Sod's Law E-Book

Sam Leith

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

To every explorer with his map upside down, to every air-traffic controller suddenly receiving Magic FM through his headphones, to every astronomer whose new planet turns out to be a bit of bran-flake on the eyepiece of his telescope, Sod's Law says: you are not alone. Sam Leith tells the hilarious - and painful - stories of the unsinkable boat that sunk, the unbeatable horse that lost, and the fireproof theatre that burned to the ground. Sod's Law demonstrates that the entire universe is actually set up to ensure that your toast always lands butter side down and, what's more, that it lands precisely where the cat has shed hair all over the carpet. In this age of doubt, fewer and fewer of us are able to believe that a higher power takes an interest in our fate. This book reassures us that indeed it does - and that that higher power is hell bent on buggering things up. Only by laughing heartlessly at the misfortunes of others can we make ourselves feel better. Sod's Law enables us to do just that.

Leseprobe

SOD’S LAW

Sam Leith was born in 1974. After a long series of other misfortunes, he found himself living in Archway, expecting a child, and out of a job. Before that he was the literary editor of the Daily Telegraph. He is now a freelance journalist. This is his second book. The first did terribly.

Copyright

First published in paperback in Great Britain in 2009 by Atlantic

Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright © Sam Leith 2009

The moral right of Sam Leith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

First eBook Edition: November 2009

ISBN: 978-1-848-87439-8

For my father – the most accident-prone man

I know, and without whom…

Contents

Cover

SOD’S LAW

Copyright

Introduction

A Note on Sources

THE PROFESSIONALS

SOD ON THE ROAD

THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE

SOD’S WAR

OUT FOR A DUCK

SOD AND GOD

SOD AND PLOD

THE ART OF LOSING

SODDING POLITICS, SODDING POLITICIANS, AND SODDING PUBLIC LIFE

THE QUEST FOR KNOWLEDGE

ODDS AND SODS

‘Tragedyis when I cut my finger.Comedyis when you walk into an open sewer and die.’

– Mel Brooks

Introduction

‘The devil farts in my face once more.’

When Edmund Blackadder spoke those words, he spoke for us all. He spoke for every explorer with his map upside down, for every air-traffic controller suddenly receiving Magic FM through his headphones, for every astronomer whose new planet turned out to be a bit of bran-flake on the eyepiece of his telescope.

In this age of doubt, fewer and fewer of us are prepared to believe that some supernatural agency gives a toss about our fate. Yet a belief in Sod’s Law – the blind perversity of the inanimate – is everywhere. Search your soul. You have that belief. So did your ancestors, and so will your descendants.

If your descendants, that is, haven’t died out or been herded into a cellar by cannibals as a direct result of the global apocalypse. Look about you, man. If ever the pale rider named Sod was in evidence, it’s in the Year of Our Lord 2009, in the disaster-not-waiting-long-enough-to-happen that is Britain.

Ten years ago, we were on top of the world. We weren’t at war with anyone, everyone had pots of money and everyone was sharing it about. It was great. One hundred per cent mortgage, sir? Come out from your cardboard box, put down that purple tin, and sign here. Yes, an X will do fine. Welcome to the property-owning democracy.

People started selling each other credit swap derivatives and complexly securitized futures and hedges and God alone knows what else. Instead of asking what the bloody hell they thought they were doing – and while they were at it how come Iceland, which has nothing but fish and an old Björk album by way of assets, was richer on paper than the entire continent of Asia – we all went merrily along with it.

In due course, it turned out that all this money was completely made up: people were buying and selling worthless assets with imaginary money that they didn’t own in the first place. And then – to the bafflement of simple-minded souls like myself who imagined that with a roughly stable amount of goods and services in the world, it can’t be possible for EVERYONE to get poor at the same time – everyone got poor at the same time. Except for the man who owns Domino’s Pizza.

We might as well have put a collection of chimps in charge of the global economy. At least they would have taken their bonuses in PG Tips.

