A few posts ago I mentioned the funeral of a bloke who was a friend of both me and Athos (and a lot of other people; he was popular). His name was Gaz, and he liked animals; the one occasion I met him in person, he was walking around with a corn snake. Mostly, though, he liked dogs, and for many years he had a Rottweiler by the name of Willow, whom - perhaps fortunately - I never met in person. She'd almost certainly have knocked me over. Willow was much loved and the subject of very many stories, but she was also possibly the most incredibly stupid dog I've ever so much as heard about, let alone met. (The stupidest dog I've ever met in person belonged to someone else in the same general circle of friends; this was Kaiser the Dobermann. He never quite knocked me over, but he did come pretty close a few times.)

Anyway, a conversation I'm currently having on Mastodon reminded me tangentially of one of the sillier Willow stories, so I thought I'd share it here.

Gaz was fond of a few beers, and occasionally he'd overindulge a little; on this one particular night he'd overindulged rather more than a little, and came home quite drunk. At which point he realised, muzzily, that he'd forgotten to put the clean sheets on the bed, and he wasn't in any fit state to do it at the moment. Well, that was all right; he had a sleeping bag. So he just got that out, popped it on the bed, zipped himself into it, and went to sleep.

Gaz lived on his own. Therefore it was a single sleeping bag. This fact is important.

At some point in the small hours, he woke up. The first thing he realised was that he couldn't move. And the second thing, immediately after that, was that... he had a dog's backside in his face.

Willow really loved her daddy. So she'd decided to get into the sleeping bag with him for cuddles. However, being such an incredibly stupid dog, she went in nose first. Quite how she'd managed to cram herself in so far without waking him is a mystery for the ages, but she had... and, therefore, somehow he was going to have to work out how to move his arms enough to get the sleeping bag unzipped before she suffocated herself.

Somehow, he managed it, and by the time he had, he was stone cold sober again. It probably helped that there wasn't too much of him; he was a little inclined to be on the scrawny side. Even so, a single sleeping bag is really not big enough for one full-grown man and one enormous Rottweiler.

I'd like to think Willow managed to work that out... but I'm not holding my breath.

I am not having a very good day today so far, though hopefully I'll pick up a bit later. Because, in the middle of the night, this little piece of theatre happened.

Hindbrain: Boing! Boing! We're wide awake! Let's get on with the day!

Prefrontal cortex: Oi, hold your horses. Let me try moving our head... oof... nope. We are not going anywhere for several minutes till the blood pressure is sorted enough to get going.

Hindbrain: But boing! Boing!

Prefrontal cortex: What sort of ungodly hour is this, anyway? Hey! Visual cortex! Any input on the time?

Visual cortex: You have got to be kidding me. It's too dark to get any input.

Prefrontal cortex: Yes, well, that does rather suggest it's too early to get up. Don't worry, VC, we'll get there. Once we stop feeling light-headed the moment we try to move, I'll roll this body over and we'll put the backlight on the digital clock so you don't need to worry about trying to read the analogue one.

Visual cortex: Sound plan.

Hindbrain: But you're the one who wants to finish the knitting and then get on with some calligraphy and illumination!

Prefrontal cortex: Yes, absolutely, but not right now, you dope! OK, let's try rolling... good... VC? Your move.

Visual cortex: It's just gone 3 am.

Prefrontal cortex: That settles it. Executive decision: we are going back to sleep.

Hindbrain: But BOING!

Prefrontal cortex: I don't care. You can take your boing and shove it up your brainstem.

Hindbrain: But boi... er... zzzz...

Oh well, at least I have casserole. I felt well enough on Thursday to chop up a lot of veg; those all went in the slow cooker and sat overnight so that I could turn it on as soon as I got up yesterday morning. It simmered away for a little over twelve hours (there were parsnips in it, and, while they take about as long as carrots in the microwave, for some reason they take much longer than carrots in the slow cooker), then it sat overnight again to cool down, and this morning I decanted it into seven portion-sized containers. (Well, one portion of casserole, or two of curry, because I do couscous separately with the curry.) One of those has gone into the fridge for Christmas Eve, and now I need to work out how to fit all the rest into the freezer. It's going to be box Tetris in there.

I think it should be a good casserole. It contains carrots, onions, celery, garlic, leeks, parsnips, broad beans, chopped tomatoes, puy lentils, cashew pieces, pearl barley, parsley, rosemary, pepper, thyme, and the inevitable Marigold stock (which is also what's providing the salt). Oh, and porcini mushroom powder. I love mushrooms but they are somewhat inclined to block Sibyl, so I bought some dried porcini mushrooms and whizzed them in the grinder; since then I've discovered you can buy actual mushroom powder, which is good, because my little grinder has a bit of trouble with dried porcini. I think it should be all of the umami.

I also think I should be in a fit state to get to church tomorrow; but, for today, I'm very glad I still have the slow-cooker curry!

