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No explanations
Alice Thomas Ellis
We had a very ecumenical Easter in the country with a number of people who were too young to have made up their minds yet on the matter of the existence of God, Janice who is Jewish, Mouness who is Muslim, Joan who is Vegetarian and Mary whose uncle holds a position at the Vati- can. Mouness doubles as an agnostic be- cause he says although he would like to be an atheist he hasn't got the bottle, which
seems to me an entirely reasonable atti- tude. I find militant atheists rather more tiresome than charismatic Christians. They remind me of a person I knew who would strenuously deny the presence of mice in the house when you could hear them scampering in the wainscotting and eating their way through the rafters in the loft. Having stated his position he simply could not bring himself to admit that there just might be rodent-type creatures somewhere around.
Mouness's father wept at the Requiem Mass for our second son and recited a verse from the Koran over his grave, and Mouness's mother too manifests those virtues associated with the religion gentleness, generosity, courage and mag- nanimity. If there were more people who actually behaved as their religion requires them to do and everyone else would shut up arguing about it we should all get along much better.
I find I have much more in common with believing Jews and Muslims than I do with the Bishop of Durham, who, no matter where you dice him or' whatever he says, gives a strong whiff of unbelief. So do a number of clerical academics. They fear that their fellows at High Table will think them credulous and snigger uncontrollably on catching their eye, so they go whizzing off in all directions like a person wearing incompatible roller skates. It is salutary to realise what the young seldom do, that often, if you cannot understand what an eminent person is talking about, it is not because he is so clever but because he is talking through his hat. Apart from theolo- gy, the wilder shores of psychoanalysis and structuralism offer many instances of this, Buttonholing some sage and snarling, 'Whaddaya mean?', you will frequently find he doesn't mean anything at all. You can also try it on politicians, economists and social workers. And philosophers, of course. I sometimes have to remind myself that they can't all be nuts. Another friend has just arrived from spending Holy Week at Quarr Abbey and is presently washing the dishes. By their works shall ye know them . . . .
Few people believe that the breathing we heard outside last summer was of supernatural origin, many claiming that it was a hedgehog. I put this theory to Alan, who was one of the witnesses, and he said it just might be possible if there were about three thousand hedgehogs ranged on the mountainside breathing in unison. It might also, of course, have been one hedgehog breathing through an amplifier, and if anyone can suggest how this concatenation of circumstance could have come about I shall accept his explanation. It was very loud and just as audible three or four hundred yards up the hill as under the damson tree.
Alfred's friend Kay recently suffered a more prosaic but more distressing domestic mystery. Her fridge blew up. She heard a dull explosion early one morning, and going to investigate found the fridge door
on the other side of the kitchen and the glass in the window shattered. Everything in the body of the fridge was unharmed, but everything in the door — eggs, milk, fruit-juice — was trickling all over the floor. She sent for a man from the shop where the fridge had come from and he turned out to be a sceptic. He kept grinning at her in a sneering, cynical sort of fashion, and all she could do, being in shock, was to point wordlessly at the evidence. She sent for the gas man too, since although it wasn't a gas-powered fridge she was just so confused. I asked her to lunch to tell me all about it, and when she was a bit late Alfred said worriedly that the way her luck was running she'd prob- ably just discovered the gas stove had frozen over. We don't expect an arcane solution here, just a simple explanation from someone conversant with the laws of physics. There was no champagne in the fridge, not so much as a can of lager. Could it have been live yoghurt?
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