Hubris

“The 13th has never been unlucky for me. Never. I’ve never had a bad experience with the number 13. Not once. Not ever. I’m immune to it.”

Even as I typed those words last Friday I was reminded of a poem by Roger McGough (can’t remember which one, sorry) where he talks about being afraid to tempt fate in case fate, tempted, one day weakens... but I shrugged it off anyway with a cavalier laugh and got on with cocking my snook at the universe. You can’t touch me, I thought to myself. I’m immune. Y’hear me? Immune! You can’t touch me with your so-called Friday 13th bad vibe!

Somewhere in the very centre of the universe an omniscient mind heard me and had an inclination...

And by the end of the day Friday 13th was going all out to prove just how unlucky it could be.

All was fine until it came time to head home. Of course this is the moment where you desperately want things to run smoothly. You can practically smell your evening meal being cooked. You can almost feel the warm cosy embrace of your sofa wrapping itself around you and calling you to submit to end-of-week TV-soothed slumber.

You just want to get out of the office and escape while the going is good.

Last Friday, the 13th, the going was decidedly not good. As I was literally on my way to the exit doors I was called to the men’s public toilets. A cubicle was occupied and the patron was refusing to respond to all calls to vacate the premises. I had no choice but to force the door. Inside I found a young male slumped over, completely unconscious, his trousers around his ankles and his head face down on his knobbly knees. He absolutely could not be roused by anything we did. It didn’t look good. One of my colleagues recommended we try smelling salts until I pointed out that, given the ever present stench of the urinals, if he wasn’t compos mentis now with the ambient bio-fall-out irradiating his nasal hairs a tiny little smell in a bottle was hardly going to kick-start his cerebral cortex.

So we called an ambulance. And therein the farce truly began. The operator took all the details and then asked some bizarre questions along the line of did the injured party have a history of heart trouble, etc. Now bearing in mind I had already explained that the injured party was an unknown member of the public I found this question rather ridiculous. I think the operator picked this up from the mocking pause that I dropped into our conversation. “I still have to ask, sir” he told me smartly.

Did he? Did he really still have to ask when he already knew I had never met the person in the toilets before in my entire life? I realize that most telephone operators work from a script these days but surely there is room for commonsense? Room for people to think independently and realize that sometimes portions of the script can just be dispensed with?

Plainly not.

Anyway. Despite all this guff the ambulance was apparently on its way.

Great, I thought. Blue and twos flashing it’ll be here in 5 minutes and I can get away home.

Not so. 20 minutes later me and my loyal colleagues were still waiting. 25 minutes later we saw a paramedic’s car parked on the other side of the road. Just sitting there. Waiting. What the hell was he doing? Mr Knobbly Knees in the toilet could be choking on his own sputum by now! Why wasn’t he attending to the 999 call I had made? We approached and asked, amazingly politely, if he had indeed come to answer our summons for help. Yes he had, he said, but he couldn’t do anything until his “back-up” had arrived.

Oh. Back-up. A SWAT team was on its way then. Or possibly armed specialist forces. Great.

We had no choice but to back to the building and continue our wait growing more and more sour with each passing minute. We appreciated, loudly, that in today’s world dealing with possible drunks or drug users can be extremely hazardous and a bit of support is probably a necessity but even so... this poor guy could be voiding his entire colon down the bog for all anyone was doing to help him.

And so the wait went on. And on. Made worse by a drunken gang of teens who suddenly appeared and decided to hang around outside the front of the building and empty their bladders over our railings. Charming. The evening was getting better and better.

Finally, 50 minutes after my initial 999 call an ambulance at last sirened into view. Hoo-bloody-ray. At last. Now with two green jacketed body guards flanking him the paramedic boldly stepped into the breach. As I opened the door to let them in one of the teens mumbled something along the lines of: “oh, hey mate, we think one of our friends might be in your toilets...” Cue Beavis and Butthead laughter.

Oh how typical. I managed to marshal my sarcasm (i.e. utilize it) and told him that yes, that was why we had called an ambulance as his so called mate was out stone cold.

“Oh,” said the dazed teen, “is it OK if I come in and watch?”

Come in and watch. Not, how is he? Not, is he OK? Just: can I come in and watch.

I shut the door on him and locked him outside.

15 minutes later the paramedics had got Mr Knobbly Knees up and mobile. He looked as dazed as his erstwhile mates outside. Confused and a little embarrassed too. But I daresay by Saturday he was rather proud of his exploits and was boasting of his advanced state of inebriation to all those of his friends who were not too inebriated themselves to tell him to shut up and go and flush his stupid head down the toilet.

Their job done the ambulance crew melted away into the night, reholstering their standard SWAT team issue revolvers. Don’t thank us; it’s just what we do. Yippee-ki-yay.

Whatever. My colleagues and I headed outside too and wiped the dust from our shoes and headed our separate ways.

