by David Stubbs
To avert this peril, I would be glad to present a Public Information film, warning young people against homeopathy misuse. To make the piece more harrowing, it would help if you could furnish me with case studies – there must be hundreds of them – of people who have made themselves ill (or even died) through overdosing on homeopathic pills.
Yours, with great urgency
HRH The Prince of Wales
John Cook
Chairman
British Homeopathic Association
Hahnemann House
29 Park Street West
Luton
England
16 February 2011
Dear Mr Cook
According to my records, I have yet to receive a response concerning my public information initiative to combat the widespread phenomenon of homeopathic overdose. I assume you must have entire cabinets dedicated to files of recorded cases. It might be that you consider the photographic evidence of victims, convulsed by the excess of active ingredients in the average homeopathic pill, to be too grisly for Royal eyes to behold but don’t spare me, I am not squeamish! On the other hand, please don’t ‘swamp’ me. Just send me a dozen or so of the most really, really appalling cases.
Yours &c
HRH The Prince of Wales
John Cook
Chairman
British Homeopathic Association
Hahnemann House
29 Park Street West
Luton
England
22 February 2011
Dear Mr Cook
I just had a member of my staff call your offices concerning the photos I requested, only to be informed there are no recorded cases whatsoever of death by homeopathic overdose. Either this was due to a faulty telephone line, or it strikes me we have been astoundingly lucky so far. Perhaps a Guiding Hand of some sort has averted the worst?
Even so, we must not be complacent. May I suggest we use ‘human guinea pigs’ on which to test the effects of homeopathic medicine taken to excess? In line with American practice, perhaps we could take some of Britain’s most hardened criminals, the ones serving life imprisonment, and give them the choice between serving out their sentences in full or being set free, if they agree to be experimented on with excess doses of homeopathic remedies, with the lethal risk that entails. About eighty or ninety such men would give a broad sample base, I’d suggest. Shall I inform the Home Secretary or shall you?
Yours &c
HRH The Prince of Wales
God
Heaven
Within and Without Us
12 June 2011
Well, God (or Jahweh or Allah, or however you prefer to be addressed)
I trust You don’t mind my corresponding with You like this. A bit silly, You might think, but although You know all things and know what I’m about to write, I’m going to write it anyway. You see, I find that I can best gather and arrange my thoughts set out in the epistolary form – I expect Your St Peter and Paul felt the same way. I’ve tried praying but as well as hurting the knees like the dickens, I find I get a bit tongue-tied. I don’t really know what to say to You.
Plus, and I don’t mean this as any sort of carping criticism, when I have prayed the rate of return hasn’t been all that I might have desired. You may well remember, I expect You do, that I prayed very hard to You in my Gordonstoun days – some of them were a bit silly, like the plague of boils I requested to be visited on Tubby Southbridge, the boy who led the delegation that forced me to drink the contents of my own inkwell through a stripy straw. I can understand Your vetoing that one. But then, on those long, sleepless, lonely nights, praying that Mummy and Daddy would the next morning come bowling up in the big car and whisk me away from that ghastly, fiend-filled Caledonian chamber of sado-masochistic misery, back to tea and hearth and Nanny – did You hear me, I wondered? I have to believe You did.
All water under the bridge, I suppose. Anyway, the reason I’m writing is this. It used to be commonly believed that the Monarch of England was divinely appointed. Not so widespread nowadays, that idea, but in the spirit of Pascal, I always think it’s worth hedging one’s bets. So, given you’re divine and I’m next in line to be appointed, I was wondering – suppose You were to send me a sign, via Nature, giving me either the thumbs-up or thumbs-down as regards my future prospects on the throne?
What I have in mind, Sir, is this. Among my most favoured hounds is my basset Woodrow, who out of affection and respect for his age, I allow to sleep in front of the fireplace in my study. Every afternoon, when I come in to attend to my correspondence, he’s in the habit of sitting up and barking enthusiastically at me. There follows a bit of give and take before the both of us settle down again: myself to my letters, Woodrow to his slumber.
What I propose is that tomorrow afternoon, in the midst of our give and take, I ask Woodrow the direct question: ‘Will I be King?’ At this point, Almighty God, I invite You to use him as a vessel through which to express Your will: either have him bark the word ‘Yes!’ or, should You will it, ‘No!’ For me, that would settle the matter once and for all, though I am sufficiently sceptical about both the Gentlemen of the Press, to say nothing of certain members of my own family, to suspect my explanation of Woodrow’s declaration would not settle the matter for them. Let us therefore keep this between ourselves.
As for this correspondence, I shan’t be so daft as to send it out via Royal Mail. I propose, with respect, to throw it on the fireplace in that it may be reduced to ashes and send smoke ascending up the chimney – and symbolically, up into the skies and Heavenward. Assuming You exist (and I believe You do), would You look out for something like this or have one of Your angels keep watch for it? These are deep theological waters.
Most respectfully yours
HRH The Prince of Wales
To God
Heaven
Within and Without Us
13 June 2011
I thought I’d send You a follow-up letter. I listened most anxiously to each of Woodrow’s barks this afternoon. Mostly it was his usual, common or garden ‘woof’, but he did at one point yelp something out of the ordinary. I took the precaution of ‘tape recording’ proceedings and playing it back, it sounds like he was saying, ‘Trout!’
Trout? Is there some sort of symbolism, fish-related perhaps, which I should divine in this? After all, one thinks of Jesus and His Disciples as ‘Fishers of Men’. Perhaps if you could have Woodrow bark, either in the affirmative or negative, the same time tomorrow afternoon then I would have something to reflect deeply upon.
Yours &c
HRH The Prince of Wales
Copyright
First published in 2011
by Aurum Press Ltd,
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London NW1 0ND
This ebook edition first published in 2011
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