At least one tiny piece of the world has fallen into place. At last the age old battle comes to an end.
Is the famous regional meal of scones served with jam and thick cream called a 'Devon' cream tea or a 'Cornish' cream tea? After many hundreds of years of wrangling an archivist has discovered a 'document' which mentions that the monks of a Benedictine abbey in DEVON a thousand years ago served medieval cream teas to the workers repairing the building. This was so popular that they extended the service to weary travellers passing by. Sounds pretty final - but there is something almost too perfect about this. Could the 'document' be a fake? I am actually on the Devon side so I don't think I'll bring that up.


Also in the papers are reviews of a autobiography about how awful it was to be brought up by a mother who followed the nawgahB. I had nothing to do with this myself but a surpringly large number of my friends did and from totally disparate groups too. Funnily enough they were almost all rather straightforward and intelligent people. To the outsider, (me), the whole thing looked like an idiotic and transparently obvious con but they were all really happy with it and followed him for several years. They must have started off when the cult was smaller as they had all spent time in India and had had many conversations with the B... himself. I met a woman only a few months ago who still calls herself by her B.... name. It went through a period of being fashionable with upper class hippies who obviously had time and money to spare and I was quite shocked at how much some of them had handed over to him. When I questioned them about his strangely materialistic spending habits they would laugh fondly and say things like, 'Oh B......., he just can't resist a Rolls Royce', as if it was some endearing little quirk. They all stuck religiously to wearing shades of red and orange and the locket-thing with his picture. It was quite bizarre when we gave parties as sometimes they made up about a quarter of the guests. They were never horrible about trying to convert us but also couldn't leave it alone and would drone on sadly about how they found it impossible to BELIEVE that we weren't interested and it was only a matter of time.
Unfortunately, for them, I had heard gossiping about the sex side of the ashrams and how one friend of ours had stupidly told the B.... that he thought he might be gay. That night he was blindfolded and led into a darkened dormitory and locked in with ten other men. By the morning he had realised that he definitely wasn't. Also a shy, practically virginal girl friend was put through the same treatment in order to release the real her or something. She would never talk of this but sometimes had a strange smile.

They finally went out to the B....'s town in the desert in Oregon and I think it was all just too big and impersonal and apparently vicious in-fighting started amongst the elders of the cult , money was unaccounted for, and the atmosphere of love and happiness ruined. (Partly by having to wear compulsory plastic gloves while having sex, I gathered). Any feelings of regret that I might have harboured(?) about missing out were flushed away when I saw a documentary about the B.... and on a fuzzy video clip of one of his 'cleansing sessions' was the familiar figure of one of my girl friends, naked and writhing on the carpet in front of about a hundred people, who seemed to have been interrupted in the middle of a cocktail party. Naturally I looked puzzled when she asked, casually, if I had noticed that the programme was on. 'What programme?'. They have all taken off their orange garments years ago , of course, and seem as straightforward and intelligent as they were before it all started. Then again, what do I know of what happens at night, when the dormitory doors close.
- posted by Iris @ 1/19/2004 09:59:00 PM comment