h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I haven't written an Epilogue this week, as such. Part of the reason is that I am sitting here with a streaming cold and can barely see the screen through the haze of Ibuprofen, Benylin, Vitamin C, Sudafed, and every other concoction known to pharmaceutical science, that I have been trying to zap it with since it struck me down on Thursday.

However, if I am honest, part of the reason also is that I feel the idea may have run its course for the moment, and/or that I might temporarily have lost my way.

Over the last year or so, I have been greatly comforted by the fact that something like faith had come back into my life, albeit simplistic, patchy, and un-coordinated, and I will always be grateful for the support and prayer I got from here on behalf of Russell. You lot probably saved his little catty life.

I am also grateful for learning about the Rule of Benedict, and I am still thinking of ways in which I can use this.

However, I have run up against two big and partially connected problems of late, which I am finding it very difficult to reconcile, and which have increasingly led to me posting Epilogues containing more questions than answers. Since part of what people said they liked about my witterings in the past was that they came to some resolution, however tentative, the fact that I have been unable to reconcile these issues means that resolution has been pretty scarce, and who wants to read yet another diatribe from me with an inconclusive ending?

It's no secret what the issues are, I have been grappling with them for about four or five weeks now. They can be summed up as the conflict between Church and State and my inability to forgive people. Insofar as the State has recently followed a set of actions with which I wildly and profoundly disagree, this has brought the whole issue into very sharp focus for me. Especially with the Election being called in the UK, the start of the Uist Hedgehog Cull for the third year running and the death of the Pope which has led me to think about the place of moral teaching in a Church and to find that there as well I seem to be at odds with the established view. How can I say that the fact that everything will be alright in the next world excuses the injustice, hatred, greed and evil of the actions of our own and other leaders in this one?

Various people at various times have offered by various means to go through this with me, and unfortunately I have been so busy that I haven't been able to spend the time to take up these kind offers. I apologise if I have seemed churlish over not taking up these offers, which I know were sincerely and kindly meant. So I find myself these days preaching to people about things I can't work out for myself, and not having time to join in the debate I myself caused, or listen to the answers!

I don't like finding myself in such a false position, and to carry on down that road would be to become as big a hypocrite as those I accuse of hypocrisy, in government and elsewhere - in fact, to be a double hypocrite, because I could not forgive them either.

I have gone round and round these loops over the last few days and, for the last couple of weeks, knowing that I was going to come up against this rock face over and over, I have actually faced the task of sitting down to write on a Sunday with a mixture of reluctance and indecision, and I think when you get to that stage, whatever the task is, it's time to take a break.

So I am going to hie myself off into the wilderness for a while. Not literally, and probably not for forty days and forty nights, but for long enough to think these knotty coils through so that I become useful once more, to myself and to others.

It doesn't mean I won't still drop in, and it doesn't mean that I have gone for good. I can also use the time constructively to work on my book. But for the next few weeks, I think the Holme Valley will have to look after itself, even if I will still be looking after those who rely on me, furry and non-furry, to the best of my ability.

Happy trails everybody & happy birthday Sean if you see this.

STEVE