The other morning, it happened again. It hit my knee square-on, flipped, caught the top of my right Dr Martens with its leading edge and slid foursquare to the floor. Marmitey knife in one hand, I bent down to pick it up. There was a greasy mark on the toe of my boot. There was a greasy mark on the floor. It looked as if the kitchen tiles were perspiring. An inspection confirmed it. Butter side down. The laws of exchange had dictated that exactly what the toast lost to the floor in melted Anchor, it gained in cat hair. Meanwhile, on the Today programme in the background: tumbling interest rates, collapsing banks, cities in flames. Everything that could have gone wrong, it seems, just did.
This—the juxtaposition of toast and Today—was as close as I'm likely to get to a religious revelation. Very few of us ascribe our larger problems to the workings of metaphysical agencies, you see. Global warming is, our theology has it, our own fault. The collapse of the banking system, similarly, can be pinned on nothing more unearthly than a planet of variously greedy, misguided, imperfect people. And yet—if you are anything like me—you believe, sneakingly but firmly, that your small misfortunes are the result of a personal campaign of persecution by the Ineffable. You don't believe in anything so grand as God or the Devil. You believe, rather, in the karmic equivalent of a parking warden hovering by a meter. It even has a name. You call it Sod's law.
Sod's law is what remains of our determinism. It is the atheist's reflex concession to magical thinking—a vestigial tail of the vast eschatologies of our recent past. And this is peculiar. We humanists take pride in our humility. It's absurd, we say, to imagine that there is an omnipotent being who takes a profound personal interest in our doings. We regard this conceit as hubristic, egomaniacal. And yet we seem quite prepared to believe viscerally in a power that—rather than confining itself to events sub specie aeternitatis—takes the minutest care to ensure earthly inconvenience at every turn. We are egomaniacs after all.
This has implications for the arts. On a superficial level, they offer prima facie instances of Sod's law at work. Take 2004, when you couldn't walk down the street without being ambushed by a book about Henry James. For David Lodge, whose Henry James novel was overshadowed by Colm Tóibín's and beaten to the Booker by Alan Hollinghurst's, it was annoying enough that he wrote another book about how annoying it was.
But there's also a more interesting question when it comes to narrative. For the one thing that cannot, by definition, be involved in a novel is chance. A novelist can have characters who are magical thinkers, or antinomian fatalists, or who believe they make their own destinies. But what the characters think is irrelevant: the novelist can't create characters to whom something actually happens accidentally. Real, malevolent bad luck is confined to the outside world. And so the novelist—whom we take to live in a world of chance, but who in most cases suspects the world is out to get him—authors the misfortunes of characters who in most cases believe they are in charge of their own destinies. Is it possible that we've got it all the wrong way round?
Toast may give us some clarity. When I was ten, I remember being glued to an edition of Tomorrow's World in which the presenter interviewed some scientists who were doing systematic work in this area. Hundreds and hundreds of times, these scientists, in white lab coats, were toasting bread, buttering it, and pushing toast from the edges of tables. Splat, another piece of toast would go. Butter side up, or butter side down. And the scientists would solemnly make a note on one side or another of their clipboards.
As it turns out, they weren't the only ones. In the course of researching a book, I recently stumbled on an abstract of a 1995 article that appeared in the European Journal of Physics. And it argued that, yes, toast will tend to land butter side down. Or, to put it more precisely—modelling toast as "a thin, rigid, rough lamina" (which is how I make it, too) Robert AJ Matthews discovered that on falling from a plate or table of average height, "gravitation torque induced as the toast topples over the edge of the plate/table is insufficient to bring the toast butter-side up again by the time it hits the floor."
But here's the interesting bit. Only falling from a table more than three metres high will the toast manage a complete rotation and thus be more likely to land butter side up. Yet we will never eat from such tables because, Matthews explains, the formula giving the maximum height of human beings (to which the height of our tables is inexorably connected) contains no fewer than three of the "fundamental constants of the universe." So, this Prometheus among men concluded, "toast falling off the breakfast table lands butter side down because the universe is made that way." And there's an end of it. We predestinarian pessimists were right all along. The facts of the universe are Sods. Which also means that if you have the misfortune, like most of us, to be non-fictional, your toast will always taste a little bit of cat hair.
