I slept reasonably well, though having eaten far too much yesterday did leave a bloated feeling which didn’t go away.
I got up to see my bereaved friend was having a little anti-religion rant on Facebook as today marked two months since his wife of over thirty years had died. This made me think… I met Graeme in 1975 when we were both in the Boys Brigade, and we both stayed in it until I left first in1984. Looking back, although we had a wonderful time there, the whole raison d’etre of the Boys Brigade was to force religion onto kids and it took me many years to realise that I had been brainwashed, I didn’t actually believe any of what the ministers had been preaching, but I just desperately hoped it was true. Even though I realised that the idea of the God with which we had been presented required far too many excuses.
Now over forty years later I find myself looking back to see that the church in which we met has closed down, with one exception none of the old crowd goes to church any more, and (by and large) the Boys Brigade failed in its mission. I was confirmed in my disbelief at the funeral of the chap who ran the Boys Brigade group for many years when the one person of our old gang who stayed with the church (and is now a vicar himself) gave a little speech/sermon in which he praised our old leader for having a strong “faith” – this “faith” being a stubborn pig-headed insistence on clinging to a set of beliefs which had long since been shown to be frankly wrong.
I also saw I had a load of birthday messages on Facebook, which was rather kind.
“er indoors TM” and I then went for a cheeky McBrekkie… back in the day I seemingly lived in McDonalds. I can’t remember the last time I was in there. McBrekkie sadly wasn’t all that good. We then took the dogs round the park for a little walk, and I then, pausing only briefly to iron some shirts, spent the rest of the day slobbing in front of the telly nursing an ongoing guts ache on what was probably the crappest birthday I’ve ever had…
Mind you the weekend had been good, so I can’t complain. Mid-February has always been a bad time to have a birthday.
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