Home life
Gloom and doom
Alice Thomas Ellis
It was the 13th yesterday. I have the sort of watch that isn't supposed to stop ever, and yesterday it stopped at one o'clock. It's started again since, but I didn't like it stopping. As evening drew on I glanced out of the window and espied the trimmed toenail sliver of the newest possible moon. I felt I might just as well throw a boot through a looking-glass and go out and stroll under a few ladders. I am not as rabidly superstitious as some — for in- stance my friend Richard who goes to fanatical lengths in order not to see the new moon through glass and will drive with his head stuck out of the car window in sub-zero conditions if the thing is imminent — but I felt a touch uneasy. My religion forbids me to give way to superstitious fears, so I swiftly said a paternoster and an ave, which is wholly illogical and not altogether sane. I also comforted myself with the thought that the window through which I saw the wretched thing was double- glazed and that this would negate the misfortune.
Our friend Bill was dashed unlucky the other day. As he was about to leave after lunch the heavens opened and I said, 'Bill, that rain is radioactive and you must be very careful and put up your umbrella or you will start glowing in the dark.' Then as he was walking through the park on his way to the tube he was struck by lightning. It zoomed in, zonk on the top of his umbrella, slid down the plastic handle and bounced off his hand. It didn't kill him, but it certainly gave him a nasty turn. All this unleashing of power makes one edgy. While the unfortunate Russians were throwing mud at their reactor I spoke to a scientific person who seemed to think they could well be making a mistake. He ex- plained gloomily that this might squash all the little neutrons closer together until they formed what is known as a critical mass and shot down through the earth until they hit the water table, whereupon, bang, the entire Ukraine would be rendered lethally uninhabitable for more or less ever. Now this was a man who, on the whole, is pleased that E=Mc2, so his despondency struck chill to my heart. Discussing the earth, I was reminded that, like all the nicest things to eat, it is crispy on the outside and soft in the middle and it seems a pity if its inhabitants are going to blow it to smithereens.
The stepmother of the girlfriend of one of the sons was acting in a theatre in north Wales at the time and the warning system at the local nuclear establishment started going bleep because the level of radioactiv- ity around had gone as high as a kite. The son was in Wales too, so I rang him up and whimpered that they mustn't drink the water and certainly not the milk because cows are wonderfully efficient at hoovering up the nasties and concentrating them, and that they must cut out the broad-leaved veg. He told me shortly not to be so silly. Humanity now seems to divide into those who refuse to worry and those who would rather starve than eat lettuce. (Anyway I read somewhere that lettuces contain posi- tively hundreds of chemicals designed to discourage greenfly and moth and black- spot and God knows what else, so already they don't sound too wholesome.) I only wish that the experts didn't also fall on both sides of this divide. There are experts in every single field of human endeavour contradicting each other flatly, and this is dizzyingly confusing for the layman seeking only to live out his allotted span without too much hassle, or the need for profound thought and decision-making about matters which any reasonable person might think he could take for granted. The layman has a hollow feeling that none of the experts really has the remotest idea of quite what the hell he's up to. Either that or half of them are lying like carpets.
It is all very worrying and discouraging, and what makes me so mad is the thought of the trouble we went to to make sure the kiddies ate up all their greens. What, I ask myself, is the point of fussing, if some ass is going to press the wrong button and render all our care redundant (this is called human error and is almost more worrying than the prospect of a wild-eyed lunatic pressing the right button)? A poem follows:
On the whole I wish we could have been spared
The genius of the man who figured out that E=Mc2.
Home Life, a collection of Alice Thomas Ellis's Spectator articles, was published this week (Duckworth f8.95).
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