About me

My name is David Tatem – I’m a retired minister of the United Reformed Church living in Coton, a village just on the edge of Cambridge in the UK.

I was born in Plymouth in 1952, attended Devonport High School for Boys and then studied Quantity Surveying in Bristol. After working in London I studied for the ministry of the United Reformed Church (URC)  at Westminster College, Cambridge; just down the road from where we now live. I have (URC) in the UK since 1979 and retired in July 2017

Very little of the work that I have done has been in the conventional setting of being the minister of one congregation. Even where it has technically been that, it has been different, including my first church which burned down. It has included working ecumenically with students as a chaplain to students and in three other specifically ecumenical settings, lastly as the denomination’s Secretary for Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations.

The above gives you the technical details but not much of the personal. I am an only child, married to someone from the Netherlands who I married in 1983 after we met in St Albans. We have two children, a son and a daughter. I speak Dutch, after a fashion and often mix it up with German which I also speak but not with French, which I learned at school and can get by with if the other person speaks very slowly and clearly. Since the Brexit referendum I decided that I wanted to take at least some personal action so we spent a couple of years living in the Netherlands in order for me to get Dutch citizenship. The result is that along with the rest of my family, I am now a dual national citizen and once again a citizen of the EU.

We love travel and have a camper van which we will take to interesting places at the slightest opportunity. I am almost totally non-musical except for occasionally playing the bongos. My favourite literature is Science Fiction, not the trashy stuff but the kind of writing that makes you think seriously about the possible directions society may take, for better or for worse, with or without aliens.

There is a lot more that I could write here and I may well update it from time to time as appropriate but most of it may also emerge in the blogs that I will, hopefully, write more regularly than I have done for a while.