Much as I don't want this Blog to become an Evolutionary Biologist's cliche, and be about my encounters with Religion all the time, it looks like I might have a fairly hard time of it (as you might have surmised from the no posts for ages), as every single one of my encounters is, in fact, Religious. I don't mean this in the sense that I frequently have majesticly righteous visions of things catching fire in increasingly incomprehensible ways, but rather in the sense that everything that's happened to me while being back in Edinburgh that wasn't me sitting on my bed imagining what it would be like if Arthur's Seat had eyes, and was staring at everybody, involved the old A-Atheism in some way. I've played pool with Creationists (who cheated several times more than I did, to both my and Jesus' disapproval), thrown out some old hot chocolate in a Church, and run away from a man with a look in his eye only marginaly less disturbing than the covers of his books, which were along the lines of "Jesus'll love you while you burn forever in sulphurous Hell". More interesting than those, however, is the relationship I've accidently struck up with a Monk on the Royal Mile. Now, I'm quite scared of Monks, as a rule, never quite knowing if they're donating the butter you're buying them to a small, independant commune or a company that makes nuclear bombs out of endangered animals, and this one was, at first, no exception. He ran up to me as I was walking from one improbably religion-based episode to another, telling me that I should give him money for reasons I don't remember. I'm hideously miserish when it comes to even real, established Charities, to be embarassingly honest- I haven't even joined Amnesty International, despite being in the Society and giving a five minute talk about it in three weeks time- and while he was talking about freezing Monks unable to raise enough money for even one forty volume Sanskrit tome, I was thinking about how I could probably get to the Hot Chocolate shop without him noticing were I to run under his legs. Still, something gave in me, and in desperation I realised a pact I'd made with myself after not giving money to thirty-three charities in a row.
"April!", I said loudly.
The Monk stopped in mid-explination of the Holiest Fountain in the World, and looked bewildered.
"I'll give you the money in April! When I'm finished here! And not just you! All of them! No matter if you're connected to Arms Dealers or Terrorists or that bloke next door who plays the same bloody song over and over every night! April! I'll take all the small books about Karmic Spooning you have then!"
I think I may have got a little flustered. Passers by might have thought the Monk was holding me up, thereby lowering my reputation in Edinburgh to ever-new depths. Still, the Monk himself, once realising I was serious, and, more importantly, not actualy going to kill him, split into one of the biggest smiles I've ever seen on a creature with lips, and assured me that yes, indeed, April will be fine. And now every time I walk past the Royal Mile, which is lots because it's Edinburgh and that's what you're supposed to do, he smiles at me, waving books and CDs of insperational wailing, saying "April!" "April!", in a manner suggesting he's enjoying himself very, very much. It seems they aren't all bad, those scary Monks.
...I realised yesterday I'm actualy leaving in May. I don't quite know what I'm going to do.
