Round Robin

We thank you for your communication. However, why do you think that we care about your daughter’s prowess? A worthless paean to the glib and the superficial.
Do you really think that we care that your son has swum the channel? Let him sleep with the fishes, say we.
So, you have been up in a balloon? Yet you do not regard this as the worst form of blasphemy? Down, heathens, down towards the hell you will surely reside in.
As an example to you to attend to the pure and proper way of disporting yourself, let us tell you of the activities of our family and our endeavours to share and spread the light this last year.
Shortly after the New Year, the two of us and our son Tarquin sojourned forth across the bleak and pitiless moor in the very unforgiving depths of winter’s malevolence to preach the true word to the unresponsive and heathen hordes of the neighbouring village. We were waylaid, cut by thrown stones, and made to depart the village with immediate alacrity, but our faith never wavered in the despondency of our untimely eviction.
The following month, at the time of Shrove Tuesday, we had cause to remonstrate with our neighbours as to the unholy, unbridled and unsuitably abandoned fashion in which they celebrated the eve of the Lenten time by cooking great swirls of fried batter smothered in sugar and lemon juice and thrown upwards out of the pan so that it landed the other way over in a devilish reversal, all the while causing the creation of such vile quantities of acrid smoke that the stench was like that of hell itself. Such abandoned celebration of the dark arts is entirely unsuitable in a worshipful community.
Throughout March, we obeyed the tenets of Lent and made best endeavour to hide from the temptations of the flesh and the mind by withdrawing our physical and mental processes from such lures and inducements, a state described by some spiteful individuals with inadequate knowledge of the power of the spirit as “hibernation”.
And then came April and Easter – ah, happy time! The time of feast after the famine. We celebrated by scourging ourselves within a cubit of our very lives, to replenish the lifeblood of faith that had been clogged in our bodies the winter long.
May brought a brief visit from our daughter, birth-named Chastity, but now exulting in the reduced soubriquet of Chas. She said that now she had left the parental home, she felt weaned, and hence was able to leave the “titty” behind. We did not understand what this meant. She now travels the country with what is apparently known as a dance troupe. Personally, we are glad of it as it gives her ample opportunity to visit numerous places and attempt to convert the indigenous pagan hordes to the one true way. She assures us that this is the case, even going so far as to use the expression “until I communed with them, they had no idea what heaven could really mean.”
June and the longest day. The day of greatest provocation to our ideals by these locals who use the whole historical panoply of fertility, harvest and extended daylight as an excuse to indulge in the most libertine and unfettered behaviour imaginable. Tarquin took advantage of the length of the day to leave the parental home later, all the better to observe the participants in the concluding throes of their drunken carousing. When he returned, much later, to report back, his eyes were agog at the sights he had witnessed, and no amount of courteous persuasion could inveigle him to part with what he had experienced, even to his parents. We were concerned that the shock could have a lasting effect.
July was the month of our anniversary, of the renewed celebration of the opening of our eyes to the burning light of heavenly revelation, and we were happy to receive a surprise present in the form of a tethered goat, clearly from some of the more enlightened members of our neighbourhood community, who wished, out of modesty, we assume, to remain secret. The goat is, of course, the very epitome of our quest. It is ruggedly individual, even in its stubbornness. It defends its beliefs with the certainty of all horned animals. It feeds without fuss. It fertilises the earth. It survives. It endures.
At the end of August, we finally ate the last of the goat. Times had been hard, but the Lord had been kind in the guidance of his offering.
In September, Tarquin left to go to University. He had convinced us that this would best suit our mutual aims in that he could use the skills he had acquired at school to apply to the conversion of souls on a rather larger scale. He was intending to go at the same time as someone he had met on Midsummer’s Day, someone he had converted that very night. She has visited us on a few occasions. Her name is Tash and she has the rapid gift of laughter, for she smiles all the time she is with us. Tarquin has reassured us that he will continue to monitor her progress towards conversion extremely closely.
Throughout October, we were blessed with the opportunity to allow our thoughts to drift, undisturbed and unmolested, towards the rewards and responsibility of our spiritual destiny, unencumbered by the welcome but nevertheless distracting presence of our children.
However, November brought us a visit from Chastity, who, we were both delighted to observe, had lost that rather gaunt look of hers, that we had associated with pressure from the vanity of her associates, and had started to fill out in face and body in a rather more becoming fashion. Tarquin and Tash also visited. Their appearance is much changed also, both in the colour (or rather lack of it) of their clothes, and the arrangement of their hair. Tarquin assures us that this reflects a policy of outer ostentation and inner austerity that lends itself best to the conversion process by gaining the confidence of their fellow students, who, he declares, are ripe for acceding to the power of revelation.
December brings us to this so-called month of festivity and your communication.
We thank you for your offering, ill advised as it undoubtedly was, and trust that our attempts to apply a necessary corrective to the ill-conceived paths that your lives have taken in the previous year will have been received in the correct fashion, as a much-needed shaft of truth in the miasma of your flounderings towards establishing some form of significance on this earth that is but a temporary and worthless resting place.
However, please note: if you do not send this refutation of your facile, trivial meanderings when you should have been worshipping the Lord your God in a state of appropriate humility to at least ten of your so-called friends before the week is up, the worst and most lasting form of evil luck will surely descend upon you and drill you into the earth like the termites you assuredly are.
We wish you a Very Merry Christmas.