My Sinful Trip to The Local Church

About six days into my holiday I started to panic that I hadn't packed enough knickers. I had about twenty pairs with me which should have been fine but because it was so hot I was showering about five times a day and kept forgetting I was on an underwear budget. Sorry for these details but it's an integrel part of the story.

Getting ready for the evening meal one night I thought prehaps I could risk going commando because a)I'll be sat down the whole time and b)I'm coming back to the room straight after. When I got my dress on I thought yeah, no one will ever suspect a thing plus I was feeling a little naughty. I had my eye on one of the waiters and thought it might be an experience to sit there wearing no knickers and give him come hither looks. Then I went even further and put on my highest heels (increasing falling head over arse odds by 90%)- I was officially a sex kitten with bad things on her mind.

The meal went accordingly and I made sexy progress with the sexy waiter, Alessandro. For some reason people called him 'Jimmy' and he kept saying 'Ock aye the nooh' to everyone's amusement. I presume some passing Scot tourists had had a bad influence on him. So I left the resturant after a brief chat with Jimmy/Alessandro that was as confusing as always, to find my parents chatting with another couple. When I approached Mum turned and gleefully announced, "They're holding a special evening service in the Church down the street. Margaret and Alan here went on Sunday and they said it was lovely. We're going."

Now, let me point out that my family is not in the least bit religious. Like most people in Britain we attend Church for marriage, deaths and the occassional christening. My father is so resentful about his Catholic upbringing that he bitches about it at least once a month and has instilled in me a suspicion of all people involved in any kind of religion, especially the kind that like to wear smocks. My mother is Church of England but this mainly involves gossiping and the sporadic jam-athon for upcoming fetes. The only reason she says she likes Church is the hymns which I don't think counts.

Even though knowing my parents are prone to attacks of spontinaety that often remains unexplainable even after the event is happened, I was still bewildering by the suggestion of attending a Catholic church service. My Dad looked at me with desperate eyes and I could see immeadiately it was all Mum's idea. My mother hardly asks anything of me so then I felt guilty for thinking, 'What the fuck? Are you crazy? Do I look like I want to go to Church right now? Or ever for that matter?'. So I kept my mouth shut and straggled along behind Mum, Margaret and Alan. Dad looked like he was being taken to the chair. I totally forgot I didn't have any knickers on.

It was sort of like back at Uni when you meet someone random and they go, "Hey, want to go to the beach and drink Absinth?" and you go "Hell yeah!" because you're already wankered. Except the randoms we had met were middle class professionals from Wiltshire who wanted to give praise to the Lord and Absinth had not been mentioned. I see now it was The Fates fucking with me again. The one evening I decide to not wear knickers and I find myself in a 14th century Catholic church with priests and nuns and all kinds of crap.

So there I was, sat in the back pew, right next to the sign that had pictures of people with exposed knees and shoulders with big red lines diagonally across them. I'd been to Catholic services before but this was really dark and olde worlde. I felt like the Knights Templar might burst in through the doors and massacre us all, me first cos I'm by the door. I know that's not what The Knights Templar were all about, y'know, not their bag but I felt doom was upon me. I was getting so shifty and so concerned about the prospects of my soul, I got dragged in to their ways! I thought if God does know I'm sat here without any knickers on he'll smite me right? But then I thought, surely he has bigger shit to deal with? But then I thought maybe God is like the police in that they seem incapable of capturing the real criminals but can hand out about a hundred speeding fines a day. Am I the 'breaking the speed limit' equivelant of Catholic dogma?

I quietly broached the subject with my Dad who looked like he was in fact the one who might be about to massacre us all.
"Dad, you know how they're all arsey about you not exposing your shoulders, etc. Well, say, hypothetically, you weren't wearing any pants, that would be worse wouldn't it? If God can't deal with shoulders he's not going to appreciate that is he? You'd be condemned, right? If you went and confessed it to the priest, what would happen?"
"There is probably some loophole where they say, 'Aah but my child, you are too poor to afford pants so you are forgiven'."
"But what if you can afford them, you've got like two drawers of them but you just forgot to but them on?"
"Aah, my child, you are forgiven because you are a simpleton who forgets to put pants on"
"What if you didn't put them on purposefully?"
"What are you getting at?"

Anyway, I wasn't smited but I came pretty close.