H-P, of course, will sue Autonomy, or rather the beneficiaries of the sale of Autonomy; but those beneficiaries will almost certainly mount a vigorous defence, the founder of the company not being a man to give in easily. Indeed, it is not impossible that he, or they, will launch a counter-suit. And H-P will also be able to sue its advisers who so signally failed to detect shortcomings in Autonomy’s accounts.
Once we had ethics that guided our actions in advance; now we have lawsuits to tell us what we should have done.
10 - The Sock Fairy
I don’t believe in ghosts, spirits, djinns, demons, witches or fairies, with one notable exception: the Sock Fairy. The Sock Fairy inhabits, or hovers around, every washing machine in which my wife or I ever put my socks. He, she or it manages somehow to turn what were six perfectly matching pairs of socks when put into the machine into (say) three pairs plus three odd socks. How this transformation is achieved, I do not know, but it is achieved with the greatest regularity and efficiency. Likewise, I do not know what benefit or pleasure the Sock Fairy derives from this; I suspect it is a malign or cynical pleasure from witnessing my exasperation and impatience as I try to rematch my socks once they are removed from the machine. The Sock Fairy, by the way, follows me wherever I go, with as much persistence as the crying baby that never seems to grow up and that has been within a row or two of my seat on every flight that I have taken in the last forty years.
The Sock Fairy has been responsible for the wastage of many hours of my life and a great deal of misery and frustration. It is extremely difficult to match socks once the Fairy has been at them; for example, it cannot be done in artificial light, but only in bright natural light. This is because many socks are very similar, in pattern and colour, but not absolutely identical. Once you have made a mistake in matching them, there is a knock-on effect: the mistake is amplified, and it becomes more and more difficult to pair the socks. In the end, I am left with a number of orphan socks that I put in a separate bag (which grows ever more stuffed with socks) in the vain hope that one day I shall be able to turn them into pairs.
While not physically heavy work, matching socks once the Sock Fairy has had his, her or its way with them is emotionally trying and even exhausting. One very soon feels wrung out by it. One’s despair is almost of existential proportions as one struggles with recalcitrant socks; what is life that such a trivial pursuit should take so much time and effort? When pairing my socks, I am reminded of the man that Logan Pearsall Smith once described, who considered suicide because he could no longer face the tedium of having to tie his shoe-laces every day. Half an hour of sock-pairing leaves me not only tired, but without the sense of satisfaction that successful accomplishment gives one. After all, they are only socks, the humblest of parts of a man’s attire. (If they were anything other than humble, surely one would see more advertisements for them? Armani never advertises socks, even if it sells them.)
The process of pairing my socks dents my self-confidence. I think I have found a pair of identical socks but when I look more closely I discover, or think that I discover, slight differences between them, either in colour or in pattern or in texture. I am no longer sure that I can believe my own eyes; perhaps the faint difference in colour (for example) is not intrinsic to the socks, but is the result of different experience in the washing machine—in biological or human terms, the difference between them is not genetic but environmental. Then again, I assume that the two socks of a pair are identical when bought, an assumption that may not be justified and in truth I have never bothered to check when buying a pair.
The Sock Fairy is a subtle demon, as subtle as the serpent in the Garden of Eden: for he, she or it produces dissension between me and my wife. I start off with the full intention of pairing the socks exactly, but after a short time I lose my determination and think that any pairing, provided only that it is not too grossly discordant, will do. After all, if on close examination I cannot be sure that the socks are not a pair, surely no one is going to notice that they are not (if they are not) when I wear them. Nobody examines the socks of his interlocutor that closely.
When it comes to the pairing of socks, however, my wife is deontological rather than utilitarian. Good enough is not good enough. Once you accept to wear different socks, however similar they may appear on casual inspection to be, you are on the slippery slope that leads to scruffiness, to wearing ties with soup stains, to looking like a tramp. And we are fast approaching the age at which it would be very easy to let ourselves go. We might even become smelly.
A solution to the problem might be to buy a very large number of pairs of socks of exactly the same colour and design, or at least of perhaps two or three colours (one cannot wear brown socks with grey clothes, or black socks with green or beige clothes). The problem here is that stores rarely carry a sufficient number of identical socks of the right size and colour to carry one through a week or two—assuming one changes one’s socks every day. One could, of course, make do with two pairs if one were prepared to wash one’s socks daily instead of accumulating them for a week, but this is a counsel of perfection that is not in accordance with human psychology.
Sock manufacturing companies (which are practically all in China these days) are clearly in league with the Sock Fairy, if not actually in his, her or its pay, because, while they produce pairs of socks that are very similar to one another, they constantly change the design by just a little, sufficient to make exact pairing very difficult or near impossible. If Heraclitus were alive today, he would not remark that you cannot step into the same river twice, but that you cannot buy the same pattern of socks twice. Whether this has quite the same metaphysical significance I am not sure.
