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The small gap between certainty and the opposite

It’s a funny old world we live in. Yesterday I travelled by train into central London to lunch with some old mates who on the face of it have nothing more in common than a past in the sense that we all went to the same school at roughly the same time.

At least that’s one way of looking at it.

Another is that in fact we’re all mates of a particular member of our group who some years ago came up with the wheeze of old boys of our school meeting for a two-hour curry lunch in a particular restaurant – without invitations, reminders, ceremony or indeed sanction if any of us fail to show – every time there’s a Friday the 13th in a month.

The concept results in some weird situations.

One lives one’s life against a background of knowing that that it’s “on”, whether you either register the date in any particular relevant month and/or you then make it to the venue or not.

On one occasion – I was told yesterday – as many as twenty-six attended.

On another, my brother took up a position on our usual base table shortly before the call time of 1.00pm, i.e. that which is one away from the far left-hand corner of the room. Some twenty minutes later – nobody in the meantime having joined him – he rang our “team leader” on his mobile to check where the hell he was.

After a bit of static – and amid some background noise – he received the answer.

At that moment he was in a bar behind a stand at the Newlands cricket ground in Cape Town, South Africa, for an England Test Match.

Ten minutes later my brother was on his way back to work.

Yesterday’s gathering comprised eight of us in total, one of them a chap who for the life of me I cannot recall from my time at the school even though the name was vaguely familiar and  I must have been aware of him because he was a contemporary, albeit two years younger.

A gap of fifty years in coming across each other can do that to you. Mind you, of course, when you’re a teenager, two years’ difference might as well be two decades.

Inevitably the Coronavirus epidemic came up, almost from the start as we all joshed about whether – as a mode of greeting – we should shake hands, wash our hands, fist or elbow pump, or even pump buttocks. Our leader switched between the last two of the above.

My two-years-younger unfamiliar pal had some standing in the subject because he currently resides in China although he had been most recently in the UK since 8th December.

I can pass on to Rusters today that in his rather authoritative voice he reported that the current crisis had its origin in a Chinese street market in which a bat – a species which carries in its body at least six viruses at any one time – had taken a bite out of an armadillo-type creature called a pangolin, popular in China because of their scales and meat (in regional medicine circles used for treating the likes of deafness, hysteria in women, excessive anxiety and quite probably male sexual potency) which are apparently the most illegally-trafficked wild animals in the world.

Well, I guess you live and learn.

The aspect of the current crisis that I find most notable is its capacity to remind us all of how tenuous are those things that we ordinarily regard as the fundamentals of human society and existence.

Which, when you think about it, or at least when I do, in itself may be no bad thing.

Every day we wake up and face the world assuming that the toaster is going to work; that water is going to come out of the tap; that the newspaper shop across the road will be open; that the 7.48am to Waterloo is – if not actually on time – going to come by at some point to pick us up after we get to the station; and – of course – that, once our working day is done, everything when we get back home is broadly-speaking going to be how it was when we left it that morning.

It doesn’t stop there.

We rest easy in the assumption that the sports team we follow is going to play its game next Saturday and that – on a personal domestic level – if they play their cards right, one day our kids will go on from school to university and then into half-decently-paid jobs and then maybe have a family.

Indeed, this very thought/fact is half the reason that we go to work and then skimp, save and plan for the future ourselves.

But supposing we wake up one day and find that we are at war with Germany – or that the Martians have landed – or that overnight the Arctic ice cap has completely melted and the Thames Barrier is under three feet of water … or even that some strange unknown virus has broken out in a far-off land and that within the past fortnight every bar of soap and every handwash sanitiser dispenser has been panic-bought from the now-empty shelves of our local Sainsbury’s by herds of silly people who have believed what the ‘fake news’ hordes on social media have just made up?

You never know, it might just happen.

 

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About Henry Elkins

A keen researcher of family ancestors, Henry will be reporting on the centenary of World War One. More Posts