:: GussetBLOG ::

:: Wednesday, September 10, 2003 ::

Tag-team Christening

I had to attend the Christening of one of my nephews on Sunday. As a concept, Christening isn’t something I really agree with, but for sake of reducing family tension it’s the sort of thing you go along with and keep quite about. Religion is something that I don’t think you are really capable of making a sensible decision about early in life, and something I think you should discover (or disregard) on your own, rather than have the views of you parents/guardians/school etc. forced on you.

That aside, the ceremony itself was unintentionally hilarious. The vicar had been away for the last two weeks and so played only a minor roll in the service, sitting back and letting a bunch of around a dozen helpers in matching jumpers with pictures of the church on perform some sort of bizarre tag-team service. A different person would jump up from the benches and scurry to the front for each reading, hymn, handling of ceremonial object etc. Presenting a seven month old with “my first bible” already seemed like a bad idea before they attempted to present a burning candle! Fortunately this attempt was aborted and someone else had to except the candle on his behalf.

It was amusing how three of the five hymns sung seemed unknown to at least 90% of the attendees. The start of every verse an awkward slur of voices attempting to synchronise, usually finding full voice for only the last few words of the line. The mysterious new and unknown hymns were all written in the 80’s (according to the copyright notices on the back) and all had cumbersome names like “I am a new creation no more in condemnation” (bit of a heavy, Catholic sounding one that), “As the deer pants for water so my soul longs after you” and “From heaven you came, helpless babe, entered our world, your glory veiled” (which featured such beautifully matched rhyming couplets in the verses as babe/veiled/serve/live, tears/bear/torn/said, feet/sacrifice/space/surrendered, in stark contrast to the inspired combination used in the chorus of king/him/offering/king)

All of this with a girl sat behind me eating crisps as loud and as slowly as it is imaginably possible to do so. Surely if your children who obviously don’t want to be there can’t make it through an hour without eating you should at least humour them with something that can be eaten less noisily? Chewy sweets perhaps? Gob-stoppers? Tranquilisers?

The next interesting point was someone forgetting to introduce the next hymn. You could tell she had forgotten because after performing her menial moving an object type job she went and sat back down again with all of the other jumpers eyeballed her all the way back to her seat with a look of horror on their faces. One of the more competent jumpers (the one with the walking stick with a plaster stuck on it) then stood up in her seat, tuned around to address the congregation from there, and introduced “One more step along the world I go.” But this did not save the situation, as another jumper wearing church monkey couldn’t operate the remote control for the CD player. Thrust me, I know this isn’t complex, I had to operate the same CD player at the wedding of the parents around 18 months ago. Yes, that’s right, she was up the duff within months of the wedding. What is it with these religious types who have to get married then immediately produce offspring, or get married in order to produce offspring? (I think I just answered my own question.) Indecently, this was the only hymn accompanied by CD, all of the others were accompanied by presets on a Casio keyboard and thus sounded like John Shuttleworth compositions.

So, back to the story, the CD monkey was searching through the CD for the appropriate track, not skipping through the tracks, searching. So the church is treated to the sound of a track winding through at two or three times normal speed. Everyone looks around confused, fairly sure it isn’t supposed to sound like that. The walking stick carrying jumper helpfully shouts out to the CD monkey that it should be track 10 on disk 2. He continues to fast forward but is obviously not getting anywhere, were probably only on track two or three. The walking stick carrying jumper attempts a joke in an attempt to prevent the congregation falling into coma. I think I was the only one that found the observation “is it playing in the right direction?” funny. Not because it was a good joke of course, or because it sounded anything like it was playing in the wrong direction, but because it conjured an image of death-metal backwards records and voices whispering “join us, join us...” repeatedly. Walking stick jumper woman eventually decided we all new it well enough to sing it without music. Just as well this didn’t happen with one of the other hymns.

:: Dan 10.9.03 [Arc]    ::
...