Who Are You?

Who Are You?

Who's asking?

Never you mind. Why should I tell you? You're not going to be interested in my birth two months early, or that I wasn't expected to live. They baptised me when I was two days old, using a chamber pot as a font.

Not any old chamber pot, mind you. It had been used by George III when he came to Weymouth on a sea-bathing cure and stayed at the house in which I was raised. Still - I suppose piss is piss; I expect the pot had been washed out. I was christened with water from the River Jordan, brought back by my father at the end of World War Two. They say piss is antiseptic - or is it disinfectant? Perhaps it would have killed the green algae that must have been present at the bottom of the bottle. Who knows?

Jesus was baptised in Jordan water too, though he was dunked right under it, standing up to his waist in the middle of the river, his cousin John pressing on his shoulders, lowering him down and down into the brown water until he was completely submerged. I wonder if he peed in it? I bet he did. Most people do. It's the cold - and the sound in your ears of the water streaming by.

As Jesus rose up, the river cascading off him in rivulets down his face, his chest, making his clothes stick to him so every rib and protuberance of his body was outlined, the cat was out of the bag about his identity. A voice like a public address system announced: "This is my son; with him I am well pleased." Very 21st century-speak, don't you think? It seems his Father had recognised his Son. My father didn't see me until I was nearly two, but Jesus was nearly thirty before his father claimed him. I suppose there were those angels singing in the sky at his birth. And the three very odd Kings who visited him when he was a couple of months old, not to mention the shepherds washing their socks by night. They all seemed to know who he was.

Nobody knew who I was when I was born, and I'm not telling now.

Anyway, I'm nobody. Nobody you would know.

I'm only me.