Nobby Dee’s Diary

Nobby Dee decides, after a long life of accidental calamity and self-harm, that God is in everything – the detail, our thoughts and his diary. Everything we do, he suggests, is down to God rather than up to us. This would be a depressing conclusion were it not for the fact that we detect an ironic tone to his prose upon the matter.

As I edge ever nearer to my headstone that’ll read, ‘A Life Lived Unblemished By Any Achievement’, I often spend time pondering what my purpose in life was. What did our omnipresent God have in mind when he decided that I should experience life?

And it is true. God knows all and does everything for a purpose. Whenever I stub my big toe, a terribly acute and debilitating pain, that normally results in me howling at the heavens, ‘fucking hell’, I know that God did it to me for a purpose. Whilst it may not make any sense to me, to him the creator of everything, it makes perfect sense.

You see, when something happens that involves you being the recipient of pain, God did it to you and he did it to you for a specific reason. You could be hammering away in the shed building a Hadron Collider and belt your ring finger with your hammer and it wasn’t an accident. You belted your finger because God wanted you to do it. Probably because he was somewhat concerned that you were a mad demented bastard who had taken it upon yourself to build your own Hadron Collider that would perhaps capture the God Particle and bring about the End Of Days.

Some time back I actually tested this theory. What I did was I popped into the shed, removed my right boot and sock, tightened my foot up in my vice so as to prevent me struggling to remove it and with both my hands clutching a fifteen pound sledge hammer I said to God, ‘Lord I have faith in thee. Show me a sign.Please, please stop me from belting my own right foot with this here fifteen pound sledge hammer’. Then, absolutely confident in my God and my great faith in him, I swung the sledge hammer and pretty much flattened my right foot.

Suffice to say, after I released my flattened right foot from the bloodied vice, dropped the sledge hammer and crawled back into the house wailing in agony, I suddenly realised what I’d done. I’d actually taken the Lords name in vain and dared to test him which resulted in him being angry with me and allowing me to smash my right foot into a bloody pulp. In other words, once again, God did it to me and he did it to teach me a lesson.

You see, for whatever reason God decided that I was to be a Kneader Of Dough. I had wanted to work in the local factory that makes cakes. My aim was to become a key member of their highly trained Quality Control staff where you sit there on the production line doing absolutely nothing for hours watching cakes fly past you. Then, just as the one hundred thousandth cake whizzed toward me, I’d use my authority, stop the whole operation, nibble on a cake to see whether or not the cakes hurtling down the conveyor belt were up to standard. Thereafter, If I decided the cake was very nice, I’d signal to everyone, ‘Hoorah! It’s a lovely cake. Let me have another hundred thousand’, I’d press a button and allow another hundred thousand cakes to travel past me on the conveyor belt.

But, God had other ideas. He knew what he was doing. He always does. He must have known that the world would be better served if I kneaded dough rather than test the quality of cake.
What happened was I’d left home and found myself on a particularly arduous ten mile run being chased by an irate lady. Cognisant there was nothing in her purse I quickly disposed of it and took refuge in a Bakery, which is where I became a Kneader. The proprietor of the Bakery, a man who needed a Kneader and knew a Kneader when he met a Kneader, decided there and then that I would spend the next forty years of my life kneading dough into lumps which I’d then pop on a tray and place in an oven until it produced bread.

Despite the debilitating heat and the endless repetitive lumps of dough that I kneaded over and over and over again, day in, day out, over some forty years, possibly numbering in their millions, it was very rare that I’d take a moment for myself and consider suicide by climbing inside the ovens with a tray of my kneaded lumps of dough and ending it all. Course, the fact that I didn’t was entirely down to God.