A tale to be told...

Today I am going to delight you with the first episode of a tale I have been telling myself in my head for more than a dozen years or so. Well, when I say delight I hope that it does because it may become my Monday thing if you like it.

Anyway without further ado...

A Prologue.

Meet the Vicar of Love and his cat (le chat) Bon Chance. I don’t know much about them really, they just popped up while I was listening to the radio last night although I don’t think the rock ‘n roll had anything to do with their appearance. I can’t imagine the Vicar of Love or even his cat roaming around Nashville really - or perhaps, hot damn, yes I can. Bar to bar and hall to hall, the Vicar of Love and his Cat Bon Chance out on the town and having a ball.

No, I don’t know much about them but I might as well tell you what I do know so let’s start at the very beginning; a very good place to start according to Mary Poppins. Not that I think there will be many spoonfuls of sugar in this tale, maybe the odd chimney sweep but he’ll probably be very odd indeed. They live somewhere in the deep south of the United States. New Orleans maybe. 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 than it would have corrected the misspelling of his name. Bonne Chance is a feminine phrase, but Bon Chance is ‘as Tom as tomcats 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. But of course, this is their tale to tell and not mine, so I’ll just make it up. As the Vicar of love says in his pious prayering, ‘Eye-eye to all that do be eyeful, do-be-do-be-do-be-do.’

Bon Chance!