91Èȱ¬

From Revered Kate Bottley, Vicar of the churches of Blyth, Scrooby and Ranskill:

Now I know it’s usually Simon Mayo who does the confessions Chris, but this can’t wait and I need to cleanse my soul, I admit it, I have sinned, and on Friday last week I had to do my act of penance. Alongside 22 other sinners I sat for 4 hours on a driving speed awareness course. I’d been caught on camera and despite it only being a little bit and despite the reason being what I considered the noble cause of hospital visiting. Speeding is speeding and I’d been held bang to rights.

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There were some real characters on the course and being a great lover of people watching I actually quite enjoyed it. There was Lauren (I’ve changed the names to protect the guilty) who only passed her test 6 months ago, an older lady called Josie, who blamed her husband for always saying ‘Put your foot down woman!’ and lovely Karen, who I think worked as a nurse in A and E and like me should have known better. It was actually quite good fun and I learnt something too, and I couldn’t help noticing at the end we all drove rather slowly out of the car park.

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There were all sorts of people on my course, different ages and backgrounds but we had all done the same thing wrong and we were all now having to face something of a consequence. The bible says ‘All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’ and despite the word ‘sin’ being a bit of a funny one, it’s true that as the saying goes ‘nobody is perfect.’ and that includes middle aged, ginger women vicars! Of course the bible too has much to say about confession, forgiveness and about making amends. And I think those are so important, we will all mess up from time to time, hopefully those mess ups will be tiny, but when we do mess up it’s important to accept responsibility, to seek forgiveness and to make amends.Ìý I believe it’s also of course important to try and not make the same mistake again, because if we can admit our mess ups and make a change it means we can be a better person tomorrow than we are today.

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So despite having a surprisingly nice time on my speed awareness it’s not an experience I’d like to repeat, and so this vicar is going to be easing off the revs in future.