The next morning he picked up his newspaper from the mat. The front-page headline read 'New famine crisis in Ethiopia'. He turned straight to the financial section to check on the share index. Good. He'd made the right investments.

 

The mail arrived next; he was pleased to see a letter from a business colleague inviting him to stay in his holiday house in the Caribbean. The rest – including an Oxfam appeal for those faced by famine in Ethiopia – was junk mail, so he binned it.

 

He went off to his golf club. On the way he stopped to fill up his Porsche. As he was paying, a woman came and asked the garage-owner if she could leave a collection tin for the Ethiopian crisis on the counter. Ritchie walked out without a glance.

 

After golf, he clinched the deal over an excellent lunch, drank a celebratory bottle of champagne and drove off home in his Porsche. However, his judgement had been somewhat impaired by the alcohol; he took a corner too fast, wrapped the Porsche around a large beech tree and was pronounced dead by the paramedics at the scene of the crash.

 

When Ritchie arrived at the gates of heaven, there were thousands of people streaming through the gates. They all appeared to be waving tickets and being ushered through. He tapped one on the shoulder and asked what was going on. The man said they were Ethiopians and they were going to a great banquet. Ritchie brightened up – dying 'wasn't so bad if there was a banquet to greet you. When he got to the gate the gate keeper asked him for his ticket and when Ritchie said he didn't have one but he would pay for it now the gatekeeper shook his head firmly, closed the gate and locked it, leaving Ritchie standing outside in shocked disbelief.

 

He sat down on the ground, trying to think of what to do next. Money had always been able to buy him what he wanted before. He felt tired and hungry. Soon, the most wonderful smells of cooking came wafting past. He got up and peered through a knothole in the fence. There he saw the Ethiopians sitting down to the most wonderful banquet of every conceivable dish. The gate seemed to have disappeared so he banged on the fence as hard as he could. The gatekeeper came and called over the fence, telling him once again that he could not come in without a ticket. Ritchie said he was very hungry and asked if it would be possible for one of the Ethiopians to come and bring him some food. The gatekeeper replied that on earth Ritchie had enjoyed all the good things in life while the Ethiopians had had nothing and in any case, there was a very wide, deep pit behind the fence that no one could cross.

 

Ritchie thought for a moment. Then he asked the gatekeeper if one of the Ethiopians could go and warn his brothers to change their ways so that they might get a ticket to heaven. The gatekeeper answered. He reminded Ritchie of the TV appeals, the newspaper coverage, the collecting tins and all the other publicity that he had seen about the plight of the Ethiopians. If, like Ritchie, his brothers chose to ignore all of this, then there was no more that could be done.