I know where you are, God. But do you know where I am?

Jan 8 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

THE round moon was smiling high above the village on Boxing Day morning, but still you could see the lights slyly winking around the mouth on the face of the automatic bank in the wall, as the balloons of festivity slowly puckered.

“Give me more,” it seemed to say, “more, more, more.” In a consumer society, the spender is a patriot.

But in that week, which droops like a weary party-streamer between Christmas and New Year, we also offer our prayers in their millions – from the polished pews of the churches and the lonely dark of the bedrooms, in the conceited hope that our lives will somehow be improved, while our ginger senses feel for the promise of the young year.

“I know where you are, God. But do you know where I am?” we ask.

This theological conundrum was leapfrogging through my mind, causing considerable furrowing of the brow and creaking of the knee joints, as I knelt on the concrete to clean-out the hutch of our rabbits, Milly and Molly.

Suddenly, the sky spoke with a mighty fluttering of wings from a herd of birds unleashed from a neighbour’s coop. I suppose if you were up there, communing with the stars, the shine on my bald patch would become a sign that there was still life on Earth – one of the few sights visible from a spaceship.

Anyway, a pigeon, who had evidently been enjoying second helpings of sprouts, mince pies and sherry, opened the hatches and released his bombs, achieving hits of such accuracy that they would have tingled the pulse of President Bush.

Beneath the bird was the whole spread of Birkenhead, including the shopping mall and the green-domed Town Hall, but with an unwavering eye he had singled out my pate. Why? The question was searching in vain for a brain cell in the caverns of my head, when I waddled into the lounge for a tissue. My wife was sitting on our quite-new sofa, repeating the mantra, “He prowls the bedroom like a panther, his muscles flexing to the rhythms of desire”.

“Steady on, sweetheart,” I said, wiping the bald patch with one hand and simultaneously scratching a stubborn itch on my inner left thigh with the other, proving conclusively that my co-ordination was still in tune.

“Not you.” she said looking up with her radiant, turquoise smile. And there before her on the table was a calendar showing a different image of Daniel Craig for each month.

At this juncture I should explain to those of you, who spend your leisure recording the love-croaks and the dance routines of the lesser-warted toad, that Craig is an actor who plays James Bond.

Surprisingly enough, the calendar was a present to my wife from me. I had intended buying her a year’s subscription for that splendid journal, the People’s Friend, so that she could read about passions in the Manse and romantic stories set on the cold cobbles of a Scottish fishing town, which might tell of how an enthusiasm for missionary work and crochet drew a shy bachelor with a chronic nose-dribble to the attention of the stalwart secretary to the kirk’s operatic society and Bible class. Read next about how their autumn love bloomed on a coach trip to Cleethorpes.

However, an inner voice guided me to Mr Craig instead. The calendar was one of the lesser gifts in my wife’s stocking. But our 11-year-old son stood, wide-eyed and ruffle-haired, in the room, waiting to test his main present, a Christmas bike – that rite of passage known to so many British boys.

So we headed for the municipal park and how fine it looked – the virgin cricket squares lying patiently, awaiting the warm creep of spring, watched over by the old pavilion, built in timber 160 years ago; ghostly murmurings of approval from the boundary, now heard only in the low whistle of the naked trees; the muddied hollers from the football pitch, the whirring Frisbees, the gentle casting of anglers’ lines on the lake, the cunning smile of the fish; bounding dogs, timid dogs, wheezing dogs, pedigree dogs, Smudge and Spud, limping dogs, fierce dogs, whiskered dogs, all snouting and rooting, their tails high.

“Good boy,” said an owner, as his pet left a deposit on the grass. The man promptly removed it with a poop-scoop. After all, they are good friends.

Feet trod the boards of the Chinese bridge over the lake. Our boy whizzed down the tracks on his bike, through the great puddle by the memorial stone.

In the light of this day, you could feel the rise of the young year. God knew where we were, but I wore my hat, just in case.

LISTEN to David Charters on his picture podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk