Not long after the beginning, and a bit before the end, the Almighty said to Noah: “Is that your real name?” “Yeah”, said Noah: “you gave it to me, your ever generousness. I was hoping for something a bit more romantic, maybe even an extra syllable or two, or become all psychedelic and have a hyphen and a double barrel, but Noah is functional. I’m not complaining, a lot. After all what’s in a name? Wouldn’t a cactus be just as uninteresting if it was called something else? Why am I and my not very exciting name so humbly in your almighty and quite tedious presence?” asked Noah. “I’ve had a great idea”, said God: “and I want you with the very boring name to be the first to hear it.” “Can’t wait to hear it your Denseness, even if it is only half as brilliant as the square wheeled chariot and deep-fried ice cube you nearly invented for us last week; and as for the three-armed jacket, well what can I say? Jacob wears his every day and I won’t tell you what he does with it at night, as it involves folk music. And didn’t the Paisley patterned boulder illuminate the landscape?” said Noah “Oh good”, said God: “I do so enjoy it when the minions are attentive to my every word and trembling syllable, What’s the point of being an Almighty if you can’t Almighty it over the lower orders from time to time?” “I couldn’t agree more, your Bampotness. Even if you do appear to be a few slices short of a full loaf on occasions. So, what’s this big idea you’ve had?” said Noah. “I want you to build a boat, the biggest and bestest boat there’s ever been” said God. “Why”, said Noah, “we live in a desert, we don’t do boats; never have done, don’t get a lot of call for them in these parts, your Obliqueness. Ordinarily you’re every utterance is a symphony of sound and beauty to the sticky out bits on the abstract countenance you have so generously created for me, O Guano features. Couldn’t you do another plague of frogs and locusts? We loved those. Your subjects haven’t eaten so well since. Very tasty they were indeed, and so much more nourishing than the daily fare of cactus bark and centipede you dish up to us as we go about our increasingly diminishing mortal trespass. I hope you weren’t baffled by the paradoxical construction of that sentence. One Almighty’s punishment is another lowly minion’s business opportunity. I was running a fast food joint while it lasted. Made a change from the normal feast, where you have to catch your dinner before it catches you. Eat before your eaten that’s the Law ‘round here. It makes you feel more like a recipe than a person on occasions, your Compostness.” “Be that as it may, said God: “I’ve got some drawings which Eve helped me to make” “Eve?” said Noah: “did you say Eve?” “Yes” said God: “Eve”, that’s what I said, she likes me more than all the rest of you put together and that’s why she’s my favourite” “This will be good” said Noah: “let’s be having it. Let’s see the cosmic blueprint of a less than useless boat that Eve devised” “I helped to devise it as well”, said God: “In fact I done all the pencil sharpening, and here it is.” Noah sniggered and said: “That’s not a boat it’s a camel!” “Brilliant, isn’t it?”, said God: “you’ve got to hand it to Eve; she’s a genius at this kind of stuff, and she says it will make me look jolly clever as well. And that will stop all you ungrateful and wretched minions from smirking and sniggering every time I have a wonderful idea.” “This is even better than the ten commandments, three dos six don’ts and a maybe” said Noah. “My Ten commandments were wonderful” said God: “even Moses said so.” “The only reason you have ten commandments”, said Noah: “is because you have ten fingers. If you had seventeen fingers we would have seventeen commandments; one for each digit. People who use their toes to count their fingers should avoid life’s mathematical complexities. And as for Moses ‘The Born Leader’ he’s a party hack. He’ll agree with anything you say as long as he gets his name on the tablet. He’s publicity mad. When he grows up he wants to chisel the definitive text on cactus attraction, for the benefit of future desert wanderers. Eve says he a bit of a Freudian fruitcake on the quiet, whatever that is. She also says, his mother told him he was adopted, and he’s never quite got over it.” “Why would Moses want to get over a cactus, seems jolly silly to me” said God: “He’s a complete basket case, according to the local grapevine. Never mind all that, let’s see the blueprint.” said Noah: “A wooden camel, only a cosmic idiot could imagine it. If it was a wooden horse it could have been sold to the Trojans, or a wooden cat to the Pharoahs, and I’m told the antipodeans go a bundle on timber budgies, but camels; nobody wants one, not even other camels. How did someone as colossally dense and as infinitely thick as your self acquire the surreallness of thought to imagine it in the first place?” said Noah. “You’re a bright little chappie for a minion”, said God: “Eve told me about the Greeks and their wooden gee-gee and I suggested a boat, then Eve pointed out that this was a desert, and consequently we need a desert boat. ‘One that floats on sand’, I said. ‘Not quite El Plonkero’ she said. Then Eve said we have to adopt and then apply some lateral thinking to the problem. She pointed out that we live in a desert and that we need a boat that sails in the desert. And then I had the mostest cleverest thought I’ve had in ages. We need a ‘desert boat’ I exclaimed. And Eve said I was a true plankton eater. She says the nicest things to me. A ‘ship of the desert,’ she says, ‘and what’s a ship of the desert?’ Quick as a flasher in the rush hour, I said ‘a camel’, and Eve replied that I was quite bright for a log, and that camel plus ship equalled wooden camel to sail away from here to some other paradise she called Hollywood, ‘Land of heavenly bodies and the drop dead gorgeous Brad Pitt.’” “And you believed her?” said Noah. “Of course I believed her”, said God: “she’s Eve and if you can’t believe in Eve what else is there to believe in?” “There’s an answer to that”, said Noah: “but you’d toast me like a heretic on the happy juice if I repeated it, your Doorknobness.”