CALL me a softie, but I could not resist an email from a retired priest in the Chichester diocese, the Revd Malcolm Pickering, telling me that "while there may have been lots of dispiriting news" from that diocese, "just occasionally something exciting happens - if only on a small scale."

In the small, isolated village of Camber, in the Walland Marsh, with its better known Camber Sands - one of the really good sandy beaches at the eastern end of the south coast - the "very small but enthusiastic and dedicated congregation" has been without a priest for a year. Mr Pickering tells me that they had not had an Ascension Day service for as long as anyone could remember, but this year they decided to have one. ("We can now tell our new priest: 'We always have a service on Ascension Day.'")

Mr Pickering officiated, and the choir "turned out well, with some brilliant descants, and a small anthem, 'Name of All Majesty'. The service really resounded, and we felt that the Lord did go up with a merry noise." To keep the spirit of a feast day, the churchwarden and his wife, Michael and Lorraine Botten, provided a dinner that they served in the nave of the church (above), and the group washed it down with local home-made wine.

"It was surely exciting that this far-flung outpost led the way in keeping this most important and neglected feast," Mr Pickering says. "Looking back on a long ministry, this was one of my most exciting Ascension Days - not the grandest, but spiritually very uplifting."