A Religious Experience, Part One

We interrupt this coverage of France to chronicle an event which simply won't allow me to type any further without detailing. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to my experience at The Church.

And “experience” is certainly the only proper way for me to categorise it. Not traumatic, not necessarily enjoyable and absolutely mind boggling, The Church is a beast unto itself, a product seemingly born out of the collective drunken mind power of the race of backpackers that Flood the London streets.

We'd heard rumours of not so much a bar, but a weekly event. Nothing but a figment during the week, something spoken of as if the hazy recollection people have of it was only a hallucination, The Church only shows itself in reality for four hours on a Sunday afternoon. From midday to 4:00pm, the story was that the inside of a former church – in what may well have been an attempt to see what happened when you combined blasphemy with sacrilege – was turned into a hovel of drunkenness, debauchery and dereliction. Where drinks had to be purchased in numbers of three - bartenders generous enough to provide patrons with -plastic bags to carry them in – people dressed in costume for no good reason and the floor was covered in hay.

In other words, it was something we had to witness for ourselves.

Dragging myself out of bed far too early Sunday morning for a man who had only befriended his mattress at 4:00am that same morning, my mind and body questioned what they had to make me hate them so much. In the hallway, Laureen and Brendan shambled past me in the manner of people defeated by their own morbid curiosity. All we could do was dedicate ourselves to the self-deception that we were doing this as some kind of social experiment.

Sitting on the Tube as it rocked me back and forth to ensure I didn't forget that I was hungover, I stared at the coffee in my hand, wishing it was at least ten times stronger and possibly made from Speed. My mind was spinning with ideas of what exactly I was to expect from this place. Though, admittedly, that may not have been the only reason for the spinning.

At any other time, disembarking a train to be greeted by the sight of a number of loud, obnoxious, costumed and drunken – impressively so, considering it was only 11:30 in the morning – would be cause to retreat back onto the train and ride it straight back into the world of self respect. Fortunately, this morning, like most others, I hadn't been burdened with such minor things as dignity, so all it meant was that we were heading in the right direction. And considering we'd arrived sporting a healthy lack of ideas in regard to where we were supposed to go, having people to follow came as somewhat of a relief, assuming they didn't decide to pass out in traffic on the way.

As we saw the line snaking around the building, it became hard to deny – not to mention far too late – that this was our destination, despite the depressing things it suggested about humanity. Scanning my eyes across its foundations, the building seemed to be doing its best to deny any knowledge that it was once a church, trying to avoid the shame that I had no sense of whatsoever. Nowadays it was disguising itself as a theatre, a venue for concerts and other stage shows during the week.

Finding ourselves at the back of a line that was longer than it had any right to rationally be, working itself around several corners and decorated with empty beer cans and morons, I engaged in the fool's errand of convincing myself I was much better than these people, despite the fact that I was following them into this black hole of a building. The results I achieved were less than spectacular.

Finally, a deep breath and in we went, my mind accompanied by the last fleeting thought that maybe I should have had all my shots before leaving Australia.

Would you look at that, I'd walked into the Twisted Arm megastore. I'd walked into a sea of multinational boganism, although from what I could gather it was primarily dominated by Australians. It was disturbingly familiar. But the Kiwis, South Africans and the vastly outnumbered nations of the UK were all making a show, drinking until they were all speaking one universal language – the intoxicated slur. And the rumoured plastic bags were making no attempt to conceal themselves, dangling from the wrists and belts of every other person, a small family of cider or beer cans contained within.

Disappointingly, one of the first things I had noticed – and I'd consulted the soles of my shoes to ensure I wasn't mistaken – was that the floor was completely devoid of hay. I ventured a guess that it was to avoid having the place likened to somewhat of a retard farm. I still made the comparison.

In the centre of the room, on the large expanse of floor that found its home in front of the stage, there was a sea of bodies. Some were dancing, some were swaying unsteadily and trying to pass it off as a dance, and some had abandoned the concept of rhythm altogether, instead choosing to jump up and down and yell at the ceiling. All manner of costumes peppered this sweaty, possibly syphilitic ocean – pirates, nurses, Indians, police, Ghostbusters, Jokers, gladiators – with a large number of them able to be prefaced with the adjectives 'douchebag' or 'slutty'. A video camera swept across the crowd, the images captured projected onto large monitors on the wall and proving that the one way to turn an idiot into an even bigger idiot is to put them on a screen. The camera also spent a lot of its leisure time zooming in on girls' boobs, as they turned away under the unconvincing guise of coy embarrassment, which, when taking into account they were armed with enough cleavage to demand your attention under threat of suffocation, seemed a little contradictory. As did the fact that the body behind the camera also belonged to a female.

Now sporting our own bag of canned booze – after all, if we were doing The Church, we were doing it right, regardless of the opinions of our stomachs, heads and livers – we stood and spectated the crowd. And for a good while, apart from it seeming like the womb from which every dodgy bogan pub I had been to was spawned, there seemed nothing special to the place. All these expectations of horrified awe had gone unfounded.

But then, with the dimming of lights and the revving of a small motorcycle engine, everything began to change.

To be continued...