Never let the truth get in the way of....etc

Great image from today's Guardian, possibly a bit too good - I know the papers retouch at their peril but there is a tad too much contrast in here for me - but it's still brilliant and loaded with symbolic meaning. It reminds me of The Omen - where all the unlucky ones who were due to die had a ghosted image superimposed on their photograph which foretold the manner of their death. In this case, it appears The Pope will be crushed to death by a tumbling scale model of the Twin Towers - or perhaps it suggests he blew them up in the first place...

I went to a fairly rigid Catholic School. I hated it. To be fair, it was much better than the local high school  and preferable to the welsh speaking school my cousins elected to go to - but I still hated it. For me, religion smothered everything in a depressing, thick blanket of doom and guilt. The nuns in particular were angry, bitter, sneering hags - or self deluded manic depressives who were obviously living in a pretend world.

When the papal Visit of 1982 sent a frisson of Catholic hysteria through the country - there was a real sense of anticipation by the staff - and some excitement from us, he was very popular ( JP2 ) and we all seemed to think something astonishing and miraculous would happen. It was made clear that anyone who actually saw the pope would get special treatment. A boy in my class called Patric Irwin, roughly about as unpopular as I was, but with nice - middle class architect parents ( his mother had a fur coat, and his dad designed the ceiling panels for Theatre Clwyd in Mold ) told someone that he had seen the pope not once - but twice - with his parents who had driven overnight to manage being at two events. A blatant schoolboy lie, obviously it was a combination of 14 year old bravaudo and a need to be popular or liked - but a teacher overhead and the whole thing got out of hand very quickly. Trapped in a lie they dragged him up in front of the whole school to anoint him as blessed and recount his story - which was uncomfortable to say the least.

Obviously he was rumbled ( they called his folks to fawn over them ) and he was duly humiliated and punished ... and from what I remember - he was never forgiven and the rest of his school life was uncomfortable, to say the least.