Every morning for the past 13 years, the Right Rev Michael Langrish has started his day by rising from his bed, walking a few paces down a corridor between his home, the Bishop's Palace, and Exeter Cathedral.
Here, he spends a few moments in quiet prayer. It's the only Anglican cathedral in the country with such a link. You could call it a direct path to God. And it is one that Bishop Michael admits he will miss when he steps down from looking after the spiritual welfare of the whole of Devon, and its 623 Church of England churches, at the end of June.
There's a convention that retiring bishops don't stay in their diocese after their time is up. "Although I think if you were the sort of person to interfere, you could do it just as easily by email these day," chuckles Bishop Michael, so he and his wife Esther, a counsellor and artist, are moving 200 miles away to West Sussex, where their daughter Emma lives with her family.
The youngest of their three children, Kathryn, 33, who has mild Down's Syndrome, will remain in the city, where she lives independently.
"She's very clear – 'Exeter is my home and I'm not going to move' – and I'm very pleased that she's able to do that," he says. "She is pretty feisty," he adds.
Having Kathryn, he says, has undeniably influenced him in his ministry, he says. "The day that Kathryn was born, and we were told, rather brutally, that she had Down's Syndrome, I can remember going for a walk with the dog and saying gosh I have counselled others in similar situations so many times. What is this going to do to my faith?"
But it didn't desert him, he says, for he got his answer from God, which was "I'm not going to give you anything that I won't also give you the strength to cope with".
Being the parent of a disabled child has made him aware of the vital work of carers, like his wife Esther, influencing what he gets political about, as one of the 26 "Lords Spiritual" who sits in the House of Lords.
He's always been vocal about the bias of the tax system against families where only one parent works, saying this is not always a choice, particularly when one is the carer for a disabled child. And he's been vocal recently in criticising the way the disability living allowance is being restricted in the face of the current benefits review.
"Is it fair to say to a 33-year-old who the state has encouraged to live as independently as possible, 'now you should go back to live with your parents?'
And children are also being unduly penalised in the current benefits review, he says, particularly those in single parent families.
Bishop Michael was among 43 Church of England bishops who recently penned a letter to a national newspaper warning that the proposed cap on year-on-year rises in benefits would have a "deeply disproportionate impact on families with children, pushing 200,000 into poverty".
"One of the ways in which you judge a civilised society is how it treats its weaker members," says Bishop Michael, who before he was ordained as a clergyman 40 years ago, worked as a teacher and did youth work in London's End End. He saw deprivation among young people too, as Suffragan (assistant) Bishop of Birkenhead, Liverpool.
"There are certain things that haunt me," he says. "I can still remember walking through a subway on Merseyside, where there's a lot of graffiti, and there was this slogan 'trying to be something in a world that tells you you are nothing'. It is at the heart of my Christian faith that no one is nothing."
Bishop Michael had under his belt 20 years of teaching and ministry in the West Midlands, and seven years as the suffragan bishop on Merseyside when he was appointed Bishop of Exeter in July 1999.
He was enthroned in the cathedral in March the following year, and the following week, he rolled up his sleeves and set out on a fact-finding mission in the county's rural communities, meeting farmers and others. While first appearances had suggested his new diocese was an idyll, he quickly realised that Devon contained just as many challenges as Birkenhead.
"Certainly one of the things I noticed was that even when things were economically bad in the North West, we had big international companies that could act as drivers. One of the challenges for a place like Devon and Cornwall is that there isn't any," he says.
"We have some real poverty hotspots in Devon, parts of North and West Devon score very highly, and they have not attracted the EU funding as parts of Cornwall have."
These areas of the county were hit hard by the foot and mouth crisis, which devastated the Westcountry in 2001, just a year after Bishop Michael's arrival.
Farming was already in trouble following the BSE crisis and falling farmgate prices, but foot and mouth was the straw that broke the camel's back, as heartbroken farming families saw their animals slaughtered in "contiguous culls" to halt the spread of the disease.
The bishop is among the many in the county who think the cull went too far, with precious herds destroyed unnecessarily.
"It was pretty zealous over-caution," he says. He visited primary schools in the areas which were badly affected.
"Children who grow up on farms are not romantic, they know that animals are going to be sent to be slaughtered in the end, but this affected children deeply," says the bishop.
Bishop Michael got out and about to meet the people of Devon in happier circumstances in 2009, when the Diocese of Exeter celebrated 1,100 years since it was founded by his predecessor, Bishop Leofric.
He and his two Suffragan Bishops, the Bishop of Plymouth and the Bishop of Crediton, set off on a tour of parishes across the country. The celebrations culminated in an open air Eucharist on the Cathedral Green attended by 8,000
There will be another big service, on June 25, at Exeter Cathedral, to say goodbye to Bishop Michael, to be followed by a picnic party in his garden next door, to which all are welcome. He and his wife, he says, are very sad to be leaving Devon. "We have lived here longer than we have lived anywhere else and we have a very strong friendship base," he says. "We went through a period of almost irrational anger at having to leave."