It is many years since I first became aware of the problem created by the Sock Fairy, and so far have found no solution to it. But there is an interesting lesson about human psychology here, and it is this: how quickly one assumes that an irritation in life or an apparent problem is the result of ill will on the part of an animate being with some kind of grudge against one. Of course, when socks appear to have gone missing in the washing machine, I am perfectly aware that the appearance is unlikely to be the reality: that the rule is ten socks in, tens socks out, and so forth. It is much more likely that I mistook the number of socks that I put in the machine than that any of them disappeared in the wash. And if any of them did disappear there would be a perfectly rational, that is to say materialist, explanation of their disappearance,
But although I think this with what I might call the official part of my mind, that is to say that part of my mind that I am willing to acknowledge as being fully mine, yet (if I am honest) I cannot entirely rid myself of the suspicion that there is an animate force somewhere nearby that has worked against me when socks appear to have gone missing or become dis-paired. Naturally, the suspicion is not sufficiently strong for me to do anything about it, by (for example) trying to propitiate the Sock Fairy with some kind of sacrifice. What, apart from socks, would the Sock Fairy want or be satisfied with? It is probable that socks are not an end in themselves for this nasty being: as flies to wanton boys are we to the Sock Fairy.
Our propensity to see malign forces at work against us is quite strong, and no doubt Darwinists would attribute survival potential to it (after all, we have survived with such a propensity, haven’t we?).
Here is another small and trivial example of our inherent tendency to paranoia: when I drive I quite often make small mistakes, and when I make them other drivers assume not that I have made a genuine mistake, but that I have tried to obtain an advantage for myself by my conduct at the wheel. Often when I drive in a town that I have never visited before, I find myself in the wrong lane to get to my destination, and have to change it. In the meantime I might have overtaken a long line of cars in the lane that I now belatedly want to join, and it will occur to no one that I have overtaken in that lane that I am simply unfamiliar with the tow
n. To judge from the expressions on each of the driver’s faces, he interprets my action not as mistaken but as unjust, unfair, psychopathic, an underhand attempt to save myself a bit of time at his expense. The true explanation, that I am a stranger in this town who does not know his way, occurs to no one, not even for a fraction of a second, as a possibility, as part of what doctors call a differential diagnosis. And indeed, many drivers in this mental state are prepared to act upon their supposition, seeking to exact their revenge if they are able a few hundred yards up the road. One of my friends extends his paranoid interpretation of behaviour on the road to those who seek to overtake him, which he takes as a personal affront or insult.
We are never very far from paranoia. If you go to a foreign country whose language you do not speak and whose culture you do not understand, you will be inclined to think, if you hear a group of people laughing among themselves, that they might be laughing at you. You are afraid that you appear ridiculous in their eyes, especially if you are conspicuously different from them in appearance. The more delicate or fragile your ego, the more readily you will become paranoid; but no doubt almost everyone has a threshold for becoming paranoid.
The number of pathological conditions that result in or are accompanied by paranoia is very large; one might almost say that paranoia is the most common psychological consequence of physiological disturbance (that and depressed mood). I think, then, that I am justified in saying that paranoia is never very far below the surface of human mentation.
There is another aspect of our psychological propensity to attribute bad motives to others: it is highly enjoyable. Which of us does not actively enjoy speaking ill of people? And we should rather be the object of malice than the victims of chance, for at least malice directed at us reassures us that we of some significance to someone, that we are worth harming. Very occasionally I had patients whom I would not have wished to deprive of their paranoid delusions, even if I had been able to do so. Their delusions, though uncomfortable in some ways, explained to them their situation in life in a way that flattered them; they suffered because they were at the centre of an immense conspiracy organised by the most powerful forces in the world. Therefore they were not as insignificant in their own eyes as they were in those of the world, far from it. To have deprived them of their delusions upon which they had irreparably wasted their lives, to have made them face their true situation, would have been cruel, even if at times they suffered because of them.
I wonder how many of us can do entirely without our illusions, how many of us can face reality, especially about ourselves, exactly as it is? Humankind cannot bear very much reality, said T S Eliot, and I suspect he was right. On the other hand, humankind cannot survive too much illusion either. It is a difficult balance to strike, especially for oneself.
11 - As a Matter of Interest
For those of us—the great majority—who are not scholars singlemindedly pursuing a particular subject, what we read is largely a matter of chance. No doubt we select among the books we come across according to some guiding principle or other, but which we come across in the first place is in the lap of the gods. It is almost as if books sought us out as much as we seek them out.
Yesterday, for example, I was in a second-hand bookshop in a small town in England with a beautiful ancient abbey, a famous school and a good Indian restaurant. The bookshop was in a low-ceilinged mediaeval building and I sneezed as soon as I entered.
‘The dust,’ I said to the owner, a lady in her late forties dressed with genteel shabbiness.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I moved a book on a shelf yesterday.’
She was the kind of bookseller—very common among that endangered species—who acquired books faster than she sold them, with the result that there were piles behind her, piles in front of her, piles beside her. Indeed, she was in some danger of burial by books. My eye, practiced I have to admit, alighted at once on a volume in burgundy buckram, 1920s I guessed from its style of binding and lettering. I knew that it was destined for me.
