‘God! I wish this wasn’t happening’ mumbled P grumpily to himself, just as he did at least three times every other day of his life. Sometimes he said ‘God! I wish I’d done that’ or ‘God! I wish I hadn’t done that’ or ‘God! Why does this always fucking happen to me’, but for P life was a serious of disasters, a series of misfortunes and annoyances that happened to nobody but him, but then he was always yearning for the easy life, the easy way out, looking to dump on somebody else. Quite why he was always wishing to do something else or be somewhere else was a mystery to his friends and colleagues as outwardly at least, P appeared to have a nice, comfortable life. He was comfortably employed in a strong, steady job that was virtually guaranteed for life if he behaved himself and did not make a colossal cock up, he had good, well-balanced, supportive friends, a nice home and a beautiful woman who loved him, despite his endless moans and whinges and grumbles.

‘God! I wish I didn’t have to go to work today’ he whined to himself one morning, just as he whined to himself virtually every other morning of his working life. He awoke every morning in a warm comfortable bed, in a lovely warm little house, a draught-free house with Thermo-cool double glazing and triple layered, heat refracting loft insulation, a house with wall to wall soft, thick carpeting in all rooms, bar his kitchen and two bathrooms that all had genuine oak floorboards, double varnished for cleanliness and stain-proofing, a house with instant hot running water, a power shower, fitted kitchen and multi-channel satellite television that he used only for griping at repeats of Men Behaving Badly or Fat Pets or to surf the adult channels before they were scrambled and to scream at when his team was losing in the football. He flumped slowly out of bed, flopped his feet onto the soft carpet that had been vacuumed just the day before by his adoring girlfriend, stood gingerly and stretched his aching back, his rather attractive deep green eyes closed beneath a furrowed frown of miserymorn and crust. In his fuzzy head he wished his back did not ache every single morning.

In the bed beside him, his saucy girlfriend Daisy turned over sleepily. ‘You say that every day’ she murmured without opening her eyes, pressing her face dreamily into her pillow and sliding her lithe naked body across the bed to slip into the warm hollow left by P. ‘Now shut up and get me a cup of tea’. P sighed and glared down at her as he pulled on his T-shirt, then his jeans, patting his stomach and worrying that he was getting too podgy.

‘I wish you’d get yourself a teas-maid’ he said, sulkily, as he padded from the bedroom, eyes closed once more, the pain in his back all but forgotten.

‘I have’ said Daisy. ‘You’. His lovely green, heart melting eyes flared open to enable him to glare at Daisy angrily, but it was wasted on her sealed eyes and as he noisily stomped back into the room and opened his sock drawer, she was already heading back into sleepyworld.

Twenty rushed minutes later, P quickly finished his cup of tea and stumbled outside, late once again, his teeth the only clean thing about him. He took a moment to take in the day through bleary eyes (somehow still piercing and bright despite his lack of sleep) and furrowed frown, a freezing, dim lit morning waking up from the night as reluctantly as P had. He cursed softly and stepped out, closing the front door silently behind him. The crisp morning frost, glittered like tiny diamonds in the early morning light and crunched beneath his boots, his breath hung around his face in grey clouds and the street lie beneath a wintry duvet of cold as he fumbled in his pocket for his car keys, his hands already numbing with the January chill. He stepped out into the street, slipped the key into the doorlock and opened the door with a familiar clunk. He sat quickly and slipped the key into the ignition. He switched on and heard the oh too familiar whining and whirring of an old engine struggling to start. P stopped trying, took a long, slow breath and tried again. Again the engine failed to start. That’s what you get for buying an old car, he could hear Daisy saying inside his head. ‘It isn’t an old car’ he would reply. ‘It’s a classic’.

‘God! I wish this wouldn’t happen every fucking morning!’ he bellowed, then shrank miserably inside himself as his curses echoed down the icy avenue. He tried again. On the third try, his old unfaithful kicked into life and he throttled hard, hurting his poor old car even more as cheap oil rushed around straining, ageing metal as the revs raced up, annoying his still dozing neighbours. P left the engine running and clambered out to scrape the frost from his windows. The depot in which P worked was just seven minutes drive away and could be walked in twenty minutes, but he was a lazy man and preferred to drive everywhere, especially on mornings like this. He cleared his windscreen and was starting on his driver’s window, when a crow passed overhead and dropped a hearty good morning onto his recently cleared glass. ‘GOD!’ he cried and almost wiped it off, then had a bright idea. He cleared his other windows, then climbed into the car, turned on the heater, which blasted his face with cold air, then flicked the window washer soaking the crow’s leftovers. The wipers started automatically, smearing a mixture of now cold bird shit and quickly freezing water across his windscreen obliterating his vision once again. ‘God!’ he cried again and fumbled in the glove box for some tissue.

When he finally arrived for work eight minutes late (‘God! Caught the bleedin lights and the roundabout again!’), the first thing he had to do was wash the crow crap off his hands and yet again he called on his God for a wish, only this time he honestly wished one of the Gods would hear him. ‘God, I wish I could go to sleep for ten years and kiss this fucking job goodbye’ he muttered to himself. As P dried his hands and set about his laborious labour, he was blissfully unaware that sometimes wishes, like dreams can come true.

