A Little Drummer Boy Forum-pa-pum-pum

Well what a do! Another month goes by and I write this newsletter from the big parish tee party in Port Vila.


So nice to see everyone, well not everyone mind you but many of the parish. And apparently the heads of every house are discussing terribly, very important matters. Oh yes, very important, so important nobody can actually know what these “matters” are, but we are told they are terribly important.

Yes, in between the tea and cakes I myself have seen people talking with furrowed brows. Bless.

So given all of these very important people I thought that I should dedicate this issue of the newsletter to issues of domestic household management. Many of the households in the parish seem to be interested in the question of how best can a house be managed? Well I don’t know, obviously being a man of the cloth we get our orders from a higher being, so I guess in that sense we are like a communist dictatorship but that sounds wrong?

However, let us not be judgemental and look at the current methods used, for ease I have tried to group the methods by category;

The simple method

The Polynesians have a wonderfully simple way of dealing with the head of household. They don’t bother, the existing monarch decides that you can all vote for him and his family. A great system whereby everybody in the house gets to vote for the incumbent.

The less simple method

The variation to having everybody vote for the incumbent is to have the incumbent vote for everybody. This is the strategy used by our Melanesian brothers. Can be a bit messy from time to time, but allowing others to block vote for you certainly saves the average person a lot of time.

The complicated method

There are off course other models whereby you allow the family to choose the head and then have some uncle or aunt just steal it from him or her – this seems to be the method used in Australia and Fiji.

The very complicated method

Each member of the household is allowed to choose for themselves – a crazy foolish notion that assumes other people in the household have no idea who you voted for. There are claims from the big white house the other side of the pond that this method actually works but there is little evidence of that.

Well, what diversity we have in our parish and we love diversity, well usually – in some streets.

I guess we can all learn something from every household – even though they all have their own methods we should not be so quick to judge. He who casteth the first stone and all that ......

Until next month, god bless the good ship Pacific*

Rev Smiley



*I have been asked by Ms Jillian to clarify that this does not apply to all those who sail in her, especially if they are trying to get into our village under suspicious circumstances – if so she will send them to another street for processing, once she can work out which corner of the Parish will have them