Sometimes people think a bishop swans around in purple,
you know, sort of being glorious
or living in a different planet,
you know it’s all spirituality stuff.
It’s actually, it’s not,
it’s deeply earthed in communities
and with people
and I would say sometimes bishops
are better connected to the grassroots than many politicians
because we have people everywhere and they tell their stories.
Well every day is different for a bishop
and for example today I began in my house,
my offices with 25 clergy
coming for breakfast and for a meeting.
That was between eight and 11.
I then leave my staff to clear up
and came over to Bradford
for an award ceremony for a school in Bradford.
I then go on to another meeting
and this evening I’m in a parish.
Every day is different
and it involves a lot of public facing.
Well I engage with the media
because people have their perceptions of reality shaped by the media
for good and for ill
and it seems to me that if you want to engage,
if you want to listen to the conversations out there
you’ve got to be involved in the media.
[radio broadcast: can happen simply makes the point that
when you go out in the morning anything can happen.
And as Lewis discovered in Monaco
we can’t control everything all of the time.
The best laid plans and all that.
I mean I’m a Liverpool fan so I know what I’m talking about].
I’ve been doing radio broadcasting for a very long time,
starting with local broadcasting
and then national, on Radio Two,
but I do the Chris Evans Show regularly on Radio Two,
which is the biggest audience radio programme in Europe
and I do Radio Four as well,
the Today programme and they’re the regulars.
[radio broadcast: even for the faithful
there are no promises other than that
whatever the world throws at us
we will not be abandoned.
So anything can happen and anything can happen.]
So when I left Bradford University
as a linguist
I was offered a job abroad translating in Germany
where I’d worked previously.
And it was very tempting
but I was just about to get married
and my wife didn’t speak German
and she’d just graduated as a nurse.
We decided it wasn’t a good place to start married life
and I went to GCHQ instead
with German and French as my degree
but then retrained in Russian.
And I was intrigued,
I mean I just thought it was a government department.
In those days we didn’t know what it did.
So I’d gone through all the exams,
the interviews,
and had worked there for nine months
before I discovered what it was all about.
It was the early ‘80s
so it was the height of the Cold War
and I was doing Soviet military intelligence.
I was working as part of the,
of that sort of world
in which you get an engagement with
the real underbelly of world politics
and the military and so on,
so if I tell you anything else I’ll have to shoot you.
Well I think Bradford was very important for me
and I began to realise that there was more,
there was a creative element to me that I’d never really realised.
If you’d said to me “Can you write?”
“Can you broadcast?”
“Can you do this? Can you...?”
I’d have said no.
Other people are good at that. I’m not.
But I think the,
it opened up a world that began to shape me later,
really when I was at GCHQ.
The world expanded and
I think the really important thing about university
and particularly for me and Bradford
was that it, it expanded my world view.
It’s supposed to hit your mind,
transform your mind, university,
and when you hear people say "well I,
“when I left university I wasn’t any different from when I came”
then it was an utter waste of time.
And I changed I think quite significantly.
I remember failing badly at interpreting
stuff that we had to do in an interpreting laboratory at the time.
I was never a natural linguist, some people were,
I just had to work hard
and I always felt a bit hopeless at it.
I remember,
used to play football, five a side regularly for modern languages
and beating the engineers, which we did regularly,
was always fun because they thought we were wusses
and we thought they, you know, drank too much.
Bradford is a unique place.
You know, the demographic mix.
Bradford is on the way up as well,
you know, it’s turned a corner.
Economically it’s becoming more interesting,
it’s a fascinating place to live and the University is at the heart of it.
This is the place to be, you know,
if you just want to stick your head in a book you could go anywhere.
If you want to make the best of the environment
that the university is set in Bradford is fantastic,
and the best curry houses in Britain.