GREENBEARD: The Reverend Explains

Dear Exterminating Angels,
                it is my task to inform you that Hunt N. Peck is still in Florida engaged in some mysterious business, and consequently will not deliver to you the next chapter of the novel Greenbeard. I am disappointed by this, as the yarn is loosely based upon the exploits of my ancestor, as recounted in family papers.
    I must write this apology myself, despite my many pressing affairs, as it seems Monsignor Squirelli cannot control his dislike of Mr Peck. In any case he has become overbearing since arranging for me to be transferred from the old asylum on the hill to a private nursing home last year. This was a kindly act, it is true – I had become convinced that I was King Henry the Eighth and caused a scene in a fish-and-chip shop when they would not sell me a surfeit of lampreys, a large chips and a pickled onion – but he seems to derive far too much moral superiority from it. These things happen to us for a purpose, and the root cause of my derangement was a misunderstanding, to wit, while drinking with East European seamen, in the hope of bringing the love of God into their souls, I had assumed their bottle contained some variety of Polish vodka as it had the letters POLISH on the label, but it contained, in fact, some kind of industrial floor-polish. These are the risks one runs in the service of the Lord, but good can come from unlikely directions and it was while I was convalescing and musing upon such misapprehensions that I had the idea for the Microwave Mission to Mars. Misconstruings, mishearings, malentendus, such communication failures surround us always. Indeed only last night as I conversed at length with a drunken fellow in the Autochthonic Arms, the whisky gave wings to my rhetoric and I attempted to use the beauty of modern physics to open his heart to the love of God, however, a chance remark from him revealed to me that for the whole of my peroration he had been hearing me say ‘gay cemetaries’ when in fact I had been saying ‘guage symmetries’. It saddened me that my fine malt-fuelled preaching had been for naught, it bemused me to try and imagine what exactly the fellow had thought I was saying, but it strengthened my faith in the Microwave Mission to Mars as it demonstrated that such misunderstandings are the cracks through which the Devil seeps into the world. Indeed the Lord works in mysterious ways!