The book was Malay Poisons and Charm Cures by John D. Gimlette, ‘formerly surgeon-magistrate, Selinsing, Pahang,’ published in 1929. Oddly enough it was the third edition of this highly technical work, which I suppose implied small previous print runs rather than high demand. There was something irresistible about its opening statement: ‘Malays, like other Eastern people, are skilled in the art of poisoning’; though this was later qualified as follows:
Malays are not a timid people, and, although in India secret poisoning became one of the most prominent, if not the most prevalent, of court atrocities under Mussulman rule, the Muhammadan Malay, as a general rule, attempts vengeance by means of poison when he is bearing a grudge and brooding, and when violent or other measures appear to him to be too dangerous or too uncertain. Very often, when jealousy or malice inspires him, the intention is rather to cause annoyance or injury less serious than death.
I was taken back, mentally, to the time at school when a friend and I plotted to put phenolphthalein in the tea of a master whom we disliked. Phenolphthalein, of which there was a plentiful supply in the chemistry laboratory, is a powerful laxative. I am glad to say that the pleasure of plotting, and of imagining the outcome, was so great that it we deemed it unnecessary to proceed to action.
With books in existence such as Malay Poisons who can possibly be bored? It seems unfair that death should put an inevitable end to the delight of such unexpected discovery; but perhaps if there were no end to it, there would be no delight in the first place.
In addition to technical accounts of the poisons found by Malays in frogs and toads, fish, beetles, moths and caterpillars, jungle plants and cultivated vegetables (to say nothing of arsenic, the employment of which may apparently be suspected by the inhibition of the growth of maggots in the corpse), are many fascinating anecdotes in Malay Poisons:
In April, 1896, a Malay was charged at Kuala Lipis, Pahang, with causing hurt by means of poison. He pleaded not guilty; but, although the motive of his crime was never actually discovered, he was eventually convicted of having mixed kechubong seeds in a curry, thereby stupefying a Malay constable, the constable’s wife, his niece, and a girl friend, as well as two men, who all partook of the same dish. The symptoms in each case were similar, namely, attacks of giddiness, passing into unconsciousness for few hours, followed by complete recovery. This group of cases is of interest owing to the fact that one of my colleagues, the District Surgeon, Pahang, who appeared for the prosecution, was able to give evidence of a very practical kind. A sample of seeds in powder which had been found in the handkerchief of the accused was sent to the District Surgeon for identification. I am indebted to my colleague for the following notes in a persona experiment. He says: “I took pinch doses of the sample, which consisted of the bruised seeds, and had the following experience: I felt flushed, dry about the mouth and throat, and became hoarse. When I tried to walk, I staggered about like a drunken man and got very excited. I then took an emetic of zinc, and slept for about five or six hours.” He was also observed in a delirious state, rolling on the floor and uttering inarticulate cries like the mewing of a kitten.
A friend of mine, a professor of pharmacology, was recently responsible for a brilliant piece of detective work involving eastern vegetable poisons. A woman of Indian descent poisoned her husband or lover (I forget which, but probably the husband, since the husbands of poisoners usually have to go first) by putting something in his curry. Clinically, it appeared to be aconite, the poison in the common plant Aconitum napellus, but no aconitine was found in the curry on chemical analysis. My friend suggested that the poisoning might have been by pseudo-aconitine instead, clinically indistinguishable in its effects from aconitine, but chemically different, and found in the close Indian relative of Aconitum napellus, Aconitum ferox. And so, on analysis, it proved, and the poisoner was convicted.
Let me conclude this paean t
o Malay Poisons and Charm Cures by quoting its final paragraph:
A blinding powder, that is to say, a powder used by thieves to disconcert their pursuers, obtained in 1913 from the Ulu Kesial district in Kelantan, was found by Dr. Dent, Government Analyst, Straits Settlements, to consist of pounded glass and sand containing grains of alluvial tin ore (bijeh). Another blinding powder used by Malays for the same purpose is composed of quicklime and ground pepper.
Not many years ago, a taxi driver in Birmingham told me that he always carried cayenne pepper with him, with a dropper attached to a rubber bulb, to squirt into the eyes of his drunken and obstreperous passengers. There’s technical progress for you: no poly-pharmacy, as we doctors call it, but pure cayenne, uncontaminated by ground glass, quicklime or tin ore!
At the same time as this book, I bought another: a first (and perhaps only) edition of Aldous Huxley’s collection of stories, Two or Three Graces, published in 1926. It had been bought in July of that year, presumably new, by Ethel Godfrey, of whom I know nothing. Somehow I doubt it was she—I think it must have been some subsequent owner—who underlined some passages the principle of whose selection is visible as through a glass darkly: You lack the courage of your instincts and Love, after all, is the new invention; promiscuous love geologically old-fashioned. Did these thoughts strike the underliner as new? As true? As false? We shall never know.
Threats of Pain and Ruin Page 7