From hungover sermons to dating as a clergyman, a Kent priest has opened up on what it's like to be a millennial vicar and why he chose the career path.

In an abridged extract in The Telegraph, Tonbridge School alumni and assistant chaplain Rev. Fergus Butler-Gallie talks about the issues he has faced since being ordained aged 26 in 2018.

The Oxford history and czech/slovak graduate said: “Being ordained in my 20s meant my first years of ministry coincided with a flurry of house-warmings, new-job drinks and engagement parties.

“The realities of church work when I was feeling a little worse for wear were not unfamiliar to me in those first six months – a faceful of incense is not an effective hangover cure.”

Dating as a vicar presented another social obstacle.

Rev Buter-Gallie, who grew up in Bethersden near Ashford, said a job that involved celebrating love made him keen to find a partner but dating as a cleric "is weird".

"I was rubbish enough before I was ordained," he writes, "a poorly put-together mass of nerves and badly timed jokes. Add clerical angst and you have a seriously unattractive package."

The answer to the inevitable ‘What do you do?’ question could conjure up images of "a lifetime of village fetes and Victoria sponges", he said.

In 2020, Fergus moved south from Liverpool to take on the position at a church – a decision his friends were asking him to reconsider and one he’d come to regret.

He said he was "humiliated at meetings, ignored in public and endlessly gossiped about" and that there was an atmosphere of "wickedness" at the unnamed church.

He eventually left and has now written Touching Cloth: Confessions and communions of a young priest, which can be pre-ordered here.