´óÏó´«Ã½

In a small, frosty backwater of Alaska, a minor rebellion is brewing, fuelled by the "knife and fork of [Shropshire] goodness and decency".
Life may be cheap, but there's a new Pope in town... and he comes from west of Market Drayton!

I half expected there to be an empty mount at the end of the room with a little label on the bottom of it that said "Morris".

All the little heads stared at me with their dead, glassy eyes, except the lemming that seemed to be looking wistfully at the ceiling.

I've always quite liked lemmings. People tend to associate them with mass suicide, a sort of hamster branch of the Heaven's Gaters, but the truth is, lemmings never jump off cliffs en masse, at least not of their own volition.

As with so many things in life, Walt Disney is to blame. In 1958 Disney were making a documentary called "White Wilderness" and deliberately herded a whole bunch of lemmings straight off a cliff, filmed it and the myth was born. Terrible business, really.

In reality, the only flightless mammals foolish enough to deliberately hurl themselves off cliffs have two legs, less hair and an unending predisposition for stupidity.

I waited for nearly an hour and then gave up and tried to use the door. It was locked.

When I tried to turn the handle I could hear giggling from the other side of the door.

This is a classic bullying situation and they should think themselves lucky I'm not in a workplace situation, or I would report them to the local harassment officer and there would be serious repercussions.

It was another two hours before they unlocked the door and a very large man (who looked like he had never smiled) told me the Pope was too busy to see me now and that I should come back tomorrow.

I told the man my Mother had died and I just wanted to go home. He just said, "Everybody dies".

Fortunately, I know from experience that the best way to deal with bullies is to stand up to them. They are often the biggest cowards underneath all that aggression and muscle and anger.

So I poked my finger in the very large man's chest, intending to give him a severe telling off (with emphasis on taking into account other people's feelings in the way you behave), but I only got as far as the initial finger jab.

In the street outside they are hanging a mural from the roof of the building opposite. It's a giant picture of the Pope, sitting on a throne of ivory, smiling down at me, and holding a hand grenade in one hand and a baseball bat with a nail in it in the other... A bit like a violent version of the regal ball and sceptre.

Under the picture are the words "The Pope Knows".

I'm not in the least bit bothered by it.

I can sense the icy wind of change in the air of Lost Hope.

Since the current regime in this miserable little place will not allow me to leave, I can think of only one alternative.

Using the backs of anti-Morris posters, I've managed to cobble together some posters of my own.

Simple messages. Basic truths like "The Pope must go" and "Why do what the Pope says?" seem ambiguous enough to spread dissension.

I got talking to an old man with ginger hair. He looked a bit like a geriatric Don Rickles, only with a nervous tic that sent the whole right hand side of his body into spasms. His name was Polo and he claimed he had been in Lost Hope for the last seventy years, and that the Pope had been there long before him.

Clearly this is not true, the Pope I saw couldn't have been much over forty.

I pointed this out to Polo and he started going on about a fountain of youth hidden in the white chamber, a zebra man living in the woods, and the albino water-dragons asleep in the frozen depths of Lake Hell.

To be fair, much of this sounded quite convincing. However, then I made the mistake of asking him how he came by such an unusual name.

He lifted up the ginger hair on the back of his head to show me a fist sized hole where, I suspect, a fair chunk of his brain used to inhabit.

I asked how it had happened and he muttered something about the Pope and a rusty spoon... I didn't press him on the matter.

To be honest, not much of this makes much sense to me. Why keep these people here against their will? Why call yourself the "Pope"? Why be sufficiently proud of killing a chipmunk that you would mount its head on the wall?

There is much wrong here.

I marched up to the Pope's front door and hammered on it until my hands hurt (which wasn't very long given the recent abuse they have suffered).

No one answered. Maybe he is out, or maybe he is hiding behind his settee, afraid I will expose him for the fraud he is.

I talked to a number of people after that. People are already coming forward and expressing their desire to leave Lost Hope.

I gave them all some rousing rhetoric and told them to spread the news.

There's a new candidate for the Pope in town - he's good, fair, kind and noble and he's from just west of Market Drayton.

I was taken for another private audience before the Pope. I didn't even have to wait very long this time.

It all went quite well and after the usual death threats and intimidating gestures he offered me a full pardon if I left Lost Hope and went back to Shropshire.

I declined on two counts.

Firstly I feel it is my responsibility to give the people of Lost Hope a chance to taste the sweet free air of the West Midlands before they die.

Secondly, and most importantly, when the Pope suggested I go back home, he used a profanity immediately before the sacred name of my mother county. "..and go back to *&$£ing Shropshire"! he said.

I will not stand for anyone, Pope or no, to show the gleaming fields of Salopia such disrespect.

Now I imagine that the Pope is in fact just another troubled individual in desperate need of a little bit of Shropshire, but this time he had gone too far.

I knew then that this man had to be taught a lesson.

As I was dragged out the front door, a crowd was waiting for me, not an enormous crowd, but big enough to legitimately call a crowd. Not a huddle or a group, not quite a throng but certainly throng-ish, a crowd and they were calling my name.

"morris"

"Morris"

"MORRIS"

They were calling my name and it wasn't so they could drop me in a lake, or burn me alive. No, it was because they believed in the power of Shropshire, embodied in Mr Morris Telford.

It's time for the reign of Pope Morris.

The men that protected the Pope and did other general thuggish duties took one look at the crowd, got in their four by four and left. Didn't see them again.

My followers joined me and we went looking for the Pope. It's midnight now and I'm sitting on his throne typing this while the others search for him. Today is the dawn of a new age.

It's time for the reign of Pope Morris.

He was holed up in a secret room in the left wing. It was a little room with nothing but rolls of toilet paper.

He'd built quite a sturdy little igloo out of them in the middle of the room and was sitting in it quite calmly, humming what was (as far as I could tell) the theme-tune from classic eighties action motorbike TV series Street Hawk.

The people of New Hope wanted to express their frustration at living under his violent rule by beating seventeen shades of suffering out of him, but I managed to stop them.

They did strip him naked and make him dance on broken glass, but this was just preliminary cruelty and after a few hours I got them to listen to me.

I told them that even if they tortured, killed, stuffed and mounted him, it wouldn't undo all the suffering, it would just be causing more suffering.

I don't want to be responsible for that.

My mission is to help people, to expose wrongs, to eat the pie of evil and lies with the knife and fork of goodness and decency... to scrub off the droppings of the bird of injustice from the double-glazing of society... and to get the correct numbers and dialling codes of the Mr Tricksters, Mrs Charlatans and Evildoers Esquires of this world from the great phone directory of perception, give them a call about some home truths and reverse the charges.

I convinced the people to let me have a day alone with him, find out why he set himself up as Pope.

I'm going into a small room with him now.

There's nothing in there either of us can use to hurt each other. It's just me, the ex-Pope tied to a chair, a bottle of water and nothing to do but tell him about Shropshire for the next 24 hours.