding.
Though a heckler had a pop, Dame Sarah’s confirmation ceremony went off without any other hitches, and saw a woman finally take up the Church of England’s highest elected office. Although the CofE has allowed women to be ordained as priests since the 90s, this is the first time the top job (shy of the sovereign) has been held by one. Here’s to a positive step forward, for both women and the Church.
In other nothing-less-than divine news, it has been revealed that a Birmingham bar is set to launch a Guinness kebab in time for the Men’s Six Nations. Hallelujah!
Arriving on February 5, the limited edition beef kofta kebab will be available at all seven BOX Sports Bars across the UK – including the one in Birmingham’s Brindley Place – from the start of the tournament.
As someone who, admittedly, pays homage at the altars of Kebabylon more often than he does at the Church of England’s churches, this has quite possibly pipped Dame Sarah’s confirmation to the post for me as ‘good news story of the week’. And with the following supplied description, I’m expecting a few more converts to follow suit… “The beef is marinated in Guinness, giving the meat the deep, rich flavour of the black stuff, before being wrapped in a handmade flatbread, drizzled with a sticky homemade Guinness chipotle glaze and topped with fresh mint yoghurt,” say the architects of this gluttonous gem. “Yes, it even comes with a creamy white head.”
No more words – just get in my belly. The kebab is a Great British institution, and the West Midlands and Shropshire boast some of the finest examples to be found across the land.
Now that the January health kick is officially over, I’ll be getting stuck back into plenty of them with gusto.
For the back half of this week’s musings, I’m going to pay tribute to a lady who despised doner, gyros and shawarma in every form – but apart from this she wasn’t half bad.
Yesterday would have been my mum’s 71st birthday. She died in 2021 at the age of 66 after a battle with lung cancer. Despite her aversion to possibly the planet’s greatest culinary pleasure, she was the greatest lady I ever knew, and has left a hole that all of the mixed-meat specials in the land couldn’t possibly fill.
It hasn’t even been five years since she’s been gone, but from the time we said goodbye the world has changed so much, and I sometimes wonder how much of it she would now recognise.
AI advancement would doubtlessly have made her feel uncomfortable, and I don’t think she’d much have cared for the farce that UK politics has become since she passed.
She’d have been excited about plans for man to finally put boots back on the Moon, but she wouldn’t have pulled a hair over the Greenland situation or any of the Trump administration’s rhetoric in general.
Truth be told, I don’t think she’d have cared much personally about Dame Sarah’s elevation. But, had she had the chance to meet her granddaughter, I think she’d have been encouraged about what the significance of this step and others like it might be for girls of her generation. My mother was almost the furthest thing away from being a woman of the cloth that you could possibly imagine – much more at home sat at a roulette table than on a church pew.
She’d have enjoyed the communion booze, so in another life might well have been mildly tempted by casual Catholicism – but that would have been as far as she’d ever have gone. With a devilish glint perpetually in her eye, I think it's fair to say that any chance of my daughter directly following in Dame Sarah’s footsteps is unlikely.
Yet, in a world where opportunities for women are a bit better than they were yesterday, she’ll get to make her mark in one way or another. Happy birthday, Mum – here’s to your granddaughter becoming ‘Minister for Kebabs’. Daddy needs feeding…
