Gogglebox Vicar KATE BOTTLEY movingly describes the pain of losing her mother

Celebrity cleric Rev Kate Bottley runs through all the places her mum, Margaret, has been lately. It’s an exhausting – and exotic – list.

‘She’s been to Venice. She’s been on an elephant safari in Kenya. She’s been skiing – she’d never been skiing in her life before! She’s had cocktails at the famous Raffles Hotel in Singapore.

‘She’s been to the Strictly show. She’s even gone home with Bradley Walsh.’

More than anything, Kate, 48, wishes she could phone her mum and laugh about all this, as she is doing now. But, of course, she can’t. Her mum died in January. The Grand Tour? It’s happening posthumously.

When her mother died (‘and please can you say died,’ the former Gogglebox star says, sternly. ‘I didn’t lose her down the back of a sofa. She didn’t wander off in the supermarket’), Kate wanted to give mourners at the funeral a keepsake.

She had 1,000 small cards printed with photos of her mum (‘cheap as chips when you buy bulk’), and handed them out with the instruction: ‘Take Margaret somewhere nice.’ Her friends duly obliged.

‘Some people just took her wherever they were going and brought her home again, but some left her there. My friend who went on safari tucked her behind a post, then discovered it was an elephant scratching post and she wondered if that was appropriate.

‘She got left in a taxi in Bangkok, too –  although that one was unintentional. In the summer, she’s going to Ibiza.’

Kate still has hundreds of cards left, and is on a mission to scatter them like confetti. ‘I don’t normally encourage littering, but I’ve left one in every hotel room I’ve been in.’

She recorded an episode of Blankety Blank the other day and pressed them into the hands of fellow celebs Martine McCutcheon, Mel Giedroyc and Bradley Walsh. She isn’t sure what Bradley did with his card, but she likes to think Margaret is still in his pocket.

Her flashmob appearance led to her becoming a star of Gogglebox in 2014, and since then she has popped up on everything from House Of Games to Celebrity Mastermind

On Easter Sunday, Kate — a Church of England priest turned media personality — went to church for the most important service of the year. 

It’s one she sums up, in inimitable Rev Kate Bottley style, as ‘the one where we celebrate the Resurrection and the belief that death has had its arse kicked’.

She takes a deep breath. This is difficult, even for someone who stresses that she does death professionally.

‘Mum went, too. I set her down on the pew beside me in the hope and faith that we will one day sit together again, in person. One of the last things I said to her in hospital, whether she heard me or not, was: ‘You’ll save me a seat, won’t you, Mum?’

Easter week was particularly difficult — the first major celebration where the family had to factor in an empty seat. Her mum shared her faith, and all the rituals that come with it.

‘Mum loved Easter. She had two pottery geese outside her house and every year she’d make them Easter bonnets. She’d tell me I was too old for an Easter egg, then buy me one anyway.’

Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise that a conversation with Kate Bottley, even one about death, should be as uplifting as it is thought-provoking. Her ‘thing’ is communicating God’s message in a style that is the opposite of pious.

A self-confessed show-off, she first came into public consciousness in 2013 when a video of her leading a flashmob dance at a wedding went viral. ‘Is this a real vicar?’ everyone asked. The answer, of course, was yes.

Although Kate had not grown up in a religious home in Sheffield, she started going to church because the boy she fancied was the son of a clergyman.

She fell in love with the boy (she and Graham married in 1998 and have two children), but also with religion, and she was ordained as a Church of England priest in 2008.

Her flashmob appearance led to her becoming a star of Gogglebox in 2014, and since then she has popped up on everything from House Of Games to Celebrity Mastermind (specialist subject: The Adrian Mole books). She also hosts radio and TV shows including Songs Of Praise, alternating presenting duties with the likes of Aled Jones.

Easter week was particularly difficult – the first major celebration where the family had to factor in an empty seat. Her mum shared her faith, and all the rituals that come with it

Kate tells me the last episode of Songs Of Praise her mum watched, on the Sunday before she died, happened to be one of hers.

‘She’s hopeless with technology so I set it all up for her, and said: ‘Oh, it’s one of mine’ And my mum said: ‘I prefer Aled.’ Thanks Mum! But that was my mum.

‘She’d watch everything I did, then tell me: ‘That frock was bleedin’ awful.’ But if your mum can’t tell you your frock is rubbish, who can?’

Although Kate no longer has her own parish, she continues to minister (she describes herself as being ‘like a supply teacher’).

She cannot tell you how many deathbeds she has attended, but obviously her own mum’s was a first.

‘A mother’s death is like no other, isn’t it? I feel suddenly very grown-up, which is silly to say when I’m 48, but it’s weird feeling that you are at the front of the queue now,’ she explains. ‘It’s made me obsessive about my daughter, Ruby, which I wasn’t expecting. I keep sniffing her hair. It must be a female thing.’

Kate’s mum, Margaret Stevenson, was, she says, ‘a smasher’, a woman who left school at 15, married the boy next door, worked as a dinner lady, cleaner and seamstress, and oozed pride in her children.

‘She’d be in Morrisons and would tell the girl on the till that her son lived in a posh part of Sheffield, and her daughter was that vicar off the telly. Once, she came with me to Westminster Abbey. On the train, she said: ‘What if I show you up?’ She could never have shown me up.’

Margaret was 76 when she died and had been in and out of hospital for years. She’d had a heart attack and cancer, ‘but she’d always pulled through’, says Kate.

Not this time. She went into hospital before Christmas, and by the third week of January, Kate realised her mother was dying.

‘God love our doctors, but I do wish they’d spell it out. They say things like ‘she’s seriously ill’ — I’ve seen it hundreds of times when I’ve been sitting with families — and I, as a priest, have ended up having to explain that someone is dying.

