This is not an Ecumenical Matter

For context, I don't have much of a real-world social life compared my peers - I'm borderline Boomer/Gen X. Those people that could do personal encounters, tendency to start dying nowadays. I'm fine. In retrospect most of my motivation to engage with people, be a great party-goer, was driven by my genitals. That drive hasn't gone away, but desire for a quiet life has taken over.

Forget that. I have a besty, Marinella. Lives 5km away. Such a lovely person, I really landed on my feet meeting her.

Mari has a friend Sean staying for a couple of days. A guy she met in Rome years back. (I'm terrible with datetime things. Fairly sure I'm 60, Mari a decade older, Sean a decade older than that).

Sean is Irish, studied Missiology (the branch of theology to do with missions, comfortably named) in Rome, the epicentre of bonkers mythology.

Mari herself would be unusual anywhere, rural hills of Toscana, wtf. Like, when you meet her, it won't take long for you to realise that she's well-educated (was a gyn/obs surgeon), very clever. But her superpower is she's kind. After technically retiring, she went to (insert country) Africa to help out in a hospital.

I think she is brilliant herself. But she knows so many brilliant people. Is weird. (Although I do something similar myself - learn stuff, seek out the people who are best at things).

Back to Sean, her house guest for a couple of days. I didn't want to impinge, but I had to say hello at some point.

I'm from a village in northern England. Prejudices. I did get to know plenty of Irish people in Sheffield (not true - Bernadette spoke for all Ireland, I think she was born in Sheffield), I did get to know plenty of Irish people in London. But I still had the stereotype of an old Irish priest though. Mostly Father Ted, bless his soul. Or Church ordained kiddy-fucker, not bless.

This Sean, worked as a priest some of his adult life. Lived in the Philipines for a while, then a lot of time in China - on paper teaching English (not a priest not a priest), helping Chinese postgrads to make their papers work in English. Incredible guy. Absolute consumer of information - ok, that is a trait some people have, remember bus routes, but... Maybe he would be diagnosed with autism or something if he saw a shrink, in his 80s. As we started chatting, talked about cars. Encyclopedic knowledge (I know absolutely nothing about cars). Travel things, Boieng engineering issues and how they'd screwed up. We ended up on the geopolitical situation, at Mari's kitchen table. The guy is brilliant. Devours everything, which I've seen plenty of humans do, but then he's analysed at a very careful level. I've never seen such broadness brought together, totally consistently.

I've left the best one until last, which happened first.

Literally the next thing he said after intros was that he wanted to sort out Mari's tired old computer (Yeah, I've tried). He said "I have 7 or 8 Linux distros on a stick here". Yeah. That. Ancient Irish fecking priest. Mint.