Burial Plot

Everyone who has been wondering why I was not at a funeral last week, I had been tipped off. Despite having known the deceased barely, if at all, certain people had been planning to attend in order to have me arrested for being in the same room as them.

The plan had been that I would have been back in prison that night. The last time that I had been there, then they had put a hit on me, but the hitman had taken such a liking to me that he had given them their money back. They must have found a more reliable one this time.

It has all been burned as per, but over 50 priests, mostly young or youngish, independently wrote to me in prison, often saying exactly what they thought of, well, let's not. On my release, there were emails in my inbox from three times that many, including from every diocese in Great Britain and from every continent except Antarctica. And that was just the priests. Then there were the political activists, also mostly young or youngish. In both cases, I was surprised that a lot of those letters ever reached my cell. Oh, yes, I was tipped off, all right.

There is no faction more vicious than either the liberal wing of the Catholic Church or the right wing of a nominally leftish party. In the English-speaking West, those are symbiotically related, essentially and effectively a single entity in what were once their common heartlands. Here in the North East of England, at least, that machine wants me dead, and it wants me sent to prison for the purpose of killing me. Not for the first time, I can only wish it better luck next time.