Oh God and all that

Worst thing about feeling low is not lack of answers but lack of questions (apart from: what's it all about? - which is meaningless.) The questions are always more interesting than the answers - and often more reliable too. Any questions anyone?

The wind is blowing, nice policeman from Andalucia has come up to help Mr Handsome from Blackburn with getting everything ready for the (we hope) about to arrive pollitos.. chickens to you. Tiresome Terrier has a suspected tapeworm: she crapped all over the dining-room in the night. It made a merry awakening for Beloved, always up first. He is now off to the vet with TT and Beautiful Wimp both.

Brain dead Granny resorts to the online Guardian, and recommends Madeleine Bunting on the growing significance of faith - of all kinds - in Africa; a salutary reminder to faithless Westerners, currently being funny at the expense of Easter. Bob Geldorf it seems insisted on this fact about Africa being inserted into the report of some major international commission. Africans surprise surprise don't trust politicians - they do trust their religious leaders - who supply many of the few services that exist. The trust includes leaders of traditional religions - witch doctors, so-called - who contrary to Western stereotype are often benign.

Granny can confirm this: working alongside her ex doctor husband twenty years ago, she not only visited Ecuardorian healers, she also spent a morning in a big psychiatric hospital just outside Nairobi. The weary Asian psychiatrist said: 'I couldn't manage without the healers; they deal with the social illnesses which is 80% of it, so than I can concentrate on organic illness which is more than enough.' She also heard of a Norfolk GP who after spending a year or two in the high Andes said: 'The healers rub peoples' stomachs with guinea-pigs - and then they feel better. I wish I had guinea pigs sometimes in Norfolk. I don't have anything like that; most drugs make miserable people feel worse.'

Well those are questions and answers of sorts. And if Granny can't quite get it together with God and all that, it's her problem. (Not her Beloved's though. He thinks a religious sense - and need - is genetic. And that it's a gene he doesn't possess. Does Granny? She hasn't a clue. Though she could do with a guinea-pig just now; better still, a guinea pig rub.)