Wilfred De’ath

My Christmas reading included Richard Dawkins’s celebrated atheist treatise, The God Delusion, which is now out in paperback.

I should have got to it before, but the strange thing is that the deeper I got into it, the more I came to believe in God, if only the God of Chance. Most of the good things that have happened to me in my extraordinary life have been the result of chance.

When my children were small and fed up and bored with themselves and each other, I made them play what we came to call the dice game. You put down five options of things they would like to do (a walk on Hampstead Heath, a visit to the zoo, the cinema, a river trip, a railway journey) and one they don’t want (tidy their rooms) and then you throw the dice. Whatever came up, that they had to do.

Naturally, there would be howls of protest if the sixth option came up. But the basic rule of the dice game is that you MUST obey the dice – so I made them tidy their rooms.

I play the dice game with myself these days; for instance, regarding women I am interested in. I put down the names of three old women (Anna, Cherry and Prunella, let us say) and three young ones (Alice, Astrid and Grace). Then just pray that the God of Chance will see to it that a young one comes up for me to pursue because I am not sexually attracted to old women. I have been lucky in this respect and have enjoyed some erotic experiences thanks to the dice.

Cooking a simple meal for myself or, more enjoyably, for friends (eg spag bol, a curry or a roast), I have employed the dice game to choose one of six wines to complement the dish. The interesting thing is that, almost invariably, the wine that comes up is the appropriate one. Or am I kidding myself?

As I write, I am playing the dice game to choose which one of six French cities I intend to stay in on my next visit to France. I have put down: Caen, Angers, Lyon, Montpellier, Toulouse and Tours. I pray again to the God of Chance that it will come up Toulouse or Tours, two of my favourite cities, and not Montpellier, where things have never gone well…

Hang on! I’ll play it for you now. It has come up Tours, thank God. So I’ll report from there next month.

Dawkins does not really deal with the God of Chance in his book. I once met his beautiful ex-wife, the Doctor Who actress Lalla Ward, in the BBC pub in Mortimer Street. She was really something.

If I had put her on my list and she hadn’t come up, I might have been tempted to break the règle du jeu and throw the dice again.