How Not To Marry a Welshman (and Other Success Stories) — Chapter 15: Bushes for Their Own Sake

While navigating the subterranean darkness and nail-on-chalkboard screeches of the MRT Blue Line and its loud, Naga train, Den Mum’s internal software runs a massive diagnostic audit on the chaotic theology of Neil Gaiman and the Book of Jonah — ultimately celebrating those sovereign spirits who trade the exhausting performance metrics of the cosmos for the quiet sanctuary of a shared human life.

Den Mum was thinking of Wales as she watched the YouTube video of calming music set to drone footage of the Welsh countryside’s sweeping vistas. This naturally led her mind to consider how Richard Burton was also Welsh, and for a moment she settled upon some choice scenes from The Taming of the Shrew starring Burton and his then-wife, Elizabeth Taylor. She smiled remembering how well Katharina could wield a bedwarmer to terrorize her husband — a thought that accompanied her as she and other passengers careened down the tunnel, the Naga train screeching all the way.

Den Mum then thought of Michael Sheen, another Welshman, who played a tip-top angel, in her opinion, or a delightful bookseller in his reincarnation in Good Omens Season 3. This led her to consider that final episode once again: specifically, how bushes really are there for bushes’ sakes alone. This simple truth is so often forgotten — to men’s peril and women’s pain — throughout history. Upon analyzing the ideological baseline of the Season 3 script, she found she heartily disagreed with the dialogue’s depiction of Jehoshua (Jesus) regarding the systemic purpose of “Ladies” — specifically referencing prostitutes and ladies-of-the-night.

To Den Mum’s fiercely literal mind, these women did not inherently provide comfort to the world any more than wild bushes provided comfort to the landscape by their very nature. The logic was completely misaligned. A bush simply grew according to its own organic parameters; it held no native directive to soothe or accommodate a traveler.

To her software, this specific narrative glitch mirrored, in some profoundly telling ways, the chaotic views and predatory behaviors that had recently surfaced regarding Neil Gaiman himself. It was a classic, sobering manifestation of the critical delineation between two core variables: the man as a part versus the author as a whole. When an individual’s real-world code is thoroughly compromised by a lack of baseline integrity, their fictional fortresses eventually give way, exposing the messy, unbalanced filters running the entire machinery behind the curtain.

To Den Mum’s software, untethered lust wasn’t some harmless, romanticized “comfort” to be celebrated. Without a highly specific, deeply bonded structural partnership at the wheel — the exact intellectual and emotional connection mirrored by an ex-demon and his second-best angel arguing over a map — that energy is just a driverless machine moving at terminal velocity. It’s dangerous, chaotic, and completely lacks a “nagging-yet-endearingly-responsible” partner to navigate the tight turns of real life. Den Mum considered that humans — and for that matter, bushes — could indeed provide true comfort, but never in a base, transactional way.

Human beings could only provide authentic comfort if you valued them deeply as people. It could not stem from a raw, consuming “need,” but rather from a profound, explicit acknowledgment of their intrinsic value and worth, paired with how one’s own soul consciously decides to accept that comfort while hopefully providing it right back in a mutual, wholesome symbiosis.

It was structurally identical to learning how to properly appreciate a wild bush and the cooling shade it could provide. You had to simultaneously acknowledge that the bush deserved to be watered, that it possessed its own sovereign right to grow, and that it existed in the universe for far more than just you and your immediate shade requirements.

This was precisely the whole point of the Book of Jonah, when one truly sat down to think about it. Jonah had thrown a massive system tantrum over his withered plant because he only valued its presence for what he could extract from it, entirely blind to the deeper, divine reality that every living entity holds an independent worth far beyond the selfish parameters of human convenience.

It was precisely why, in a nutshell, within the quiet sanctuary of the bookshop after everything else in the cosmos had utterly failed and disappeared nearly save for the two of them, Crowley wanted nothing more than a world left entirely free. He craved a perimeter where beings could simply appreciate life and exist in absolute peace, liberated from the heavy mechanisms of a fascist deity and the malicious, pathetic scripts of a devil. Conversely, Aziraphale’s system had reached a point where he wanted nothing less than just to be with Crowley.

Yet, faced with the crushing weight of their respective institutions, both ultimately decided to disintegrate into raw energy, fully thinking that this terminal dissolution was the absolute end of their tracking. Instead, they found themselves reincarnated as humans — a final, definitive fate that beautifully manifested their deepest internal parameters.

This human reincarnation of Aziraphale and Crowley showed how desire, when configured strictly for good and stripped of base transactions, can smoothly navigate through the chaos of the universe to land at the coordinates of ultimate, enduring comfort. It manifested in golden bands of care and spontaneous cocoa runs filled with gentle ribbing about one’s complete unawareness regarding ornithology or, conversely, space dust. All the while, the two creatures in question remained just as firmly rooted in deep friendship as well as love as they had been for millennia before in entirely different forms. They had successfully traded the exhausting performance metrics of the cosmic level for the quiet, sovereign vulnerability of a shared human life, which was indeed, when it came down to it, all one could ever want, really.