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On Sundays you awoke very troubled, confronted the Slough of Despond and hiding under the covers feigning sleep until your mother roused you, and once more you would have to suffer the Unburdening of you sins. You fought the dragon Apollyon over breakfast with pleas of all manner of illness and injury while your mother prepared herself and the roast dinner on an interwove basis, such that she was in her best clothes and veiled hat and high heels as she slipped the baking tray in the preheated oven. There was no escape and you were dragged forth through the Valley of the Shadow of Death to be scourged along with the rest of the Faithful, amid the Hopeful of eternity in the cold Dungeon the parish church. You might have swooned along with Mercy as you sat awaiting the interminable end of the good Father’s sermon, but in fact he knew he dare not run overtime lest he have the entire neighbourhood’s roast dinners on his conscience. You returned home where you sat in Giant Despair over the inevitable cauliflower and silver beat which you sloped to pulp like the Man with the Muckrake throughout the afternoon, unable to neither leave the table nor enjoy the Delectable Mountain of dessert until every last bit of your vegies were devoured. Vanity-fair awaited amid the sunlight through the window as the hours passed at the kitchen table, and a poisonous lick of white sauce and morsel of horror was forced down the Path of Righteousness to your stomach every ten minutes and otherwise you made walls of mashed Brussels sprouts and who knew if the Gate was Strait or not, and sloped it up to build castles, all of them Doubting, but there was no Mercy and no Forgiveness. The battle of the roast dinner vegies was fought heartlessly every Sunday. And was this the way to Heaven, to Paradise? Did you really want to make that Pilgrimage? Certainly not—for in Heaven, you knew, every day was Sunday.

 

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