Oink-Oink!

“I’ve got a reeeee-aaally pooooorly throat,” someone croaked down the phone to me recently and then coughed miserably for emphasis.

Someone else had stopped off briefly in Mexico on the loop home and before they could even complain of stiffness, heavy limbs, mild headaches or internal throbs they were whisked away for a brief sojourn in quarantine until the all-clear klaxon announced that the cage was opening and they staggered blinking back into the sunlight.

I was packed into a commuter train last Tuesday morning and for some reason the heaters were running at maximum. Wafts of hot air belched their way through the carriage followed each time by the death-hacks on a man pressing an insufficient handkerchief to his mouth. Every few seconds he ripped phlegm up his larynx, swilled it around his mouth before noisily swallowing and then repeating the whole process. With each rising globule the woman pressed against my shoulder looked increasingly nervous. Her eyebrows rose a little more and she wiggled as though trying to move further away. Eventually, just outside London Bridge, he let loose a particularly slimy barrage. Her eyes rolled back into her head and she passed out. Unable to properly slump to the floor she was lodged between upright bodies, a dead weight towards which people vaguely wafted copies of the Metro, until the doors opened and clean air flooded in.

Swine flu.

Are we getting all a little panicked about nothing? Or aren’t we? Why can tell anymore?

‘Deadly Virus takes grip of the country as number of confirmed cases rises to 55’ said the Sun on Saturday, and all right, so they only mean in the UK, but still it's a slight come down from its earlier suggestion that ‘the whole of humanity is under threat’.

Whilst the Express recently told us that it could ‘kill 750,000 people in Britain and lead to mass graves and inflatable mortuaries.’

“Has the media exaggerated the threat of swine flue?” the BBC journalist rhetorically asked last night.

‘A third of the global population is under threat,’ squealed the Guardian this lunchtime.

No-one seems to know. Not even the victims. Twelve year old Sophie de Salis said that “it’s just like a normal cold” whilst forty-three year old Barry Greatorex claims “never to have experienced anything like it.”

It’s all so gloriously inconsistent.

A leaflet comes through my letter box warning me about the symptoms and what to do if I feel ill (essentially, hide under the bed until it goes away) whilst one school in Bristol reopens, the jolly hockey sticks one in Dulwich stays shut and some fool makes an announcement that any school forced to close over the exam season will have its pupils awarded GCSEs and A Levels on the basis of the mocks and predicted grades.

Hell, at sixteen I’d have been running around trying to find someone who’d willingly infect me.

It is, of course, the slightly bored media looking for something new and a bit more sensationalist to herald the end of the world as we know it than the continuing stuttering economy. There’s only so long indexed economics bottoming out can be sexy, but Pigs! Central American climate! Sneezing fits! Fever sweats! Death! Wow – there’s a screenwriter in Hollywood just praying that the infection/intubation rate speeds up because it would add to the tension on forty-two minutes.

But don’t worry. The people is charge of saving the planet this time have... Spreadsheets.

Yes, the World Heath Organisation, who have declared a possible pandemic have done so by assessing potential risk. They’re looking at the worst possible outcome, not the definite we’re-all-gonna-die predication that has been recycled and misinterpreted into our lounges and minds. Somewhere, perhaps in Geneva, a short man in light grey suit and oversized glasses who went to international school and speaks every language with a mid-western twang is multiplying possibility by impact and upgrading the relevant cells in his excel document from green to red. He is feeling pretty pleased with himself. In fact, he might have an erection.

Here’s the bad news: Risk assessment is boring. So, we don’t get to hear about it. Instead we get the jazzed up version, life with a bit more pizzazz to sell a couple of more papers and give the juniors at BBC24 something to do on a Wednesday afternoon at four o’clock.

In reality, it may not be foxy, but we all measure risk, in one way or another, on a daily basis. Some of us try to calculate the impact of every word we say, we try to control every single outcome of every single situation. Some of us just attempt to
claim back toilet seats, moat cleaning costs and horse shit on expense accounts.
Or, indeed, it could just be whether we stop-look-and-listen when crossing the road, but very few of us actually think purely in terms of risk.

We’re more likely to think in terms of chance. Which is the same thing, but it sounds less dull, more random, more fun.

What are the chances, for instance, that on Friday I’ll go to Kensington to meet my friend Clare who’s is celebrating the viva that concludes her phd? Well, pretty high – I’ve known Clare for over a decade. Of course I’m going. But then, what are the chances that as I lean across the table to embrace her and say “I presume that you’re now Dr Clare” the door to the toilets will open and out will step someone else I know?

“Steph!”

“Dave!”

“What are you doing here?”

“Do you know Clare, then?”

“How do you know Steph?”

WHOA! HOOOOOLD IT!

Butbutbutbutbut...

Okay. Deep breath.

“StephgoesoutwithSteve,notthatSteve,theotherone,theonewhodidn’tgotobedearlyattheNewYear’spartyinSalehurstRoad-yesthatone!theonewhowenttoMIT!ImetClare(keepup)in Sheffieldand(yes,that’sright)thereasonIcan’tcomehikingintwoweeks’timeisbecause I’musheringatClare’swedding–theweddingyou’vejustbeendiscussing–andit’snotmyfaultI’vefailedtoworkoutthatyoucouldbeinthesamedepartment.ClaredoescloudsandStephdoesoceans.AsfarasI’mawarethereshouldbemilesofopenairbetweenyou.”

So, what are the chances of all of the above? Okay, so I knew both worked at Imperial, but I’m rarely in Kensington (or any bit of West London to be honest) and I was running late and she was just leaving and (oh!) it was beautifully timed.

I couldn’t have made it up.

Should I have considered it before? If I’m entirely truthful then I did in a wouldn’t-be-funny-if way, but it was a lucky chance and I wasn’t going to complete a fully fledged risk assessment analysis for it because that would have destroyed the mystery of it.

And I couldn’t have sat down with a wink and said “eh, see I know everybody.”

God, Einstein once (more or less) wrote in a letter, does not play dice. Neither (thankfully) does the World Health Organisation. We do, however. We, the poor dumb idiots scrabbling around playing craps for shots in back alleys under the broken neon do so because we can.

The media likes to do so, too. Only this time it seems to be hedging its bets. Not even the imaginary Daily Sensation wants to be the one, when 1918 Spanish Influenza levels are reached, gets to run a punning headline around ‘I told you so, thirty million dead.’ So instead they’ve trapped themselves in a cycle of panic-self-induced-moral-backlash-quick-panic-again.

And, then, over the hill – their saviours: MPs of all parties swindled the decent hard-working public TM out of money. Now, THAT’S sexy.

So, that’s it.

Until the winter sets in anyway.