Low life | 18 June 2015

Before delivering his sermon, the vicar said we must offer one another the sign of peace. He struck the first blow by stepping forward and thrusting a stiff karate hand at the nearest inert parishioner and demanding that peace be with her. I hoped to get away with shaking hands with just the pair of female deaf mutes in my row or, if the spirit moved, with the very elderly woman in front of me, subject to her having the agility and the ambition to turn around. But the giving of the sign of peace in this church, I now learned, meant getting up off one’s arsebones and trotting about, offering it to as many people as possible before the music stopped. So once I’d done the deaf mutes, I moved out into the aisle and plunged into the orgy of cheek-pecking and handshaking that was going on there, and I said ‘Peace be with you’ and grasped at hands and planted kisses more or less indiscriminately.

At one point I found myself a wallflower, but saw an elderly man in a suit in a similar predicament. I steadied myself to lunge in his direction with an extended hand, or even a kiss, for the spirit was well and truly upon me now — but he turned his back. So I nipped around to take him on his blind side, but he spotted me in his peripheral vision and turned his back again.

Then I remembered. Several years ago, I was in another relationship that failed and the woman wrote to the editor of the parish magazine, to the local Lib Dem candidate, and to the Devon and Cornwall police, denouncing me as a paedophile, an alcoholic, a drug addict and a porn addict with thousands of images of children on my laptop.