Sod's Law

We've all heard of Sod’s Law, but what exactly is it in practice? Once unkindly known as Murphy’s Law, we can recognise that it is in full operation against us when frustrating situations such as the following occur time and again no matter what we might do to avoid them. See if any of these are familiar to you: 

As a pedestrian, you arrive at the traffic lights just as they’re turning green and have to wait the full length of time for them to change back to red so you can cross. As a driver, you arrive at the traffic lights just as they’ve turned red and have to wait out the full change-over time before you can continue on your way. And you draw the short straw every time at the same bleedin' lights whether you’re on foot or at the wheel of a car. It's as if the law on mathematical probability ceases to function at that set of traffic lights and the law that provides that you should be held up for as long as possible whether you're walking or driving kicks in.

Uuuuuuuuuuuu!!

Still, as a pedestrian you leave the house in dry sunny weather and you’ve scarcely gone more that a hundred yards or so when the sun goes in, the clouds come out and the heavens open up to disgorge their load of water which inevitably soaks you to the core. The irony of your situation is compounded when just as you arrive back home, the rain dries up, the clouds part and the sun comes out! “Now why does this not surprise me”, you think.

Still as a driver, you arrive at a petrol station when it is chock-full of cars and have to wait ages in a queue till there is a vacancy at one of the pumps. Having filled up and paid inside, you re-emerge to behold a wilderness before you, not one single car on the forecourt - it is a vehicle-free petrol forecourt! You realise the queues at the pumps were there for your benefit and now that you’ve been served and cannot be further inconvenienced they’ve vanished as if by magic!

And yet still as a driver, you come out of your house to go to your parked car. Up to now the street has been quiet and relatively free of traffic, “too quiet”, you think. But now, as you get into your car to pull out into the road, the street has suddenly become the highway from hell. Every motor vehicle within a radius of a hundred miles seems intent on passing through your street, and at breakneck speed, and you find yourself stuck there at the kerbside for what seems like ages before you’re able to pull out. But even then, as you move out into the road, another car, inevitably a mean-looking offroader, has appeared as from nowhere within a nanosecond and is bearing down on you with homicidal intent. So you instinctively hit the gas and hare down the road like a man (or woman) possessed, at a suicidal pace, terrified you might slow down the driver from hell and he might kill you with his death-dealing machine!

I can't stand it anymore!

As a shopper you join a reasonable queue at a supermarket check-out desk which seems to be the most likely to move quickly, especially as it’s shorter than the others to either side of it, and are  surprised to find that just about every other check-out queue has moved on and on and on while yours has remained almost stationary due to some hiccup ahead. Even shoppers that joined another queue well after you have checked their groceries through and left the store while you’re still waiting to be served, with smoke fumes coming out of your ears!

As a cinema-goer you sit down somewhere that looks just right and then a group of yobs turn up at the last minute and sit behind you. They then proceed to indulge in a non-stop binge of burgers, chips, crisps, popcorn, chocolate bars, all washed down by various soft drinks, whilst pushing with their legs on the back of your chair. In between mouthfuls of fast food, they can’t stop yapping and laughing, with the result that you reluctantly decide to leave and come back to see the film another day in the hope you might have more luck then. But of course, as we all know, you won’t fare any better!

As a park-goer, you decide to go for a stroll in the park, but on entering the park you find a tranquil and relaxing haven has unexpectedly turned into some sort of kindergarten and fairground rolled into one, with kids on scooters and bikes everywhere, mothers with buggies, men with giant vicious dogs the size of a wolf, joggers brushing past you, ball-players launching footballs that uncannily hit you on the back of the head or land between your legs and trip you over. The commotion and the hazards are so great that you do an about-turn and return to the peace and quiet and safety of your home!

This is it, buster!

As a television viewer, whenever you turn the tv on to a channel that has commercial breaks, it’s always in a commercial break and always at the start of it so that you have to wait the maximum time possible and then when the commercials finish and the programme is resumed you find it wasn’t worth waiting for anyway! This may be repeated any number of times but it’s no use, Sod’s Law ensures that you land every time smack-bam in a commercial break that doesn’t want to end!

