Rodney had a tree soul, an elm tree to be precise.

It was a slip-up, of course. People are not supposed to have elm tree souls. But mistakes are bound to happen on the overburdened Celestial production line when demand to replenish the world's population has jumped from one to six billion people in the last two hundred years. Ask any production line manager and they'll tell you straight: 'You can't increase productivity without substantial investment in technology and manpower otherwise quality simply cannot be assured.'

Or something along those lines.

Now, to the average person on the street this all means nothing, but to poor Rodney it meant a whole heap of strange things. An average elm tree lives for approximately 300 years and although, physiologically, Rodney's body would deteriorate at the same rate as the rest of the human race, his soul thought otherwise.

Which is why at the age of 44, he thought it perfectly natural that he was still living at home with mum.

Another side effect was sleeping. An average person who lives to the age of, say, eighty years, can be expected to have approximately 21,500 nights, or 172,000 hours of sleep (of course, more in the early years, when the thought of a lifetime of sentience is too much to bear, and less in later years, when the thought of having it revoked is equally distressing).

But for Rodney, every fibre of his being told him that he ought to be sleeping almost 80,620 nights, or around 645,000 hours during the same mortal lifetime, almost four times that of your average human soul. Which is why at the weekend he rarely rose before midday and, on most weekdays, could be found dozing at his desk for at least an hour after lunch or during any of the compulsory lunchtime lectures on a range of innovative topics including 'New International Accounting Standards', 'Mind the GAAP' or an equally enlightening accounting subject.

It wasn't laziness, as most people surmised, but destiny.

The fact that the hypotheses for these two side effects directly oppose each other is neither here nor there, the point is that Rodney resigned himself to the fact that he was and would always be, the victim of a Divine arboreal cock-up.

Smaller effects, like having strange dogs wander up to him and sniff the ankles of his unwashed jeans, expectantly, were less disconcerting since he'd started wearing Dr. Martens, the ones with the steel toe caps.

Or when shuffling through the park on his way to work at E. M. Roberts accountants, when birds and squirrels would stop in their tracks and eye him suspiciously, speculatively almost. Even then, a handful of carefully aimed M&Ms tended to do the trick.

Of course, there were some things that he would never get used to, like his innate fear of people from the Netherlands.