25 August 2016
Divine Intervention
A tribute to the wisdom of the Almighty.
By Chin Chin
There may be a sporting chance of contact with the Almighty on the road to Damascus but I would have put the odds against an encounter at a filling station on the E45, a main road in the north of Italy. Yet there can be little doubt about it. There I was, standing at the pump and trying to fill my car with diesel. There were lots of buttons with incomprehensible instructions and, when I stuck my credit card into the slot, it disappeared. I pushed some buttons hopefully. No diesel flowed and the card did not come back. Panic! No card and no fuel. What should I do now? I had visions of ringing the credit card company and trying to explain that their card had vanished as inexplicably as the crew of the Mary Celeste and that I was stuck on an Italian road without fuel. What would they do? Did British consulates ferry new cards to out-of-the-way service stations? Even if they did, would I dare to use the new card? What if it too suffered the fate of its predecessor?
It was at this point that the card reappeared. I don’t know how it knew to do so. I certainly wasn’t pressing any buttons at the time so I can’t have called it back electronically. Still, I have been a good master to it over the years, taking it to many of the best hotels and restaurants, and I can only think that it was sorry to see my distress and decided to come home all of its own, like a plastic version of Lassie in the film.
Well, that was certainly a relief, but it only solved part of the problem. Yes, I had the card back but the car was still empty. I looked at the pump again. There seemed to be a slot for cash and I suddenly remembered that there was a €50 note hidden away in the glove box. I scrabbled around for it and came out triumphant. Just wipe off some of the chocolate which had leaked onto it in the heat, smooth it out a bit by pressing it in a book and, hey presto, as good as when it came out of the mint. I put the end in the slot and the machine snatched it from me as quickly as any life assurance salesman. What it didn’t do, however, was to produce any diesel. Nor, of course, did it think to return the note. Here was a new quandary and I began to press buttons again with increasing desperation, particularly as a short queue had begun to form.
Now I do know a little Italian, enough to order a risorgimento in a fashionable restaurant, but it doesn’t run to explaining to an increasingly irritated crowd which buttons I had pressed even if I could myself have remembered the sequence. What I would like to have done was to step aside, to allow others to collect their fuel, and then to return to my button-pressing when they had gone. I had heard that teams of monkeys typing at random will eventually replicate the complete works of Shakespeare so it seemed to me that, there being far fewer buttons than there are keys on a typewriter, I should be able to extract diesel in a matter of a few hours. The trouble was that I could not afford to stand aside because my €50 would get mixed up with other peoples’ money and then I would get nothing if I were to push buttons to the crack of doom.
I began to sweat and began pressing faster. The impatience of the queue became unmistakeable. “Heaven help me” I muttered under my breath and that is precisely what it did.
You might have thought that once the Almighty had decided to render assistance he would have done so by guiding my fingers on the buttons. That would have been simple enough but as it happened he decided to make an old fashioned job of it and send a troop of angels. In they rolled in a small white car, four young nuns and a rather older one. What is more they all spoke excellent English and, lo, the petrol pump bowed down before them. Well, that bit is figurative, of course, but at the touch of their fingers on the buttons the fuel began to flow as surely as did the water when Moses struck the rock. “Thank you, Lord” I said.
It is when you cross the border into France that Divine intervention takes on an altogether more sinister aspect. But for the Almighty siding with the French, the place would still be ours. After all, Henry VI was crowned king of England and France following the death of Henry V, victor of Agincourt, in 1422. Fifty years later and we had been driven back to Calais. So what happened? Did the strong arm of the English bowman fail? Did the French knights suddenly become more professional? Neither. The Almighty simply decided that the English ruling France just wouldn’t do so he sent in the nearest available saint, who happened to be Saint Joan, to sort it out just as he had sent the nuns to help me at the petrol pump. We all know what happened then. Biff, Bang, Orleans was relieved. The tide turned against the English and before long they were in full retreat, the gallant Talbot dead and his continental achievements reduced to nothing more than his name on a 4th cru classe St Julien – although admittedly a very good one.
So why did God oppose the English at this crucial time? Why did he feel that the two countries should be kept separate almost 600 years before Brexit? It is not for me to question the divine will but I suspect it was about food. The Almighty has always stood for perfection and le petit dejeuner in a French square is about as near to it as you can get on this earth. To add porridge and sausages would not have been an improvement. So, as I sat munching my morning croissant, safely back on French soil, I smiled and nodded towards the east in what I hope was an appropriate acknowledgement of the indubitable wisdom of His decision.
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