The old phone booths were just around the corner from the clocks

The photobooth is still there

In the olden days, before the internet, and I-phones, if you wanted to make a call in the big city, a physical telephone call in a public place, you had to race along to Flinders Street Station. And along the St Kilda Road frontage in tight array, a whole line of phone booths, with lovely varnished wooden and glass doors would allow you to have a conversation away from the hustle and bustle of the big city. Inside the booths, there was a bench for a telephone book, and all around the walls little perforations created a sound deadening effect. In this strange, snug and  insular environment you were alone with your thoughts.  To communicate down the line, and thus, ensure the threads of commerce and industry were upheld. And logically, this teleporting hub was  situated smack bang along the main thoroughfare at Flinders Street. At the station itself. Where  silver tendrils ferried trainloads of commuters to all corners of suburbia. Where they’d go home to Eric Pearce, six oclock news and Bob and Dolly Dyer. It was  where SP bookies could get the latest scratchings other than  the corner barber. A lover could call his sweetie without the folks hearing and upon a pre arranged signal, a phone would ring at a particular booth, and shady business deals would be transacted. These booths were the progenitors of life and culture. . It also proclaimed in a funny sub-colonial kind of way, ‘Modernism’. 

A bit like this…

In another institution other little boxes proliferated across the suburbs. Perhaps bigger ones in the city itself for high usage. These little booths were for communication of another sort. 

It seems uncharitable to assume too much. The sanctity of the confessional is sacrosanct. And why shouldn’t it be. It’s where little secrets can be kept secret. It also does more than that.   It works as a sort of kind of semi sound-proofed cell to report messages through a medium to God. 

New Archbishop upholding confidentiality of sacred portal so that kiddies may be punished for their SIN!

In them olden days, priests could quietly gain material for later masturbation. Single girls could be punished if they fell pregnant, and serial sex offenders would be pardoned by a small donation and a ‘Hail Mary’. It was of its time. No questions asked, discretion assured, and in a direct hookup to God. The absolution would be all conquering… well… absolute. 

So upstairs, in the great cosmic teleportal, He’d (God) be on the red phone, listening to all the cross talk, the wicked and the pure, and quietly pull himself off. Cos listening in on other peoples conversations is a little creepy. An exctasy of shadenfreude. United in that all-consuming principle that Rupert Murdoch so readily plays upon. Guilt and the crisis of original sin.  Empires are built on it. 

Kiddly fiddling is a sin. It fucks kids up for life. But if a member of THAT clergy hear about it he’s not obliged to do anything. That’s tradition. A tradition made by old men, (like God) to keep women and kiddies in a lower place. Buggerising kids is against the law.  But the church has let it be known it is above the law. Their message to little kiddies, ‘You are all tainted with original sin, we can’t help it, Go way and Die!! And if we hear about it, we won’t lift a finger. Communication in gods teleportal is our secret. Not society’s secret’.

Churches don’t pay taxes, They’re charitable. 

Is there any charity in their bloody mindedness?