The Immutable Law of Sod

The wind has changed direction here, bringing us weather from the cooler Atlantic to the west, as opposed to violent storms dumping half the Sahara desert on my car from the south. It’s still very warm, but the breezes convert the sun from sex that’s too hot to handle into gentle kisses that leave the skin tingling pleasantly by the early evening. The ascent to the bedroom is not quite the journey into Hell it was two days ago.

After a day spent working in the garden and generally tidying up after the family invasion, I took a shower and then put on a fresh, white teeshirt. I remembered the leftover pichet of red wine from last night’s supper party, chilling in the fridge. A lot of the young terroir wines down here that sell in boxes benefit enormously from being chilled. In turn, I benefit from drinking them, so at 6.03 pm this evening I took out the pichet, the neck of which I’d stuffed with a cork the previous evening. I located an old-fashioned corkscrew and pulled out the stopper, at which point red wine sprayed out all over the crisp new teeshirt.

The pattern thus created is so beautifully composed, I’m seriously thinking of spraying more wine on it, and passing it off casually as a designer number. But my point is, can there be a scientific basis for Sod’s Law? (Foreign Sloggers: Sod’s Law states that the one thing you don’t want to happen will happen when you most want it not to happen.)

Sod’s law says that the morning after you trim your fingernails, you need to get a thorn out of your thumb, and you can’t find the tweezers.

Sod’s law dictates that a maximum of one week after you throw away that old rubber washer, an electrical appliance episode will occur when the sole requirement is a rubber washer of the exact same magnitude of the one you threw away.

Have you ever noticed how, when you bring home some self-assembly furniture thing from Ikea, there’s always two wooden dowels and three Allen screws left after the assembly is complete? Some irresponsible folk throw them away. I never throw anything of a potentially solution-inducing nature away. You never know when that dowel might come in useful as the door spindle on a 19th century bit of French country furniture. (I write about this as one who knows the value of dowels in the curing of French country furniture door-wobbles).

The philosopher Arthur Koestler wrote a book called The Roots of Coincidence. I read it in my Twenties, and its rejection of Newtonian physics in favour of the potential alchemy of Einstein made a lasting impression on me. On balance, I think many of Koestler’s musings go nowhere; but I do agree with many of his observations about the difference between pure coincidence, and a quantum future we perhaps predict for ourselves.

“Be careful what you wish for” was one of my mum’s favourite maxims. It is the basis for my incurable habit of hoarding bits in my Odds & Sods Drawer. But while such attention to detail can alleviate the worst consequences of Sod’s Law, it cannot banish it.

Sod’s Law insists that the one piece of “YOU HAVE WON!” junk mail you tear up or delete is in fact the one offering unique access to a cheque for £65 billion. Sod’s Law demands that, when a plasterer tells you he can write scripts, you ignore him….and he turns out to be Paul Whitehouse. (This actually happened to a friend of mine).

And so it goes on. Is Sod’s Law merely a mild form of incipient paranoia? I don’t know. All I can tell you is that it exists, and it appears to be random – up to but not including the moment when you become convinced that, just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean that Sod’s Law isn’t out to get you.

Earlier at The Slog: Smoke signals about Murdoch, Osborne’s gdp figures, and the fracking fest