Two days before Christmas, at 10.30 in the evening, the vicarage doorbell rang in my parish of Gilesgate, Sherburn and Shadforth, former pit villages just to the east of Durham city centre. It was a police sergeant. He had a young woman in his car who had just been removed from a situation where she was suffering domestic violence.

The woman had said she knew me, and that I would be able put her up for the night. If I couldn’t help, the sergeant explained, she was going to be on a chair in the front office of his police station until the morning.

My two grown-up children, both of them now in professional jobs and living away from home, were back to spend Christmas with me and their mother. They watched this scene unfold on our doorstep. Afterwards – when I had taken the woman to the local Travelodge, where we have an arrangement, and found her a room for the night – one of them remarked: “What a strange way of life you live, Dad!”

And it can feel unreal. Stressful, too.

This summer, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury and a former oil industry executive, revealed that his time as a parish priest was the most stressful job he has ever done. “It was isolated, insatiably demanding and I was on the whole working without close colleagues – and that wears people down,” he said. The role is “for many, quite overwhelming and completely exhausting”.