Hello again, and welcome to June's edition of The Autolycan. After last month's revelations about Macbeth and Leif Erikson, something more homely this time, and an alarming story from the Guardian about the consequences of an untidy house. Beware, it could happen to you. Hope you like it, and do please share if you do.
I'm off to give this whole place a deep clean.
I'm off to give this whole place a deep clean.
A CLEAN
SWEEP
A man has
been sent to jail after failing to keep his home tidy
The
Guardian
If only I'd known, when the kids were young, that it was a criminal
offence. If only I'd been able to crook a beckoning forefinger,
summon them to the paternal presence, and demand that bedrooms be
returned at the very least to a condition where it was possible to
detect where walls stopped and floors began without having to bring
in ground penetrating radar. If only I'd had sanctions available
when I came home - during the teenage years - to find an entire
network of PCs, laptops, random hard drives, keyboards and all manner
of mysterious electronic gubbins all linked together and ensnaring
the whole house in a treacherous web of tripwires and booby traps.
If only I could have cited both the precise law that was being broken
and how order was to be restored; failing which I could have
threatened to dial up their most feared police hotline – the one
which scrambles the alpha males of the Now Look Here, There's Bloody
Cables Trailing Everywhere, One Of Us'll Break Our Bloody Necks
Squad.
Suppose I'd had the option, failing obedience to these - my most
reasonable of parental demands - of summoning the Old Bill and
watching as they screamed up in a tumult of klaxons and flashing
blues. I could - couldn't I? - have basked in that smug self
righteousness which would have come as trained police negotiators
eventually coaxed them out of the house, banged on the bracelets and
carted them off for an eventual appointment with Lord Widgery or some
similarly enlightened dispenser of justice.
But of course I never did any of these things. I like to think that
fatherly love trumped everything. Perhaps it did, but was it also
that a call to the boys in blue would have resulted in a return to an
unnaturally silent and accusing house, which I would then have had to
tidy myself for fear of being next on Regan and Carter's hitlist?
There's no justice.
But banged up for being untidy? Which of us is safe? Who's next for
the menacing knock on the 3am door? 'Master Autolycus, you are
charged that contrary to pretty much every section of the
Ragamuffins, Draggletails and Tatterdemalions Act (1842) you did
wilfully and with malice aforethought.....'
And
in any case, weren't some of the giants of the age famously untidy?
Wasn't it Einstein himself - whose desk was a glorious, chaotic
jumble of clutter – who posed the question 'If a cluttered desk is
a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?'
I'm glad the kids never learnt that one. But suppose the untamed
wilderness of his office had proved too much for his charlady who had
shopped him to the elite This Place Looks Like A Bomb's Hit It Force.
One look at the state of his desk and they'd have smelt an easy
result - 'real bonus for the clean-up rate here, lads' - no point him
arguing that he was on the very brink of solving the most fundamental
secrets of the universe and would be able to give them a precise and
definitive value for E just as soon as he'd worked out what MC2
was,
only it was a bit tricky doing it by long multiplication, it took a
lot of paper and that was probably why the old bat had turned
mutinous in the first place. No, he'd have fretted away his time in
the cooler, and we'd have had to wait for some other prodigy (Brian
May? Brian Cox? Why are they all called Brian and play in rock
bands?) to come up with relativity and the Big Bang.
Mind, there might have been certain advantages – the
GPS system in your car owes more than a little to Einstein, as do the
ones in HGVs which strand them down country lanes from time to time,
or – occasionally – lure them onto beaches. Mrs Autolycus and I
were in Swansea once when ours waved a bright yellow flag across its
screen and announced sullenly that it was lost. It had, it said, no
bloody idea where it was and we'd have to sort it out ourselves.
Either it was confused by the Welsh road signs – and why wouldn't
it be? - or Swansea has yet to be recognised as part of the globe by
the good folk at Tom Tom. We'll just have to hope that all will be
well when they introduce Dai Dai. Or perhaps Blod Blod.
