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The Guardian, UK
Apr. 4, 2006
Zoe Williams
media.guardian.co.uk

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ReligionNewsBlog.com • Item 14247 • Posted: Wednesday April 5, 2006  

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It is true that the “squiggles” on Noel Edmonds’s hands are mysterious; they look like the kind of thing a teenage girl might do to herself with a Biro because history was too boring. He does remind me, curiously, of a teenage girl; I can imagine him in a history lesson, bored. Those two facts are much more mysterious to me than his squiggles. Top marks, then, to the journalist who unearthed his new age belief in the Cosmic Ordering Service. I would have been much more likely to ask, “Have you been inhabited by the spirit of a teenage girl? Is that why your voice has also gone a bit quavery?”

The Cosmic Ordering Service was founded by Barbel Mohr. History does not yet relate where the squiggles come in – or maybe it does, but was too boring. So, imagine a mail-order company; picture its catalogue, if you will; remove the 600 pages of actual stuff; take away the models, with their glossy hair and the fathoms-deep sadness in their “I’m never going to make Vogue, am I, mum?” eyes; while you’re subtracting all that from your mental image, now remove your hard-bitten cynicism and distrust of all humanity. What you should be left with is a “pure, childlike innocence”, much of the sort that beams out of Noel. And now you can start making your cosmic wishes.

“You’ll think I’ve gone away with the fairies,” says he, “but it’s fantastic. At 57, why shouldn’t I give cosmic ordering a go? After all, it seems to work.” And work it does: Noel has made six wishes, and so far four of them have come true. One of them will chime in all our hearts – in March last year, he wished he had a house in a sunny place. By September, he had bought a holiday home in the south of France. Similarly, at lunchtime today, I wished I had an item of tooth-achingly sweet confectionery. Within less than half an hour, I had a Snickers.

Wish two (Edmonds, this is): he wanted a new challenge after the break-up of his 18-year marriage. Within months, Channel 4 had offered him Deal or No Deal. “I think that’s spooky,” he told reporters. I can better that, I think: recently, I too wished for a new challenge; within weeks, my washing machine had broken and it still has washing in it. It’s quite a challenge now just to get out of bed, I tell you.

Cynics, as ever, will want him to be more precise before they believe all this. “Prove you wished for a new challenge with red and blue boxes of cash,” they’ll rudely demand. “Prove that at least one of the six wishes included ‘Take some members of the public who are amazingly desperate for money, and watch their funny faces.’ ” You know what these imaginary cynics have done, don’t you? They’ve failed to reach their childlike state of innocence. They need to go back to the imaginary mail-order catalogue, and start again … erase the men in pants … erase the home-facial machines … pluck out the sarcasm … I wish they would just be a lot purer, like me and Noel.

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