I think I am losing my soul… I was sitting on the step getting ready for the morning’s work in the paddock and realised that my soul was disintegrating. Such a shock to know that the work has been hard and soul destroying… but then again, it is hard to keep one’s soul intact these days, isn’t it?

And then I checked my dictionary and realised I should be writing about my sole. Which is a tad ironic, as surely doing honest, productive work in the paddock should not destroy your soul at all, whereas another job, like processing and rejecting flood insurance claims might.

But which soul are we talking about? It was said ‘What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?’ Perhaps you might fling an accusation at me like “How do we know what that means? The Bible translators could have gotten their nuances wrong and it should be a sole, and being a quote from a man who went out with his fishing buddies a lot, he could have been talking about the flat fish found all across the world and used as a food source.”

And to that, I would say, “Watch which way you are flinging, mate. You could poke someone’s eye out with those accusations.” And then I would say, “A-ha! …Those Norwegian singers from the 80’s were quite the pretty boys, weren’t they?”

And you would say, “What on earth are you talking about, you deranged person?”

And then I would reply, “Oh, sorry, I am getting distracted by my exclamations. I meant to make a point that in the Bible, the word soul and sole are quite different. Soul in the ancient Greek was written psuche, which means breath, or spirit, whereas sole (the fish) was not mentioned at all in the Bible, although sole (of the foot) was written in the Old Testament with the Hebrew word kaph, and not at all in the New Testament. Therefore, the saying could not have accidentally been ‘What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world but loses his kaph,’ (when it should have been psuche)…”

At which point you would say, “I don’t understand a word you have been rambling on about.”

And then I would try to summarise by noting that it is only in our spoken language that we might confuse the word soul with sole, as they sound alike. But once you write them down, we see the difference and furthermore, these differences are only in English, not in the ancient Biblical writings, so I shouldn’t pretend that a famous saying was misinterpreted all these years and actually meant something else.

Hmmm, now what was the point?

Oh yeah… I was sitting on the steps putting my shoes on and watching parts of my sole disintegrate, and that was a bit of a concern.

I need new boots.

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