There has been a fair amount of time spent in churches of late not for all the happiest of reasons either, but those stories are for another time.
There is something about being in the church which makes it quite hard (for me) to be there being serious and contemplative, and it’s to do with a particular word which tends to come up a lot, because it is church after-all, and the word is Christ. I can’t hear the word now without my brain flicking immediately to a very particular character from a very particular BBC drama. (I wonder if anyone will know where my brain goes when hearing that word before I get to the end of this daft ditty, when I shall tell you.)
But it means if I am sitting in quiet contemplation under the roof of the church and a vicar starts wanging on about Christ, it’s hard to continue concentrating on the job at hand, without a small immature chuckle and a wondering of the mind.
Then when my usually quite empty brain starts moving in this auto-word-association manner, I am launched back in time to prep-school where I was taught science by a man called Alan.
Poor Alan. He didn’t stand a chance against us awful south England uppity children. Alan was from Up North and he had a ginger beard and tight belly squished snugly into what can only be described as golfers-jumpers. We used to laugh at him constantly. He would stand at the front of the class aggressively scratching his ginger beard (don’t get me wrong, many of the absolute best people have red hair, my first ever kiss was in a graveyard with scrumptious chap with light strawberry-blond hair and a face of freckles).
But we were also quite frightened by Alan, he had a powerful shout and a scorching scowl and we didn’t always understand what he was saying, which grants a bit of authority (because even bratty 10 year olds can’t constantly say what/pardon/excuse me? to find out how to light a bunsen burner without beginning to feel stupid).
Oh how he disliked us. Going into his science lab was never easy – it smelt strongly of vinegar and he would make us cut up red cabbages to see what colours they were made from by soaking them onto blotting paper. The most interesting class we had with him was when he prepared us for the appearance of Hayleys Comet – a once in a 75-year chance; we didn’t see the comet though as we all had to be in our chilly metal framed beds when it passed over school. (I’ll be 85 when it next passes through our sky, so possibly dead or on another metal framed bed in a different sort of institution...)
Because we were a fairly foul bunch of kids we gave him the nickname Fungi. And we would howl with laughter thinking about Fungi and draw cartoons of giant red and white spotty toadstools in his class. There’s no way he couldn’t have seen them and wondered of the provenance of this name. I suspect it was as basic as the fungi being red and livid looking.
He once got so angry with us (proving to us that red heads really are angrier people) that he shouted loudly over our heads: DON’T BE SO FACETIOUS! And the way he spat out the word facetious has never, ever left me. So when I am having little moments in church tripping over the word Christ and having a chuckle, my thoughts bring me back to that vinegary classroom and Alan yelling (dangly thing in his throat waggling manically) full throttle in his northern accent (proving to us that Northerners really are angrier people). He really lost his shit.
To give him his due, he got us – well, me, at least – back in spades, by showing us the terrifying film Poltergeist a few weeks later one weekend (I believe it was an 18-cert. We were 10.).
I didn’t sleep in my grim metal framed bed for many months after that, in the certain knowledge I'd be taken from my bed by a posessed tree.
(Did you guess? It’s Alison Steadman as Pam in Gavin and Stacey “OH MY CHRIST MICHAEL”, clutching her cheeks with both hands. If you’re called Christ, or Michael for that matter, I’m afraid I can’t take you seriously anymore. Word associations, it appears, stick for a very very long time.)