As a pub-goer you line up at the bar to give your order but it seems that wherever you choose to stand, the bartender is always somewhere else, and though you might switch around to occupy more advantageous points along the bar the bartender has already moved back to where you were before and you become a nervous wreck trying to determine where the bartender will be next so you can make a bee-line for them and get yourself noticed. When you’re finally served and gingerly make your way across a crowded saloon with a perilously overfull glass, a youth in a rush accidentally brushes past you causing you to lose your balance, let go of the drink and land face down on the shocking purple carpet in a puddle of ginger-beer (or whatever)!

As a customer in a bank, you’ve had to join a ridiculously long queue which was not joined by any other person behind you. When you’ve finally transacted your business, after a punishingly long time, and re-emerge into the street, rushing off to pick up your parked car before you receive a parking fine for going over the time, you arrive at your vehicle to see a parking ticket slapped on it for having exceeded the time by ten milliseconds and you note with bitter irony that the parking fine is greater than the cheque you paid into your bank account! Suicide is naturally not far from your thoughts but you content yourself with a few swear words!

Pass me a copy of The Sun, will you?

As a diner at a cheap café-cum-restaurant, you order your food and sit back to wait for it. You’ve ordered an English breakfast for lunch and a cup of tea. When the tea comes, it’s weak, milky and lukewarm and about as tasty as a sodden dishcloth, but you make the most of it and look forward to the meal. The food eventually arrives and it is soon apparent that the bacon is all fat and underdone, the sausages are burnt on one side and raw on the other, the yoke of the fried egg has coagulated and the white is like rubber, the grilled tomatoes have scarcely seen a flame and are sour, the toast has not felt the heat of a grill and has scarcely been introduced to butter, and the mushrooms are soggy and raw. Great!

Finally, you need to use public transport to go somewhere and you decide to go into the nearby Underground to catch a train. As you near the bottom of the escalator you hear your train pulling out of the station and realise you’ve missed it by a billionth of a second! The platform is now almost deserted but it’s not long before it fills up again and, with the train being late, the throng on the platform builds up so that by the time your train arrives it’s a mad Titanic-like scramble to get aboard and inevitably you end up standing after you’ve allowed pregnant mothers, geriatric codgers, women of all ages, priests and little children, to take a seat before you. Having stood for almost an hour with all the sitting commuters glued to their seats as though they were staying put just to spite you, everyone suddenly stands up and gets off one stop away from your destination. Hardly anyone gets on and now, as you survey rows of empty seats and are spoilt for choice, you stubbornly refuse to sit down because you’re a man (or woman) who’s been transfixed to the spot by uncontrollable anger and the mother of all frustrations!

Why the two-timing s.o.b!!

And so the run of bad luck goes on and on day after day. You soon realise that Sod’s Law is at its most vicious when you’re out and about and almost inactive when you’re in your own home, unless of course you hit upon a bad patch of Sod’s Law-induced bad luck which comes home with you and wreaks havoc with your domestic life. Suicide suddenly starts to look like the lesser of two evils and you hastily grab hold of the gun you had hidden in the bread-bin and shoot yourself through the head. Goodbye, cruel world… But no, there is no sound and no brain-shattering bullet to put you out of your misery - the thing you grabbed hold of was not a firearm but a French baguette and you’re still alive. Sod’s Law has thwarted you again!

Taking a tumble

The other day I fell down the stairs at home… again.

Well, when I say “fell down the stairs”, it would be more precise to say that I fell over on the stairs and as I began my precipitous trip down them I grabbed hold of a banister rail, almost wrenching my right arm from its socket, and as I pulled up short my left leg got wedged and twisted in between two banister rails. But it broke my fall; the question was, had it broken anything else?

As indicated above, it’s not the first time and I rather fear it might not be the last. On other occasions I was not fast enough to check my flight (no pun intended) and I careered down to the bottom of the staircase finishing with a nasty bump on my behind and usually bashing an arm, leg or even my head (or all three!) against the end banister rails, with minimum consequences other than bruises (physical and mental… hehhe).

Funnily enough, to judge by my injuries sustained this time round and paradoxical as it may appear, it would seem better to allow myself to bump my way down to the bottom of the stairs on my posterior as a sledge than to try and check my fall and risk dislocating an arm or a leg or both, as on this occasion. But I had no time to think and it was a reflex action on my part.

