The Cry Of Love, Jimi Hendrix’s last bona fide studio album, and I are finally re-united after close on 30 years. What else could someone like you reduced to reading The Blogs Of Others care to hear more? And the Jesuits are the ones for me (if and when)

I’ll be adding more to this entry tomorrow, but I just wanted to record that today has arrived courtesy of whoever I bought it from an album (once an ‘LP’, now a ‘CD’ - oh, dear how important initials are these days when you want to prove you are still breathing and not yet dead). It’s one I once had as an ‘LP’ - OK, LP and I’ll forget trying to be such a smartarse - then ‘lost’, as I ‘lost’ quite a few LPs which were stacked in the attic of my house in Norlan Drive, Kings Heath, Birmingham B14 after I moved to Cardiff to start a job as a sub on the South Wales Echo and had to rent it out. I’ve been looking for it ever since, and a few years ago came across it again on Amazon, but the price was way beyond what I care to pay - around £35. Why I don’t know. However, taking another look recently, I saw someone was selling it secondhand for £24, and tight cunt that I can be, I decided even at that price I wanted it. It was, and now again, is one of my favourite albums.

It’s The Cry Of Love by Jimi Hendrix and was the last studio album he recorded, not, as happens all too often, a collection of outtakes and rejected crap which various record companies put out to fleece the fleeceable. I shall listen to it again tomorrow on my way to London for my four days of work (or should that be ‘work’, as I rather enjoy it?)

. . .

Apropos Pope Wayne - or is it Francis? These things are apt to confuse a handsome thirtysomething like me - the first Latin American football striker to be elected Pope and Bishop of Rome - yes, I had to read that twice, too, but we are, after all, living in a very modern world, one in which men can marry other men, women can marry other women and

Pope Wayne: He had a lethal left foot, but then discovered the Jesuits black is apparently white after all despite centuries of not being so - I heard a rather amusing anecdote about Jesuits, Dominican and Franciscans. Pope Wayne (who might well have played for Real Madrid in the 1970s, but who failed a medical) was so disillusioned by the cynical tactics of his fellow players and was, at heart, quite a sincere chap that he hung up his boots and took to the priesthood, choosing to apply to the Jesuits as at the time he thought they were the coolest.

It seems a Jesuit, a Dominican and a Franciscan were sitting together in a room when the light suddenly failed. The Franciscan took fright, fell to his knees and immediately prayed to God intensely that he (I understand the correct form is ‘He’ but then when was I ever one for correct forms?) should bring back the light. The Dominican, a slightly more cerebral chap, began a long discourse on the nature of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil and who . . . blah-de-blah-de-blah. The Jesuit got up and replaced the fuse.

When I was 12 and living in Berlin, I attended a Jesuit college for three years. I don’t know a great deal about the Jesuits, except that they tend to act as acid does to most metals, intellectually and otherwise. I must admit that I am rather drawn to the Jesuits and were a miracle to happen and I was not only persuaded that Christianity is not after all a load of voodoo hooey, but decided I had a vocation and should become a priest, the Jesuits would be my first and only port of call.

Actually, perhaps I shouldn’t joke as much. At least this guy has the good grace not only to admit the poor have a shit time, but also that the RC church should do something about it. And no one lives in a small flat, cooks his own meals and travels ‘to work’ on the underground for several years in the hope that he might one day be elected Pope and it will all look rather good in the Vatican PR handouts. Or am I just as naive as the rest of you?

Unsurprisingly, the British press, who rarely have much better to do, have already got their sharpened knives and are questioning just how active he was in the armed resistance to General Galtieri when that son of a bitch had the gall - had the gall! - to restrict shipments of tea to the Falkland Islands (or, as we Brits like to call them, the Falkland Islands). Did he or did he not - the public surely has a right to know! - personally suggest that if the Falkland islanders couldn’t get as much tea as they would like, they should perhaps, you know, try drinking coffee. I mean, it’s not the end of the world is it (unlike the Falkland Islands if you live in london rather than Buenos Aires)? Bastard! Calls himself a man of God? Yeah, right. The Jesuits will, apparently, take anyone.