The result of a generator

Had I not overheard those nuns in the bus I would never have realised that the smoke rising from the foot of the cross for so-called World Youth Day in Sydney this year was not the kitsch visual effect of a production team who’d spent too many hours in their adolescence watching midday films like Barabbas, but was instead the result of a generator which, having caught fire under the floor, had been doused just in time to prevent too great a reference to other moments in Christian history, such as the burning alive of Giordano Bruno in the Campo De’ Fiori in Rome, or the much larger conflagrations in England or Counter-Reformation Spain.