Well, several buses, in fact. Virtually every bus in Bangor is carrying an ad from the latest Alpha Course campaign. I love Alpha: it's cuddly and it's friendly and fun, and it's designed to introduce people to Christianity by emphasizing all the cool things and quietly shoving all embarrassing stuff (homosexuality, abortion, pre-marital sex) to one side.

Its founder is a former lawyer called Nicky Gumbel. Isn't that a nice name? He sounds like a little elf. Funnily enough, he looks like one, too. He's got a nice wife called Pippa - what a nice name, makes you think of sandals and Volvos - and he's the Vicar of a nice church called Holy Trinity Brompton. HTB (as it's known) is full of hundreds of nice, rich people from nice parts of London. They have three distinguishing characteristics:

1. They all own misprinted copies of the Bible with Matthew 19:21 missing;

2. They all believe that they have been saved from sin by the death of a man who is, for the purposes of their worship, adequately represented by a small biscuit¹;

3. They are all stark, raving mad.

Unfortunately for all these nice people, Nicky Gumbel isn't a very nice man. [Maximum respec' to Jon Ronson]

^{1. I know we've talked about the metaphysics of biscuits before, but it's worth going into the subject again here. Worshippers at Holy Trinity Brompton are evangelical protestants. To them, the communion wafer and wine are symbols of body and blood of Christ rather than the transubstantiated real deal that the Catholics get. In summary, Protestants get down on their knees on a Sunday morning and worship a biscuit that represents the flesh of a 2000-year-old Galilean joiner, rather than a biscuit that has actually become his flesh.}