I did something profoundly stupid last Friday. In fact, I’m being too easy on myself, since whenever anyone else does it, I always smugly deride them for being so...now, how do I normally put it?.. oh yes, INSANE!

But my back has been killing me for weeks, and despite a tough, no-nonsense approach to aches and pains, it has recently left me feeling vulnerable.

Which is why – and yes, I do deserve to be ridiculed – I went online and Googled ‘Back pain, lower left side, above waist’.

Seven words, meaningless on their own, but once fed as a coherent sentence into the Web and suffixed by a question mark, might just as well have read: ‘Gullible man, beneficiary to recent windfall, seeks theatrical types for investment counselling...’.

After all, both are liberally laced with the portent for ruin; a fact I have discovered to my cost.

Currently, and I’m not exaggerating, I could be suffering from Ebola to a viral infection long believed to have been carried back from the Moon by Armstrong and Aldrin.

Thankfully, I’m no hypochondriac, but it’s not been easy navigating the deep currents of my own pimped-up anxieties.

The point I’m getting at is it made me think: about the hereafter; the afterlife; the probabilities of an omnipotent presence or the simple, inescapable fact that we cease to exist. Period.

And I have to say I’m very indebted to Professor Brian Cox, TV’s hottest six-pack brain, for neutralising my fears.

Having watched his latest series and the groundbreaking Wonders of The Universe before that, I can honestly say I am now proud to call myself a spiritual agnostic.

What does that mean? Well, for starters that Richard Dawkins, Oxford’s – and the world’s – favourite athiest will hate me.

He doesn’t like people who sit on the fence, neither athiest nor believer. And yes, compared to my occasionally firing synapses, his intelligence is a billion times more potent.

But the reason why I’m so grateful to Brian – if I may be so familiar – is that he has allowed me to realise that the universe is so big and so weird and so unfathomable, that actually anything IS possible.

So rather than worry what eternity holds in store, I now realise I’m happy with either option because I’m actually not supposed to know.

As Woody Allen’s father once famously put it in ‘Hannah and Her Sisters’: “How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don’t know even how the can opener works!”

And that’s it. I can’t get Sky TV to record so why the hell should I think I can solve the greatest mystery of all?

I can’t – and best of all it’s not my fault.

By design (millions of years’ worth I might add) I’m too stupid, too naive and too interested in just why – in addition to my painful waist – my eyebrows have suddenly enjoyed an explosion in growth.

Being bushy is surely enough for any individual to have to contend with.

Eternity can wait.