The Diary of a Guardian Angel

Our Asshole sits alone in a bedsit, waiting for his life to fall back into place. The insurance company have – in a fit of charity that, for once, he recognises as strength, not weakness – been able to cover the house fire. This means he’s waiting for the repairs to be finished before he can move in.

His business has evaporated, as both employees and clients have left him at the earliest opportunity. His savings have been wiped out, so he’s had to take a job as a labourer for a large building firm. He had to find someone he’d not had any dealings with, because he’s realised too late that the people you meet as you build a life may come in handy when you need to rebuild one.

Meanwhile he’s had plenty of time to think about why he lied to the police about the beating. Normally he’d be happily set the long arm of the law on anyone he could, but this time he held back, and he’d not sure why.

He’s also been trying to figure out the picture that was left on him when he woke up in hospital. It’s a picture of a girl he doesn’t recognise, which makes it all the more curious. He’s sure it’s a message; he’d assumed that it was a picture of someone he’d screwed over, screwed up, or perhaps simply screwed. He’s stared at the face for hours, and drawn a complete blank. He simply doesn’t recognise her.

It is fortunate then, that the news is on, and something has happened today that he may just be interested in.

The astute reader would have noticed that despite my stated job being “Guardian Angel” I’ve been careful to avoid mentioning religion. There’s a reason for that, and it’s actually fairly simple – I’m not in the amusingly assonant Religion Relations Department.

My job is moral education, plain and simple. I come across religions very occasionally and it amuses me that while they all differ in the details, they all get the main message right.

Regardless, despite all agreeing in the main, it seems a human obsession with creating new versions of all the major religions; from all the various orthodoxies and cults, to novel creations like pastafarianism, the lolcat bible, and this surreal creation epic. This doesn’t just apply to religion though; humans seem generally prone to creating new artificial distinctions in whatever it is they’re into. Just look at the fractious geeks and their coding religions, the plethora of different (yet indistinguishable) genres of music and all the pointless arguments between various sports fans.

I’ve often meant to ask someone in RRD about this, and I got the chance the other day. His response was some complicated drivel about the human animal being a pack animal and being unable to cope with empathy at the scale of the entire human race. His friend summed it up for me: “to a human, people look like ants from a long way away”.