The fall is usually occasioned by my foot coming down too near the edge of a step and sliding off it. The result is easy to imagine. Had I been wearing shoes or been barefoot, instead of just in my socks, it might not have happened, as in both these cases there is more grip than with socks, but it can still happen and to be honest I don’t now recall what I had on my feet (if anything) the other times I fell. I could be talking a load of baloney.

Having sustained the fall and managed to free my left leg from the banister rails, it was time to assess the damage, so to speak: very painful right arm, especially at the shoulder and under the armpit; generalised pain in the left leg, especially around the toes and foot in general. I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t dislocated my arm but when I finally got back to my feet and went downstairs to make myself some tea (the reason for my taking to the stairs in the first place), although painful the arm was usable, the pain was not extreme, and I could handle objects with ease (as long as they were not too heavy). As for the leg, it appeared to have come out of it very well and it hurt only slightly, as was to be expected.

In the days that have followed, my right arm has got better and better and it is clear that the pain was just due to the sudden jolt it received when I tugged on it to break my fall. What has proved less satisfactory however, much to my surprise, is my left leg. For the last few days it has been ‘snapping’ or ‘clicking’ at the knee-joint, a painful occurrence, which happens in particular when I attempt to turn on it to change direction or with some other small manoeuvres, though strange to say it has not much affected my jogging where I make no sudden turning movements and where I get into a regular rhythm.

The clicking of the knee-joint and the twinge of pain it causes has diminished a bit but as yet it has not ceased, and so I wait to see if it decreases to nil or continues to give me trouble, at which time I will betake myself to the quack for further assessment. But, compared to the day after the accident, when my dodgy leg and bruised arm made it extraordinarily difficult to lift myself out of the bathtub without engaging in a complicated body manoeuvre, things have improved greatly. So we shall see.

This latest fall of mine, especially as I get older and no slimmer (rather the opposite!), has brought home to me the fragility of life and the realisation of how much more serious such a fall could be and that I have gotten off lightly again. But I really must not make a habit of it. With the death of my schoolmate George in 2008, and various other deaths around me in more recent years, I have become ever more aware of the inescapable end for which we’re all headed in one way or another. As such, however, I'm less willing to hasten such an end through sheer carelessness on my part. Anyway, I won’t pursue this - I’m getting too morbid and going off subject.

Some of the worst accidents happen in the home (I include one’s garden under this term), as we’re often told, and I can vouch for that. I’ve slipped in the kitchen and landed on my backside on the floor, I’ve fallen out of bed, capsized in a swivel-chair, and been tipped onto the floor as my bean-bag (yes, I’m rather partial to beanbags) collapsed in an amorphous heap. All of these were minor mishaps, little or no injury, and I survive to tell the tale. When my children were small and I younger (much younger), we used to have friendly fights and, believe me, they were probably much more dangerous than most mishaps I’ve had in recent years! The boys always thought I was pretending as I lay on the floor red in face, weak in limb, panting, unmoving, struggling to get my breath back, only to have them jump on me again and resume the tussle.

The garden too, where I often labour, is a source of dangers waiting to happen. There I have been more fortunate than in the house, probably for no other reason than that I spend much less time in the garden. That is not to say that I’ve not lost my balance on occasion and fallen in a flower-bed or, worse still, in the small conifers adorning the rock-garden, but these are rare. No, falling down the stairs, or partially down them, is my speciality and, if I’m not careful, will be my downfall in the literal sense! And of course, as we all know, the heavier you are (not bigger in my case), the harder you fall.

When I think of a fall down the stairs, inevitably a scary scene from the film Psycho comes to mind, where the hired detective is pushed down the stairs at the end of the movie and goes reeling back and back, arms flailing in the air, scary music playing, as we follow him in his backward fall to the bottom of the stairs where his fate is sealed in the worst possible way. My staircase is not so long nor is there scary music playing when I take my tumble and nor, so far at least, has any of my falls been fatal (otherwise how would I be writing this?!). But it does make me think and resolve to take more care as I move about the house, the garden, or wherever. Just the other day I heard of a builder, working without a safety harness, who fell just two and a half metres from scaffolding onto a hard floor and died on the spot. How? He landed on his head!