What's more, if Albert's head hadn't been spinning with
ideas about warping space-time thereby paving the way for the warp
drive - 'No, no, straight up, it's dead simple; look, you just kind
of twist them together like, and then you can travel through time,
down wormholes, all that; look, it's not difficult, it's not bloody
rocket science!' - well, in that event Captain Kirk and Mr Scott
would probably have been stuck with a noisy old two-stroke combustion
engine, and it would have taken them all seven series and thirteen
films to coax the Starship Enterprise the first few miles out of its
spaceport. At least we wouldn't have had Scotty looking anguished
and announcing that he 'canna change the laws of physics' – which
is arguably what Einstein did do. Like any mechanic Scotty would
have had to perfect the art of shaking his head and sucking his teeth
simultaneously, whilst muttering 'Dear, oh dear, oh dear. Which
clown d'you get to do this then? Course, it'll all have to come out.
Crankshaft's completely buggered. Probably looking at about a grand
for a new one, son. Not much demand for starship crankshafts, see,
bangs the price up no end. Then there's the VAT......'
Lagging a little behind Albert in his grasp of
relativistic astrophysics and cosmology, but with some $50 billion
squirreled away in his piggy bank way out in front when it comes to
personal wealth, sits Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg's desk is every
bit as cluttered as Einstein's was, possibly with less justification
in his case since he's got all that technology which is supposed to
help. One of the very few things which Mark and I have in common is
that we've both found out that it doesn't.
But just imagine a world deprived of Facebook after its
founder had been hauled off by law enforcement to kick his heels in
some miserable State Penitentiary, and all because his house was a
bit of a mess. Not only does it bear thinking about; it sort of
grows on you, doesn't it? Without Facebook, you'd have to go
somewhere else for endless pictures of someone else's tedious meals
and heartwarming videos of cute kittens (not all that difficult,
admittedly.)
And
if we might not have been spared the selfie stick altogether by
Zuckerberg's incarceration, there must surely be fewer of them in a
Facebook-less world, to the dismay of those stick manufacturing
moguls who control what is now a multi-million dollar industry
worldwide, but to the delight of those of us who would prefer to
choose for ourselves the time and place at which we are to be struck
in the face - mostly by someone filming a 360°
panoramic selfie -
always assuming we have to be struck in the face at all. Personally,
I wouldn't lock Zuckerberg up on the grounds of his incorrigible
untidiness, but because Facebook encourages the production of of a
device – the selfie stick - which, according to the Daily
Telegraph,
is now responsible for more deaths a year than shark attacks. I found
this hard to believe, so checked it out. I found a sad procession of
people who'd met their end taking ill-advised selfies on a train
track with a train advancing from behind – with unhappily
predictable consequences. (Even more depressing though were those
confident few who posed for a grinning selfie while pointing a gun
to their own heads, and – yes, you've guessed it – contrived to
press the wrong thing. Really.)
Einstein, Zuckerberg. And don't even get me started on
the equally slovenly Mark Twain and where we'd be without all those
quotes beloved of motivational speakers and management gurus since
they make for an easy presentation which doesn't need much
preparation. Of course, I never went in for that sort of thing
myself, on the grounds that it's better to keep your mouth closed and
let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
(Oh, was that Twain? Really?)
But given that slovens, like other groups in prison, are
quite likely to come out worse than they went in – with all that
this implies for national squalor – perhaps we've got this wrong
and need to think again. Perhaps it's not so much the super-slobbish
we need to worry about as the obsessively clean and tidy. With a bit
of imagination I'm sure we could come up with a range of punishable
offences that would see them confined to the slammer in no time.
Infringing the Changing Bedsheets When You Did It Last Month (Unless
Perhaps It Was The Month Before) Act. Failure to abide by the Well,
It Looks Clean Enough To Me Regulations. Tidying up frantically
before relatives come to stay, contrary to the provisions of the
Tidying Up Frantically Before Relatives Come To Stay (Prohibition)
Order. What's more, supply them with mop and bucket, broom and
duster and they'll have the prisons spruced up in a jiffy.
It makes a lot more sense, and it's a sobering
experience to look back and realise that young as they were the kids
got it right and I got it wrong. They're not daft now and they
weren't then. No doubt they saw creativity, exploration, adventure
where I saw mess and muddle. Intuitively, they saw the chance to
stretch themselves without – like the chap in the headline –
themselves doing a stretch. I guess I owe them an apology. Maybe
it's time to wipe the slate clean.
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