I’ve long wanted to write a book called The Science Of Sod’s Law.
You’re probably familiar with that annoying everyday fact of life. Sod’s law, popularly known as Murphy’s Law in other parts of the world postulates, with no little glee, that, if anything can go wrong, then it most certainly will.
Studies have already been made of the more familiar aspects of Sod’s Law. Why a piece of buttered toast will, for example, always land on its buttered side if it is dropped. Which it always does. Unfailingly. There is, of course, an argument against that particular example known as Mother’s Law which is curt and to the point.
‘I told you to put that on a plate’.
End of argument. No, the versions of Sod’s Law that fascinate me are the less well known ones. Take, for example;
If you walk past a fence that has a sign on it saying ‘Danger, This Fence Is Electrified’ then you will automatically and with no regard to your personal safety, reach out and grasp hold of the afore mentioned fence.
Or…
If the surface area of your entire ground floor equates to 1500 pristine and beautifully carpeted square feet then you will tread on the one piece of Lego that has been left on it as you navigate your way through your home in your bare feet during a power cut at 2am in the morning.
Another example is the very real fact that, if you want to attract as many people as possible, most of whom will have cameras and other recording devices to your erstwhile secret location, then you must post a sign up on the gate that states Keep Out
You couldn’t make this muddy field more inviting now if you tried (Jaggery/geograph)
A Keep Out! sign is nectar to those of a curious nature. People picnic by them, set up tents in their shadow and mount candlelit vigils. We can’t resist them. Why, we ask, must we keep out? Just what is going on in there?
The sort of wanton curiousity that led me to write my book Keep Out! Britain’s Forbidden Places (Amberley Publishing, 2021).
It started with me reckoning that the US Government have got it all wrong with Area 51.
How easy would it be to keep Dreamland out of the public eye and, in doing so, remove any and all of the countless conspiracy theories that surround it, if they’d just littered the perimeter with a few rusting parts from a John Deere tractor, some discarded tins of Budweiser and a closed down petrol station, sorry, gas station, complete with a screen door that is forever rattling back on its hinges in the unforgiving desert breeze.
No signs, no barbed wire, no patrolling guards or mysterious black helicopters forever prowling its perimeter. They needn’t have bothered with any of that. If only they’d thought about it and dumped some 21st century detritus about the place.
As good as an official invitation to wander inside and have a poke about (Shutterstock)
Had they done, no-one would have been the slightest bit interested in an otherwise obscure tract of Nevada desert and they could all have got on with their experiments with time travel and reverse engineering alien space craft without being bothered by anyone.
But no. They had to make it look like someplace where strange things happen. And on a regular basis. Which meant that, as inevitably as night follows day, everyone immediately wanted to know just what the hell is going on up there? Because the more that someone, anyone, tries to cover something up, the more we want, we demand, to know everything there is to know about it-despite the fact that there are people out there who are absolutely determined that we don’t.
Because our natural instinct, if we are told not to do something is to get out there and do it anyway. It’s programmed into us as children and, for many, it simply refuses to go away.
Hence the twin fascination with the secret, the forbidden, the unknown and the exclusive. The more secret something is made, the more forbidden any access or information regarding to it becomes, the more unknown and mysterious it is…the more we want to know about it.
I wanted to include RAF Sculthorpe in the book. Primarily because I’d heard, from more than one good source, that the main runway there is not only kept in pristine condition but remains one of the longest in Europe and was, during the time of the Space Shuttle programme, mooted as a possible landing place for NASA’s orbital research vehicle if it needed to return to earth in a hurry.
A space shuttle pilots view of RAF Sculthorpe’s main runway (Chris/geograph)
Was this a true story? Or a tall one, conspired and developed in the depths of The Running Horse pub on a particularly quiet Thursday night?
I asked NASA. Finding an e mail address for them that worked was a bit of a challenge, but I got there in the end and asked them the question.
It was swiftly acknowledged. But I got no answer. I waited and waited and waited and waited and, eventually, the book was published without any reference to RAF Sculthorpe in it.
Then, finally, NASA deigned to come back to me. Their reponse was priceless.
“We can neither confirm or deny this rumour”.
Brilliant.
Because, obviously, that means it must have been true.