h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Christmas is looming still (the commercial aspects of it, the "arrangements" which have to be arranged) casting a dismal shadow over everything, while the spiritual aspects of it seem about as far away as ever. This is without doubt the darkest time of the year, a time for looking back and seeing how little you have achieved in return for another year that has vanished like smoke before your gaze. Today, having been dragooned into going to MFI to argue about a piece of furniture that has arrived with the instructions for another, different, piece of furniture inside the box (a long story, and a boring one) I was also dragged into Matalan, which happens to be next door, and which has an even bigger collection of mindless Christmas tat than the garden centre I mentioned two weeks ago. Including a singing karaoke Christmas moose. (I am not sure if it was rational or irrational, but by the time I escaped, I was definitely the latter).

Still, we plod on. There is, in all honesty, little alternative. This week Russell went back to the vet, and had his blood tests done again. He's gone back down to his previous weight, but, as the vet said, you can also look on this as him being "stabilised", so it's not necessarily bad news, and he's obviously not deteriorating as such, in fact he is just as much of a pain as he always was, wandering around yowling for food, scrapping with the other cats, and invading the bed when he comes in freezing cold and/or wet through from the garden. Also in refusing anything less than sliced chicken to wrap round his tablet, so much so that I fear he may be contemplating holding out for an even greater delicacy. Quail in Aspic perhaps, or Swan in Caper Sauce.

Whoever invented the term "herding cats" as a euphemism for pointless and repetitive behaviour obviously got it dead right, if the cat feeding arrangements in our house are anything to go by. To understand what I am about to say, you need to know that the house is essentially two separate houses that used to abut up to each other, which have now been knocked into one. There are still two separate front doors and in essence it can still be divided into two houses, "ours" and "Colins". Colin was the old man who lived in what we now call "Colin's" until he died in 2000. Dusty and Kitty, formerly Colin's cats, now ours, still live there, and are fed there, especially as they don't mix with Russell and Nigel - well, not without much growling and many hissy-fits. Russ and Nige get fed in the porch to our house. New readers start here.

All this domestic harmony which has served us well in the feeding of cats for the last four years, is starting to break down, or so it seemed this week. I put down Russell and Nigel's food in our front porch, but instead of eating it, Russell followed me through into Colin's where Kitty was waiting for her grub. I went through the usual ritual:

"Morning, Kitty, do you want feeding later or now?"

"Naow"

" And what was the name of the Chinese leader who destabilised Chiang Kai Shek and started the Long March?"

"Maow"

Having satisfied the requirements I filled the dishes for her and Dusty with food. Kitty immediately started munching away, but there was no sign of Dusty. Instead, however, Russell started on the other dish. They both managed to eat side-by-side, while simultaneously growling at each other, until finally Kitty gave up and exited through her cat flap with a final hiss at Russell. Owing to the fact that Russell had now eaten the food meant for Dusty, I had to go back into "our" house to get another sachet.

As I entered the kitchen, I noted that Tiggy had managed to get through the hole where the cat flap used to be, into the porch, and had demolished the cat food which I had intended for Russell and Nigel. I scolded her, brought her back in and put some dog food into her bowl, which she ignored. Nigel wandered in, sniffed at it, and also ignored it, instead choosing to follow me back into Colin's and eat what was left of Kitty's food, before exiting through their cat flap, while I was replacing Dusty's which Russell had eaten. Dusty was nowhere to be seen. Aaarrrgh! Outwitted by four small furry animals with brains the size of walnuts, and still a full day at the office to endure.

Actually I have often thought it would be amusing if cat table manners were adopted as the standard for human meals. Especially the ones you have to dress up for. I could imagine being at a formal dinner and thinking to myself "hmm, I quite like the look of Princess Anne's sprouts", going over to her and growling at her before barging her off her plate, knocking a few sprouts onto the floor and then proceeding to chase them under the sideboard and eat them covered in nice fresh fluff. Bleugh!

Other than such musings, I haven't had a lot of time for noticing what has been going on in the world this week, but I did see a couple of news stories that gave me food for thought.

A British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half-century has changed his mind. He now believes in God, more or less based on scientific evidence, and said so on a video released last Thursday.

At the age of 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a telephone interview. Apparently he was influenced in his thinking by some of the discoveries of the new physics. Things like the search for the Higgs Bozon having led him to the conclusion that the way the universe is constructed is just too complex to be random.

However, Professor Flew thinks that this is a far cry from the sort of God who is sentient and judgemental, and who is in charge of redemption, human behaviour, and miracles and the like. Yet in the same paper, another story points out that miracles, or at least something like them, do happen.

A medieval limestone slab which for years has been used as a gravestone for a dead cat called Winkle has fetched more than £200,000 at auction. The stone has a carved image of St Peter on it and dates from the early 10th century. It was found originally in a salvage yard by a man who took it to his home in Somerset and put it at the bottom of his garden to mark the spot where Winkle was buried.

It was only when the stone was spotted by local potter and historian Chris Brewchorne that its value became apparent.

"At first I thought it was Roman but I noticed the chap's head on the carving was tonsured, which suggested it was Saxon. I don't think it's an exaggeration to describe it as the finest mid-Saxon carving in the country."

The carving went under the hammer at auctioneers Sothebys on Friday. They had expected it to fetch between £40,000 and £60,000 but a private collector bought it for £201,600. The man who found it sadly died last year before it could be sold, but the money will go to his widow, a former farmer. As for Winkle, an adopted stray who, according to Brewchorne "spent most of her life hanging around the local cider mills," she will be getting a new headstone.

"I'll be making one for her," he said.

Ah, England, land of miracles and recanting atheist Professors. Land of frost and fire, land of midwinter spring being its own season … For all its faults, and they are many, fundamentally can there be anything ultimately and incurably wrong in a country where a stray cat has a priceless Saxon carving marking its last resting place? As Arthur Mee said "every signpost points you to its wonders."

And thank God there are still enough people around with the decency and humanity to adopt a stray cat in the first place, feed it, (with its own food) and give it a decent burial when it eventually passes on (not, perhaps, to sit at God's right hand, which was my first, and possibly blasphemous, thought, but maybe on some angelic knee, purring in contentment for all eternity).

And thank God for atheists, who recognise the complexity of the incredible web of synchronicty that surrounds us. Physicists may have opened the box which constitutes the universe and found what seems to be the wrong set of instructions inside, but hey, the very fact that there are instructions means that someone/thing wrote them in the first place.