We have – as every reasonable person will surely agree – made a religion out of stupidity. That is our defining achievement and we will surely be remembered for this. If we are to be remembered at all, that is. If there is anyone still around who can be bothered to do so. Foolishness is a cosmic principle however and that’s another way to look at it. As a cosmic principle it is only to be expected that foolishness shall duly arise, and not just arise, but flourish mightily into the bargain. It is only to be expected so perhaps we can console ourselves with this thought! Perhaps we can, although I must confess to not feeling particularly confident on this score. Not hugely confident at all. I suspect the consolation will be somewhat thin on the ground at the end of the day, when all is said and done, when all is said and done. Sick as a parrot, sick as a frog; sick as a parrot, sick as a frog. I’m so sick I could vomit up the entire world! Do you know that feeling when you suddenly suspect that you might have eaten something that you really should not have done? You go over all the things that you have recently eaten, ticking off the items one by one. Going through them in your head. A few suspects stand out particularly. Was it perhaps the chicken sandwich that you had last thing last night? You can’t be sure how long that chicken had been in the fridge after all. Possibly longer than you would like to imagine. Possibly a lot longer. Your stomach starts to mewl like a sack of unhappy kittens. It feels like something is alive in there; something alive and rather distressed. Something alive and rather distressed that wants urgently to come out. And then it happens – you create the universe in a stupendous act of cosmogenesis. It’s redundant to say that of course – all acts of cosmogenesis are by necessity stupendous. Can you even imagine an act of cosmogenesis that was – shall we say – so very commonplace and unremarkable that you’d observe it and say to yourself, “Well, that wasn’t up to very much, was it?” It was a damp squib you see – it fizzed weakly but it failed to go off. Perhaps you could see it all right but it was so very unremarkable that you barely registered it; your mind immediately skips on to something more interesting, such as a fly landing on the rim of the mug that you were drinking your tea out of, or a small damp spot on the ceiling that you had previously not noticed, or an interestingly shaped morsel of dirt on the carpet. I could go on course, but I’m sure you get the point. Why wouldn’t you, after all? You’re not stupid. You’re shrewd enough. You’re plenty shrewd. Be that as it may, you keep on thinking about that late-night chicken sandwich. You remember noting that the flavour wasn’t all it should have been, or perhaps it was something that you rather suspected it definitely shouldn’t have been. You are revisiting the flavour in your mind and you are becoming more and more convinced by the minute that you should have paid more attention to it and desisted from throwing the sandwich down your throat in the curiously inattentive way that you did and thrown it into the bin instead. Hindsight’s such a great thing though, isn’t it? We can all be wise after the event – there are generally no prizes given for that. No one’s going to run up to you and clap you heartily on the back to congratulate you for your remarkable hindsight! No sir that isn’t going to happen; that just isn’t going to happen so you might as well just suck it up…