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Doing Things by the Book
October is one of those months when nothing exciting seems to happen. It is as dull as those days before television when there were the long nights with only the steam radio to listen to. Worse were the hours cooped up in a barrack room, or the tedious journeys on buses to and from college or work.
Relief from that mundane life could be found in a Penguin. As a schoolboy I had little or no money but I found that I could then, as now, pick up a Penguin quite cheaply from a Jumble Sale. Not the dinner jacketed little birds that hop about in the South Atlantic but the kind of paperback books which slipped easily into the pocket. I read them avidly, often at my peril. Two weeks into a new job, I was nearly sacked for surreptitiously reading a detective novel instead of working.
I was not the only one who read books. On night shifts we weary workers would swap copies of Hank Janson's risque stories and soldiers were not averse to sitting reading in bed until the wee small hours. They were not too well disposed towards my hysterical laughter when immersed in a P.G. Wodehouse. A well aimed boot, thrown the length of the room, would signal that the time to shut up and put the light out had come. I usually threw it back, with a degree of accuracy, and carried on. A near riot broke out on the night that I hit the wrong person. Barrack room damage was done.
On my bookshelf there is a well worn book from those halcyon days. Its pages are somewhat stuck together from the time that I was duty NCO and I took it in my bag with a flask of coffee, which leaked. I kept it for sentimental reasons because it was a book which was to shape my life. I have had many other copies of it but the old original is a reminder to me of how this life of faith started. It is, of course, a Bible, the Authorised Version, black cover, no pictures. We have the Bible read to us every Sunday, and on weekdays too, but that is the sanitised, often politically correct, version. If you delve further, as I love to do, there are parts that stir the heart and stimulate the intellect, hidden truths and the kind of naughty stories which they will not let us to read aloud in public. Slip a copy of any Bible translation into your pocket and browse through it. It is guaranteed to be better than a Penguin.
May God bless you all, Fr. Allan
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