My mother tells me that I saw the last flight of the Concorde from her shoulders. It was 2003, we watched the jet disappear at twice the speed of sound. My sister screamed out of the skylight of our Honda CRV, the same one that broke down in the school car park on my 13th birthday. In photographs, we watched the concorde fly for the last time.

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The bigger kids used to suck holy water off their fingers. They’d dip them into the chalice affixed to the pillar with the silver placard over it that read ‘holy water, blessed by Christ’; they’d stick their fingers into the greyish water, because that was their ticket to eternal paradise. And this was the only part of church that went unrehearsed. We were taught to worship and read the same way, the words don’t matter as long as you can say them. As long as you can sing a hymn loud enough for him to hear. Two weeks before Ash Wednesday they’d start to habitually cancel morning classes. Instead, we’d file into the auditorium; assembly became an offering for God. God who was always watching. We practiced the tragic hymns from our tattered blue books. Forty Days and Forty nights, over and over, upbeat because religion is fun. Practiced walking in a straight line out the back gate and over the bridge, practice make believe, believe. That we are not walking on concrete over a sewage gutter, that we are going to go celebrate the sacrifices of God and his scapegoat son. A creature, ironically, with horns and square pupils.

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When I was 6 or 7 we went on a class field trip to The Concorde Experience. It was a museum housed in a big shipping container that closed down a few years later. There was a pilot simulator in the corner; the boys would crash jet after jet just to see them burn on the tarmac. Our teachers held our hands as we felt our way through the cramped first class cabin of a jet that would never fly again. We folded ourselves into the seats, lifted coughs out of the crevices. There were models of food that they would’ve served on the original flights to Paris and London, bread and wine made of dust and water.

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It was at secondary school that I discovered Forty Days and Forty nights was not as upbeat as my primary school had sung it. I took this to mean that at some point religion becomes a funeral march with the tempo of self-flagellation. Gone were the days of sight reading, now we meant it. One day as I stood with my eyes open during the Lord’s prayer, the religious education teacher asked me if I believed in God. I said, “No Reverend, I don’t believe that God is there or that God is watching or that God can hear my voice.” And he said, “ in the book of Matthew, it is shown that even the Devil has learned the Bible.”