Free Flying Free by Nigel Farage Page B

prang?
    Look, the people who wrote the Bible didn’t concern themselves much with psychological verisimilitude. Papyrus was expensive and time short, what with the Second Coming and Armageddon expected just as soon as they’d swept the wrong sort of sand off the rails. It was easier for them to stick to the headlines.
    A lot of miracles might not have been quite so miraculous if we’d had detail. The evangelists might have gone into other recorded cases of catatonia, novel resuscitation techniques, Lazarus’s hangover, the therapy which he had to undergo and what his wife and the life-insurance companies had to say about it all. But no. Lazarus dead, Lazarus alive. That’s all we get. Miracle.
    So we know that Saul (a European Commissioner if ever there was one) ran into some pretty impressive son et lumière stuff on his way to Damascus and subsequently decided that maybe these Christians were on to something, but the notion that he at once gave up all his former convictions, ambitions and friends is just downright silly.
    At a guess, he drank rather more than usual, told himself that he must have eaten some dodgy matzos, found that the fun had gone out of a good stoning, became thoroughly grouchy and had to fake his laughter when they told the one about the praetor, the Philistine actress and theX-shaped cross, discussed the whole business with his mistress and only over months or years became a pain in the arse within the Christian camp rather than without.
    Augustine’s ‘Make me good but not yet’ is far closer to the mark, to judge by my own experience and all the recovering alcoholics, junkies and reformed rogues whom I have encountered. We all live by our faiths, however mundane, and if Saul abandoned his and his fellows for the sake of a few fireworks (like formerly Eurosceptic politicians within days of winning power), he was a berk. Had I been the ghost of a Christian put to the sword by him, I would have been affronted to have died for convictions so paltry.
    So the novel experience of being tenderised by a car may have been instructive and thought-provoking for me, but it did not cause me to renounce my loves and loyalties to date.
    It caused me immediately, however, to do two things which thousands of wounded soldiers have done in reality and in fiction. First, I fell in love with a warm smile, competent, jolly affection and Nature’s guarantee of a future: my nurse.
    Well, Carol Vorderman ( Countdown was the daily boon amidst the drabness) and my nurse…
    Carol was not available, so my nurse bore the brunt.
    I don’t want to imply that Clare Hayes was merely a symbol, nor that I fell for her solely because her warmth and vivacity contrasted with the monochrome routine of hospital life. She was a great girl who was to make me happy for several years. At twenty-one, however, immature and only barely aware of prospects beyond those on my very near horizons, I was unfit for marriage and would surely never have considered it had it not been for my brush with death.
    I left the hospital in late January, still in a full cast. I was to remain in half-plaster until November.
    My brother Andrew was now working for a paper company near Waterloo and was the proud owner of a 2CV. He therefore chauffeured me daily to and from my work. This gravely circumscribed my social life. As I half-sat, half-lay in the back seat of the Gallic rattletrap, I thought that,were we to have an accident, I would be lucky to have ten mourners. To have started the job with a VW Beetle and to have finished it in a 2CV would surely have marked me forever as a failure.
    I saw a lot of Clare that year, but then I could not spend much time in pubs and bars, not dressed up as a chalk with my younger brother, constantly checking his watch, in attendance.
    That divinity which shapes our ends and in which I do not believe now got seriously cross with me. He or She had gone to all that trouble, admittedly on a pitifully low-budget, with the