Cock-a-hoopery.

'Oh Lord, My cup overfloweth....,' as the well-endowed nun said when her bra shrank.

Does that look right to you?

(I was hoping to insert at this point a tasteful picture of a well-endowed nun bustin' out all over, so that 'Legend-in-his-own-lunchtime' could smirk and say "Looks okay to me!" but as with my search for the flatulent nuns of a previous Post (Dead sheep and Green Energy, July 2nd. and ensuing Comments) you can't always find just the right nuns when you most need 'em).

Never mind, it was the 'shrank' I was doubtful about. I've spoken (speaked? spake?) a lot of English in my time but past participles still puzzle me. Come to that, quite a lot of things about my past puzzle me, and that would include participants and my principles as well as my participles. But 'shrank' worries me. Okay, ships sink and that ship sank, just as pigs stink and that pig stank, but philosophers think they don't thank, which is as I thought, so shrank should be shrought. (Quite the little poet this morning, aren't I? Those banana skins must be stronger than I thought). But when you think about it, if you think before you fight, then you thought before you fought, so why didn't you thank before you fank? And as for men who wink, .....let's not allow things to get out of hand. The whole thing is fraught, it stinks, I think.

(May I just point out to my more pedantic friends that fraught can in fact be a verb, though obsolete; it's means to carry or tote, as you do freight. If that gave you a fright, I'm afraid you might be frightened .... or affrighted?....or afraught? ....or affrank?).

But I confesss I digress, as one is wont to do after the banana skins.

The reason for my good humour is that I have had a letter published in the Telegraph (Mon. Sept 6th. p.23). The current interest in religion, cosmology and the origin of the Universe (Stephen Hawking, John Gribbin and all that) had prompted John Capel to write to the Telegraph to imply that God must exist because spontaneous faith is as old as mankind. I was able to point out smugly that this is in fact an argument against religion, for the many worshippers of so many different gods in so many cultures for so many millennia can't all be correct. A small triumph, but better than finding a penny when you've lost sixpence.

Mind you, to prevent an outbreak of cock-a-hoopery, the Western Gazette, based in Yeovil, recently gave my own God-book a write-up ..... about 4 cm of very narrow column-width, most of which was taken up with describing the work of the National Eczema Society (and only published in the Crewkerne edition). On the next page they devoted 9cm. of the same column-width to a police raid on a house in Yeovil in which nobody was at home, no crime had been committed and they found no drugs.

So much for the burning questions of our age and my fight to liberate the world from the shackles of religious dogma.