Did you ever wonder if an unwanted bicycle left in a yard to rust has feelings? Or if a toothbrush, considered flaccid and no longer fit for purpose, experiences a deep sadness as it’s flicked, by the very person whose teeth it has so lovingly looked after, casually and without emotion, into the bin?
Danny, Shane and Bowyser have been mates since they could talk.
Now in their late forties, they have wives, kids, successful careers, fat wallets, fast cars, yachts and villas abroad.
They also have one other thing in common: they are compulsive womanisers.
Driving back from Belfast airport on the Antrim Coast road one Sunday morning after a week of debauchery in Puerto Banus, Phil is at the wheel when the car leaves the road, plummets down a ravine, and kills them instantly.
GOD — a lot on his plate that Sunday morning
And so they find themselves at heaven’s door, where an old man with an enormous beard sitting on a cloud dressed in a red robe, greets them with a booming Brian Blessed-like voice, and introduces himself as GOD.
It transpires that there is, in fact, a Day of Judgment. Actually, he tells them conspiratorially, there are 3,245,113 — or thereabouts — Days of Judgment every second of every day, and now you find themselves facing yours.
Reincarnation, he says, does exist. Scary? Sorry.
Now, normally, says God, this would be adjudicated in the blink of an eye, but Terry Wogan has just arrived, and precisely where to place him is causing some concern.
I digress, says GOD, who has always hated Eurovision and spontaneously and unilaterally determines that Wogey will spend Eternity signing Blankedy Blank cheques with a Blankedy Blank pen.
To reward your libertine behaviour on earth, he says, your matter and souls will be transmuted into a re-embodiment reserved only for those he considers to have committed the ultimate in heinous levels of sin.
You will be reborn, he roars through a fully amplified Star Trek-like echo chamber, but not as living entities; you will become things, your souls and minds very much alive, but trapped as inanimate objects.
Now, take Hitler for example, GOD continues, warming to his theme… he is currently
Hitler — his fate is to go where no man would boldly go
reborn each new morning as a fresh tampon, relocated at my bequest to the front of the bathroom cabinet of the woman most in need.
And to reflect their sexual transgressions, GOD informs them, they will be transmogrified into sex toys, and fated to spend the hereafter entirely at the bequest of their owners.
The Life of Things is the sorry tale of existence in a bedroom where the trio find themselves at the mercy of a sexually deviant middle-aged couple, whose main weekend pursuit is swinging.
Calling Danny, Shane or Bowyser? Will the real Roger Rabbit please stand up?
The one good thing, GOD tells them, is that they will never be that far away from each other.
And you needn’t bother praying to me, he adds, with a final sneer before signing off the dispatch note, just pray to the god of Duracell that your batteries will run out.