‘A man who embraces glorious, guiltless blasphemy like an expensive whore.’
New York Times.
Yeah, right. She scrolled into the Amazon reader reviews.
This book came out of rage and it made me angry too. Stooke is a diamond. I salute him.
… The guy beats Dawkins hollow because he seems to have started out as a believer and he knows what that’s like. The sense of betrayal comes across so much more powerfully than the smart-arsed science-boy stuff you get from Dawkins. It’s time for the pope and the archbishop of Canterbury and a few imams to get scared. Stooke is the goods.
I got this book for Christmas, which I thought at first was a bad joke. By the time I was halfway through the book I realised it was Christmas that was the joke.
Merrily watched the cigarette browning in the ashtray. So what did you get for Christmas, Merrily? Apart from Britain’s premier evangelical atheist as a parishioner.
She picked up the cigarette and tamped it out in the ashtray. She had a parish to work, the open desk diary reminding her to drop in this afternoon on Sarah Clee, who provided summer flowers for the church from her garden in Blackberry Lane, and should be back home after a hip replacement.
Real life. She spooned out some lunch for Ethel, scrambled herself an egg and carried it, with a slice of toast, back to the computer. On the desktop was an icon marked Sacred.
Cole Hill Preservation Society. The membership database. Jane had all the names on her laptop but, for safety’s sake, she’d copied the file onto the scullery computer.
All the names of all the decent citizens concerned about their heritage. All the gentle pacifist pagans. And maybe one or two loonies. No worries about her mum prying, because of the new trust between them now.
Merrily’s hand hovered over the mouse. The paperback copy of The Hole in the Sky lay at the edge of the desk like a time bomb.
Bliss stopped the car on a forecourt in front of some shops on the edge of the Rotherwas Industrial Estate, got out his mobile and checked in with the incident room.
‘Hold on a moment, Francis.’ And then — a knowing, calculated insult — Iain Brent, PhD, didn’t even bother to cover the phone. ‘Don’t need Bliss for anything, do you, ma’am?’
Bliss didn’t hear a reply.
‘No, Francis,’ Brent said. ‘Unless you have anything for us?’
Twat.
Bliss spent a couple of minutes staring through the dirty windscreen at the dirty sky, trying to lose the tightness in his chest.
On the way out, after his dismissal by Howe, Kevin Snape had called him back.
‘Nice one, Francis. The Dinedor connection — staring us all in the face, but nobody else spotted it.’
‘Deductive flair, Kev. Sadly out of fashion nowadays.’
‘No, come on, what put you on to it?’
Just a hunch, Bliss had said. And contacts. Like he was going to tell them the truth — that all he’d done, because he knew bugger-all about local councillors, was Google Clement Ayling, Hereford and then watch two full pages of links to the Dinedor Serpent come bouncing up at him. And then Google the Serpent.
Bliss started the car, looking for Watery Lane which apparently gave access to the new road site. His mobile went off. He pulled in again. ‘Yeh.’
‘Inspector Bliss? It’s Steve Furneaux, Planning Department, Herefordshire Council. You wanted to talk to me, I think, about Hereforward. And then my secretary said you’d rung an hour or so ago — she wasn’t sure whether it was to cancel or postpone.’
Bliss thought about it quickly. Yeh, he’d done that. He’d called to cancel. Just like he’d been ordered to by his superior officer — daughter of the ex-copper, bent, who was also a member of Hereforward. Not of immediate importance, is it? Annie had said.
Right, then.
‘No worries, Steve,’ Bliss said. ‘All it was… small problem about me getting to your office before lunchtime. Where is it you actually go for lunch?’
‘Oh, various pubs. And Gilbies bar.’
‘Gilbies would be fine,’ Bliss said. ‘Shall we say half-one?’
When he turned along Watery Lane it was rising to its name, the ditch on the left overflowing, half the road swamped.
Bliss drove through regardless.
Over seven thousand people worldwide had signed Jane’s online petition, calling for the preservation of Coleman’s Meadow as sacred space. Merrily hadn’t realised there were so many. Easy to underestimate the Web’s ability to draw together threads of dissent.
from Dr Padraig Neal, Co. Wexford.
The warmest of greetings, Jane, from Ireland.
I most fervently applaud your courageous stand against the barbarian bureaucrats and would respectfully draw your attention to our own battle royal. As you may have read elsewhere, Ireland’s most venerated ancient site, Tara, seat of the pagan High Kings, is threatened by the construction of the M3 motorway, powered by Euro-grant millions.
Tara represents, in the words of the poet Seamus Heaney, ‘an ideal of the spirit’. But the secular state is without ideals. Heedless of tradition, it will thrust a spear into our spiritual heart and fill the hole with money.
Several like this. She kept on scrolling down, looking for a specific reference to the Dinedor Serpent. Although there seemed to be a direct parallel here, if on a far smaller scale, to what was happening at the hill of Tara, the various Irish protesters didn’t seem to have been aware of the Serpent.
A hard copy of Jane’s petition had already gone to Herefordshire Council, although Merrily guessed that some of the messages accompanying the names and addresses of supporters had been edited out first.
These are gentle people. Well-meaning, Jane had said.
From Helios, Chichester:
This is to confirm that my Order has now placed a suspended curse upon The Herefordshire Council. If a single modern brick should ever be laid upon Coleman’s Meadow, it will come into effect and you will — be assured — have local by-elections within the year.
Bright blessings to you, Jane!
Merrily found several like this, also, some of them far more local and even more weird.
One, from a man in Malvern, said:
Dear Jane Watkins,
I thought I should write to you as I have visited Coleman’s Meadow on a number of occasions in the past few months and wondered if anyone else had had similar experiences to me.
I should point out that I am an experienced pendulum dowser and also, I suppose, a sensitive, in that when I visit neolithic sites I can usually sense something of their origins and the purposes for which they were created.
The essence of it is, at Coleman’s Meadow I believe you have a very active site-guardian.
(I presume you know what I mean by this term. In the unlikely eventuality that you do not, I append a list of relevant websites — I trust, Miss Watkins, that I do not insult you.)
Most site guardians are, as Shakespeare has it, ‘all sound and fury signifying nothing’.
Not so at Coleman’s Meadow. I rather think that anyone working on or near this site who is not well-intentioned will have cause to regret it.
Please post this message on your website so that this information is available to anyone who may wish to comment or even to use it, in the defence of this site against negative intentions.