Malclergia the Detroyer of Rest Days

I've made a discovery.  Or, to be exact, my son Keith has. But due to the horrors of what he has found, he's having a lay down. So I've promised to tell you.

Reading in a tome he should never have opened, in a crypt we didn't know was there, underneath St Bogwulf's Chapel - the little estate chapel in the grounds of the community, which Drayton Parslow's Funambulist Baptists rent at a reasonable rate - he discovered the dread secrets of Malclergia the Destroyer of Rest Days.

Now, I've never liked the terminology of "Rest Days". Always sounds a bit pious to me. "Rest Day" is all very "I'm just like God, who rested on the 7th day", whereas "day off" has a bit of working-class honesty, in my opinion. But all the same, I'm not going to annoy Malclergia, for reasons that I hope will become clear, so I'll give her her full title.

Malclergia, it transpires, is one of those spirits that don't quite belong to heaven or hell. A bit like the Woodwose, Herne the Hunter, or the Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Except unlike those others, she doesn't rock up on May Morning an hour late because primordial beings can't cope with British Summer Time.  Rather, she wanders the earth, finding annoying things to do to clergy when they're expecting a break. She's basically just a 12-year-old kid trapped in an eternally ethereal form.

When the heating goes ten minutes before the Old Age Warm Space for the Even More Vulnerable, and the central heating steward is in Bulgaria? That's Malclergia, shoving some dirt in the kerosene.

When at 5am on your day off, someone phones you up screaming that he needs to talk to a clergy in person, now, because he's discovered the vortex that leads to Hades - and you must get to see him immediately - and then you find out he's in another county, and the church just happens to have the same patron saint - that's Malclergia, guiding his eyes to the wrong line on the Google results.

When you're on the beach in Tenerife, and your son who's manse-sitting phones your personal number  to tell you that they're all locked out the church and the only person who still knew the combination to the key-safe has just banged his head and can't remember numbers anymore - that was Malclergia swinging a piece of lead piping.

When there's a knock at the door, and you hide under the couch, but you can see through your Ring doorbell that it's Mavis, and you leave her there for three hours, but she just knocks every five minutes, and then you're desperate for the loo - but the downstairs loo is the other side of the glass front door - so you give up and answer it and make some excuse of being in the back garden - then she says she knows it's your day off, but it'll only take a minute - then spends two hours asking what flowers will be appropriate for her niece's wedding - in a different church, in a different time zone - Mavis may well be personally possessed by Malclergia.

When it's discovered that the treasurer has withdrawn all the money from the fabric fund and put it on  the second favourite in the 4.30 at York, as a way of kick-starting the roof replacement project - Malclergia was the one encouraging the mole that dug the hill that tripped "Bernard's Delight" in the home straight.

Malclergia, the Destroyer of Rest Days. Watch out for her. She knows just when you're starting your second drink in the White Horse. She knows the exact moment just before you set off on holiday. She draws her energy from clergy tears. And she never sleeps.