A lucky bottle of milk

Do you make your own luck?

Saved by a whisker

This morning I was overtaking a huge lorry in the dark when suddenly there appeared in front of me a cyclist with no lights. No time to brake, swerve not an option, I guess I just trusted to luck. It turned out there was a whisker between me and the truck on one side and me and the cyclist on the other. Fortune had smiled on us.

Picture I took this morning of the cross section of a recently-felled tree

For 84 years I feel I have been walking a tightrope from which at any moment a chance misstep or a fluke breeze might have plunged me into oblivion. I reckon my existence to date has stretched over at least 733,152 hours- that’s a hell of a lot of missed opportunities for the Grim Reaper, a huge expanse of time during which I have kept under the radar of implacable mortality. Not that the Pale Rider hasn’t tried from time to time but either He is not as ept as I imagined or He, too, has been cursed by misfortune.

Can’t help thinking of the old joke: A parson and a country squire go shooting grouse. The squire fires and misses. “Missed the bugger,” he curses. This happens several times. Eventually, the parson tells him to clean up his language as “the Lord on high will be most displeased.” At that moment a flash of lightning strikes the parson dead and a thunderous voice calls out “Missed the bugger!”

Beginning at the beginning.

“The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?” Richard Dawkins

Life, I realize, is a privilege, not a right. I am the product of the coming together of countless coincidences, all of which were the result of a concatenation of hundreds of millions more stray concurrences. Remove any one of these zillions of contingencies and I would not be here. Nothing can be taken for granted.

Your life depends on the courting of countless people in the Middle Ages, the survival of your distant Ice Age ancestors against the stalking whims of a saber-toothed tiger, and, if you go back even further, the mating preferences of chimpanzees more than 6 million years ago. Brian Klaas

I will not say any more about my origins except that for a long time it struck me as madness that, in the darkest days of the war for Britain, when the country was threatened with subjugation to Nazi rule, people in London were saying “What shall we do? Let’s have a baby. It’ll probably grow up in a nightmarish world of evil but let’s go for it.” Then I found out that procreating was actually regarded as a patriotic thing to do- “One in the eye for Hitler”- an act of defiance born of an optimism that if enough decent people produced enough presumably decent offspring, the world might be OK. Far from comforting me, though, this intimidated me- would I be able to shoulder the tremendous burden that had been placed on me of growing up to be a decent person?

War and peace

The world had endless opportunities to rid itself of me during the War. I understand I operated a one child early warning system and would rush into our London garden when I heard the V2 missiles coming and shout “Mum, mum, doodlebug come!” (She wasn’t my mum, of course, but that’s another story.) Eighty years later, this skill still comes in handy when alerting those around me to an incoming mosquito.

On another occasion, I was told that one night while we were in the underground shelter, our house was reduced to rubble. We emerged in the morning to find a bottle of milk on the step unscathed. I felt I had a lot in common with that bottle of milk.

I might not have lasted much longer, as around the age of 5, when I was at a remote boarding school run by pacifists, fate was presented with two opportunities which it ultimately scorned. If the pebble thrown by the son of Scotland’s best known poet had been a little larger, his muscles stronger or his intentions more lethal, I might have suffered more than temporary concussion. There was certainly more violence in this hotbed of pacifism than I had encountered before. On another occasion, if I had got to the bottle of what I thought was orangeade before the Headmaster’s daughter, I might have drunk a bit more than she did and not lived to tell the tale. For some unknown reason, the Grim Reaper seemed to have proved more playful than severe.

Tempting the dark angel

For many years, fate had better things to do than concern itself with the existence of a fairly cosseted youngster who nimbly avoided the panoply of infectious diseases that struck down many of my generation. To be fair, I did not present it with too many opportunities, though my solo train journeys from about the age of 8 and my habit of wandering off into the woods on my own would have been easy targets. But the Flying Scotsman never came off the rails and the only monsters I met in the woods were ones that lived in my own head.

I made up for this parsimony with open-hearted generosity from my early twenties on, riding my luck outrageously as well as a variety of motorbikes on and off for about 60 years. The first time: never have been on one before, and far too well lubricated by French wine, I set off in the dark to ride from Albi to Toulouse, missed a bend, ploughed through a funfair and came out on the road I had just left.

Doing the ton up on the M25: my schoolfriend Robbie had tried this and his tyre had burst. Mine didn’t.

Doing an unsignalled right turn on a busy Thai road and feeling the rush of air as a car swerved round me. Life and death kept apart by a millisecond, milligramme or millimetre. I finally gave up two wheel transport last year when I was made painfully aware that I had tempted providence to the point where it find might it impossible to resist any further.

Other events on my travels could easily have landed me at the pearly gates. Getting lost on my own in the Sahara without food or water. The group of Touareg tribesmen might not have taken that route to return from market. A hazardous jeep trip over perilous mountain tracks during curfew hours in Colombia with a driver who regularly mistook the accelerator for the brake. Strolling along an idyllic Thai beach when a mischievous macaque monkey decided to lob a coconut down on me. All instruments of fate who, thanks to a chance decision, an unconscious impulse or a wayward aim failed to carry out their employer’s bidding.

Bad luck as well as good resides in cockles and coconuts

If Desdemona hadn’t dropped that handkerchief.

If Caesar had not decided to postpone reading the schedule of Artemidorus or if Gertrude hadn’t fancied a cup of wine when she watched the duel.

Throughout history, the humble and the mighty have been reduced to lifeless skin and bones by a loose screw, a flowing scarf, a mistimed baton.

If a short-sighted eagle had not mistaken Aeschylus’s bald head for a rock; if Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s driver hadn’t taken a wrong turn and the assassin made the same mistake; if the crew of the Titanic had not kept the binoculars in a locked chest. If the officer with the key had remembered to hand it over before going off on leave.

"In the end, the mountain decides who will climb and who will not. You can do everything right and still get wiped out."
(Krakauer, reflecting on the 1996 Everest disaster

"I was lucky. That’s all there was to it. Lucky, lucky, lucky. I have tried since then to persuade myself that there was some divine intervention, but I cannot." Roald Dahl

So are you powerless against luck, as Dahl believes, or do you make you own luck?

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.
(All's Well that Ends Well, 1.1.209)

Cobwebs and bicycles

It has been as if at every moment I have found myself at a crossroads with a cobweb-like tangle of paths and I more or less blindly stumble onto one, not knowing whether it will lead up a mountain or trip me up and hurtle me over a terrifying precipice.

Everything that happens is a multiple pile-up of actions, reactions, impulses and happenstances, a miraculous concatenation of disparate pieces from long lost jigsaw puzzles, a tumultuous discord of notes from every piece of music ever imagined. Death always a whisker away from owning the chaos.

And what is luck? Is it pure random chance or some sort of cosmic plan? Is life a half-cooked minestrone, made with no recipe and random ingredients? Is “randomness” really “noise” from which no signal can be extracted, because we don’t know the properties of the particles that a given measured particle will be associated with in its future? Will chaos theory in cahoots with physics and mathematics one day eliminate the random, exposing the underlying patterns, interconnectedness, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals, and self-organization? Or is this just a more sophisticated manifestation of apophenia?

So, one other way the near encounter with the cyclist this morning was lucky. It triggered these thoughts on luck and how I had probably used up more of it in my life than I deserved.

Luck is a very thin wire between survival and disaster, and not many people can keep their balance on it. Hunter S. Thompson