Converts

After five or six weeks of living in a dormitory I´ve now moved into my own room at Platypus Two, a house a few doors down the street where the owner offers rooms on a long-term basis. Despite being a nice big room in the middle of the city the rent is only seventy quid per month. Staying in the main hostel for so long had begun to get a bit wearing, partly because of an influx of lunatics recently. I think I mentioned an English bloke who used to work for my grandad in the plum orchards of Evesham. Well, it turns out he´s fallen into the sinister clutches of Christians back at home. Every night he gets roaring drunk and starts haranguing people about how much Jesus loves us all. "I don´t care if yer hates me, it´s J-J-Jesus, man, he´s, he´s . . . he loves me. I don´t care what you think, or any of yer. . .yer bastards. Bastards. Jesus. He loves me, even if you think I´m an arsehole." What is most remarkable is how he can keep this up for hours on end. Some people have demonstrated a remarkable lack of patience with him, in particular one English girl who interupted one of his slurred sermons to tell him that Jesus had visited her bedroom the night before and performed the sort of sexual acts upon her that cannot be described in family newspapers. By way of apology she added: "It´s not that I want to be blasphemous, particularly, I just wish you´d shut your face." But compared to a Swiss hippy I met last night, this chap is the very model of good sense of moderation. I just happened to ask about his travel plans. "I must get to San Juan in Bolivia by June the sixth," he said. "So you have a flight back home from there?" I asked. "No." "Oh, so why do you need to be there on that day? Is it a special occasion?" "Yes." "Some sort of anniversary?" "No." "Oh. So why is the date significant?" "It is the sixth day of the sixth month of the sixth year. Six, six, six. I cannot say any more." "So you need to be in this town in time for the birth of the antichrist?" "Yes." I didn´t get to question him further, as he flung his long hair over his shoulders, rubbed his bald spot and slinked out of the room. As I see it there are two possible reasons why he´d want to witness the arrival of Satan´s spawn. The first is that he is a satanist who wants to praise his dark master. I imagine this would involve running naked through the town sprinkling chicken blood over pushchairs. The other, more sinister, possibility is that he´s a deranged Christian who´s going to attack the town´s maternity ward and slaughter the infants. I´ll try to find out more. Another interesting nugget of information from my students. I had remarked on how clean and free of litter the streets were in Bogota. The told me that this was thanks to a former mayor, a man famous for his bright ideas. At that time the city was famous for being the dirtiest in the world, so to turn this around he formed a crack unit of sinister clowns. These would hide around the town centre watching and waiting for someone to drop something. Then they would strike; mocking and harrassing the litterbug while a film crew recorded the humiliation for the evening news bulletin. Apparently it only took a couple of months for Bogota to become one of the cleanest places on the continent.