I Am at the Top of the Crumpet Chain

It was a dark and stormy night. Hmm, that's a good intro, I must remember it in case I want to write a crappy novel. To be quite honest the night wasn't really stormy. It was certainly cold and rainy, my god it was pissing down but stormy? Not really in my opinion. To me stormy demands thunder, lightning and crazed nineteenth century scientists patching something together from corpse offcuts. So definitely not stormy then but it was certainly dark. Wait, let me start this entry again.

It was a dark and rainy night. There, that's much better and has a certain symmetry as it followed a dark and rainy day. I should have been at home clad in fluffy slippers and a fluffier dressing gown. I should have been enjoying the weather reflecting on the fact that it was outside whereas I was inside. Instead I was out cheek by jowl with the weather and neither of us seemed to be enjoying too much. Why was I out in that dreadful weather when I should have been home wrapped in fluffy things? In a word, crumpets. Crumpets and crumpets alone had driven me out into the teeth of the elements.

The explanation, for anybody who is unaccountably still reading and previous experience notwithstanding is anticipating that a point will be arrived at eventually, is as follows. I like crumpets. I like them but I rarely buy them as it doesn't often occur to me to do so. Just occasionally however and for not apparent reason the word "crumpets" forces itself to the forefront of what I am pleased to call my consciousness and then there is nothing for it but to dash out and buy crumpets immediately not matter what the weather. This is my explanation for my presence on the streets of Newtown on a night when I probably wouldn't have left the home if I had needed a heart transplant.

I have noticed this about myself in the past. Often I will forgo necessities in order to buy myself another five minutes in an armchair whereas a sudden whim will drive me out into weather that would make Scott of the Antarctic plump for a tropical cruise instead. This leads me to two inescapable conclusions. Firstly, I'm an idiot and secondly the term "necessity" is a surprisingly nebulous concept.

Of course there are things that one needs but there are very few things that one needs right now. As a blanket statement I can confidently state that I need to eat but if my cupboard is bare and the weather is terrible I will frequently choose to go to bed hungry rather than get cold and wet. The absolute confidence I have in the fundamental reliability of my food supply means that the missing of an individual meal is not that important. Thus the comfiness of my armchair and the state of the weather can be significant factors in whether or not I eat on any given occasion. Somebody with a less secure food supply would brave the elements to get food even if they weren't particularly hungry. This also explains why dieting is far more prevalent in Australia than it is in Somalia. You have to have a great deal of faith in your ability to get food before you refuse a meal.

It has been said that the world is only a few missed meals away from total chaos. To be more accurate it isn't the missing of a meal or two that would cause chaos, it would be the loss of faith in our ability to get meals in the future. One of the great fallacies of the world is that people starve because there isn't enough food. This is not true and never has been. The world has always provided enough food for the people living on it and population increases notwithstanding will continue to do so for a good while yet. What fails is the ability of certain people to access that food. In short the supply network breaks down. Sometimes this is due to local shortages but more often it is due to insane government policies or the lack of anything resembling a government at all (for an example of each refer to the Irish potato famine and the everything famine in Somalia). When the distribution network breaks down people starve and when they do civilisation disintegrates (or at least it does now that emigrating to America isn't a viable option any more).

I have only the vaguest idea of the myriad of interlocking actions that result in crumpets being only one cold and soggy walk away from my armchair. If pushed I would probably suggest that farms and truck drivers on amphetamines are involved somewhere. This, again, is an indication of how secure I feel my food supply to be. If I ever demonstrate that I know exactly where my food comes from, how it gets to me and have specific plans for acquiring I would earnestly suggest that you start panicking.

In the meantime, have a crumpet.