Hurry, hurry! Only eight billion years left to extinction! Our solar system will be transformed by the ageing sun before coming to a spectacular end in about eight billion years or so. I’m particularly fond of those words “about” and “or so.”
Will there be fireworks? Extinction parties with no hangover the morning after? Sign me up! I’m just as relieved as you are that I’m not going to be living some 8 billion years from now. Or so. At least I don’t think I will.
Everything depends on our place in history, doesn’t it? Sometimes history itself can be altered depending where people are. If the police hadn’t been several hours late arriving at a house in Shanghai in 1921, they could have arrested the entire communist party, who took over the country 28 years later. China today might have been very different if one police officer hadn’t gone back just before the raid to pick up his warrant card. I don’t think he would have bothered these days.
In more recent times, during the worst of the Covid panic, the Pandemic Response Committee was referred to — by its members, no less — as the Stable Door Group. You see what they did there? It was sort of like one of those government inquiries whose final report has been written before the inquiry panel meets. Still, they usually meet in pleasant air-conditioned luxury to discuss things like global warming and third-world poverty.
Luck — that fickle friend — also plays a part in human misery at times. Check the midges/mosquito/military/salmonella situation before travelling to the Highlands of Scotland/Los Angeles, the most mosquito-infested city in America/North Korea/any restaurant of your choice in Mexico City. You are lucky, travelling to any of those locations, if your boat to Skye or flight into danger is cancelled.
People often like to warn us of unlucky things to avoid. This unwanted advice usually begins with the words, “You won’t need me to tell you — ” before they proceed to tell you. Recently someone counselled me that it was too late to learn to play the bagpipes, “as many elderly gentlemen sometimes mysteriously do.” At least he called me a gentleman, I was thinking, before he added, “No one would ever do that if he expected to be doing it for long.”
I only wish I had thought to remind him that a gentleman is a man who can play the bagpipes, but doesn’t. But just my luck, that particular riposte slipped my mind, what’s left of it.
David Aitken
