All please now turn to page 37 of your hymnals (assuming that you have not lost your hymnals at some bar near London Bridge station on your way home from a party at the Irish Embassy):

Show me the way to go home.
I’m a bishop and I want to go to bed,
I drank some Irish whiskey just an hour ago,
And it’s gone right to me head.
Ouch! How did I get this bruise?
I hope it doesn’t make the news.
Who am I? Where am I? What is my name?
Show me the way to go home.

We knew that the Lord moves in mysterious ways. We hadn’t realised he zig-zagged back to his Southwark Diocese after a party in Belgravia at which he followed, maybe too faithfully, the biblical injunction to “drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake”.

It’s true that the annual party at the Irish Embassy has a reputation for hospitality so generous that guests have been known to cling to the pavement all the way home for fear of falling off.

True, too, that Psalm 104 cites “wine that cheers the heart” as a blessing from God; also that Proverbs hails liquor as a solace to the downtrodden, saying: “Let them drink and forget their poverty, and put their troubles out of mind.”

Isaiah, though, is not so approving: “Priest and prophet are muddled by liquor . . . they are muddled in their visions, they stumble in judgment.”

So nothing new under the sun, after all.

It would have helped had the Bishop of Southwark, Dr Tom Butler, not dawdled so long before quashing talk of a brutish mugging. But we may forgive his vinous trespasses, sharing Mae West’s view that to err is human, but it feels divine.