WELL, here we are in the middle of March and I have to admit I am more than ready for the spring.

It seems to me to have been a very long cold winter. Although in the middle of last week, when Rebecca and I set off for an early-morning walk, I thought I felt less chilly.

Actually, we have had quite a number of consecutive dry days through the first part of this month. That strikes me as quite a rarity. When we moved here from the South East, five years ago, we noticed that it rained every day for 40 days. We have since discovered that in the luscious green South West that's not particularly unusual!

As far as I am concerned, I am sure that sunlight deficiency really does make a difference. It's not that I notice myself being dragged down by its absence, but I really feel the difference when blue skies finally reappear.

One of my regular fantasies is to have a home in the sun. I'm not sure I would want to leave this beautiful country for good on retirement, but wouldn't it be wonderful to have a foot in both camps? Life in the lush green of Devon for part of the year and reliable warm sunshine for the rest?

It makes me realise that I am one of those people who often thinks 'the grass looks greener'.

I don't complain about the heat — I remember a really hot holiday in Turkey where a 10-minute walk down the hill into the local town required the intake of two litres of cold water, and I loved it. But it's certainly true that after a while I would find myself yearning for lush English countryside and a good lashing storm.

To put a more charitable gloss on it, you could say that wherever I am, I don't lose my appreciation of the things that somewhere else could offer.

In a way, that was the conviction underlying a conference I went to recently. It was about Fresh Expressions and if you haven't heard the phrase before you might think it's a new kind of coffee. Actually it's a new style of church, and the theme of the day was how best to hold it alongside older, more traditional ways of church-going.

Archbishop Rowan was with us and, as always, rooted our thinking in fertile soil. He has an amazing knack of producing distinctive and helpful phrases that seem to come off the cuff. Actually they spring from a deep well of holiness and Christian maturity. He reminded us that the word church is a verb before it is a noun, and that the activity of church should be about growing in spiritual maturity.

Fresh Expressions try to do this in imaginative, new ways that might reach out to those who have turned away from traditional models of 'church'. In Exeter, NightChurch, Exeter Network Church, and the cafe-style discussions at Belmont are all good examples.

They are to do with sensing the grass might be greener elsewhere. As a national Methodist Church leader put it on the same day: "We need to learn not to play fast and loose with the family silver, but also not just to polish it and put it away in a drawer."

There is room for both kinds of being church to flourish. Learning to hold them together takes time and patience — just like waiting for the English summer!