in other news

I've decided not to join the secret service after all... Turns out since they're all secretive, I wouldn't get to brag about my big fancy job with them, and their canteen is rubbish. All it is is a can machine and a few sweets and foodservice instant coffee with a burker boiler that hardly ever works and drips boiling water into the sink constantly.... Or was that my last job? I can never keep these things straight in my head.

Anyway - yesterday I went on what can only be described as a trip through time.
Meself and himself and the other himself, found ourselves in the city, in the early part of the day and a big latin mass about to be said in one of the churches. By god, we said, we'll have a bit of that, bit of culture, bit of language, bit of religion, sure why not?
Well. They should sell tickets. It was amazing. The priest and his two assistants stood with their backs to the congregation for all of the latiny bit, so you only got the odd "carpe", or "labia", here or there. It gave a great sense of how alienating the old church was though - with their mysterious non layman language, and how you'd be looking at the backs of their heads for so long. Then yerman turned around, and that's when the fun really started. If there was a theme park in the vatican, with haunted houses to visit where you could see priests as they might've been in the old days handing out fire and brimstone, this guy would be the top man.
Did you realise the pain of childbirth was a punishment because of Eve's misbehaviour in the garden? We could've all saved ourselves a lot of money on epidurals if only... There was a punishment for Adam too - probably manflu - I missed hearing exactly what it was because I was so shocked by the former.
Anyway he was going on and on about giving up things you like for lent. And I was thinking he should give up giving out. He referred to this letter sent by the pope a couple of years ago - when we were trying to get over the abuse scandals, anyway - one of the recommendations in the letter was that we should give up things we like every friday for a year. The priest didn't mention whether he had adhered to this recommendation himself, but you just knew he knew no one in the church (out of the whole 30 or so of us in the place) would have done it, he wanted us to feel bad. (I did, but only because I was so affronted by the cheek of such a recommendation forming part of what was hoped at the time was going to be an apology). He also asked that we refrain from "Googling" he didn't mention any other search engine - and if google were present they would have surely thought it unfair - but "Googling" was mentioned in much the same tone as "looking at porn" He also said 30% of the bold angels, ie the ones turned into devils, were still on the earth. I feel kinda bad passing this info on, but I was so impressed by him having statistics to hand like that...
We were just leaving when he started in on "Nice People" too. "Nice People can lead you astray" he was saying - as us 3 relatively nice people sailed out the door, not for the first time I was glad to have a loud chirrupy little fella with me who didn't know or care about the correct social conventions and had decided to sing all the way through...
The church has changed a lot, but if you ever want a glimpse into the guilt laden/ bizarre past, there's a definite tourist attraction for you.