Divine Fiat

“But if God is invisible then people would keep bumping into him”.  Good point. 

“Mummy, we have to be civilised” Admittedly I was pretending to beat him with a ping pong bat at the time but I was more than justified:

I was knitting a puppet for someone else, and Joni decided he would like one too.  Make a monkey, he said.  So I knitted a monkey.  At around the 90% mark he said “don’t want a monkey, make a snake instead”.  Redesign the head a bit, line the mouth with red, improvise a forked tongue, sew a couple of red buttons on the eyes, and Bob’s your uncle, or possibly your snake.  It probably wouldn’t feature on the centre-fold of “Good Housekeeping”, but considering it started life as a monkey, I don’t think I’ve done too badly; 

snake puppet  joni and puppet

This photo appeared in yesterday’s paper;

which made me realise that I maybe should have been a bit more impressed at having been granted private audiences in the personal offices of some of the figures depicted here.  I guess it’s like a foreigner in England running into George Osborne or something; no good reason to know who this person is or why anyone should be impressed by the encounter (if indeed they should).  We may therefore have reason to hope that having made it this far up the food-chain, my qualifications are at least being given the best possible chance of being recognised by somebody somewhere. 

We received a fine for having an unpaid tax on our car from September 2009.  According to my husband’s anal comprehensive filing system, we officially took ownership of our car in August 2009, and we have no record of having received any bills until the 2010 tax bill early in the new year.  So I took the stack along to the tax office this morning.  “Ah we probably wouldn’t have sent you a bill because your address wouldn’t have been in the system at the point where the bill was issued”.  So you’re fining us for a bill from three years ago that we were never sent and couldn’t have possibly known existed since this is a local tax?  “That’s right” she said, without a hint of irony.  I paid it.  What else could I do? 

Meanwhile I’m off to Chile in approximately seven hours time, and although I have the power to transform a monkey into a snake, my stuff appears not to have packed itself at my command.  And they say faith moves mountains. 

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