Leith - Sods law: why life always lands butter side down

First published in paperback in Great Britain in 2009 by Atlantic

Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright Sam Leith 2009

The moral right of Sam Leith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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Atlantic Books

An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

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www.atlantic-books.co.uk

First eBook Edition: November 2009

ISBN: 978-1-848-87439-8

Sam Leith was born in 1974. After a long series of other misfortunes, he found himself living in Archway, expecting a child, and out of a job. Before that he was the literary editor of the Daily Telegraph. He is now a freelance journalist. This is his second book. The first did terribly.

For my father the most accident-prone man

I know, and without whom

Tragedyis when I cut my finger.Comedyis
when you walk into an open sewer and die.

Mel Brooks

The devil farts in my face once more.

When Edmund Blackadder spoke those words, he spoke for us all. He spoke for every explorer with his map upside down, for every air-traffic controller suddenly receiving Magic FM through his headphones, for every astronomer whose new planet turned out to be a bit of bran-flake on the eyepiece of his telescope.

In this age of doubt, fewer and fewer of us are prepared to believe that some supernatural agency gives a toss about our fate. Yet a belief in Sods Law the blind perversity of the inanimate is everywhere. Search your soul. You have that belief. So did your ancestors, and so will your descendants.

If your descendants, that is, havent died out or been herded into a cellar by cannibals as a direct result of the global apocalypse. Look about you, man. If ever the pale rider named Sod was in evidence, its in the Year of Our Lord 2009, in the disaster-not-waiting-long-enough-to-happen that is Britain.

Ten years ago, we were on top of the world. We werent at war with anyone, everyone had pots of money and everyone was sharing it about. It was great. One hundred per cent mortgage, sir? Come out from your cardboard box, put down that purple tin, and sign here. Yes, an X will do fine. Welcome to the property-owning democracy.

People started selling each other credit swap derivatives and complexly securitized futures and hedges and God alone knows what else. Instead of asking what the bloody hell they thought they were doing and while they were at it how come Iceland, which has nothing but fish and an old Bjrk album by way of assets, was richer on paper than the entire continent of Asia we all went merrily along with it.

In due course, it turned out that all this money was completely made up: people were buying and selling worthless assets with imaginary money that they didnt own in the first place. And then to the bafflement of simple-minded souls like myself who imagined that with a roughly stable amount of goods and services in the world, it cant be possible for EVERYONE to get poor at the same time everyone got poor at the same time. Except for the man who owns Dominos Pizza.

We might as well have put a collection of chimps in charge of the global economy. At least they would have taken their bonuses in PG Tips.

Ah, I hear you say. Fortunately, we have the gold reserve to prop up our ailing currency. Except we bloody dont, because while he was Chancellor of the bloody Exchequer, Gordon bloody Brown sold 60 per cent of it for $275 an ounce aka pottage, one mess of while its price was at a twenty-year low. At the time of writing, gold is selling at $930 an ounce.

With a mind like that, it could only have been a matter of time before he became Prime Minister. But surely, I hear you say, nobody would vote an eejit like that into a position of power. And how right you are. Unfortunately, they didnt bloody need to.

I had a nice job, too. I used to be the Literary Editor say it with capitals of a respectable newspaper. Writers were nice to me at parties. People used to pretend they were interested in my opinions. Publicists pretended to find me attractive. Now I can barely get arrested.

No sooner had I decided that I was secure in my job, and had sorted myself out with a stonkingly enormous mortgage, a pregnant girlfriend, had spent most of my savings on a diamond ring and was halfway through planning the wedding, than I lost my job.

Blah blah blah recession blah blah letting you go blah blah blah heres a black bin liner for your stuff can we have it back when youve finished? was roughly how the conversation went.

Brilliant. Fortunately, I had something to fall back on. I had about 40,000 worth of shares, left to me by my late grandfather, God rest him.

Shares in HBOS.

So Im now reduced to writing toilet books to keep my family from the poorhouse. Not that theres much chance of even that working. The last toilet book I wrote was a dismal failure in hardback and when it was republished, completely redesigned and under an entirely different title, graduated to being a dismal failure in paperback.

And this from the publisher that sold a gazillion copies of Life of Pi: a perfectly absurd book about some kid named after a swimming pool sharing a boat with a tiger! I dont mind telling you Ive changed publishers.

But I digress.

The fact is, Sods Law appears in all cultures at all times. Socrates talked about the general cussedness of things. His observation would have chimed with that of his near contemporary Zeno, who committed suicide in 262 BC and who can blame him? after stubbing his toe.

The Anglo-Saxons said wyrd bith ful ard which, freely translated, means: If theres a spare arrow flying around this battlefield you can bet your damn kingdom its going to end up in my eye.

The French, who were the beneficiaries on that occasion, call it la loi de lemmerdement maximum or, occasionally, la loi de la tartine beurre. The Germans use the phrase die Tcke des Objekts.

Specialized instances are adduced and their statements refined and elaborated. The Peter Principle, for example, describes the aggregational effect of Sods Law in the work-place (in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to the level of his incompetence). Muphrys Law states, correctly, that anything you write criticizing a piece of proofreading will contain a spelling mistake. Other corollaries and offshoots, such as the Buggeration Factor or Finagles Law, continue to be the subject of detailed scholarly disputes.

Whatever its guise, we all know it when we see it. Its founding principle, the axiom from which all the others proceed, is this: if anything can go wrong, it surely will.

Sods Law is glossed with three citations in the Oxford English Dictionary. They are from an October 1970 issue of the New Statesman, from a September 1978 issue of the New Scientist, and from the July 1980 issue of SLR Camera magazine. Only the third bears quotation.