I think I always travel in terror and apprehension, foreseeing death in a thousand forms. Everything I do, and lots of things I see, also terrify me. I have the suicidal gift of seeing the unclothed state of things and (worse), pointing it out. Fear prods me to utter treasonable and seditious truths, and my life-force stands aside, appalled, as my Golem speaks; friends blanche and seek out escape routes, and the CIA, GRU, MI5, KGB, Mossad, and of course, my native ASIO, and ASIS, fill up their files, take photos, send off messages to terminate me, and send smart bombs aloft to blast me away. Wet affairs indeed. I sweat.

That I still survive, I put down to my total avoidance of all forms of public communication (N.B., Saddam), and to my erratic and often totally unofficial transit systems, as offered by passing taxi-drivers, fishermen, gardeners, and peripatetic friends. Nothing is arranged, no schedules fixed. To the bomb-aimers in the B47’s that hover unseen, constantly over me, I must be a sort of Brownian parody, forever random in the soupy mazes of humanity. I have noticed that IRA bombs, truckloads of plastique, kegs of gunpowder, and ‘earthquakes’ (I know there are deep penetration atomic devices that have missed me) go off just ahead, just behind, and just off-side. Almost every day. Sendero Luminoso have missed me (just) in Lima, earthquakes in Ararat, bombs in Wexford, bullets in Gaberone.

If politicians have ignored or opposed me, they all eventually are swept away. I have seen hundreds of my old enemies jailed, disgraced, dead of heart attacks and choler, or rendered powerless by strokes or scandals. If they attack me, I am long gone, leaving the hand grenades of truth, the time bombs of revelation to fester in the mind of their electors; those whom politicians call the great unwashed, the cockroaches, the masses, the insects, the voting public, the bacteria (or so the press gallery reports); those whom they despise (all party members; all are potential assassins), I leave with a doubt. Could it be true? Are they fools and knaves? All human? Is politics really an unnecessary invention? Do all police forces and secret agencies fund themselves with drug money and prostitution? Or is it only true in India, Thailand, England, America, Columbia, Peru, Australia, Europe, Russia, (and of course) Japan.

Are we in the hands of criminal idiocy of unbridled proportions? Is this how we really expect to run the world, and survive? Is the Pope Catholic?