An Update From Bishop Quinine

Dear me, but we’ve had a fine time of celebration and Bible Study to welcome Bishop Quinine into the faithful community of St. Onuphrius’. Currently he’s still in a coma, but it’s only the second day, and we have moved the respirator in from the crèche just to be on the safe side.

Before losing consciousness Bishop Quinine shared all manner of insights with us, including the password to his lap-top computer and email (I believe that occurred around the time we shifted from Mezcal to Absinthe), which has been most enlightening.

Firstly, Little Pete’s Jerusalem surprise of a new North American province has sent everyone into a tailspin: Layman Schofield has always had problems bowing down before anyone, and now that Greggie Venables looks like being overtaken by a Nigerian/Australian (now there’s a coupling which must be never be allowed to have children) plant in the new Province of FOCAS he’s flexing muscles (he didn’t know he had in an attempt to convince Big Pete to not leave him by the wayside. This includes trying to tell his new suffragan Bishops what to do, which Little John-David never thought was part of any agreement, and he’s now torn between cosying up to the Little Pete and his relatives in an attempt to gain a foothold against the Africans (who, he hopes might make him an even more flamboyantly dressed layman), and standing firm with Tierra del Fuego (or wherever Venables calls home this week) as an original schismatic in the hope that the others side with him for old times' sake.

Meanwhile, in England Jet-setter Tom wants the Convict Colonials sent back to Botany Bay, so he can be appointed Bishop Nosey-Parker-in-General over all evangelicals, which would give him (on those rare occasions he finds himself forced to be Britain) somewhere to stay much closer to London. At the same time he’s also taking every opportunity he can find to whisper into ++Cantaur’s sweet-but-hairy ear that Lambeth should circumvent the American split by enthroning the Bishop of Durham to become a flying Overseer-of-all-things-Biblical in the TEC. And if that doesn’t get Paul Revere up out of his grave and back on his horse nothing will.

Indeed, there’s so much toing and froing in Bishop Quinine’s email that we could scarcely find the passwords to his porno sites. We got there in the end, however, and weren’t they an education! Even Brother Richthofen’s friends had never heard of anyone doing that with gerbils! Providing there wasn’t something wrong with the peyote we expect the bishop to wake up in another day or so, and won’t we all have a fascinating conversation then?

I’m Father Christian and I teach the Bible.