Three Months

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For the past thirteen years I have been reducing my appearances and have purposely not released any new material of a literary nature with view to entering a more private existence. I have always been a private person at heart, but events throughout my life have conspired to prevent this and thwarted any attempt to be private.

What most brought me to public attention were the television and radio programmes I regularly appeared on and also the books and documentary films associated with topics which hold the public imagination in thrall. It is for that reason I have not submitted a book for publication since the beginning of the 21st century. Likewise, I have scaled back my broadcasts in the media to a point where I no longer make them. I ceased giving interviews to the print media decades ago and only then in quality magazines. Moreover, it will soon be three years since I declared I am no longer prepared to provide interviews on the Highgate case. What there was to say has already been said many times over. I found myself answering the same questions again and again; questions which frequently already have the answers provided in my published account.

One of the problems, I quickly came to realise many years ago, is that interviewers, regardless of the subject, simply do not know the right questions and the questions are every bit as important as the answers.

I am still having to regularly turn down television and radio interview requests, along with a plethora of other invitations to partake in projects which would maintain this perception of me being a public figure, which, I accept, is exactly what I have been for the majority of my life. Yet what made me so is now in the past.

The concomitants of being a public figure have slowly eroded over the last thirteen years to a point where I stand at the threshhold of finally achieving meaningful privacy. Hence, in three months I shall step over that threshhold and become a private person. This will not affect my episcopal duties, sacerdotal ministry, art and music etc, but any involvement in secular preoccupations and the expression of views on same in the public hemisphere shall altogether cease.

I will continue to address questions on this blog for just three more months. Thus, if there is a anything you wished you had asked, but have so far not done so, you have until the feast of Saint Lucia 2013.

"The reality I once experienced exists no longer and although its memories are the most potent that I possess, they now seem so far away ─ possibly because next to the hunger to experience a thing, there is no stronger hunger than to forget."

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