There's a thing people's faces do when you tell them you spent two weeks in a burns unit. They start arranging their features into something sympathetic before you've finished the sentence, and then they say oh mate in a lowered voice, and you can see them picturing it: the dressings, the debridement, the long and sleepless nights, the screaming, the writhing, the unrelenting agony you must have endured.

Not a single person ever believes me when I tell them it was the most relaxing fortnight I've had since August 14 2021.

The cause, briefly, because you know you want it: I was making a batch of brown sauce in a pressure cooker which I filled past the clearly marked "DO NOT FILL PAST THIS LINE" line. The safety valve became blocked. It sat there looking all still and innocent and as I opened the lid ten litres of sauce at a hundred and twenty degrees Celsius departed the pressurised pot at speed and stopped its flight abruptly upon my face, chest, arms, the walls, and the ceiling, where it printed a saucy silhouette of a man with his arms out like a coyote that has just been lured off a cliff. We now call it Boom Sauce.

Not a single person ever believes me when I tell them it was the most relaxing fortnight I've had since August 14 2021.

Geelong hospital first, then the Alfred. And then two weeks in which no human being on earth was able to expect anything of me.

It. Was. Glorious.

The children were elsewhere. The workshop was shut. I did not cook a single morsel, hear my name yelled from the other end of the house, change a single nappy or answer a single question beyond "have you pooped today?". And I enjoyed the novelty of someone enquiring of my bowels for once.

Every decision — when I ate, what I drank, when I presented for inspection, when the lights went out — was taken out of my hands and made by someone with the appropriate state-awarded certificates. Free of responsibility I read Anna Karenina cover to cover while roaming the hospital grounds like an eighteenth-century aristocrat taking the waters. I was calm. I was cheerful. I was the most consistently positive I have been since pre-school.

Coming home killed that relaxation inside a moment.

I started The Brothers Karamazov that afternoon. It has taken me 351 days and I finished it this morning, which happens to be my burniversary. Having spent a fortnight as the world's most inappropriate man in a burns ward, I understood parts of what Dostoevsky was getting at that I don't think I'd have understood otherwise.

Early on, the monk Zosima tells the story of his brother Markel: seventeen years old, dying of consumption, who in his last weeks becomes radiant and says that life is paradise and we simply won't see it. The moral spine of the entire novel descends from a dying boy's good mood. I noticed the catch: the people who keep the grace are the ones who don't come home. Markel's mood is never killed, because Markel never comes home.

My recovery was remarkable, and many people have told me that God must have been leaning in. But I had spent a fortnight in a building where, at the same moments I was enjoying Tolstoy in a garden, people died from assaults, aneurysms, infections and cancers. The woman in the room next to mine had been t-boned by a hoon driver travelling at 200km/h and, before she caught fire, had broken almost every bone in her body. Two rooms along was a man who'd had a heart attack and caught one of those wall-mounted continuous hot water urns as he collapsed. He lay there poaching under the stream for hours, until his six-year-old daughter found him and called the ambulance. At the time he was two months into an induced coma.

I know all this because I spent that fortnight going up and down the ward being obnoxiously cheerful company, and everyone told me everything, grateful to have someone to hear their story. They opened up fully to me. There must be something disarming about a faceless man wrapped up like an Egyptian Mummy.

My face, since you're wondering, came back better than it went in. If anything I look a bit younger and refer to this escapade as my thermal dermal; I have deployed that line perhaps two hundred thousand times and not once has my wife laughed.

Every time someone attributed my admittedly unusual recovery to the active intervention of God I would think of my ward neighbours and cringe. I can swallow, without difficulty, that God loves us and also that the world contains enormous and unevenly distributed pain. It is a great mystery, and I'm able to leave it at that and carry on. What I can't stomach is the idea that God is actively intervening in individual outcomes, and that He felt it important to give me smoother skin while allowing a child to stumble upon her par-cooked father.

My church meets outdoors, which means we begin every service by thanking God for the weather (notably, only when it's nice). Somewhere out past Broken Hill a farmer has been praying for rain for five years. I would like someone to explain the mechanism by which a hundred spoiled middle-class Surf Coast nitwits get a comfortable Sunday morning and the farmer gets nothing, and I would like them to do it without using the word plan.

Ivan Karamazov does this better than I'm remotely capable, though his version is grander. He tells his brother that he accepts God — he's very clear about that — and simply declines to accept entrance to a heaven bought with the tears of one tortured child. So he returns the ticket. Most respectfully.

I don't understand any of it and don't ever expect to. It changes nothing about what I believe, but I still bristle every time somebody thanks Him, the origin of all existence, for the weather.

Alyosha, Ivan's brother, a novice monk and the nearest thing the book has to a saint, has no rebuttal to Ivan. He simply kisses him.

I had Psalm 38, verse 5, which I'd been chuckling at since about day three and offered as answer to every person who raised the guiding hand: my wounds stink and fester because of my foolishness. Nobody found it as funny as I did. It's not a kiss, but it is the only theology of the incident I am prepared to defend. There was a guiding hand printed on the inside of the pot, and I filled past it.

There was a guiding hand printed on the inside of the pot, and I filled past it.

While I'm historically capable of learning nothing from almost any experience, I'd like to report some improvement: while I am the same idiot still using the same pressure cooker, it is now filled precisely to the top of the line.

Never a drop less, mind you.