“I’m not one for sunbathing,” Dr Rowan Williams told Radio 2 listeners yesterday morning. “Too much lying around and I get fidgety and a bit guilty. But there is something about sunbathing that tells us more about what prayer is like than any amount of religious jargon.”

Prayer is like the Archbishop of Canterbury in Speedos on a deckchair?

No.

“You’re not going to get a better tan by screwing up your eyes and concentrating,” he explains. “You simply have to be there where the light can get at you.” (The Times, 19 October, 2005)