Ah, I hear you say. Fortunately, we have the gold reserve to prop up our ailing currency. Except we bloody don’t, because while he was Chancellor of the bloody Exchequer, Gordon bloody Brown sold 60 per cent of it for $275 an ounce – aka pottage, one mess of – while its price was at a twenty-year low. At the time of writing, gold is selling at $930 an ounce.

With a mind like that, it could only have been a matter of time before he became Prime Minister. But surely, I hear you say, nobody would vote an eejit like that into a position of power. And how right you are. Unfortunately, they didn’t bloody need to.

I had a nice job, too. I used to be the Literary Editor – say it with capitals – of a respectable newspaper. Writers were nice to me at parties. People used to pretend they were interested in my opinions. Publicists pretended to find me attractive. Now I can barely get arrested.

No sooner had I decided that I was secure in my job, and had sorted myself out with a stonkingly enormous mortgage, a pregnant girlfriend, had spent most of my savings on a diamond ring and was halfway through planning the wedding, than I lost my job.

‘Blah blah blah recession blah blah letting you go blah blah blah here’s a black bin liner for your stuff can we have it back when you’ve finished?’ was roughly how the conversation went.

Brilliant. Fortunately, I had something to fall back on. I had about £40,000 worth of shares, left to me by my late grandfather, God rest him.

Shares in HBOS.

So I’m now reduced to writing toilet books to keep my family from the poorhouse. Not that there’s much chance of even that working. The last toilet book I wrote was a dismal failure in hardback – and when it was republished, completely redesigned and under an entirely different title, graduated to being a dismal failure in paperback.

And this from the publisher that sold a gazillion copies of Life of Pi: a perfectly absurd book about some kid named after a swimming pool sharing a boat with a tiger! I don’t mind telling you I’ve changed publishers.

But I digress.

The fact is, Sod’s Law appears in all cultures at all times. Socrates talked about ‘the general cussedness of things’. His observation would have chimed with that of his near contemporary Zeno, who committed suicide in 262 BC – and who can blame him? – after stubbing his toe.

The Anglo-Saxons said ‘wyrd bith ful aræd’ – which, freely translated, means: ‘If there’s a spare arrow flying around this battlefield you can bet your damn kingdom it’s going to end up in my eye.’

The French, who were the beneficiaries on that occasion, call it ‘la loi de l’emmerdement maximum’ or, occasionally, ‘la loi de la tartine beurrée’. The Germans use the phrase ‘die Tücke des Objekts’.

Specialized instances are adduced and their statements refined and elaborated. ‘The Peter Principle’, for example, describes the aggregational effect of Sod’s Law in the work-place (‘in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to the level of his incompetence’). ‘Muphry’s Law’ states, correctly, that anything you write criticizing a piece of proofreading will contain a spelling mistake. Other corollaries and offshoots, such as ‘the Buggeration Factor’ or ‘Finagle’s Law’, continue to be the subject of detailed scholarly disputes.

Whatever its guise, we all know it when we see it. Its founding principle, the axiom from which all the others proceed, is this: if anything can go wrong, it surely will.

‘Sod’s Law’ is glossed with three citations in the Oxford English Dictionary. They are from an October 1970 issue of the New Statesman, from a September 1978 issue of the New Scientist, and from the July 1980 issue of SLR Camera magazine. Only the third bears quotation.

‘Even if you’re using a masking frame this can easily over-balance. According to Sod’s Law, that’s going to happen when you’re halfway through exposing a sheet of 20 x 16 inch colour paper costing the best part of £1.30.’

I have no idea what those two sentences are talking about, but I am interested to see that ‘over-balance’ is hyphenated rather than all one word.

In March 2009, Viz – if the OED can include citations from periodicals, so can I – defined a special case of Sod’s Law it called ‘Chod’s Law, n.’: ‘The axiomatic principle that, when having a quiet day at home watching Cash in the Attic, repeats of Top Gear and Ice Road Truckers, at the point at which you decide to go for a shit, find yourself an Auto Trader [editor’s note: Viz magazine has immemorially associated Auto Trader magazine with defecation] and sit down for a leisurely half hour on the pot, no sooner have your cheeks touched plastic than the bloody phone rings, the fucking meter reader knocks on the door or some bastard tries to deliver a parcel.’

