Saturday 9 January 2010

Sparing the faithful's blushes

A surreal sight in a Douglas shop window today has me wondering.
There’s a big sale on in Mackay’s, and at first sight the window behind the huge ‘Sale’ notices is bare.
Not quite. Actually the shop dummies are there, but the dummies themselves are bare. Clever little idea – isn’t it?
And it gets funnier. Because as my missis and daughter noticed first, all the dummies have been turned around so that they modestly look inwards towards the shop floor.
Just another part of the joke, or is there something more to it? Because you see, the shop is next door to a church, St Thomas’s.
No, they couldn’t have, could they?
Well actually they could, and they probably did.
Because this is the church whose tiny but well connected congregation raised so much fuss about having to pay to park in the town’s multi-storey car park – whose entrance lies just to the other side of Mackay’s - that Douglas Town Council eventually dropped all charges for Sunday parking.
And this is the church whose clientele got so snotty about being combined into a single parish with the larger, less snooty All Saints that the current bish has upgraded them again. Now a church with a single figure congregation which used to be pretty much tended by a very junior curate on his day off again has it’s own full blown priest who…..
Well, he has a lot of time on his hands in which to take up any minor matter any of his parishioners cares to blow up into a moral mountain actually.

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