The slippery business of catching a snake

It is strange how events elide and create a pattern whose significance remains elusive. I had just returned from a raid under the cover of the night on a huge field near our house a mile from the sea. I had about 50kg of ripe tomatoes in plastic bags in the back of my battered old seven-seater Land Rover Defender and was wondering if, as an impoverished father of six, I could use the Thomist defence: ‘It is not theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another’s property in a case of extreme need: because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes his own property by reason of that need’ (Aquinas, Summa Theologica).

‘Not until you flog the Defender you can’t,’ I heard the chorus of faces in the ancient gallery chant. But then as I parked outside our house, I saw through the windscreen the most amazing shooting star to the north, which obviously settled the matter in my favour. Don’t ask me why but take it from me: that shooting star was the work of God and not of the Devil. And it was a gigantic thumbs-up splashed across the night sky.

As luck would have it, the next day my old friend Paolo, who currently manifests as a poet and art historian, presented his degree thesis at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Ravenna on L’Estetica di Lucifero (The Aesthetics of Lucifer). In Italy, anyone can listen to such presentations and there were about 30 there, mostly young women, to hear his highly seductive and instructive romp through the history of Satan and how he has been depicted in words and pictures since the year dot.