i've got to get back to bahrain tonight

Evening at the Chateau de Healy.
I am sitting in the front room watching the goggle box.
(Heelers means the television. - Ed note.)
MC Hamster is at the bars of her cage doing her Prisoner Cell Block H routine.
That is to say she's clutching the bars with her little hamster hands and staring at me fixedly.
"No way hamster," I tell her. "I'm not buying it. If I take you out of that cage, you'll just start scrambling all over the place, and there'll be bites, and holes in jumpers, and it's just not happening. I'm watching Mother Angelica Live Classics."
Mother Angelica is an insane nun on the Catholic channel EWTN.
I like to watch her programme as it encourages me to question the nature of reality.
The main question being: If we live in a finite universe of logical laws and boundaries, how the hell did this woman end up on television?
Anyhoo.
I've been exploring my boundaries with Mother Angelica for ten years.
The fascination shows no sign of waning.
MC Hamster doesn't stir during my heartfelt speech from the armchair rejecting her appeal for early release.
She just keeps looking at me with that poignant accusatory hamster stare.
It's most unsettling.
Paddy Pup is at my feet.
No one else is present.
The other members of the Healy family are attending a glittering soiree at the ducal palace.
I experience a brief feeling of peace perfect peace.
Except for the nagging guilt about keeping Hammikins incarcerated, I am as relaxed a greatest poet of a generation as you are ever likely to find.
Abruptly Paddy Pup runs to the door and starts barking.
Enter my priesting brother Pete stage left.
He's just arrived on a flying visit from his parish in Dublin.
He plonks down in an armchair.
I am happy to see him as there's something I want to discuss.
We begin one of those great brotherly chats.
In discrete confidential tones I tell him about my new career plans.
"I'm going to become a courier," sez I.
"What, you mean like those guys on the motor bikes?" sez Pete struggling to control his eye brows.
I shake my handsome acneed ulcerated head.
"No," I explain. "I was thinking more of the sort of courier who brings a bag of diamonds from Geneva to New York. Imagine the life style I'd have. After making the delivery, I'd spend two weeks in New York before flying on to Tokyo, maybe with a case of banking documents. I'd deliver that and then have a little holiday in Tokyo, before flying back to London to deliver a few gold ingots or something. Wouldn't it be great?"
Padre Peter looks at me sagely.
"Good luck with that," sez he with an air of pontifical finality.
The brotherly counsel is over.
We turn our attention to Mother Angelica.
Mother Angelica is musing aloud almost absent mindedly:
"Many people come to me all upset. They say: It's not the sin I find so hard to accept. I wouldn't mind if someone else had done it. I know I could forgive them. It's just that I did it myself. I still can't believe I could commit such a sin. I just can't understand how I would do such a thing. And I tell them, look, you did it..."
These words struck most keenly upon the heart of the mighty Heelers.
Well, well, well.
It seems Mother Angelica has been greatly misunderstood.
Mainly by me.