Peter Bromhead: The wages of sin

Opinion

I should have taken more notice of the framed embroideries distributed around the walls of my grandparents' cottage.

The stitching, in gothic typeface, was typical of late Victorian illustration and spelled out ominous warnings, such as "The wages of sin is death".

Every room was decorated with themes based on sin and everlasting purgatory.

Later in life, I learned the significance of my grandmother's painstaking needlework, when I discovered this was her way of reminding my grandfather he faced eternal damnation for once going to a football final in London and forgetting to return home for a few days, having apparently gone off frolicking with some woman he'd met in a London pub after the match.

I once asked her: "Where is purgatory?"

"It's between heaven and hell and it's where you're suspended in perpetual torment for having sinned," she sternly advised.

On reflection, she certainly kept my poor grandfather effectively suspended in the void between heaven and hell for most of his life.

Now, decades later, when I thought I'd paid my own personal debt for frolicking, with marital contracts and children, I find further retribution is still demanded by those who sit in judgment on past follies.

To add to the nightmarish quality of the torment I'm experiencing, it arrives, as Shakespeare put it so aptly, "in the foul womb of night".

It started innocently enough, when my 2-year-old acquired a giant teddy bear from a grateful customer. Naturally, he takes this over-stuffed monster to bed with him.

Unfortunately, at some time in the small hours, my son habitually wakes and creeps into his parents' bed, accompanied by the bear.

Inexplicably, teddy then demands my space by relentlessly pushing me to the edge of the bed, inevitably leading to this poor columnist being rudely tipped on to the floor.

"I don't deserve this," I wail. "I'm an old-age pensioner, who shouldn't have to suffer the humiliation of being evicted out of his bed by a giant teddy bear."

Teddy and the child remain stonily unmoved by my protest, while the caregiver only snorts and tells me to make less noise.

Picking myself up, I stumble off into the darkness to sleep on the couch.

As I struggle to settle down again, a long-forgotten series of embroideries with dire messages keeps disturbing my thoughts, reminding me about the price that has to be paid for past fleeting pleasures.