These are weird times, and you may therefore like to consider the Lizardman Constant.
It is a theory developed by the American polling industry that asserts that, for every question posed to a large group of people, you can rely on somewhere between 4-5% to say something that is stark raving mad. It arises from the fact that 5% of US citizens who are asked that question, routinely agree that the world is run by Lizardmen.
You might be feeling smug, but you shouldn’t. Back here in what still passes as the United Kingdom, we have the identical percentage of conspiracy nutters in action, as they do in Germany, France, China, or wherever else you choose to go. From Aids being a plot designed by the CIA to kill of the gay community, to aliens building Stonehenge, via Paul McCartney being dead, and Big Pharma knowing, but withholding, the cure for cancer, they are always with us. Most are pretty harmless, like Megan Markle being a robot or Finland not actually existing, whilst others are, like Holocaust denial, are anything but.
Released from our isolation at last, I went to a couple of shops this morning, and, outside one, got behind a woman who refused to wear a mask because ‘it was all a conspiracy to keep the likes of us down’. When I asked her who was the beneficiary of the conspiracy, she sniffed: ‘you know; them,’ and then shot a non-specific glance northwards in the direction of the South Downs National Park offices. This pleased me more than it should have, as my own experience of the National Park hierarchy is that they couldn’t conspire to organize a bike crash, much less develop a horrible global pandemic.
Cheekily, I asked her if she agreed with me that the Hadron Collider had been put in place to open the gates of hell, and that Shiva the Destroyer had designed it to fast-track us in bent space time to our ultimate destination. Like a child being shown an in comprehensible conjuring trick, she blinked at my idiocy.
A minute later, she had been sent spinning out of the shop for not wearing a mask, and I got the last four croissants.
Whilst I was eating said croissant at home a few minutes later, a dark shadow passed over me in the form of an article in yesterday’s paper about a new hi-tech ‘Wellness Toilet’ that has been developed in Japan, and which will tell you, as a result of your visit, all your vital signs, from pulse to blood pressure all the way up to your likelihood of dying quite soon from something quite horrible. An app stores up all the stats, and then presumably sends alerts to you at the worst possible times to explain the time-bomb that you are metaphorically sitting on. The very thought of the things that it would find out about me, that I don’t even want me or my doctor to know, brings me out in a muck sweat.
As Boris has taken to saying us at press conferences, ‘I have to be level with you’. The very last thing I want from that hitherto most private moment of my day is the anxiety associated with what might be discovered about me by the various chips and meters whirring away inside the Wellness Toilet. Our ordered lives consist of things we have to know, things we come to know, things we strive to know and, most importantly, things we absolutely don’t want to know, which, in my case, consists of anything to do with the inner workings of eighty or so kilos held together by my two square metres of skin. I mean, when it saw what I weighed, would it throw a coded lock onto the biscuit tin in the larder? When it detected how much whiskey I had consumed the night before, would it immobilize the car? Even as you read this, the Japanese government is introducing the ‘Japan Toilet Challenge’ in time for the Olympic Games, which announces itself as a ‘multi-faceted campaign to use lavatories to better humanity’, and, if that’s not a conspiracy, I don’t know what is.
In the 22,295 days I have been on this planet, I have changed and adapted as well as I can to the world around me in all sorts of ways, but there are limits.
And when the Lizardmen in Kokura prefecture start making my loo think for itself, the writing is on the wall.
They’ll be telling me Elvis is dead next.
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