May 6th Sod’s Law
Faced with an indefinite period of locked down weeks I began this Blog imagining it would be an opportunity to live life more deliberately: to watch the birds feeding their young, hear their song, observe the processes by which buds unfold and I would be magically transformed into some sort of serene wrinkled old sage, wonderfully in tune with Nature. ‘Living life more deliberately’ is a phrase I borrowed from Henry David Thoreau who in1845 built a simple cabin by Walden Pond and watched the minutiae of ice melting and Spring springing.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.”
The reverse of this tranquil contemplation of the moment is the tendency to become obsessed with each trivial problem or minor mishap with Basil Fawltyesque hysterical tracking of cause and effect that inevitably leads to disaster. “Thinking too precisely on the event,” is what it’s called in ‘Hamlet’. A blueberry rolls off the kitchen table, you tread in it, you walk across the beige carpet, you throw your arms up in horror and smash the light shade, you bend down furiously to pick up the pieces, you cut your finger, you jerk upwards in pain, your back goes. Someone blessed with my personality immediately sees this as the outworking of a malign destiny where all things come together to blight you, much as in the terrifying Greek tragedies of Aeschylus or Sophocles. Fate will pursue you to your pre-ordained end. In less classical terms, this is Sod’s Law and I am one of its most faithful adherents. Deirdre is not like this. When destiny curses her sewing with a needle that won’t thread she persists, gets advice or graciously admits defeat and puts the sewing machine away for another year. The gods sigh in frustration and retire defeated.
But I am of a nobler, tragic disposition. You will have already been gripped by the narrative of my hanging baskets, a woeful confluence of lockdown, B&Q closed, 14 inch baskets and 12 inch linings. You rejoiced in the happy ending of my collecting moss to pack around the top 2 inches, but the Powers that Be can always effect a twist in the plot.
I devised a clever scheme of hanging the last basket from a chain fixed to the beam of our gazebo. Having fixed the chain and after managing to join the links with a plastic strap while teetering on a step ladder, a task that required several more fingers than were in my possession, I found that the metal ring I was going to use did not fit through the links in the chain. Several trips up and down the ladder with heavy basket in one hand, pliers in the other, a third hand holding the ladder and a fourth one steadying the chain, I succeeded in hanging it - lopsided. Rather than the hassle of taking it all down again to adjust the chains I tried to support the basket with one of the many hands required and undo the faulty chain, which required squeezing it with the pliers. At which point Zeus flung a thunderbolt, the whole thing tipped over and emptied its contents onto the patio. Then my back went. I threw the pliers down and then, glory be, they were not broken. My luck had changed. Eventually the hanging basket was hanging evenly and there was no way it could be removed. Then I saw that the night temperature was forecast to drop to zero, so I quickly unhooked the other baskets, but of course this one was fixed permanently, so in the pitch dark I was up the ladder devising a protector of old packing material. Deirdre, with her irritating good sense, asked me why I hadn’t fetched her to hold the basket up. The answer in the terms of classical tragedy is Hubris. The hero’s pride that comes before his fall.
Our grandson’s maths homework which I described the other day was to test the hypothesis that toast always drops buttered side down. We started tossing coins and plotting the results in percentages. Then it was playing cards, then drawing pins. He was testing the laws of probability. I was testing Sod’s Law.
It was Sod’s Law that caused a tailor in Eyam to order a parcel of patterns from London and import the plague into Derbyshire. How many thousands of Sod Law's close contacts with a fellow traveller on the London Underground, in a shop, in a hospital ward, handling an infected petrol pump have resulted in the 30,000 deaths and untold amounts of illness and suffering? But we are learning how to take control ourselves and take on the necessary inconvenience responsibly and not just put it down to malignant Fate. It’s inevitable that people like me in lockdown will fasten upon trivial details as we are insulated from the big picture. But we can see that in a time of pandemic tiny actions, like the rolling blueberry, can have disastrous effects.
I feel for all those actors, musicians and dancers who had performances lined up, couples who had planned weddings, people who had saved up for the holiday of a life-time and then, Sod’s Law - this virus hit and knocked the stuffing out of their plans.
I’m now going to have a bit of a personal rant. Deirdre’s father used to use an Ulster expression that’s very apt for some people today, ‘thrawn’. It’s the stubbornness that says, “I’m a hardened tough labourer, the virus won’t touch me”; or “I’ve always done my own shopping, I don’t need a volunteer to help”; or “Up here in Crich we’re safe. I don’t know anyone here with the virus.” This is the hubris that comes before a fall. There are 500 people in Crich in the ‘at risk and vulnerable’ category, yet a majority of our 150 registered volunteer helpers aren’t being used. Fair enough, a lot of vulnerable people are being looked after by neighbours or family members and most are being compliant, but we should all give Sod’s Law some attention if we think the lockdown rules are over-the-top and don’t apply to us. It’s about risk and probability. We treat very lightly the constant news that this virus spreads easily by touch and proximity and makes people very ill indeed, yet scorn teenagers who take drugs and smoke despite all the warnings!. A journalist locked down in Italy a month ago wrote in the Guardian what we British must expect under lockdown, “Elderly people will disobey you like rowdy teenagers: you’ll have to fight with them in order to forbid them from going out, to get infected and die.” We would add about endangering others too.
Some of that is happening here. It’s my age group who are often being complacent and cavalier, for instance carrying on going into shops. Because others are very willing to do this for us, safely, it’s not essential travel as distinct from some journeys some of us have to make for medical or family reasons that are essential. As things let up for the working world the chances of infection being present on a display-unit or cash- machine may well increase. An infected carrier bag or door handle or parcel, a close conversation or careless cough and a village such as ours could quickly become infected and put our local care professionals at risk. As someone working in a hospital told us, it’s all very well applauding NHS staff but we shouldn’t go on blithely putting them at risk and assuming that they want to be heroes and sacrifice their lives. We’re only being asked to sacrifice a little bit of convenience and a litte bit of the pride which stops us asking for help, while assuming care workers and medical staff are prepared to die so we can carry on ignoring their advice. I suspect if the Italian or especially the Chinese police were in Crich, they would be rounding up a lot of oldies and shipping them off to labour camps somewhere! We probably won’t catch it carrying on as normal, but it’s the probable bit that’s worrying. Sod’s Law represents the coin that dropped the other way, the one that brought the plague to Eyam and could do so here.
‘“What is the bravest thing you’ve ever said?” asked the boy. “Help,” said the horse.’
(‘The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.’ Charlie Mackesy)