God is not vindictive – He's just giving His verdict on our vanity and bad taste
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Version 0 of 1. How can there be a God, people often ask, when such terrible things happen in the world? Maybe it's because that's what He's into. But how can there be an evil God when the world is so beautiful? Well, perhaps He's a bit mood-swingy. Perhaps She's indecisive. Perhaps there's nine of Him and They work in shifts. Perhaps there's 12 of Her, failing to find a consensus. Perhaps It's a giant invisible omnipresent octopus that doesn't understand how much earthquakes hurt. Perhaps there isn't a God at all. I do get the point that that might be it. Still, it's difficult not to infer a narrative from events on which the media have imposed a narrative. Everything seems so significant, whether it's the Middle East or the death of a relative. How can you drop your phone, miss a bus and then get sprayed with puddle water by a passing Lexus without feeling that someone's trying to tell you something? To think otherwise would be an unconscionable suppression of the self. Last week, some news broke on which no narrative was imposed. No unsubstantiated inferences were drawn. Conclusions of any sort were studiously avoided. But why? The events are simple enough. On Monday morning, at a house in Clapham, while the homeowners were at work, the sunlight shining through a bedroom window was refracted by a crystal doorknob on to a dressing gown, which consequently caught fire. The ensuing conflagration caused thousands of pounds worth of damage. I said it was simple, not predictable. I know what you're thinking: serves those people right for having horrible crystal doorknobs. Or maybe you're thinking: serves them right for leaving dressing gowns everywhere like it's the last days of Rome. But the media – usually so judgmental, particularly of the sort of folk who might own what was reportedly "a £1.5m house" – said none of this and drew no conclusions from the episode. I accept that it might just be a meaningless accident, but insurers would surely consider it an act of God. In which case, why did He do it? That's the question the newspapers should be asking. After all, it's not the only such message He's sent recently: in 2013, in Enfield, light shining on a mirror ignited some curtains in what can only be a denouncement of the residents' vanity, and, earlier this year, sunshine catching a crystal ball caused a fire in Romford. They didn't see that coming. So what does the blaze of the knob mean? To my mind, it's one of two things: either God hates clutter or God hates vulgar interior design. I'm praying it's the latter. Before you say it, yes, that is because I don't think I'm vulgar. But I do think I'm messy. So I'm mixing some self-deprecation in with the conceit. (And who really thinks they're vulgar? It's almost impossible to think you're vulgar – to think that the things you think are nice aren't nice.) Anyway, I definitely don't like crystal doorknobs, which I've surely proved puts me on the side of the Lord. Although possibly not the angels, who I now suspect might be too glittery for the Almighty's restrained tastes. I reckon God loves clutter, though. Keeping saints' relics must be the holiest form of OCD hoarding. And look at the world: there's crap everywhere. But He has watched the lamentable developments of our interior design ideas and their presumptuousness has put Him in a very Old Testament frame of mind. He's looked on as people chuck out knick-knacks and occasional tables, steam off wallpaper and knock through walls to create gleaming white expanses punctuated only by a single mad-shaped vase and a giant vinyl painting of an eyelid. We've set up the graven image of contemporary spacious living, while the tablets bearing the design commandments of our ancestors are in the skip outside with the avocado bathroom suite. This revelation that God has the same views about what makes a nice sitting room as an old-fashioned middle-class British person has been very comforting to me. I reckon my chintzy sofa and piles of dust-magnetising junk will make Him pass over my house; but here are some apocalyptic signs that those with a more obtrusive sense of decor should look out for as the Day of Design Judgment approaches. Glass spiral staircases will lead to localised whirlwinds People will guess that the shape of the staircases, and the drafts induced by people hurrying up and down them, are what triggers these savage phone-box-sized tornados. That or something to do with a thoughtless butterfly on the other side of the world. The truth is less chaotic: God prefers conventional staircases. Digging out your basement will make your house fill with magma Ostensibly caused by a sudden thinning of the Earth's crust in the higher property-value areas of London, this will bring the hubristic and strip-lit subterranean gyms, home cinemas and games rooms, recently excavated under expensive residential streets, to an infernal end. Not even the latest in damp-excluding sealants will keep out the super-heated high pressure molten rock of the Lord. Hot tubs will create frenzied snail orgies, which leave your whole garden covered in slime A new species of snail from, let's say, China will be obsessively attracted to the moisture and warmth of these impious vessels, designed to bring the louche Californian dream to a chilly north Atlantic island. And so it shall be that a thousand sexy, bubbly summer dates will end in a torrent of the wrong sort of goo. Walk-in wardrobes will cause "Narnia syndrome" They go in to choose an outfit and, moments later, emerge raving about an allegorical kingdom of fashion where they've ruled as a style monarch for decades. Baffled scientists will be reduced to blaming the hallucinogenic effect of dry-cleaning chemicals. Union jack scatter cushions will turn your children racist A generation of rabid nationalists will be spawned, seemingly as a result of the subliminally radicalising effect of these ironically intended objects. Attempts to counteract the problem by bringing out an even more ironic swastika cushion will only make matters worse. Such is God's preference for normal cushions. Large black and white photographs of scantily clad classic film stars will dramatically increase instances of testicular cancer The medical evidence for the carcinogenic effect on male genitalia of living in close proximity to a massive arty snap of the boobs of someone dead will suddenly be overwhelming. The NHS advice will be to replace such images with a nice watercolour of boats in a harbour. |