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 ‘I don’t want any birthday presents this year – donate the money to a worthwhile cause instead,’ was all I had said. How could I have guessed that such a simple suggestion would create uproar in our household? I had not given the request much thought when I made it. In fact, the idea had only just occurred to me. Philosophers are like that sometimes – unfettered in their ideas, lateral in their thinking. That was why Plato was such a success. And as a result, my simple, altruistic request appeared to have caused them a fair degree of unnecessary concern. I could hear them from my bedroom, where I had gone to escape their anxious glares and frosty silence.
‘Did you hear what she said?’ Nana was whispering, in the tone she reserved for her most important reflections. ‘She wants us to donate her birthday money to a worthwhile cause! It’s all your fault, Mia.’
‘How on earth is it my fault?’ my mother replied, forgetting her previous attempts to calm Nana down now that she herself was being blamed.
‘You should never have let her answer the door to other day to those women handing out religious leaflets.’
‘Harriet’s an intelligent girl,’ my mother responded, her powers of observation at their keenest. ‘She enjoys lively debate.’
‘It must have been some debate to go on right the way through The Archers,’ Nana exclaimed.
‘I thought it would be good for her,’ my mother went on. ‘How was I to know she would come away thinking she was Maria in The Sound of Music? ‘
In fact, my mother and Nana were mistaken. The exchange of views that had taken place on our doorstep between the two women and me had ended somewhat abruptly when I’d asked their views of Descartes’ ontological argument for God’s existence and the women answered that they hadn’t had a chance to discuss it with him yet.
No, if anyone had been responsible for my unusual birthday request it was not them. In truth, the idea had been entirely my own. Yet, like many ideas, as I had suggested in number 49 of my collection of Meditations, it had been brought to consciousness by the influence of my surroundings: Holy Innocents Church, to be more precise.