My parents never taught me to take responsibility for my actions, making everything that has happened to me in the last thirty-four years entirely their fault.



One's first holy communion is an important rite of passage for a child firmly on the road to atheism.  A tremendous amount of school time and resources were devoted to preparing us for the event that could otherwise have been spent learning to read.  There were children in my class who would have been quite capable of penning a comprehensive biography of Simon of Cyrene, had they achieved sufficient skill with the blade as to be trusted to write in ink.

Some time in early March we were each presented with a half-inch thick, spiral-bound workbook which formed the basis of our education for the following two months.  I don't remember anything that was in this book, but I do remember having to draw lots of pictures of Jesus on the cross.  That and I remember being rebuked for my interpretation of Jesus' conversation with Pilate following his arrest.  Though I accept that nowhere in the synoptic gospels does Jesus actually say the words, "Bite me", I maintain that the Gospel of John is at least somewhat ambiguous on the subject.

A Similar book had been passed around some months earlier when we made our first confession.  Slimmer, but still substantial, and with plenty of opportunities to draw pictures of Himself.

"It's cool."  Said Jesus, as the penitent thief made his confession, assuming you're reading the gospel where he did that, rather than the gospel where he laughed at Jesus and called him a twat.  Inexplicably this interpretation was acceptable, probably because when my teacher leafed through the bible to show me what was actually said, she realised what shaky ground she was on.

"Bless me father for I have sinned.  This is my first confession."  That's all I really remember of the process.  It was all I remembered at the time, as it happens.  As soon as I got into the box my mind went blank.  I floundered for a bit then just started making things up, confessing all manner of imagined sins until the priest looked satisfied, then said my two Hail Mary's and a How's Your Father and went home.



Frequent visits from the parish priest were arranged to cement learning and indoctrinate.  Ours was one of those kindly, modern, desperately-trying-to-be-trendy priests that had started creeping out of the woodwork in the late '80s.  After a couple of weeks at the parish he found a microphone from somewhere and took to wandering around the church during mass, delivering a roving sermon and making clumsy use of analogy and pop culture reference to drive home his message that had long since been lost amid a sea of Pauline Fowler and Bros lyrics.

It came to a head during his first Christmas with us, whereupon he decided it would be a delightful idea to arrange a living nativity for the Christmas mass, resulting in a fist fight in the church car park over who should portray the Blessed Virgin.  It also proved more difficult than expected to source ox and ass, whose parts were played by a largely disinterested but spectacularly incontinent cow, and a goat who spent most of the service chewing on hymn books and bleating at inappropriate times.

He toned it down a bit after that, but he was still prone to occasional outcroppings of voguish swank; eschewing the traditional, respectful black suit for his "Jesus is awesome" t-shirt when touring the parish, or hanging a poster of the Abbey Road scene with the evangelists in place of the fab four in the narthex.

Well, you learnt a new word today, didn't you.  Handy for scrabble too.



The day of our first holy communion finally came.  We assembled in the vestry one Sunday morning, dressed in our school uniforms with our hands super-glued together in permanent prayer, then meandered through the church to be inspected by the congregation for any signs of fear or apostasy.

As the service processed, we were instructed to do likewise, arranging ourselves here and there so the priest could bless us or delouse us or by some other mechanism render us sufficiently holy.

A rehearsal would have helped, or at least some prior instruction; we might have spent less time following each other in the wrong direction and standing in the wrong place had someone had the sense to walk us through the procedure beforehand.  Not that any amount of practise or preparation would have readied us for the imminent theophagy.

When first placed on the tongue, the Eucharist begins to melt and disintegrate, before reaching an otherwise unreplicable state of matter somewhere between Bose-Einstein condensate and pure evil.  It somehow attaches itself to the roof of your mouth.  You pick it loose and start to chew, but the act of mastication only makes it worse.  You try to swallow but miss.  Eventually it passes the pharynx (scrabble) and you feel it slide slowly down your oesophagus and also inexplicably across into your ear.  You make a face and shudder slightly as your body fills with divine grace and morbid disgust.  Factum est.

One boy was sick.  Whether it was simple nervousness or the experience outlined above is hard to say, but he was rapidly bundled through a previously unseen door by two figures in dark robes and never heard from again.  When asked about his absence the next day, our teacher insisted that there had never been a boy in our class called Ben, and that she didn't think Ben was even a real name.

Father Andy took his sweet time getting to the, "Go in peace", then we all trooped back to the school for what I am reliably informed by the last panel in every Dennis the Menace cartoon is called a slap-up lunch, consisting of various scones and cakes and other things that might help us get the taste of Jesus spunk out of our mouths.  Afterwards I was handed a modest sum of money donated by my psychotically catholic Irish relatives and taken into town to spend it all on Lego.  Worth it in the end, I think.

Oh, and we got medals.  I don't know why, but I certainly feel like we deserved them.  That said, my grandfather spent four years trudging around Europe and North Africa and all he got for his trouble was a deck of cards, a regimental tattoo, and one German infantry boot.  When asked about it all he would say was, "Well he wasn't using it any more" then wandered off to his shed to read the paper.



My grandfather rarely spoke about the war.  I have occasionally wondered if this was because he witnessed or participated in something too horrific to describe.  Something gruesome, something which must never be spoken of again.  Something like cutting the leg off an otherwise perfectly healthy German soldier and pinching his boot.

He rarely spoke about the war, but then he rarely spoke about anything.  That will happen when your house is filled with daughters.  You rarely get the chance to get a word in, and by the time you do you've forgotten what it was you were going to say anyway.

He drove tanks for a while, so I'm told, then taught other people to drive tanks, earning a skill set that made him eminently suited to the task of teaching my mother to drive some forty years later.  She made it to the end of the street - which was four houses away - then ploughed through a traffic barrier into the side of the fish shop.

I suspect that this was due more to my grandfather's instruction than my mother's ineptitude, and if she had been at the controls of a Mk IV Churchill tank, it was likely that the fish shop would have lost.  Being as she was, behind the wheel of a second generation Ford Fiesta, it was probably 50/50.

She passed her test eventually.  All the best drivers pass on the third attempt, so she claims.



The first one was a write off, as was the car, and the blame is again most fairly laid at the feet of my grandfather who had chosen to emphasise combat tactics and turret alignment rather than checking your mirrors and reversing round a corner.

After the recruitment of a more traditional driving instructor, a second test was scheduled.  Failure on this occasion was due, as my mother would later explain, to her being 'surprised by a bus', causing her to mount three different stretches of pavement on four different occasions while performing a three point turn.  Also she ran someone over.

By the third time of asking, word had got round that she was taking another test.  This time, everyone had the good sense to stay in their houses, behind the sofa and several rows of sandbags, leaving the streets blessedly clear.  She passed with flying colours, helped the driving instructor find his heart medication, and soon after took possession of my grandfather's now slightly deformed Ford Fiesta.