I have written a couple of short stories about a lady called Amelia who is not in a good situation; like many bad situations that people get into on this sorry planet, it's partly her own fault and partly someone else's. In this case she's probably about equally sinned against and sinning. The first story describes how she ends up in this situation, and the second one goes into what happens as a result; without wanting to give away too much, she gatecrashes a wedding, and due to the surrounding circumstances she ends up on friendly terms with the pastor, his wife, and the lady who got roped in to play the organ at the last minute.

So I started writing the third story; and it seemed only natural that Amelia should go to this church the following Sunday, even though she's not a Christian (or anywhere close to that), simply in order to see these people. It's never really been specified in the stories, but I don't think she has very many friends, and she does rather need them at the moment.

So she goes to the church, where she hears a sermon about Zacchaeus. You can find the story in Luke 19:1-10. And she's fascinated, but she's also extremely puzzled.

Getting into Amelia's head here was quite an experience. I've known this story since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, well before I became a Christian; but it wasn't till I looked at it through Amelia's eyes that I was completely knocked over by it. Amelia's question - and it's a very good one - is "what exactly did Jesus do here?"

This story needs a little context. We're in Jericho, and Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, which is not very far away now. He knows he's going there to be killed, and in a truly horrible manner at that; obviously that is going to be very much on his mind. That's the context you can get from reading the rest of Luke's Gospel. The other context you can't, because it would have been obvious to everyone at the time. Zacchaeus, as we are told in verse 2, is a chief tax collector and he is wealthy.

Nobody much likes tax collectors at the best of times, but Zacchaeus would have been a complete social outcast. For a start, he was working for the occupying Roman authorities, so he was a quisling; and for another thing, the reason he was wealthy was that he extorted more than the amount he was due to collect for the Romans. This was how the Romans expected their tax collectors to support themselves, but Zacchaeus was clearly doing a lot more than merely supporting himself. He was very good at the whole extortion thing. There were probably quite a number of people in Jericho who were needlessly struggling financially, directly due to Zacchaeus. He's the Ebenezer Scrooge of the first century, only, if anything, even worse. No wonder he couldn't see over the crowd; the crowd wouldn't let him get to the front where he could see. They can't have had many ways to get their own back on him, but this was one and they took it.

Zacchaeus, however, was so desperate to see Jesus that he forsook all his dignity and climbed a tree. We're not told why he was desperate to see Jesus, but most probably it was nothing more than a burning curiosity; most people, by that stage, would have heard of this remarkable preacher and miracle-worker. Maybe Zacchaeus was thinking it'd be something to tell his grandchildren. We don't really know. All we know is that he climbed the tree, which was just as undignified then for someone of his status as it would be now. I should think all the crowds had a good laugh.

Jesus, however, didn't laugh. Instead, he looked up into the tree, called Zacchaeus by name... and invited himself round to his house.

A lot of people would be at least a little flustered by that. But not Zacchaeus. Not Norman No-Mates up in that tree. Oh no - he was absolutely delighted; here was someone who not only didn't shun him, but was actively interested in talking to him. He came down from the tree and, to quote verse 6, "welcomed him gladly"... much to the annoyance of the crowds, who thought Jesus ought to know better than to spend time with this reprobate. And all of this is pretty obvious human psychology so far, until...

...you get to verse 8. That's the verse where Amelia mentally falls over. Because Zacchaeus totally changes. It's worth quoting the verse in full: "But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, 'Look, Lord! Here and now I give half my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.' "

Amelia doesn't doubt that Zacchaeus genuinely did change. What flummoxes her is... how? What was it that Jesus did to make him change so radically?

I had to think about that one a fair bit myself; and I eventually concluded that he did two things. The first one was obvious: he accepted Zacchaeus and met him where he was. That on its own wouldn't have been enough to bring about such a change, but it was necessary for the next step. And the second thing was that he forgave him, giving him the opportunity for a whole new start (which he enthusiastically took).

I can kind of see where Zacchaeus was coming from. He must have spent years telling himself, consciously or less consciously, that it was all right. He didn't need friends. He had plenty of money. He had security, both from that and from the support of the Romans (who probably didn't like him very much either - nobody really likes a quisling - but they would at any rate have protected him). But still, he'd have had that little voice at the back of his mind, nagging away at him: "nobody likes you, Zacchaeus".

Jesus simply walked up and exploded all of that. And I have no doubt that once Zacchaeus started giving away his money and (far more than) restoring what he'd defrauded from people, it well and truly stayed exploded. The new-look Zacchaeus has a lot less money, but he now has friends... and I don't doubt that he's a very much happier man.

I think if someone had come up to Zacchaeus the day before he met Jesus and said to him, "Zacchaeus, tomorrow you're going to meet Jesus, and as a result you're going to give away more than half of your money," he'd have been horrified, and probably done everything he could to avoid meeting Jesus. But, once it had actually happened, he did it gladly; there's no hint that he saw it as a great sacrifice, just the obvious thing to do in the circumstances.

And Amelia? Well, I don't know yet. But I get the feeling she'd like to hear some more.