The Vicar of Love and le chat Bon Chance...

Meet the Vicar of Love and his cat (le chat) Bon Chance. I don’t know much about them really, they just popped out of my pen while I was listening to the Archer’s last evening, although I don’t think that the Archer’s story line had anything to do with their appearance. I can’t imagine the Vicar of Love or even his cat roaming around Ambridge somehow.

No, I don’t know much about them but I might as well tell you what I do know. They live somewhere in the deep south of the United States. New Orleans I think. The Vicar of Love is a huge man, the size of a bull - in fact that’s what his congregation at the Third Church of The Ju-Ju Jesus Peanut call him - The Bull.

His cat Bon Chance is a stray. The Vicar of Love found him squashed flat and mangled on the highway, run over by a trucker’s truck and then by the cars and SUV’s, hogs and hotrods, that came along after it. He was quite dead of course, but the Vicar, never one to be put off by something as inconsequential as death, managed to revive him with the power of prayer and pussy prosthetics. Now, when Bon Chance wags his tail it’s with the aid of the motorised tail-wagger that’s embedded in his 100% synthetic rayon fur.

Of course all the random robotics and miniaturised micro-technology in the world wouldn’t have brought Bon Chance back from the dead any more that it would have corrected the misspelling of his name. Bonne Chance is a feminine phrase, but Bon Chance is ‘as Tom as tomcat’s can be’ as the Vicar of Love declares to his congregation every Sunday. So dropping the second ‘n’ and ‘e’ seemed to be in order. Anyways, New Orleans ain’t France in spite of its pretension and petticoats.

The power of prayer is a powerfully prayerful power and the Vicar of Love a powerfully powerful prayer-man. The Ju-Ju heard his words and Bon Chance was raised again, raised from the dead like some kind of feline Lazarus – Lazapuss as he’s been nicknamed by the Vicar of Love’s congregation.

That’s it. All I know about The Bull and Lazapuss, the keepers of the Holy Home, the attendants of the hoodoo heart, the watchers of the Third Church of The Ju-Ju Jesus Peanut.

They may reappear and they may not. They may grow and flourish or they may wither on the stem and die as is the way with all doodles.

Eye-eye to all that do be eyeful.

Do-be-do-be-do-be-do.

Amen.