A Crozier by any other name is Crazier.

Lots of people have asked about our Croziers title theme since it is not a family name at all and has little, if any relationship with the dictionary definition. Hereby hangs a bit of a tale which started on family camping holidays at least 20 years ago. Our three children were always a bit scathing about camping at all, the girls all too willing to complain about holidays taken without mod cons. On top of this, their mother embarrassed them completely by recalling all the woodcraft skills learned in the Girl Guides and making tripod stands and washing up racks and successions of awnings on every camping holiday with whatever was available nearby (usually sticks and string). It was too uncool for words. Our children's parents were dinosaurs of the first order.

One memorable holiday we remembered to take good books to read but forgot to take a fly swat and – as the book of choice at the time was about the Battle of Hastings where the combatants went into the fray armed only with their crosiers – this humble option for the front line stuck in my mind. With this in the back of my mind, I had tried to fashion a fly swat out of sticks and string which after a few hours of baffling construction still resembled a prehistoric tennis racket. It was of course completely useless as a fly swat;  the top flew off the handle at each swipe and would have killed a man at a hundred paces. For some weird reason the useless article earned the errant title of “my crozier”. Ever after this, the silly name stuck and was applied to ad hoc, make do and mend, somewhat pragmatic, often Heath Robinson solutions for day to day needs. Such is the stuff of family tradition in the making and since then, all of us try to find new ways to outdo one another by neatly solving problems and thinking outside the box. To constitute the definition of a true Crozier, it has to be creative, fun, cost nothing ... and its usually naff!

As time went on and many items around the family home were mended, redesigned or given a quick, cheap fix for the time being, the children would say – looking skywards - “Hmmmm another Crozier!” Eventually, as they grew old enough to take holidays on their own, we received post cards addressed to the 'Croziers', soon T-shirts were designed with a Crozier trademark and one Christmas after K and I had just moved house, by co-incidence, two of the three children separately had “Croziers” house name plates made for us as memorable and hilarious Christmas gifts. Thus Croziering had become completely detached from its original meaning and had taken on a new life of its own.

Little did we know that in the passage of time my work would bring me into contact with one or two important personages who carried proper Croziers (a large shepherd's crook) as a symbol of office. When the children realised the real meaning of a Crozier, we were a little worried that colleagues would think that I was harbouring ideas above my station with ambitions as a Woman Bishop! Help, Nothing could have been further from the truth!

I had one earnest discussion several years ago with a Clergyman who had previously served as a Royal Naval Chaplain and, as a born raconteur, was interested to hear the background to our Crozier history. He responded that he never did know why Bishops still carried such an anachronistic item around with them until he was standing talking to a Bishop in a cemetery one day while his small son who had accompanied him wandered round the grounds quite happily. Suddenly, the child accidentally fell into an open grave which was deep, wet and very muddy. Quick as a flash, the Bishop lowered his trusty crozier into the grave and hooked out the unhappy child restoring it to his red-faced Dad.

I don't think our children really did “get” the make do and mend thing until the time came for them to have children of their own … and would you guess it … they are beginning to devise a whole new generation of croziered items to deal with the mechanics of household make-do management.

Meanwhile, for K's 60^th birthday last year, his birthday present from me could not have been anything else than a sort of crozier – in Crete called a katsouna – carried by all the shepherds hereabouts and walkers in the mountains.

The top floor of our house in Crete is an open loft and was full of swallows and other birds when we first bought it. After installing windows and having a proper stone staircase built to replace the wooden ladder, we could not decide how to divide it up into separate rooms and needed to live in the house for a while before making any big or expensive decisions about it – therefore, the title for the blog was easy – Croziers – A Loft!