1000's of kids making their communion today

magicbastarder wrote: »

i'm just jealous of kids these days. i got i think £57 for my communion and £78 for my confirmation (the communion would have been 1983).
i must work out how that much is with inflation taken into account.

I must be almost exactly the same age as you, and apart from literally a few pounds I was allowed spend at the time in both instances, I was made save the rest. I got a £20 savings certificate after my communion and a £50 one after my confirmation (a couple of years later the first was cashed in towards a 16K Sinclair Spectrum and a while later the second was cashed in towards a B/W TV to use it on)

I can remember the uncle who was the richest member of either extended family by a very long way, a director of a large and very profitable company, giving me £2! I'm sure my other cousins got way more than that, but my mother made the mistake of marrying the wrong sort and my uncle perhaps forgot that while the house he grew up in may have been in Dublin 4, it had an outside toilet.

My classmates who had very large (and less tight fisted, perhaps) extended families made multiples of what I got.

Not that I'm bitter about it or anything.

Can't remember offhand who the presiding bish was at my confo bash, but he was definitely named in that report on the Dublin diocese, not for what he had done but for what he had failed to do. (cue long-repressed mind-refrain of "and I ask the blessed Mary, ever virgin, all the angels and saints..." :eek: )

Can opened, worms everywhere :pac:

I was going to edit one of the previous posts to say how unfair it was that I got much less money than some classmates who clearly didn't take it seriously - while I took it seriously or so I thought.

But.. but.. but... maybe "taking it seriously" even then was just going along with it for the cash. I went to a junior primary run by nuns, but we had to stay back after the normal school day for communion classes in the period leading up to it - (yet, in the last days the actual wafer swallowing practice was done during the school day) - this 'detention' was unpopular with me so my mother said there'd be a treat in it for me - and she bought me a blue plastic cap-gun. I didn't ask for a cap gun, and tbh I'd have rather been spared hanging around nuns a minute more than necessary, but even then the bizarreness of that reward for that undertaking struck me as odd.

I hated the nuns (due mainly to the violence and injustice they routinely dished out) so having to spend more time with a nun after going home time was a cruel and unusual punishment!

The gun may have been after my mother tried giving me a prayer book and working on me that way :pac:

For all I know, she probably went to a priest and was told some guff along the lines of "The questioning child... their inquisitiveness must be encouraged, but in the right way... if they need to be given an incentive to overcome their resistance then it is all in the greater good.. etc"

Blue plastic cap guns tho.

Everybody knew the good cap guns were DIE-CAST made out of metal, had "Lone Star" cast into the side and when my dad was having a row with my mother and wanted to curry favour with us kids that's what he bought me.

This sort of parental behaviour on both sides may have caused some issues ...and the blue plastic cap-gun always had a certain unpleasant memory associated with it, the long-barrelled green metal one another. They both thought they were buying me something that would make me happy, but all either object did was remind me of the unhappy reasons they were trying to make me happy.

By the time of my confirmation the only time I'd heard the word 'atheist' was in a conversation involving the deceased owner of the local laundrette who supposedly had been one, he had gone to Ballymun flats and threw himself off the top. No church funeral anyway... so it looked like everyone thought that life without god was hopeless, but I'm pretty sure by then I didn't just doubt but not believe. Thanks to books outside of school I'd already known that Genesis was nonsense, can't say I was ever that impressed by the rest of it. I did resent having to do confirmation and if I'd been allowed to, I wouldn't have. I was still made wear a godawful suit on the day, and even worse, have the most godawful pictures taken later when we were made go into school dressed up like saps (except for the cool lads who had leather jackets) and stick our hands together and bow our heads for the tw@t photographer - I obtained release a few years later by taking all the prints and burning them in the back yard :pac: my mother never found out.

You can't help but look cute in a pic when you're 7 even if it's a religious occasion, but when you're an unconvinced 12 year old bowing your head and clasping your hands in an unconvinced gesture of faith, all while sporting a Steve Davis hairdo, you can't help but look like a twat :pac: