Wading Through The Toxic Sludge

Caedmon was telling me in one of our recent fireside chats that there's something very nasty going on in a faraway country where the Huns live. Apparently, a large lake full of poisonous filth has burst its banks, and a great deal of land has been enveloped in the evil stuff, which has spread at an alarming rate throughout the countryside. He has been told that it has also entered the mighty river Danube as well. I feel so terribly sorry for the people and their cats. What on earth are they going to do? I do hope that nothing like that ever happens in Streonæshalch. I don't think that the monks at the Abbey are doing anything that would cause such damage to the environment. At least we have the sea nearby - which is more than can be said for the poor land-locked Huns.

On another note, I've also been reliably told that a rather clever lady has been temporarily removed from her position as an educator of children. This is because she had the effrontery to stand up before a political conference somewhere in the Anglo-Saxon realm (Mercia, I think) to berate those princes and their miserable underlings who misrule the schools and make sure that poor children remain as poor when they leave school as they are when they first start. From the furore that her honesty has occasioned it appears that she's had to wade through an awful lot of toxic sludge herself. Caedmon was told this by a visitor this morning, and the monks here at St Hilda's Abbey are very upset. They teach our local children too - but they do so out of concern for their betterment and their Christian education. Caedmon says that these wicked princes have been peddling the vilest heresies, and they don't tolerate anyone who contradicts them. It sounds like the 'pride of life' that the worthy Apostle John talks about in one of his letters.