If you look up Murphy’s Law in the OED, on the other hand, the entry tells you: ‘see Murphy, n.’ Turn, pilgrim, to ‘Murphy, n.’ You will be informed: ‘Slang. A potato.’ At this point you will make ‘Murphy’s face, n.’

This is a rare instance of Murphy’s Law acting reflexively. Or, taken along with the bizarre fragment from a long-forgotten issue of SLR Camera, it is proof positive that the lexicographers were slightly on the skive that day.

Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia isn’t much help either. Wikipedia is, after all, no more than a sophisticated tool for ensuring that Sod’s Law maximally contaminates the global information supply.

Here, for example, is an extract from a scholarly discussion on the entry for ‘Finagle’s Law’, aka ‘Finagle’s Law of Dynamic Negatives’, aka ‘Finagle’s Corollary to Murphy’s Law’.

The difference is that Murphy’s Law is (or was originally) supposedly much more specific than what most people cite as Murphy’s Law. What most people call Murphy’s Law is actually Finagle’s Law, and despite the name, Finagle’s Law doesn’t follow from the specific version of Murphy’s Law. On the other hand, the Murphy’s Law article is already about Finagle’s Law, and the original statement of Murphy’s Law is now little more than a footnote in the public mind. In a non sequitur, Hanlon’s Razor has little or nothing to do with Murphy, Finagle, or either of their Laws, so I’m going to take that out.

WTF?, as the young people say. Thank you, Proginoskes, anyway, whoever you are.

There was a real Murphy, though. While Arthur Bloch was compiling his 1977 treatise on Murphy’s Law for publication, he received at the eleventh hour a letter from one George Nichols of South Carolina.

Mr Nichols, who had been the Reliability and Quality Assurance Manager of a Nasa jet propulsion lab, attested that the phrase originated from Air Force Project MX981 at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

MX981 involved strapping crash-test dummies, chimpanzees and a brave fellow named Captain John Paul Stapp to a rocket-sled and seeing what happened to them when the speeding rocket-sled – nicknamed the ‘Gee Whiz’ – stopped abruptly, subjecting its cargo to pressures of anything up to forty-six times the force of gravity. The photographs of what happened to Stapp are worth looking up.

Captain Edward Aloysius Murphy, Jr (1918–1990) was a reliability engineer who arrived at Edwards armed with some ‘strain gauges’. These devices were designed to measure more accurately the g-forces involved in Stapp’s face-squelching encounters with rocket-powered deceleration.

The first time he tried them, the readings came out stone blank. The strap transducers had been put in backwards. Murphy blamed one of his assistants. ‘If there’s any way they can do it wrong, they will,’ he said (according, at least, to one version of the story).

This was later refined into the simpler formulation familiar to us now. When Stapp was asked at a press conference why no serious harm had come to anyone in the course of all these crazed rocket-sled experiments, he explained that the researchers had taken careful account of ‘Murphy’s Law’ as they went about their business.

Captain Murphy, apparently, was not as pleased by his fame as he might have been. Convinced that he had in fact crystallized a vital principle of defensive design, he regarded – according to public statements by his son – the commonplace interpretation of his dictum as ‘ridiculous, trivial and erroneous’. That is, of course, the law in operation.

But there’s more in all this than malfunctioning strap transducers. Consider the big picture. The existence of Sod’s Law, and the existence of our unfailing belief in it, invites us to consider some of the most serious issues – not only about the heroic perversity of the universe, but about human self-obsession.

The less convinced we are that a personal deity has a grand plan for us, the more convinced we are that the invisible order of the universe is conspiring to make our toast land butter side down. This vestigial determinism – is it hard-wired into our brains? – is on the face of it egomaniacal.

If it’s self-obsessed to think that some unearthly power is directing the eventual well-being of our immortal souls, it’s immeasurably more self-obsessed to think that a similar power is working, with unblinking eye and unfailing attention, to spoil our breakfasts. Slightly.

How alarming, though, to come to the realization that this isn’t simply a product of human delusion: we’re right. Just because you’re paranoid, as the man said, doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you. The invisible order of the universe really is conspiring to make your toast land butter side down – and no less an organ than the European Journal of Physics has confirmed it.

