Dr Fraser's Pill

Many have written scurrilous things about Dr Giles Beeching's plans to cut the rural Church of England down to size.

But few have had the chance to see the details. Luckily a friend of the Beaker Folk, at a South London fondue party, managed to get a photograph of his specific plans for the mid-Bedfordshire area.

Turns out that the plan is to close most churches in the area as they only run a service on Sundays. Husborne Crawley and Aspley Guise churches will be replaced with a bus service, which will spend an hour each Sunday driving around the other mid-Beds villages picking up parishioners so they can attend the 8am at Woburn.

Toddington, Chalgrave, Tebworth and Houghton Regis churches will all close, to be replaced by Houghton Parkway Church, a state of the art church in Giles Fraser's preferred "bus shelter" style, conveniently located on the Dunstable north bypass.

Ampthill church will no longer hold Church of England services. However there are plans for a restoration trust to take it over, and run Common Prayer evensong during the summer months for tourists.

The clergy will be concentrated into the towns of Bedford, Luton and Dunstable. These "minster churches" will be the bases from which the clergy will be able to drink coffee, fill in expense forms and reflect that Dr Fraser's pill may have been bitter, but it was clearly prophetic. As since the implementation of his reforms, nobody goes to Church anymore.