Sometimes P dreamed of the omniscient, all knowing, all powerful Gods of the universe and wished he could be one. He wished he could make dreams come true, wishes come true, could destroy some of the hateful things and people in the world, could eradicate cats and dogs and rats and mice and llamas and geese. He dreamed he could vomit flowers and cause skirts to blow up at will and drivers who cut him up to sink into a mixture of cement and quicksand and spend eternity drowning. Dreamed he could cut throats, then mend them again, dreamed he could fuck any woman in the world without effort, consequence or even foreplay. Dreamed he could stay forever young and slim and fit and handsome on a diet or Tango, chips, curry, doughnuts, banana ice cream, steak, Sunday roasts and lager. He wished he could be a He, wished he could relegate Liverpool and Manchester United every year, destroy rugby from ever existing, improve darts, turn rivers into water wonderlands, turn straw into gold, eat the perfect bread roll, breathe underwater and a million other things he would never achieve.

These dreams were in some form created, shaped, witnessed and recorded by his part-time guardian Angel, an Angel who had been elevated to Deity status when the number of people on earth topped the three billion mark and His Coolness was getting bored with the whole affair and started planting weird fossils in the clay and painting distant pictures on the stars. The little God of miracles, celebrations, practical jokes and good, but hard to believe stuff like the platypus, camels, Alcopops, McDonalds, nuclear power had taken an illogical shine to P and decided that he amongst all the monkeys on the world would be one of his research tools. P was the perfect choice in many ways, he was imaginative, socially and sexually active, believed in Gods rather than a single God, believed that ‘life’ was part deity and part evolution and that a tinkling, ironic, mischievous God explained the vastness of the universe, the complexities of form, shape and number, varying belief and the intricacies of myriad life, as well as dung beetles, whoopee cushions, born again Christians, swimming elephants, pelicans, twisters, ITV and disco. Coincidentally the Little God of Miracles, celebrations, practical jokes and good, but hard to believe stuff was also on occasion the God of Wounds and Diseases, spreading plague amongst Italians or herpes amongst Kiwis or hamstring strains amongst footballers as easily as broken noses to rugby forwards and sneer lips to tennis players, but relenting and giving the human race the cure for the common cold only to see the research lab that discovered it was owned by a pharmaceutical company that was more interested in sales of phoney cold cures like NiteyNurse and Dr Flu and Sniffaway and so stifled the marvellous find! Even in the dreams and schemes of the Little Gods things did not always go to plan.

The little God of Miracles had settled nicely into practical jokes, celebrations and good, but hard to believe stuff anyway, despite his early reservations. After a few years, he was well settled, partying every night and floating in a personal smoky, boozy heaven by day. Strictly speaking there was no night and day in the heaven of the Gods, but the Little God of miracles tried as much as was lazily possible to blend in with the monkeys and to feel as they felt. This he believed, gave him unparalleled access to the psyche of the monkeymen, giving him all the pleasures of flesh whilst retaining his Godly status, even if it were just outside the warm fluff of the top 40.

But the ways of the Gods are not for mere apes to understand. Humans were only permitted to glimpse fragments of their heavenly perfection and divine touches occasionally. A tiny peek through the peephole of paradise through the oh so brief minutes of Tomorrow Never Knows or a sunrise over Angkor Wat or the voice of Ella Fitzgerald or the sigh of a dreaming lover as she slips her arm around you during her post-coital sleep or the gentle sway of a perfect pair of breasts or a thirty yard screamer into the top left hand corner or Violets or a lawnful of daisies. All these were dipped in heavenly nectar by the Gods. But the halcyon days of Smallpox, Scarlet Fever, Yellow Fever and Black Death were long gone and the Little God of miracles tried desperately hard not to be angry, not to be consumed by the gnawing resentment of his demotion, feeling it was totally unfair and bogus that he was being kept out of the top 40 by the new God of wounds and diseases (who only made number 40 by making His Coolness piss himself with leprosy and had since offered little Ebola), but that is what happens when you fall out of favour with His Coolness, God #1.

But whilst the Little God of miracles had been busy with inventing Zorbing and bungee jumping and ecstasy and broadband, he had been neglecting his harem of humans and his pet monkey projects. Which is why he found himself transformed into first a crow, then a pigeon and stalking P one frosty winter’s morning, to see if he could invent another project to pass a year or two. He circled the building where P worked, plopping pigeon presents into the canal and waiting for his favourite whinging apeman to come out for lunch.

P meanwhile had grumped and whinged and moaned through the morning, then dragged himself wearily to the yard wall at the rear of the building to eat his lunch sitting in the weak winter sunnyshine gazing down at the canal. The Little God of miracles spotted him instantly and took his cue to flash the sleek and lovely pigeon act, fell into a deep roll and flew down to settle beside him as he sat. P saw him and believed he had landed close to him to edge warily closer and nibble any crumbs or leftovers, but also unknown to him to overhear P and watch his every move. His Coolness was always looking for some light entertainment on Sunday evening after attending every boring service on Dirt and this twinkling of an idea could just be it.

‘Alright P?’ asked P’s dearest and closest workmate, Dave squatting beside him happily on the wall. Dave in contrast to P was a happy, contented soul. He asked for little from life and life lived up to its end of the bargain. ‘Lovely day’ he grinned. P did not return his smile.

‘Alright mate’. P opened his lunchbox, his lunchbox lovingly made for him that morning while he dressed by the long-suffering Daisy and sagged with despair. ‘Not bloody sarnies again!’ A God would be used to so much better than this, he thought as the pigeon edged closer, fluffed himself bigly and pecked at the ground to hear better...