Out of sight of the men

The pilgrims had come, she since discovered, from the Territory of the Wallis and Futuna Islands, and when the women were housed in a completely different part of the city from the men, the organisers of the religious festival found it impossible to get them to come to a single special event.

All the rest of their lives they had to look after the men folk, the women explained, and so now they were out of sight of the men, pope or no pope, they would far prefer a holiday on their own.

Where to see the pope today

She told me that when she saw her neighbours Ted and Clive on the street yesterday, their shaved grey heads held together as they waited for the lights to change, she realised that their choice of wearing identical black jackets printed all over with cavorting gold skeletons would have been less in solidarity with the women selling POPE GO HOMO t-shirts than a deep nostalgia for something in the groups of uniformed teenagers with lanyards and caps that we were seeing everywhere in our city for so-called World Youth Day – for that time, perhaps, when just the sight of Ted and Clive together and holding hands, as they had once put it to her during a chat over the front fence, could still upset the stiff-arsed passers-by of Sydney.