Currently under a rainy deluge of biblical proportions, the UK has shown
amazing reserves of contrariness by maintaining a hosepipe ban. Presumably this
is not, as the media and water authorities are telling us, in order to conserve
a diminished resource, but really because they’re worried about people going all prune-like
and wrinkly from sheer exposure, leading to national shortages of towels,
anti-wrinkle cream and Keith Richards headbands which would bring the economy
to even more of a stop than the stop it’s presently at.
Never one to let such a small thing as the weather get in
the way of a trip to the seaside (also a typically British attitude, it would
seem), I dragged my children to the car, bundled them into their respective
constraints and drove the drive to welsh Wales.
Happily, the enthusiastically named Welsh god Illtyd (which
apparently translates as “Lord of Everything”) was so pleased we were making
the effort to visit that he smiled beneficently on us, providing not only a
free car parking space next to the pier in Penarth, but also a good few hours
of rainlessness and some flavoured frozen dairy products in a carbohydrate-based
cone for the reasonable price of about a quid and an ice-cream headache.
It was nice enough for me to take an impromptu picture
without worrying that my phone would instantly dissolve under the sheer weight
of precipitation. This proves that, at
one point, somewhere in the United
Kingdom , it wasn’t raining:
 |
| Buoys day out. |
So, after lunch in a Tafarn where I had a decent pint of cwrw,
we refuelled our car at the gwasanaethau and then went home via the traffordd.
Tidy.
As if on cue, after our day was done, the heavens opened and
some water rained down like a shower of combined hydrogen and oxygen. The traffic slowed and we sloshed our way
home, appreciating that timing was on our side and feeling particularly lucky we
had had a good day and missed the really bad weather. I was glad of the day out
because, I thought, we deserved a break.
This got me thinking about the appearance of luck in our
lives and our reaction to it.
Being the rationalist that I am, I don’t really believe in
luck. I feel it is nothing more than a subjective interpretation of events in
contextual relationship with other events that might be construed as being
either “better” or “worse”. If you’re in a bad car smash, you are unlucky. But
if you only break your leg you are lucky. If the ambulance crew saws your hand
off trying to get you out of the car, then you’re unlucky again. If the hand
was subsequently found to have life threatening gangrene that would have killed
you within hours had it not been sawn off, you’re back to lucky. If the car was
your pride and joy, then you’ll feel unlucky to have lost it. If it was a
Citroen, then happy days, your driving torment is finally over.
It’s pointless trying to stack the odds in favour of being
fortunate. No one deserves the things that happen to them. Good or bad, they just happen. But we can
fool ourselves that this isn’t the case. In fact, what goes around really does come
around. If you’re a good person, then good things will happen to you. But also bad
things. If you’re a bad person, bad things will definitely happen to you, as
well as good things. If you’re an indifferent, morally ambiguous person, then
get ready for a selection of good and bad things happening to you throughout
your life.
Brace yourselves for the bad times. And the good ones.
Mind you, when I got home, I took out some ham to make the
children a butty and received a vision that challenged my certainty, that threw
my reductionist musings into the cold, confusing ambiguity of spiritual
discombobulation.
It was a sign. A sign that, perhaps there IS an ebb and flow
to the universe when it comes to positive and negative, that there IS a
demarcation between good and evil, and it is not just a personal spectrum, and
that people WILL receive their rewards or comeuppances according to their
character and their actions.
You might be amazed that I, of all people, would resort to
the supernatural for explanations of such things, but you weren’t there man!
You didn’t see what I saw. You were not witness to the compelling evidence that
is . . . Yin and Yang Ham:
 |
| Hogging the picture |
Seeing that could change the views of the most analytically
secular of atheists. All hail the Taoist pig meat of fortune!
Anyway, unluckily for the pig, it tasted divine.
