A Question of Scale

I was going to start this post by declaring last Friday night's tumble from my heels and consequent broken foot an act of God.  I thought this would appear frightfully à la mode, what with the Hawking and Dawkins tag team seizing control of the creationist ring.

You see, as I crumpled elegantly into the footwell of my Megane Scenic while a universe of hot, white pain exploded from the rough edge where physics meets biology in a singular, spectacular event of over-supination in three-and-a-half inch heels and expanded inexorably outwards sending pain into the furthermost reaches of my lower leg, I couldn't help but make connections.  One minute there was nothing, nada.  Then a whole world of pain was born. 

At first it seemed obvious to a blind man with no hands that this had to be the work of a flighty and capricious god, jealous of my shoes.  But once things had settled down to a manageable throb (gladiator sandals providing broken bones and compression in a perfect act of harmony) I realised: this wasn't the work of an omnipotent deity.  The closer I looked at things — and I was bent over double so I was as close as I could get before washing my foot with my tears — it was obvious I had a torsional deformation situtation. There were things like mass and height and gravity shaking down, with statistical probability loitering about like a serial killer at a crime scene.

C'mon.  Gods don't trouble themselves with that kind of shit.  Gods are busy.  They invent people to do that sort of stuff, people like Hawking.  He's not in a wheelchair by accident, y'know.  If you were a god, would you want one of your best minds running away and brain-draining into Buddhism?  Of course not.  You'd want to keep them where you could see them.

Gods need freedom to create; liberty to conjure, to manifest. They have notoriously short attention spans.  I mean, don't tell me the platypus is finished. 

  

The god responsible for the platypus just got bored and started on the narwhal.  Sure, you'll get the odd idiot-savant god who does, like, a really good line in cats, but on the whole they like to spread themselves thin.  Deities simply aren't completer/finishers.  If you need proof, look no further than evolution.

But gods are self-aware.  That's the trouble with omniscience, see?  You can't get away from anything, even yourself.  They know they're crap with numbers — they always give themselves a couple of arms and legs too many for a start — so they delegate all the box ticking, the pencil counting, matters of health and safety and good workplace practice, to the scientists.  And sometimes, if the geeks have tidied up the universe really well, the gods leave out something for them to, finger-quotes, discover.  Nothing too big — the whiff of a Higgs Boson, a rumour of M-theory — a god's equivalent to a packet of cheese and onion crisps, basically.   It's all very sweet; the scientists get to feel important but without feeling patronized. 

So, as my fourth metatarsal flexed and buckled at the whim of internal and external pressures, I knew I was not dealing with a random act of a higher being, I was dealing with physics and the mundane.  Blast and balls.

I love the idea of an 'act of God'.  I like its inclusion on home insurance forms.  What will they put instead, I wonder?  Now that Hawking and Dawkins have put their money on the table definitively declaring they don't believe in fairies, a little bit of home insurance has died.  An 'act of God' becomes an 'act of something-that-would've-happened-eventually-physics-permitting'.

(By the way, did I tell you I'm desperate for one of my chimneys to fall down?  Y'see, as a tenant I can wave my tenancy agreement in my landlord's face as he tots up the cost to his no-claims, and say with a rich, South African accent "Diplomatic immunity!" with a cold, smug sneer, much like Joss Ackland in Lethal Weapon II.)

So anyway, my thoughts naturally turned to limescale...

The previous tenants were obviously sluts when it came to a bit of basic housework.  There's a time and a place for sticky knobs, and on the cooker at Sunday lunchtime ain't one of 'em.  Furthermore, the Family Flyte had been in residence a fortnight before realising that the glass in the shower cubicle wasn't frosted, but rather rendered with limescale.

But not just any limescale.  This was titanium-based limescale.  It was as if the water involved had spent millennia trickling over a stealth bomber.  When I first took a scourer to it, the limescale laughed in my face.  Laughed.  The scourer disintegrated, leaving me feeling foolish and with a sense of burning revenge.

"A bottle of your finest limescale remover, good... er... woman?"  I ventured to the person of indeterminate tabard in the hardware shop.

The bottles before me looked frivolous, as if the manufacturers were targeting children in an attempt to corner the market in pre-teen acid attacks.  Not good enough, I thought,  my limescale would gargle this stuff like Lysterine.

"Do you have anything more... pH-ey?"  I looked casual, fondling the head of chicken salt-shaker.

The assistant looked me up and down, considering.  I returned its gaze with my most winsome smile. 

It seemed to come to a decision.

"You must tell no-one."

"Of course,"  I lied.

"You must take all proper safety precautions and keep it away from children."

"Of course,"  I lied again. 

And it produced a bottle, white and unassuming, from a deep pocket in its tabard.  In blue writing the bottle declared "HG Professional Limescale Remover".

Professional, eh?  Let's see how how my limescale likes them ions.  I crossed the assistant's paw with silver and fled.

I'm pleased to report the limescale didn't like it one bit.  As soon as I'd sloshed the remover over the glass, it was if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. 

"Hah!"  I cried triumphantly. 

I felt powerful.  Invincible.  And in that second, in that brief history of time, I knew what it was to be a god.  There in the shower, surrounded by gleaming tiles and sparkling glass,  I understood that the mass-extinction of the dinosaurs could very well have been down to a god sloshing around a scale remover of its own, and that the bass-line hum scientists postulate accompanied The Big Bang was actually a god going "Hah!" as it destroyed one thing to create another, solve et coagula. 

To the calcium carbonate clinging to my shower cubicle, I was an act of God.

PS:  Turned out I hadn't broken my foot afterall, so this post is something of a moot point anyway.  So shoot me.