Barking Mad

My focus shifted to the mystery transfixing football fans everywhere as I mused on the fact that Elvis left out the line after “If dogs have a heaven”, which, obviously, is that there must therefore be a hell for dogs, too, for which Dottie and Florence are destined. Or not.

When I damned Dottie and Flo in the Belfast Telegraph a while back, the speedy riposte came: “Your hatred for the Royal Family and Protestants shows you for a bigot. You even extended it to their dogs. I look forward to you screaming when you are punished in hell.”
Regular readers will realise my correspondent had a point. Was it not myself who aeons ago highlighted the fact that bestiality is only a venial sin because sheep, ferrets etc. have no souls for the sullying? How could such a thing have slipped my mind?
Dottie and Florence aren’t headed for Hades, then. But that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve a right kicking.
The pair were among the pack of mutt-savages which spread terror at the publicly-owned Sandringham estate where Brit Royals squatted for the holiday period.
Pharos, one of the Queen’s [pictured right] corgis, was ripped limb from limb after scampering wag-tailed to greet Princess Anne’s bull terriers. Dotty was first in the frame for sinking her sabre fangs into Pharos’ soft flank, which looked ominous: she had previous.
Dotty had been convicted in November 2000 of attacking two toddlers in Windsor Great Park, leaving one with bite-wounds on the collarbone and leg, the other with mutilated back, leg and arm. The court had warned Dotty she’d be done for if it happened again.
What luck, then, that evidence swiftly emerged that the fingering of Dotty was based on false identification. New witnesses revealed that it was Florence, not Dotty, who had reduced lovable Pharos to gobbets of warm flesh and wisps of blood-matted hair strewn across the Sandrigham lawn.
Scarce had we then steadied ourselves when word came of new slaughter. Royal maid Rosa was savaged by Florence when she and three co-workers went to tidy Anne’s room. Why four maids were needed to clean a room Anne had slept in was nowhere explained. Still, some of us remember her hey-day when they’d have to call in the fire brigade to hose down the walls.
James Whittaker, “Britain’s leading Royal watcher”, reckoned that, despite all, Florence is long odds-on to beat the rap and that Dotty wouldn’t have been offed even if the exculpatory evidence hadn’t come to light. The Queen favours dogs, whereas Anne prefers horses, but neither would want a bull terrier banished for biting a leg off a baby or a servant, pronounced Whittaker on BBC.
“The Royal dogs” (copyright, Independent Newspapers Ltd.) stem from ancient dynasties. The original Royal terrier was given to Anne by her father when she was four: maybe he wanted her to grow up in an atmosphere of teeth. The corgi lineage can be traced to Old Skipper, a present to the Queen 64 years ago. This may not seem ancient, but six decades in dog years is as far back as the importation of the seed of the Saxe-Corburgs into Britain.
The dogs’ tight in-breeding may help account for their rabidity. Of course, in-breeding wouldn’t be seen by Brit Royals as a drawback.
The question is, what the fuck was Martin O’Neill thinking about, accepting an “honour” from these snarling buffoons?

Author Aroup Chatterjee won’t be surprised that his book about Mother Teresa isn’t widely available.
Despite initial expressions of interest, Mother Teresa – The Final Verdict failed to find a western publisher. Brought out last year by Meteor Books of Calcutta, it can be read on-line or bought via www.meteorbooks.com.
Born and raised in Calcutta, Chatterjee became intruiged by Teresa when he moved to Britain to complete his medical studies in 1985. He quickly became aware that a woman to whom the name of his homeplace was commonly appended appeared to be a major London media figure. He writes: “I had had some interest in the destitute of Calcutta during my college days, when I dabbled in leftist politics for a while. I also took a keen interest in human rights issues. Never in the course of my (modest) interactions with the very poor of Calcutta, did I cross paths with Mother Teresa’s organisation. Indeed, I cannot ever recall her name being mentioned.”
On return to Cacutta, Chatterjee worked in a hospital literally within sight of Teresa’s “hospice”. He developed a keen intererest in, even a fascination with the activities of the Albanian nun and her Missionaries of Charity, took to interviewing callers to the hospice on video and reading reams of western reports of her alleged role and reputation in the city. He was greatly encouraged in the endeavour by his wife, “brought up a Roman Catholic in Ireland on Teresa mythology”.
Teresa eventually became a minor celebrity in Calcutta, he says, for being a major celebrity in the west.
Final Verdict leaves no room for doubt that, far from being an exotic, eccentric figure innocent of the ways of the material world, her actions and pronouncements open to differing judgments, Teresa was a scheming liar, hypocrite and fraud. Chatterjee combs assiduously through her myriad statements and interviews, identifying the self-serving untruths and misrepresentations from which she and a team of propagandists constructed a fictional image.
One example: the best-known, even iconic, representation of the Missionaries of Charity is of nuns in blue-bordered saris picking up the desperately poor from the pavements of Calcutta. This has never happened, Chatterjee insists. The Missionaries of Charity never undertook any such activity or operated such a service. There is no evidence of Teresa herself ever having tended to the poor on the streets of Calcutta.
Chatterjee invites any who doubt this, on the face of it, startling suggestion to trawl through newspaper libraries or just think back on the thousands of images of Teresa westerners are likely to have encountered. Sheaves of pictures of the wrinkled nun posing with poor people in various parts of the world will come to light, he predicts: but none at all of Teresa actually on the streets of Calcutta comforting the poor.
It may be, he speculates, that in the last quarter century of her life, Teresa literally never set foot in a Calcutta slum.
How, then, has the world, or a major portion of it, come to believe in Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the Saint of the Gutters, etc? Mainly on account of her lies, claims Chatterjee. In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, as in scores of statements, prayers and interviews around the world over a period of decades, Teresa had laid down layer upon layer of lies, referring explicitly and in detail to sorties into Bengal slumdom in search of bodies to tend and souls to save. She frequently illustrated her stories of self-praise with vivid anecdotes which, Chatterjee suggests, were either embellished until totally irreconcilable with any truth, or were simply made up.
The key to the success of the enterprise, Chatterjee suggests, is that it was wholly endorsed by the Vatican which, with full knowledge of the deceit it was involved in, began organising promotional drives for Teresa immediately the Polish reactionary Wojtyla won the papacy in 1978.
This is the best book yet written about the Teresa hoax and as enlightening a work as you are likely to read in 2004.