The buttered toast problem is one of the textbook manifestations of Sod’s Law. It has been, as a consequence, subject to systematic scientific scrutiny. The breakthrough came in 1995, when Robert Matthews of Aston University, Birmingham, turned his attention to the problem.

Matthews – a theoretician of some rigour – was unsatisfied with the quality of previous experiments on the subject. He singled out as ‘dynamically inappropriate’, for instance, a 1993 edition of the BBC’s popular science programme QED, which had attempted to gather data on the problem by having lab technicians toss buttered bits of bread up in the air and see how they landed. ‘Hardly common practice around the breakfast table,’ he remarked, witheringly. QED’s conclusion – that toast landed butter side down only about half the time – was accordingly dismissed.

Matthews set out, rather, to diagram the actual physics of falling toast. He modelled the tasty breakfast food familiar to us all ‘as a thin, rigid, rough lamina’, and managed to formulate an equation demonstrating that from a table of average height, there will be insufficient gravitational torque induced in the falling toast to turn it a full circle in the air.

This was expressed in the equation: if wT + O < 270, the toast lands butter side down – where w is the angular velocity of the toast, T is the time it spends falling, and O is the slight angle at which it leaves the table. Effectively, what this says, is that the toast needs to spin more than 270° in the air to have a chance of landing butter side up.

And Matthews demonstrates that from no table that a human might sensibly use, would that magic 270° of rotation be likely. Our tables would need to be three metres tall.

From this, he draws his truly startling conclusion. The way the toast lands is dictated by the maximum height of the breakfast table. The maximum height of the breakfast table is dictated by the maximum height of a human being. And the maximum height of a human being is dictated by three of the ‘fundamental constants of the universe’: the electromagnetic fine structure constant, the gravitational fine structure constant, and the Bohr radius.

These constants date back to the Big Bang. Ergo, Matthews concludes in his awe-inspiring paper, it is written into the very nature of the universe that your toast will fall butter side down.

Murphy gave it a name, and Sod gave it a tone of voice. But the law is as old as the universe itself. Indeed, probably older. In this, it resembles God – Who is in all places at all times, Whose existence man infers through the workings of His creation, towards an understanding of Whom man continues to grope blindly, and to Whom man has given countless names over the years but Whose essential attributes remain ineffable.

Sod, also, moves in mysterious ways. It seems quite plausible to me that the global history of religious observance was, at root, a mix-up or a mishearing. Indeed, given that The Word Was With God and The Word Was God – who’s to say the Word was spelt correctly?

These are matters to ponder.

SL, London, June 2009

A Note on Sources

In assembling this book I have taken little or no care to ensure that the stories I include are true. I have tended, rather, to take the view that their cautionary force is undiminished by not all having, per se, exactly, HAPPENED, so to speak.

My chief concern, rather, was that the reader of these stories would come away a little wiser or a little happier for knowing them. Not all truth is literal truth. But all of the stories in this book were at some point or another earnestly believed to be true, and in almost all cases still are.

I haven’t made any of these up.

I do not doubt, though, that the odd urban legend has slipped through the net. Can the guide dog who lost four owners really have been called ‘Lucky’? Was Tithonus a real guy? My criterion in each case has been that the more funny or poignant a story was, the more I decided it was true.

I also owe a debt of thanks to some distinguished predecessors – authors like Christopher Logue, Sophocles, Stephen Pile, Sheridan Morley, John Gross, Hugh Vickers and the countless bloggers who swap candidates for Darwin Awards. Their various researches, while not covering identical terrain (where astonishing bad luck ends, and pinheaded stupidity or culpable uselessness begins, is a matter for debate), often overlap with my own.

I have whipped the funnier and more perverse anecdotes from their work. My excuse for this is that these books all purport to be collections of true stories, most of them in the public domain. If it turns out that one or other of these individuals, in a shocking imposture on their reading public, did in fact make their stories up, and now sues me for breach of copyright…

Well, that would be just my sodding luck.

SL, London, June 2009