April 4th - April 10th 2005
Sunday Istanbul 1992
Saturday Globalpope
Friday Slaplist
Thursday Getting shot of
Wednesday Brainy
Tuesday Charles unchained
Monday Overpoped
Sunday 10th April 2005
Istanbul, Christmas 1992
Saturday 9th April 2005
Now we've finally got the bugger buried - and didn't that prove easier than we anticipated? - we can move on to the genuinely fun bit of the whole oldPope/newPope cycle: the elections, with all their abstruse rules, hidden chicanery, and DanBrown absurdities.
(I particularly liked the idea of cardinals in pectore - their appointments kept secret, sometimes even from themselves. Memo to self: must check mail more often.)
One intriguing twist is the fact that, theoretically at least, the next man to step up to the throne of St Peter could come from anywhere: obligingly Filipino, disobligingly Nigerian, or even, at a stretch, inscrutably Chinese.
Or, God help us, Australian.
Friday 8th April 2005
Names come and go on my little SlapList - Rufus Wainwright and Lee Bowyer headed for the top with a bullet, Jamie Oliver oscillating wildly - but (right alongside Toby Young and Stephen Bayley) there will always be a special slapping slot for Mariah Carey.
Partly because I can never be entirely sure if she's simply very stupid or just shockingly naive (though there remains the perennial strong possibility that she is simply an alien in shapely human form).
..we tend to holiday in Aspen together with friends, which is great because we are really both festive people. You know, we like to build snowmen, go on sleigh rides, and roll around in the snow in nothing but our bikinis before jumping into the hot tub.
Thursday 7th April 2005
Bad news: A batch of 300 miniature guns disguised as keyfobs is heading to the UK from New Zealand
Good news: People that buy them are suicidally stupid: "He had reportedly told pals he was going to test the safety catch, before putting it against his head..."
Wednesday 6th April 2005
Something I prepared earlier:
Tuesday 5th April 2005
Moment of the week, for me, came in the midst of Prince Charles's infamous Klosters press conference.
It's not so much the muttering that was picked up by the microphones (though it's always delightful to see institutionalised hypocrisy revealed quite so plainly), nor the photographs showing Da Heir's rictus of a clenched grin.
No, the bit I liked was where a pressman picked up on a thought I'd had a while ago, and asked the Three Princes if they'd arranged a stag-night for the groom-to-be and, if so, how it had gone.
For the photographers, silly.
Monday 4th April 2005
Sir - If I wanted the Catholic Herald I would buy the Catholic Herald. I do not much appreciate it being pushed through my letterbox in the guise of The Sunday Telegraph.
Thus one Lee Sharp of Hersham, Surrey, sitting down some time last week to compose a pithy epistle to the editor of his, or her, weekend reading of choice.
The cause of this short, but clearly deeply felt, rantette remains unspecified: possibly last Sunday's leader lauding Michael Howard's idea of repealing the ban on a Catholic monarch, more likely the op-ed piece by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor supporting the paper's strident anti-abortion policy.
Either way, you can't help wondering just how incandescent Lee Sharp must be feeling at the end of this weekend - a three day tsunami of piety that has swamped every serious news medium with beady-eyed instruction in, amongst other things, the nature of the Last Rites, the history of the papacy, the mysteries of the Rosary and plugs for the upcoming series of Pope Idol.
"How many divisions has the Pope?" asked a sarcastic Joseph Stalin.
How many editions, rather.
(On a personal note, pray for me: I'm editing next Friday evening - the night that was going to be devoted to coverage of Chuck's nups, and will now be wall-to-wall papal funeral.)
......previous week
