JUST A FEW PARISH NOTICES

As you may or may not know, my brother is a clergyman, presently in Afghanistan as an army chaplain, so preaching sermons runs in the family. The irony is that none of his friends can believe he has a hirsute hippyish brother who writes about weird stuff for a living, and - especially during my bachelor days - no-one could believe that I was the brother of a clergyman.

What am I wibbling on about my brother for? You might well ask. Well, despite the fact that me and the Church of England have gone our separate ways in recent months, I have never felt more affinity with my sibling than on this cold and frosty Sunday morning when I find myself with a whole slew of little notices to read out...

• Yesterday, although I did the bloggo postings, Graham did the website front page and the posting to usenet, and as Syd quite properly pointed out, he forgot to change the date on the front page of the website. Sorry guys.
• In my Gadarene rush to inform the book-buying populous that Nick Molloy's massively entertaining new book is now available, I forgot to mention that as well as illustrations by Anthony Wallis, it features a foreword by Dr Karl Shuker. Smashing!
• On Friday two total strangers came to tea. It was a certain young lady's birthday, and her husband emailed me to ask whether he could bring her over to meet us. She was, apparantly, a fan who had seen us at Uncon last year and wanted to learn more about the CFZ. Seeing an excuse to have cake for tea, I said `of course`, and then forgot all about it. However, they turned up, I remembered, and a convivial time was had by all. Whilst we were eating cake the recent unpleasantness that occurred in the wake of our Irish visit was brought up. Our guests said that they were amazed at all the slurs that they had read about me, and - despite the fact that some are contradictory - they didn't think that one man would have the time to do all that I had been accused of. However, they did tell me of three more slurs of which I have been accused. Apparently I am a communist, an athiest, and have been sectioned under the 1983 Mental Health Act. None of these things, by the way, are true.
• I completely forgot to congratulate my sub-editor Lizzy for having finally managed to get herself a flat of her own. She moved house this weekend and is probably highly miffed with me for having forgotten to mention it in these hallowed pages. Sorry hun :(
• I also forgot to thank Richard Muirhead for lending me a copy of Gweilo by Martin Booth - a lovely book about growing up in Hong Kong about fifteen years before we ourselves did. I recognised a lot of my own childhood in there, although his father was an even bigger martinet than mine, and his mother was far more liberal. However, the real coincidence (yes I know that there is no such thing) was that he lived in the apartment above the one that we lived in, in the now demolished Mount Austen Mansions.

And that is about it. On with the show!