'Let's just say that when the Community passes into my charge, as it sadly must one day, there will be no change in the way the farm and the Order is run.'

'Good for you, honey; you do it your way.  Don't let me persuade you no different.'

'Whatever you say,' I said.

We had returned to Bath from Dudgeon Magna to discuss what to do next.  We had another margarita.  We suspected that Morag might have returned to La Mancha, Mr Leopold's home in Essex; Yolanda attempted to call the house, but the number was ex-directory and I had not thought to look for the number when I'd had the chance, in the hallway by the phone when Tyson was distracting the young man.

'How far's Essex?' Yolanda asked.

'A hundred and… fifty miles?' I hazarded. 'Beyond London.'

'Wanna go, or d'you want to head north now?'

'I don't know,' I confessed, pacing up and down the sitting room of Grandmother Yolanda's suite, my hands clasped behind my back.  I was in a quandary.  I really didn't like the sound of the way things were going back at High Easter Offerance, and my first instinct was to return there as quickly as possible to discover what was going on and do whatever sorting out might be required.  Nevertheless, I was here on an important mission, and Morag/Fusillada's trail had not yet gone totally cold.  My duty remained as it had been: to attempt to track and intercept my cousin and reason with her.  I continued pacing.  My new leather trousers creaked and squeaked, and I kept wanting to giggle at this.  Which reminded me.  I stopped and looked Yolanda in the eye. 'Are you fit to drive, Grandma?'

Yolanda raised her glass. 'Almost up to operating level.'

'Maybe we should get the train.'

'Nonsense.  But where are we going?'

'Essex,' I decided.  I stuck my hands in the pockets of my fancy trousers. 'Do you think my old clothes are ready yet?'

La Mancha was dark, silent and locked.  It was evening by the time we got there and we'd have seen any lights on inside.  There was no sign of Tyson or the young man or anybody else.

We stood on the back lawn, looking into a smoked-glass conservatory which held a huge round bath.  The light faded slowly from the skies above.

'They're outa town, we're outa luck,' Yolanda growled.

'Oh dear.'

We stepped back and walked round the side of the house.  A small bright light came on under the eaves. 'Ah-ha!' I said.

'Ah-ha nuthin',' Yolanda said, shaking her head. 'Those are security lights, child; automatic.  Must of just got dark enough.'

'Oh.'

We returned to the car, past the painted plough, cartwheel and buggy, which I realised now were just ornamental.  The gate had been padlocked so we had to get back over as we'd got in, over the top.

'Well, hell,' Grandma Yolanda said, settling into the driver's seat of the hired car, 'we'll just be forced to go into London, stay at the Dorchester, eat at Le Gavroche, catch a show and party the night away in some grotesquely expensive club drinking vintage champagne.' She made a clicking noise with her mouth and fired up the car. 'I hate it when that happens.'

'How's your head?'

'It feels like the china shop just after the bull's paid a visit.'

'What, full of bull shit?  Haw haw haw.'

I opened my eyes and gave my grandmother what was supposed to be a withering look.  She glanced at me over the top of her Wall Street Journal and winked.  The grey-suited chauffeur slid the car -a 'Jag-waar' according to Yolanda - into a gap in the mid-morning traffic near Harrods.  We were heading for Heathrow Airport.  I shifted on my Sitting Board, making the leather trousers squeak.  I'd had little choice over what to put on that morning; the hotel in Bath had not been able to extricate my old clothes from the laundry in time for us leaving for London.  We had left the Order's address and been assured they would be forwarded, but it meant I had to wear the gear my grandmother had bought for me, which didn't seem altogether suitable for a return to the Community.  However, I was in no state to try to find different clothes.  Yolanda wore boots, dark blue culottes and a short matching jacket.

'… Oh dear,' I said. 'I think I'm going to-'

'You know how to open the window?' Yolanda said urgently. 'It's this button here-'

'Oh,' I said, farting audibly inside my leather trousers. 'Sorry,' I said sheepishly.

Grandma Yolanda sniffed the air.  She shook her head, then buried it in the newspaper.

'Hell, child; smells like a skunk crawled up your ass an' died.'

As I've indicated, our Faith is happy with tipsiness but frowns upon drunkenness taken to the point of incapacity, inarticulacy and insensibility.  Nevertheless, it is recognised that people who normally only ever get slightly intoxicated may occasionally become utterly inebriate, and that one state can lead to the other.  Unless this starts to happen rather too frequently, the hang-over will itself be seen as quite sufficient punishment for the transgression, and nothing will be said.

Occasionally, when a Luskentyrian has a bad hang-over, they are inclined to wish that Salvador had been instructed to ban the use of alcohol entirely when he was being given the rules which would govern our Faith.  In fact, right at the start, that is exactly what did happen; for a whole week, as my Grandfather scribbled down the results of his having tuned in to God's frequency, there was a commandment - there is no other word for it - written on page two of Salvador's original notes which stated that strong liquor had to be avoided, strenuously.  It was crossed out during week two of our Founder's revelations, around the time when Mr McIlone started giving my Grandfather medicinal measures of whisky, reminding Salvador that there was a place for such things and causing him to realise that what he'd heard when he thought he was being told to prohibit drink was in fact a false signal.

Before I'd left High Easter Offerance I'd been helping my Grandfather with his latest revisions to the Orthography, our holy book and repository of all Salvador's wisdom and insights.  Part of this process had comprised weeding out false signals, the results of Dispatches our Founder had been the medium for which had turned out not fully to represent God's message.  I regard it as a sign of strength and the influence of a higher Truth that our OverSeer is happy to look back and admit that some of his pronouncements were flawed, or at least capable of improvement.  Of course, this wasn't really his fault; he has consistently tried to report the Voice which he hears as accurately and faithfully as possible, but he is only human, and to be human is to err.  But to be human is also to be flexible and adaptable, and - if the individual does not succumb to the terrible influence of Pride - it is also to be capable of admitting one has been wrong, and to try to make corrections.

So, having originally held that God was male, our Founder later realised that the Voice he had heard had only sounded male because he himself was male; he had been expecting a male voice, he had grown up in a Christian society which took it as read that God was male and always depicted God as a man, and so it was understandable that while undergoing the revelatory whirlwind which had swept through him, my Grandfather had missed the fact that God was not as he'd been brought up to believe.

It is true that we can only take so much revelation at one time, only bring on board a certain amount of change; otherwise we simply become confused and start to lose context.  We must have some sort of framework to understand ideas within, and when the ideas you are using are so powerful and so important that they threaten to change the nature of that framework itself, you have to be careful to change only a little at a time, or you risk losing the pattern for the whole fragile artifice that is human understanding.  So it might even be, Grandfather has hinted, that God deliberately misled him, or at least made no attempt to correct him when it became clear that he was making such mistakes, because to have done so would effectively have been saying, Everything you have believed until now has been false, which, if it had not caused my Grandfather to doubt his very sanity, might well have caused him to take the easier course of ignoring what God was telling him, dismissing the Voice as some aberration, just some banal medical condition, not a profound paradigm-shift in the spiritual history of the world and the birth of a fresh and vital new religion.