BRIAN BRINDLEY, who has died aged 69, was a flamboyant Anglo-Catholic canon whose extravagant tastes would have been more easily accommodated in Renaissance Rome than in the postwar Church of England. He was probably the most extraordinary-looking clergyman of modern times. He wore his grey curly hair in a style resembling a periwig and dressed in lavish Roman monsignoral attire, including buckled shoes with four-inch heels, which he had painted red. In the summer of 1989 Brindley's career came to a painfully abrupt end. The News of the World printed a front page story based on secretly tape-recorded conversations in which the Canon fantasised about young men. The content was not especially shocking, but he was forced to resign. Brian Dominic Frederick Titus Brindley (the second and fourth names were added by himself) was born in London on August 3 1931 and educated at Stowe. He read Modern History at Exeter College, Oxford, where he seemed destined for a more sparkling career than he ultimately enjoyed. When the young Princess Margaret visited Oxford, she watched a masque in 17th-century style which was written by Brindley and entitled Porci ante Margeritam (or "Swine before a Pearl"). Many thought him quite as brilliant as his friends Ned Sherrin and Alan Bennett. He was ordained a priest in 1963 after studying at Ely Theological College. Some of his friends were surprised at his choice of profession, for Brindley, while fascinated by rubric and liturgy, candidly admitted that he was "not a pious person" and throughout his life he rarely talked about God. A colour portrait of Brindley which appeared in Tatler in 1985 captured the portly cleric at the height of his magnificence, arrayed in a gold Louis XIV chasuble in front of the Pugin screen he rescued from a Birmingham scrap-heap. Brindley reacted to the sudden ruin of his career with a stoicism and lack of self-pity which deeply impressed his friends. He retired to Brighton, where, after the Church of England voted for women priests, he became a Roman Catholic, taking the name "Leo" as a confirmation name, after the Pope who declared Anglican orders null and void. "I felt as if I had been a commercial traveller who had been selling vacuum cleaners for 30 years, only to discover suddenly that they didn't work," he said. The range of subjects on which Brindley could hold forth authoritatively was breathtaking. They included heraldry, typography, English detective fiction, the architecture of Florence, the gardens of Gertrude Jekyll, the music of Rossini and the prose of Thomas Cranmer (which he thought over-rated). He was also an excellent old-fashioned cook, though some of his guests were intimidated by the heaviness of the cuisine: Brindley was incapable of enjoying even a simple quiche without smothering it in double cream "to make it less rich". His house in Brighton was, if anything, even more sumptuously decorated than the Royal Pavilion, on which it was partly modelled (and on whose owner he partly modelled himself). Brindley spent vast sums of money reproducing the Pavilion's exquisite chinoiserie, and commissioned a splendid panoramic mural of the building extending over three drawing room walls. He died surrounded by a dozen of his closest friends, celebrating his 70th birthday at a seven-course dinner at the Athenaeum; he suffered a heart attack between the dressed crab and the beouf en croute.

After impersonating Francis yesterday, I'm going to spend this week impersonating other bloggers. Hey, it's easier than thinking up new content! And it feels quaite naice being Ian. You may be next!