Holy Shit!

I am a Eucharistic Minister these days for my sins! I have been many other things in my life but these days I am a Eucharistic Minister for the Catholic church here in little Portobello by the sea. Sounds grand but really, it’s just taking Communion to the housebound to save the parish priest from traipsing around every one of them himself which would be a mammoth task for him.

Apart from the holy stuff I like a gab and am genuinely interested in people’s lives. Most are elderly, some have lived through wars, been in politics, have famous relatives or spent their adult lives travelling the world as sailors. There’s always a story to hear and I’m the man who likes to hear it.

Most of my ‘parishioners’ as it were, are rather elderly and one, in particular, is beginning to lose the place a little: early-stage dementia and this can take a little getting used to. This chap, who has sailed to every continent except Antarctica, is further out where the buses don’t run with every passing week.

 One day early on in the Pandemic when we were just learning the rules and being forbidden by the church to visit folk in their homes, I gave this fella – let’s call him C -  a ring to see how he was faring. Not too good, says C, fed up and resorting to repeated viewings of his wife’s funeral (she’d died about three years previously and they’d been devoted to one another).

I decide to take a bag of comedy DVDs around – Hancock’s Half Hour, Porridge, some Ealing comedies, Father Ted, etc. I can’t stand the idea of the poor old chap watching a funeral on repeat. Nowhere in any self-help book you can name does it say, ‘To cheer yourself up, why not get that old funeral vid out’.

I was never to have ownership of these DVDs again.

Poor chap was falling a lot and in and out of hospital, so his relatives decided the safest place for him was a rather upmarket local care home. So, as soon as it’s deemed Covid-safe I proceed to give him Communion there but always with the unholy thought at the back of my mind about the whereabouts of my precious DVDs.

I can’t ask him as this will only confuse him and it may make me look like some DVD carpetbagger out for his own game.

“Where are my DVDs, C?”

“What DVDs I lent you when you kept watching your wife’s funeral”

A look of startled alarm on his face as he is reminded again that his wife is dead.

“Everything OK?” asks a passing careworker. “Why is C crying?”

“He told me my wife is dead and something about his DVDs”

“I can explain”.

So, I can’t even raise the subject. I look around his rather plush little room for any sign of my babies but there is none. Probably they are with his other possessions while they sell his house. I could ask the relatives, but I never get to meet any of them.

The other day I was entertaining a favourite pastime of scouring the local charity shops for books and CDs and that when I see them. Someone has made quite a presentation of them, quite a theme. There in the window of Cancer Research are all my comedy DVDs. I recognise the little nicks and blemishes and, anyway, it would have to be some coincidence for them to be doppelgangers of my originals.

They are priced two and three quid each and there is a dozen of them. Will I buy them back or will have an awkward conversation inside?

“You see those DVDs in your window…? Well, you won't believe this”.