Kate had 1,000 small cards printed with photos of her mum and handed them out with the instruction: ‘Take Margaret somewhere nice.’ Her friends duly obliged

Margaret was 76 when she died and had been in and out of hospital for years. She’d had a heart attack and cancer, ‘but she’d always pulled through’, says Kate

‘With us, my brother said: ‘Why aren’t they taking her temperature any more? Why aren’t they monitoring her heart-rate?’ When he left the room, my dad said, ‘Katie, is this it?’ and I said: ‘Yes, Dad. We are not getting out of this one.’ ‘

As her mum slipped away, Kate held her hand. ‘Mum’s was a normal human death. OK, she didn’t get to die in her sleep at 98, which is what we’d all want. But it was still a ‘nice’ death and she wasn’t in pain,’ she says.

Kate’s role was clearly defined, too. ‘I knew what to say: ‘Be on your way from this world, good Christian soul.’ I made the sign of the cross. Afterwards, I closed her eyes and I opened the window. It was a privilege to be able to do it for her. There was no place in the world I would rather have been.’

She zipped on, in professional mode, to a degree, advising her father how to get an order of service printed. ‘I know the death-min,’ she nods. ‘But I was careful not to take over. I’d always said I wouldn’t do the funeral myself, so a friend of Mum’s officiated.’

She wrote her mum’s eulogy, though. ‘I’d been preparing for it. I have notebooks — one for her, one for my dad, one for myself. I’d been keeping notes for years — by stealth sometimes.

‘Mum never wanted to talk about her funeral, but I’d ask her about her childhood, treasured memories. I’d advise everyone to do it, because none of us is getting out of this alive. Ruby will thank me, one day.’

As her mum slipped away, Kate held her hand. ‘Mum’s was a normal human death. OK, she didn’t get to die in her sleep at 98, which is what we’d all want. But it was still a ‘nice’ death and she wasn’t in pain,’ she says

‘It’s the little things that floor you. Like hearing the EastEnders theme tune and thinking, ‘Oh Mum will be watching this’, then: ‘Oh. My mum is dead’

Out of interest, what are her own funeral plans? She laughs and says ‘celebratory’ isn’t for her. ‘Fine if that’s what you want, but it’s not for me. Think Jackie Kennedy at JFK’s funeral in her Chanel veil,’ she adds. ‘I want everyone in black, horses, plumes.’

Suffice to say there were jokes in the eulogy. They sang How Great Thou Art (‘that was possibly a mistake because it goes a bit high towards the end’).

At the crematorium, Kate asked to be left alone with the coffin to say a final goodbye. ‘I think when you do grief professionally, supporting others through it, you have to make sure you grieve yourself, and I made sure I said the final words over her coffin. That was my moment.’

And now? Three months on, she’s on less solid ground.

‘Grief is s***,’ she concludes. ‘It wasn’t the hospital, or the funeral I found difficult. They were bearable. Even the big moments that you tell yourself ‘brace position’ for — like your first birthday without your Mum — weren’t as difficult as I’d expected.

‘It’s the little things that floor you. Like hearing the EastEnders theme tune and thinking, ‘Oh Mum will be watching this’, then: ‘Oh. My mum is dead.’

‘Dad brought her sewing machine to mine because he found it too hard to have it in the house. Her hairbrush, too. It still has her hair in it. That set me off. And the day we picked up her ashes, watching Dad put the seatbelt around them in the car . . .

‘Sometimes I do wail. My kids know I’ve got a grief cry — one of those scary ones that sound like a wounded animal. That’s happened a few times.

‘I do think it’s important to let yourself be upset. We can’t anaesthetise ourselves from pain, and we shouldn’t seek to. It’s supposed to hurt.’ Other people’s reactions to her grief have intrigued her.

Kate’s mum, Margaret Stevenson, was, she says, ‘a smasher’, a woman who left school at 15, married the boy next door, worked as a dinner lady, cleaner and seamstress, and oozed pride in her children

‘People try so hard to say the right things and end up saying completely the wrong things.

‘Some think: ‘Oh, it’ll be easier for you, because you are religious.’ Don’t be ridiculous. I’m as cross as the next person when my mum dies.

‘Or they’ll say: ‘You shouldn’t be sad because she’s in Heaven.’ Shut up! I don’t want her to be in Heaven — I want her here with me.’

Has Kate’s own faith been tested? This is tricky because although she says she is ‘deadly serious’ about faith, there has always been some wiggle room.

‘I always say I’m prepared to be wrong,’ she says. ‘The way I see it, if I’m right [about the existence of God] then great. If I’m wrong, I won’t know until I’m dead, so I won’t care.

‘The thing is, you don’t need to believe all of it, all of the time. Even I don’t believe all of it, sometimes. I bury babies for a living — how do I believe in God on a day like that?

Has Kate’s own faith been tested? This is tricky because although she says she is ‘deadly serious’ about faith, there has always been some wiggle room

‘How do I believe in God when I’m holding my dying mother’s hand, and it is going cold in mine? Because faith is fragile. Fact.’

Even the most fervent believers rage at God in grief. Has she? ‘I’m not overly cross with my gaffer, just with the situation. I would quite like my mum to stop being dead now. I’d like to say to her: ‘OK, Mum, that’s enough now.’

‘But the message of the resurrection is that we must not fear death, and we will be together again. I don’t know what form eternal life will take, but I do believe I will see her again. She will have saved me a seat.’

There is a qualification, though, a very Kate Bottley-esque qualification: ‘Can I just say I don’t want to be directly beside Mum on the pew, for all eternity. She’d only tell me off for something or other. But close by would be nice.’