Day 6 - Godlessness

I finally got around to googling Alcoholics Anonymous last night. I didn't exactly spend long on it, but 'not long' threw up an interesting range of accusations that it was a cult, and statistics which show that it only has about a 5% success rate. I also hit the official website, which sets out the 12 steps, and discovered that step 2 is a requirement to believe that a power greater than yourself can restore you to sanity.

So even if they did do chocolate, I would be one of the 95%.

It was the second time I had come up against God in the course of a single evening - which is kind of unusual. Our paths don't usually cross that often. I had spent an interesting, if slightly odd, couple of hours at a panel discussion at the Royal Society about science and religion. I hasten to add that I didn't do any of the discussing, and hid in the corner at the drinks afterwards as lots of terribly learned looking types kept greeting one another slightly awkwardly (hard to tell whether it was arthritis, autism or problems with bodily hygiene - but quite an interesting dynamic to watch). But it lead me to reflecting on the fact that, despite having done so in the past, I now can't quite summon the energy which I need to believe in a God.

Forster doesn't help. I tend to come back to a quote which I noted down as an undergraduate about 20 years ago. 'He believed in sudden conversion, a belief which may be right, but which is peculiarly attractive to a half-baked mind'. Conversion isn't religion, but it's close enough for me when I'm free-associating in a room full of professors and priests.

Free association also took me from half-baked minds to cookie dough (it's easily done: I also found myself thinking that the curtains in the lecture room would make an interesting ball gown). My usual cookie recipe is unfortunately specific to chocolate - the dough melts almost flat, and it needs the chocolate to melt with it in order to not produce something with sticky out bits. But I have been thinking that if I upped the flour content a bit and omitted the vanilla essence, it might work with crystallised ginger and dates.

I just haven't tried it today because I bought and ate a large bad of fudge instead. I intended to buy a small bag of kids fudge from Thorntons, but didn't end up anywhere near a Thorntons (which then cost me about 600 calories). So I guess this actually covers day 7 as well.