My secondary school, Bishop Vesey's Grammar School in Sutton Coldfield, had a weird obsession with Christianity.

Assembly

Hymns

Three times a week we had a school assembly where, amongst other things, we read the Lord's Prayer out loud in unison and sang Christian hymns.

These weren't even fun hymns like He's Got the Whole World in His Hands, This Little Light of Mine or the perennial campfire favourite, Kumbaya My Lord. No, they were dull hymns instead. In fact, they were so boring that I can't even remember any of them. I think we might have sung All Things Bright and Beautiful but even that one sounds too fun for Bishop Vesey's so I'm probably just imagining it.

The kind of hymns we sang at school were monotone, devoid of any joy, and full of words like "thou" and "beseech".

The Lord's Prayer

I can still remember most of the words to the Lord's Prayer though, due to being forced to repeat it so many times over seven years.

Our father
Who art in heaven
Hallowed be thy name
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done
On Earth as it is in Heaven
Give us this day our daily head
And forgive us our trespasses
As we forgive those who trespass against us
For thine is the glory and the power
Forever and forever
Yadda yadda yadda
Amen

Actually, I think it might have been "Give us this day our daily bread" not "Give us this day our daily head". Because God never did come down from heaven to give us all head. That would have been nice though. I expect that God gives a good blowjob, being a deity and all.

Guest speakers

Sometimes guests from the outside world would come and speak at assembly. The guests I remember the most vividly were a Christian man and woman who talked about God and Jesus and all that kind of shite. They were trying to convert us to Christianity, or at least the boys that weren't already Christian.

At the end of the assembly, when we were all filing out to go to our form rooms, the man and woman were standing at the doors and offering a free bible to every student as we walked past. I accepted one just because it was free. It was tiny: the smallest bible I've ever seen. You could fit it in the palm of your hand. And the pages were so thin that they wouldn't have even made good toilet paper.

Religious Studies

One of our school subjects was Religious Studies, where we learned about religions like Sikhism, Islam, Judaism and (of course) Christianity. I think we might have been better off learning something, I don't know, not religion? I understand that lots of people believe that a magic man from the sky made the world, but I don't understand why we had to devote two hours every week to study that shite. Especially when the very next lesson might be Biology where we'd learn that life came from evolution instead.

I think the intention was to make us more tolerant of other faiths and backgrounds and thereby try to make society more inclusive. All I know is that it was a waste of fucking time, like much of the curriculum at Bishop Vesey's.

School motto

The motto of the school was Dextra Dei Exaltavit Me which means "The right hand of God has lifted me up". I don’t know what God's left hand was doing. Maybe he was masturbating with it. If I was God I would probably masturbate a lot too, just to alleviate the boredom of being immortal and looking after 7 billion people all the time.

Then again, maybe God was using his left hand to finger his arse hole. I sometimes do that when I have an itch in my arse hole. Unsurprisingly I’m not invited to many dinner parties anymore.