I was going to start
today’s rant by saying “Religion is a
load of old rubbish, isn’t it?” but I thought better of it. Religion might
actually be right. I don’t know. But I do know that I can’t understand it at
all. As I drove home from the night shift there was a church service on the
radio. It was led by some bishop or other from inner London. The bishop was
taking the line that God was wonderful and brilliant. Admittedly there had been
over fifty stabbings in the bishop’s stomping group already this year, but if
you just ignored all the bad stuff in life, then everything was great.
I was reminded of the
revelation I had when I gave up with religion. As a young man I was *very* religious. Having been brainwashed
by constant exposure to Christian propaganda after ten years in the Boys
Brigade I had risen in the Methodist church to the position of Steward. That’s
the person that hires and fires the vicar. But one day I realized that I didn’t
actually believe any of the religious stuff. The fact of the matter was that I
desperately hoped it was true as the promise of the creator of the universe as
your best mate was rather appealing, and the thought of a godless creation was
rather frightening.
I went through a stage
of being a staunch atheist… then I was an apathetic agnostic. Now… I think (like Blaise Pascal)
I would like to hedge my bets.
We did have a vague
plan to take the dogs to hunt some plastic tubs near Alkham this morning, but I’d had a notification
about a new puzzle cache whilst I was coming to the end of my night shift.
There were ten riddles to solve which would give numerical values for the
letters A to J. From this there was a little calculation to give GPS
co-ordinates to find the new geocache. Ten minutes work gave me solutions for A
to J. I say “solutions”… I had
answers from which I had no idea how to get numbers.
An hour later and twenty-five miles later I had a stroke of
inspiration over a cuppa at home. I delved two layers deeper into the puzzle.
Some frantic work on the lap-top gave me the thumbs-up on the checker on the
first attempt.
Our
hounds needed a walk, so "er indoors TM", the hounds and I set
off on a little mission to locate this cache before our walk. I was pleased to
have figured out this puzzle; doubly pleased to be the (joint) first one to find it too. Being the first one to find a
cache has a certain kudos; and something of a novelty value locally as the
competition is so stiff.
Having
been successful in our hunt we relocated to Singleton Lake where we had today’s
walk. There were people fishing there. I did chuckle. The fishermen were
chatting. I say “chatting”; they were
talking bollox as fishermen so often do.
I’ve
fished in Singleton Lake on and off over the years. I’ve walked dogs past the
place on a regular basis over the last five years. I have *never* seen anything bigger than six inches having been caught in
that lake. And when you talk to people fishing there, neither has anyone else.
However *everyone* knows someone
whose mate knows someone who caught something the size of a blue whale only the
other day. The people fishing there today were all telling each other how their
mate’s auntie’s cat’s sister’s boyfriend caught something humungous only last
week.
Pausing only briefly to
re-pot those plants I got from the garden centre the other day I took myself
off to bed for the afternoon. The nicest Sunday we’ve had all year, and I was
asleep. Oh well. I wouldn’t be griping *quite*
so much had nice-next-door not texted me after a couple of hours to say they
were having a barby and did I want to get my washing in?
Once "er indoors TM" had boiled up
some scran I’m off to another night shift…
No comments:
Post a Comment