Yolanda's second husband, whom she divorced after a couple of years, was called Michael.  She once told me Michael had made a fortune in malls and then lost it all in Las Vegas and ended up valet parking in LA.  For four years, between two of her visits, I had assumed she meant gangsters' molls and that valet parking was a specialised form of landscape gardening, so had formed entirely the wrong impression of the man.

Her third husband was Steve, who was much younger than her and something called a garage software wizard; apparently he became a multi-millionaire overnight while back-packing in Europe.  He died in the Andes three years ago, while attempting to develop the sport of avalanche surfing, which seemingly - and obviously, I suppose - is every bit as dangerous as it sounds.

Yolanda has inherited at least two fortunes, then, and leads what sounds like an energetic and restless existence; I think her daughter and her visits to High Easter Offerance were almost the only two things that introduced any stability into her antsy life.

Due to those visits, my mother and father knew each other as children, though they used to meet only every four years.  My father, Christopher, was the Elect of God, of course; the first Leapyearian to be born after the founding of our Faith, he was used to being spoiled.  I'm told that Alice, my mother, grew up teasing him terribly and making fun of the arguably excessively reverent treatment he had become used to receiving from those around him in the Community.  Alice was three years younger than my father, but I imagine that her US-based but globe-trotting life made her seem at least as old as he.  They became sweethearts when she was fourteen and wrote lots of letters while she was alternately travelling the world with her mother and attending school in Dallas.  They were married by Salvador himself in 1973, and obviously wasted no time, for Allan arrived later that year and I was born, to Order-wide rejoicing, by all accounts, on the 29th of February 1976.

'Television?' I said, slightly shocked.

'Checked in, turned on to see what miserable handful of channels you had over here these days and almost the first thing I saw was you, being strong-armed into a paddy wagon shouting imprecations.'

'Good heavens,' I said.  I thought about it, taking time off from tearing into my breakfast. 'Well, I suppose the Creator can use the works of the Benighted to tip the hand of Providence should They so desire; who are we to question?' I shrugged and tucked back into my smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, pancakes and syrup.

We were in Grandmother Yolanda's suite on the top floor of her hotel, a Sybaritically luxurious former mansion on a hill overlooking the city.  I had just stepped out of the shower in the marble and mahogany bathroom and now sat on the floor of the sitting room, wrapped in a huge white fluffy robe, my back resting against a beautiful floral-patterned couch.  Yolanda had dried my hair and then wrapped the towel round my head.  In front of me on the coffee table sat a huge silver tray loaded with food.  I slurped coffee and chomped salmon, looking out over Bath, visible beyond the tall windows and between the sweeping vertical folds of sumptuous green velvet curtains.  I felt clean, fresh, wickedly perfumed from the soap in the shower and just generally submerged in heady opulence; meanwhile my stomach gradually filled with food.  It will not have escaped the more alert reader that my maternal grandmother has never really gone wholeheartedly for the more ascetic aspects of our faith and probably never will, even if - in her own words - we show her a hair-shirt designed by Gootchy.

I will confess to feeling a little awkward, surrounded by all this luxury, but reckoned that it merely balanced out the effects of my night sleeping rough and my night in the cells, not to mention my unseemly treatment at the hands of the police.

Yolanda had flown into Glasgow on the Friday, hired a car and driven straight to High Easter Offerance on her way to Gleneagles.  She had been told I was staying with Brother Zebediah in London and so drove to Edinburgh and flew from there to Heathrow and hired another car, been unable to work out where the squat was so flagged down a taxi and followed it to the address in Kilburn, where Zeb told her I had left for Dudgeon Magna.  Yesterday she had taken a train from London to Bath and hired yet another car - 'Scorpion or something; looks more like a dead cod.  Why can't you people build cars?  Supposed to be big but it feels more like a sub-compact to me…' - and driven to Dudgeon Magna.

I now silently cursed myself for not telling Zeb exactly where I'd been heading; whatever instinct had led me not to mention Clissold's Health Farm and Country Club to him had obviously been a product of Unsaved contamination polluting my soul.  Anyway, Yolanda had turned up no sign of me in Dudgeon Magna, and so had returned to her hotel to work out what to do next when she'd seen me being unjustly apprehended on the local television news; it had taken until this morning to find out where I was and to hire some lawyers with whom to browbeat the police.

After dismissing the lawyers and lambasting them for not accepting payment by American Express card on the spot, she'd spent the blurringly fast drive from Bristol to Bath regaling me with what she'd been up to since I'd seen her last.  An athletic young swimming pool cleaner from Los Angeles called Gerald seemed to figure rather prominently, as did a running battle with whatever authority supervises the waiting list for rafting expeditions down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon; Grandmother seemed to find the idea of a five-year queue for anything in the United States to be not just criminally obscene but tantamount to treason to the American Dream; a hanging matter ('I mean, are these people communists, for God's sakes?').  With that out of her system she was then free to concentrate on giving me her itinerary over the last few days with particular attention to detailed critical notes on the various institutional inefficiencies and organisational absurdities she had encountered along the way while trying to catch up with me ('You can't even make a right - well, a left - on a red light here; I did it this morning and the goddamn attorneys nearly bailed out on me.  What's wrong with you people?').

While my grandmother held forth I checked my kit-bag to make sure everything was there ('My vials have been interfered with!' I'd wailed. 'Great.  We'll sue their asses!' Yolanda had said, flinging the car into another distinctly adventurous overtaking manoeuvre).

'Are you in a rush, then, Granny?' I asked, wiping the plate with a pancake.

'Child,' Yolanda said throatily, putting one hand heavy with precious metals and stones onto my towellinged shoulder, 'never call me your "Granny".'

'Sorry, Grandmother,' I said, twisting my head to grin cheekily up at her.  This is something of a ritual with us, each time we meet.  I went back to my pancakes and syrup.

'As it happens, yes, I am,' Yolanda said, crossing her legs and resting her alligator-hide boots on the coffee table. 'Leaving for Prague on Wednesday to look at a red diamond.  Heard there's one there might be for sale.'

'A red diamond,' I said, in a pause that seemed to require some response.

'Yep; ordinary diamonds are common as cow-shit, just DeBeers keeps the prices artificially high; anybody who buys an ordinary diamond is a damned fool, but red diamonds are scarcer than honest politicians; only about six in the whole damn world and I want at least to see one of them and hold it in my hand, just once, even if I don't get to buy it.'

'Blimey,' I said. 'Prague.'

'Prague, Chekland, or whatever the hell they call it these days.  You wanna come?'