Do you think the Pope swears?

I’m a little bit strange, I admit it. I’ll be doing something innocuous and I’ll suddenly feel the need to have a question answered. Like today for example I wanted to know the answer to the question above. Despite living in the West of Scotland all my life I’m a strange one in that I don’t really swear all that often. To grow up in the west of Scotland and not swear is an unusual occurrence to say the least. Everyone does it. You aren’t considered a real man unless you swear. It’s like a rap album without the parental advisory sticker, it doesn’t happen very often.

Strangely, I was actually 24 before I swore for the first time. I lost my virginity before I swore, no mean feat for an ugly bugger. Still to this day I have not sworn in front of my mother. Despite now being 29 if I swore in front of my mother I probably wouldn’t live to see the next day. In fact it was her fault that I never swore until it was 24. Don’t get me wrong she is a nice woman but if you do wrong she can also become one scary woman, and no-one really scares me. Well no-one but my mother that is, she has this look of silent impending doom where you would rather the earth swallowed you whole and the devil whipped your back raw with barbed wire than suffer the wrath that was coming next. Sadly the devil has never rescued me yet.

Needless to say I have never sworn in front of my mother and probably never will. When I did swear for the first time it caught me off guard, I didn’t see it coming it just come out of my mouth, no warning. As much as it surprised me, it surprised the people I was with at the time. Having known me most of my life and never hearing those words being uttered by my mouth they were stunned into silence for a couple of seconds, before looking at one another and then pointing to me and falling to the floor laughing “Steven … swore……hahahahaha”. Evil fuckers! It was then I realised that me and swearing would not make a good partnership. Apparently when I swear it has the same effect as when my mother swears. People just laugh.

I’ve only ever heard my mother swear 3 times. Each occasion was hilarious. She only swears when provoked by something that makes her really angry. The problem lies in the build up to the act of swearing. She can’t pull off swearing effectively because she thinks about the act too much. You can see her thinking about swearing 5 minutes before she does it. The whole time her anger is building up and her voice is getting louder and louder she really wants to swear but she’s also thinking of her grandmother, whom she is inherited the silent-impending-doom look from, and by the time she finally has built up enough rage to swear she’s been thinking about the deed too long. The words then escape from her mouth in her quiet posh telephone voice, which is a such a contrast to her loud angry voice that anyone in the room at the time instantly falls to the floor in hysterics. Of course this is not the effect she is aiming for but she just can’t help it, she can’t swear effectively. I don’t have the posh telephone voice but it seems to have a similar comical effect when I swear because I swear so infrequently.

Anyway what was this post about? Oh yeah, the pope. Why did I think about the pope and if he swore or not? Well today I was getting ready to wash my clothes when the question popped into my head. I was getting the washing out of the laundry basket when the door bell rang. My head automatically turned towards the sound of the doorbell but my hand at the time was still digging into the basket for that last piece of clothing at the bottom when my finger. Because my head and my hand were not coordinated at the time, my finger scraped down the inside of the basket and split my nail down the middle before it ripped in two and fell off completely. At the time of the splitting of the nail incident a few words escaped from my mouth, I can’t say I remember the exact order the words came out but it went something like this……’FUUUUCK, SHIT, FUCK, BASTARD, FUCK, SHIT, FUCK IN THE NAME OF THE WEE MAN…..(deep breath) ….owwwww that hurt!”

I then went down the stairs, answered the door and discovered no-one there. “Fuckers!”

It was then, in the middle of doing a boring chore that I wondered if the Pope swore. I mean if I can be provoked into swearing surely the Pope can too. Imagine if the Pope was addressing the people of Rome on Easter Sunday and he accidentally dropped the Holy Bible on his foot. I bet you he’d swear, but he’d be sneaky about it, he’d do it Latin.