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Years ago at our Great Fair there was a tent where a man told fortunes by feeling buttocks, or rather reading them as a palmist would a hand. But my predecessor as Archbishop guessed the truth behind this buttock scheme: the so-called fortune teller just liked feeling buttocks. That was the top and bottom of it! A pervert's ruse! So the Archbishop had the man sent away to be re-educated. A simple matter in those days. At the next year's fair, or it may have been the year after that, the fortune teller was back. Same tent. But no fortunes told. No buttocks fondled either, thank goodness. The man just sat in a box and wept. His only trick, if trick is the right judgement upon it, was that he called out, desperately he called out, the correct names of every single person in all the millions who filed through his tent that summer to see him in his agony and confusion. But in the end the strangest thing about this sordid matter is that today, when I speak about this man who fondled buttocks and later wept, nobody remembers him. Most of the city folk over the age of forty must have been in those long queues, just as I was. But I have not found one soul who remembers. |