Repelling the Missionary.

The mad woman with her tale of numb bums wasn’t my only encounter in Uttoxeter today. I was approached by a missionary. At least, I assume he was a missionary. There were three of them, all looking like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, and I heard one of them tell another victim that he was ‘at the monastery in London.’

(What sort of missionaries look like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, I wonder. Have the Mormons finally tired of being mistaken for CIA operatives? But Mormons don’t have monasteries, do they?)

Anyway, I didn’t stop to find out. I waved him away with the customary ‘whatever it is, I’m not interested.’ I used to engage in meaningful discourse with missionaries, usually until they got thoroughly bored with me and wanted me gone – which was the point of the meaningful discourse, of course. These days I’m too tetchy, so they get the arm wave instead.

Missionaries irritate me a bit, you know? They do. All religions are belief systems, and everybody has the right to believe whatever they want in that regard. What I don’t think they should do is pressure people to follow the same belief when they have no way of proving they’re right. Maybe next time I’ll quote William Porter, the stationmaster at Buggleskelly:

‘You waste your time and I’ll waste mine.’