- Even criminal masterminds must find life a bit difficult at times.
I’m thinking of the ‘colossus of crime’ Flambeau, in the Father Brown books, who invented a portable pillar box and placed it on streets in quiet suburbs, hoping people would drop postal orders into it. A lot of trouble to go to, having to queue in a post office to obtain ten shillings. I’m guessing there were no CCTV cameras in Flambeau’s day, but even so the man wasn’t even a colossus of roads, far less of crime.
Flambeau was, however, ahead of his time in working out that people perform better when challenged — a useful attribute, when the world requires new vaccines. Many ‘exclusive’ commercial enterprises make their profits not by trying to attract customers but by seeming to turn them away. They create difficulties so that people feel motivated to overcome them.
A private club catering only to men over six feet tall? Some upwardly mobile applicants would submit to being stretched on a rack in order to duck through its door. An expensive restaurant open only on Thursday afternoon? The queue would start forming on Thursday morning, and just keep growing, without the need for a rack. Although lamb might be on the menu.
But we are all members of the same club now, whether we like it or not: membership is open to the whole human race. Coronavirus is the Great Leveller, and it is equally likely that a prince and a pauper (or a literary genius…) will be caught in its fatal embrace. Which is why cuddling has been frowned upon for some time, or almost always, in parts of Scotland.
‘Sceptre and crown must tumble down,’ wrote the poet James Shirley (who surely must have occasionally said to friends, “Don’t call me Shirley”) ‘there is no armour against fate.’ Except a double dose of vaccine followed by a booster, he might have added, if he hadn’t died of fright in 1666 during the Great Fire of London.
Further challenges now await us with the arrival of the new variant called Omicron, or ‘little o’. Personally, I would have called it “Oh No!”
Will we ever get our lives/economies/hairstyles back to normal? Should you start eating less and give up smoking entirely? (Although smoking can cure dead salmon.) One good piece of advice offered to me by my young niece, which I pass on to you for free: “Never read a pop-up book on giraffes, Uncle David, you might hurt your nose.”
The wisdom of the young. One club to which I no longer belong. And I’m not even six feet tall. Perhaps as time passes, I’ll start to grow on you, like a hasty haircut. Or Pinocchio’s nose.