I finally arrived home over an hour late, tired, soaked with rain and in a foul mood.

Friday 13th? I shall never mock you again. And that’s a bona fide promise. I have seen the power of the Universe and it scares me.


Postscript: Somewhere at the centre of the universe an omniscient mind wonders perhaps if it has gone too far and decides to offer a little consolation... a small token of recompense.

On my way out to get some milk on Sunday morning I noticed that among the assorted chip wrapping and drinks cartons that the wind constantly deposits on our front lawn a slightly damp but otherwise perfectly intact £5 note.

For moi?

Why, thank you Universe. Apology gratefully accepted.

The Happy Moon Days

So. The moon landings. Did they really happen or are they one of the biggest hoaxes of the 20th Century?

This isn’t a random thought that has just popped into my head (honestly, my random thoughts would make scary reading most days) but has been shoehorned there by watching “James May On The Moon” on the BBC last night.

Alas Mr May was neither flying to the moon nor exposing his shabbily trousered butt-cheeks to the good people of NASA but was instead delivering a documentary about the moon landings. And a rather good one at that.

I have no memory of the original moon landing given that it happened 2 months before I was born but I do take great pleasure in the fact that I was born into an age where men had finally set foot onto another planet. The very idea of it – people walking around on the surface of a world other than Earth – even today astounds me.

And yet, in other respects, we are so blasé about the idea of interplanetary space travel these days (with the sheer volume of sci-fi entertainment available to us) that for most teens and twenty somethings the idea of visiting planet Zog to buy a lightsaber elicits nothing more than a shrug. The idea of it has become somehow just an inevitable progression of modern technology. It’s accepted that it might not happen in this day and age but one day it most certainly will.

It’s just going to happen, OK? It’s no big deal. It’s just a matter of when not if.

But it is a big deal.

May was fortunate to be taken up 13 miles – to the very edge of space – by the United States Air Force in one of their impressively humungous U2 spy planes. A plane that resembles a pencil with the wings of an albatross.

May was visibly moved. It wasn’t difficult to see why. Looking down on a jumbo jet that is as far below you as it normally is above you when you’re standing on the planet must have been a jaw dropping experience. And then to realize that the only people higher than you are the people in the International Space Station... well, let’s hope the toilet pump in the space suit May was wearing was working properly.

It must be incredibly humbling. To be that far up and see the curvature of the earth... Imagine then to be 384403 kilometres away on the surface of the moon and to be able to blot out the entire Earth with the palm of your hand – as indeed one of the astronauts actually did.

How fragile we all are. How small.

Which brings me back to my original question. Was it all just a hoax?

I don’t think it was.

I know the conspiracy theorists out there will always argue that the whole thing was faked but yah-boo-sucks-phooey to them.

It was real. You could see it in the faces of the astronauts that May spoke to – the wonder, the mind altering awe of having actually stood on another planet. It was as real as this ergonomically unsound chair beneath my iron-hard buttocks. I’d stake my very virtue on it.

Why then have we never been back? the conspiracists argue. The fact that we haven’t must prove it. We can’t go back because to get there in the first place is impossible.

Rubbish.

What is there to go back to? Until technology has advanced far enough that we can export a whole construction site up there and build Moon World there is very little point spending billions of dollars and risking lives just to send men up there to leap about and collect another handful of moon rocks to prove a point that the conspiracy theorists still won’t believe anyway.

Sod them.

Let them mope about in their miserable “we’re stuck on this planet forever and can’t get off it” headspace.

My imagination is bigger, brighter, richer and infinitely further reaching for a having a suitcase packed ready for my imminent trip to planet Zog...

From up here the Earth looks wonderful. And the rest of the universe looks... well, excitingly inviting.

Houston. I’m ready when you are.

The Meaning Of Matter

In honour of the experiments due to take place tomorrow at the CERN laboratories in Switzerland where two beams of subatomic hadrons will be blasted into each other at speeds approaching the speed of light in order to determine the true nature of matter, the universe and God Himself I too have decided to conduct my own particle acceleration experiment from my modest laboratory here in Leamington Spa.

In order to rip apart the very building blocks of existence and unravel the secrets of life at the subatomic level I shall at some point tomorrow, armed with my own homemade Large Hadron Collider (a pea shooter) be firing matter at speeds a little under the speed of light at the back of my boss’s head when he isn’t looking.

I confess that I do not know what will happen when the pea matter collides with the skull matter. I’m hoping that new particles will be created and / or liberated which will give me clues as to how the universe itself began. It is true also that a black hole may open up in the skull matter and small amounts of blood may be seen emerging from the aperture. What this will mean for the future of my own personal existence I do not know though I am certain I can guarantee the continued safety of the rest of you. Do not be afraid.

My friends, we stand upon the brink of a new dawn. A new Aeon is about to begin for all of us.

Fellow citizens of earth I salute you. Wish me luck.