The day the ceiling fell in and I didn’t

God nearly killed me yesterday. It was, I must admit, a bit of a shock. I am – or seem to be – alive, which is fortunate because it gives me another chance to choose between Upper and lower case. God or god.

I was standing in my kitchen chatting casually with V in the next room. The discussion had something to do with sugars in tea, I assume, since the kettle had just started boiling. And then a grinding crash from above my head, and a large chunk of ceiling fell at my feet.

I didn’t react immediately. Earlier I had been cleaning those heavy chunks of shelving from the ‘fridge, which for some reason had become spattered and sloshed in blood, or rather blueberry juice from a prematurely defrosted bag. The fridge looked as if a recently guillotined head had been tossed into it, maybe to keep it out of sight of a close relative, for reasons I may one day turn into an amusing short story. So it did need a clean.

So when this great grinding smash of a crash happened, I assumed a glass shelf had hit the floor. Forgetting that all the shelves had been gingerly returned to their rightful place at least ten minutes before. A rather stupid conclusion, bearing in mind the fact that the crashing sound had been accompanied by extremely loud Eastern European versions of ‘oh FUCK!’

Then I realised there was a hole in the ceiling, and most of the hole was deposited at my feet. Four anxious Eastern European eyes bulged through the gap above my head, attached vaguely to cartoon-style faces, each absurdly like Desperate Dan from the Dandy, drawn on stubble included.

I looked up. I looked down. I computed. I concluded. ‘You!’ I yelled, with all the power my drama-trained teacher-voice could muster, ‘come down here! Right away!’

The contractors working for the flat upstairs are a ragged bunch. For some crazy reason my upstairs neighbour has employed the same batch of incompetent clowns to deal with her water damage as had failed to fix the roof, charged for it, and refused to come back and fix it when gallons of moisture entered all the flats in this Edwardian house. Along with the statutory mould, damp and misery. We had to hire proper roofers to do the job. And now here the roof-buggerers were, ‘repairing’ the damp in the flat above me.

So here they stand sheepishly, in my kitchen, East European Desperate Dan and Co, staring up, down, up, down and attempting to draw some conclusions. ‘I sorry,’ DD number 1 said, ‘I drop and fall through floor.’

‘You nearly killed me!’ My teacher voice bellowed. ‘You see? I was standing right here!’

Incomprehension. Further apologies. Promises to fix.

So now, I’m faced with the dilemma: God or god?

Background: V has recently had terrible life traumas. Finding me dead and bloody on my kitchen floor is not on his menu of life-enhancing experiences.

Mind you, it’s certainly not on my list of life-enhancing experiences either.

I’m thinking about all the millions of people who, after terrible life-threatening events, say ‘God (or the Gods) saved me’, or ‘prayer saved me’. Also I’m thinking about the millions who went into death or horrible injuries with prayers on their lips. As the plane plunged to the ground. Or the Tsunami approached. Or Cancer eroded their (or their loved one’s) lives.

Death or horrible injury didn’t happen to me, this time. Thank God. Or god.

As you probably know, I have often said this: ‘God’ is a very convenient metaphor for the hugely complex interactions of action/reaction since the beginning (or invention???) of Time. Before the 4 billion years of Earth, before the invention of Time, there was infinity. After the invention of time there is infinity. During time, there is infinity. So time is a convenient invention, as is ‘God’ to explain the whole shebang, when it’s all just Newton’s Third Law. Or Karma, as the East says. So it is quite correct to say ‘God made us’, and many of the banal sayings in the religious books, taking ‘God’ as a metaphor, are therefore correct. What makes me chortle is when the metaphor is taken too far and ‘God’ is anthropomorphised – given thoughts, a voice, intention, and even a human face. A being, who listens to prayers. And then that engenders a great deal of delightful fiction which is used to terrify people and screw money out of them.

How tempting to say ‘God saved me’ – and V!

BUT. If the analysis above is right (and I have no idea if it is- but it’s as good a theory as the anthropomorphised ‘God’) `- I prefer to use the lower case g to refer to the substance behind the metaphor.

Which is right? I reserve my judgement until either a great voice, a thunderbolt, or a telegram emerges from the Great Unknown and says, ‘Jon! You’re an asshole!’

I love you all.

Note to ‘God’ just in case: Listen here daddy, I’ve always been nice and good and helpful and if there is ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ and I’m denied one or the other just because I didn’t join the right brand, just pop me in ‘hell’. I’d hate to be in a ‘heaven’ which only admitted one brand.