Downfall

I’ve just been listening to “The Screwtape Letters” by CS Lewis on Radio 4. I’ve been enjoying it every day this week.

I remember listening to it once before. It must have been well over a decade ago now. The reader then was Sir Ian Richardson. I preferred his reading. Somehow he managed to capture a sneer, a malevolence, a feeling of high intelligence, which is missing in the voice of the present reader, Simon Russell Beale.

For those who don’t know the book, it consists of a series of letters from a senior devil, Screwtape, to a wayward novice devil, Wormwood. In the letters Screwtape advises the latter how best to drive his victim away from God into Hell & the service of Satan.

It is a remarkably perceptive analysis of temptation. It isn’t always the obvious crimes that are the real downfall of people. It is the incipient little things, the move into inertia, that are the real causes of a downfall. They creep so gently, so innocuously, into life, it is easy for the victim not to realise it is even happening, that God is no longer the centre of his life.

Talking about downfalls, I might as well admit to my downfall on Monday. As you know I made an Indian Turkey Pie. When the time came to serve, I duly got the food on the plate. The Fox took his plate to the table. I followed with mine. I put the plate down on the table, got distracted & turned round. I hadn’t realised I still had the plate in my hand. Next thing food & plate went flying through the air. The dining chair caught the pie upside down, oozing curried turkey through the cracks of the smashed pastry. The plate arrived on the carpet. Peas scattered all round the room. We both scrambled to get as much food off the floor as possible. Fortunately we had vacuumed the carpet not long before so the food remained edible & hair/dirt-free. I ate my squashed mess before it got too cold. The Fox tried to reassure me that the pie was delicious, tasty & moist. 

After dinner we then spent another while on the floor picking up errant peas we missed, & cleaning up squashed peas we’d accidentally stood on. Our shoes needed washing underneath before we started walking peas around the whole house. Fortunately our carpet in the kitchen/diner is one of those that wipes clean very easily. The dining chair has subsequently had frequent washes to try to get the stains out of the fabric seat. They are getting paler by the day.

I came to the conclusion the real problem was that I was overtired. Whenever that happens I tend to get very accident-prone, so that night I took a sleeping pill. I felt considerably better, a lot fresher, yesterday. I’ve also been very careful how I’ve put things down on surfaces. We want no more accidents.