KINGS' PARKING LOT

My sister is here. We go to see the Roskilde cathedral, and when the lady selling the tickets at the counter tells us that the entrance is free for the citizens of Roskilde my sister cracks up. Of course I know why she does it. Nobody else can figure it out. And since I'm in the know, and I know that what she has in mind is utterly hilarious, I also start cracking up. Very inappropriate given that we are in as close a proximity to where the dead Danish kings have been parked for centuries as one could possibly imagine. Some nuns wearing Mephisto sandals - what the hell, they are heavenly comfortably, they think - look at us in disbelief. I feel sorry for them. They obviously have never seen the scene in Monty Python's The Life of Brian when Pontius Pilate hands Biggus Dickus the scroll to read from after he has failed to pronounce the names starting with R, whom he thinks of releasing: "I shall welease Wodewick" - or Wogew. The crowd cracks up. But Biggus Dickus has an even bigger speech impediment, to the crowd's surprise and delight - his S letters all turn into 'Th' sounds. In Latin rendition, the calling out of names that involve an S sound as Th is bound to create some problems. The crowd cracks up even more. My sister has this scene passing through her head as we pass the sarcophagi: "Thitithenth!" - of Roskilde.

We went through the church with my sister reciting entire chunks from The Life of Brian. She is the only one I know who knows the script by heart - and who also has the whole movie downloaded on her phone. We checked it too for sound effects. The dead were about to rise from their thilentious tombs.

We should have parked our laughter outside - or is it harked, or sharked? I go ask my thithter.