Life is Healthy

Dear Early Learning Centre

My son loves playing with his Early Learning Centre Noah’s ark set. Well done on pursuing that religious angle in these increasingly secular days! He is only 19 months old, but I have already explained to him how this toy celebrates the death of everyone on earth bar one family. He loves it! I expect that in years to come there will be some awkward questions about how big the ark would have had to have been, how Noah could have stopped the carnivores eating the herbivores, and how he could have saved the humble woodworm at all without the Ark ending up looking like Swiss cheese. But for now we are just having fun playing!

I do have one question for you though: I am not David Attenborough or anything, but even I can see that in your ark Noah has quite clearly saved two male lions. Look – they both have manes:

The lion is perhaps the species in which it is easiest to differentiate between the male and the female. It’s not like it’s one of those penguins that even zookeepers can’t tell apart unless they’ve got one anaesthetised in an operating theatre. I thought perhaps that there had been a mistake at the factory and that somewhere else in the country another small child was playing with a Noah’s ark containing two lionesses. But no, the picture on the box clearly shows two male lions:



Are these lions gay? Because I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you what the Bible thinks about that. (It’s actually a bit contradictory – vacillating between loving everyone and stoning them to death with little middle ground along the lines of “I quite like Graham Norton in small doses and what they all do behind closed doors is up to them”.) But more importantly, how was Noah planning on continuing the world's population of lions with a couple of bummers? Was he going to try cloning them? Because I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you what the Bible thinks about that. (It actually doesn’t mention it, unless it’s buried amongst all those rules in Leviticus about not wearing clothes made from different materials or planting different crops next to each other. The closest I can find is “Do not mate different kinds of animals” (Leviticus 19:18), which is kind of the exact opposite of cloning, so maybe God is in favour of it? I don’t know, but it’s a moot point anyway, as it's doubtful the technology would have been available to Noah, whose main area of expertise was carpentry.)

One more question: what kind of animal are these? The box just lists the contents as a rather non-specific “12 x animal shapes”.

Like I said, I’m not David Attenborough or anything, but given that the other animals on what I am increasingly beginning to believe was just a floating fairy tale are lions, elephants, giraffes, camels and rhinoceroses, I was expecting something a 19-month old would be able to instantly recognise. We think they look like guinea pigs, but they’re the same size as the rhinos! Maybe if you made guinea pigs to scale they would represent a choking hazard, but at their current dimensions I think they will scare my son when it comes to choosing his first pet. If you’re looking for another animal with a distinctive silhouette, what about the kangaroo? (Though this might throw up a few awkward questions about Australia not having been discovered at the time of the Great Flood.)

Yours, for the time being, faithfully

Mr S Vincent

This is easily the best thing that I got for Christmas. It's a discarded draft of a letter that I wrote to Father Christmas that my parents saved and found 27 years later. It looks like it was binned due to a spelling mistake in the first line, but, crucially for historians, it was then used as the backing sheet in the typewriter for the next (and presumably final) draft, so that the imprint of what I typed can still, with a bit of effort and holding it up to the light, be read. (I believe that the Guildford Four had their convictions quashed after analysis of their "confessions" using a similar technique, though it's not recorded what they asked Santa for - presumably to stop being hit in the face by the nasty policemen.)

OK, so if I'd done it in Word in the first place I could have inserted a space between Santa and claus, and capped up that 'c', and it wouldn't have done that funny thing with the 'a', and I would have saved myself the bother of having to start again each time that I made a mistake. I still let quite a few typos through though - check out the quotation marks where I meant to put the '2' (to this day I still think of quotation marks as "number twos", as that's how my sister and I referred to them when we played with my Dad's typewriter), and also the capital 'I' instead of the lower case 'l' for the '1' (this typewriter didn't have a '1').

But if I'd have done it in Word then this copy would never have existed, except perhaps as a deleted file sector somewhere on a hard disk, and I've never wanted people looking at my deleted file sectors in case they found out about the embarrassingly mild and ordinary pornography that I had looked at.

Here's what I wrote:

Dear Santa Claus,
I hope you and Mrs. Claus are well. Are Rudolph and the other reindeer well? For Christmas please may I have a large size "Millennium Falcon". If you cannot get this please may I have an electronic detective game. Merry Christmas and happy New Year.

From
Salvadore.
P.S. On the hearth is a mince pie and a glass of sherry for you and a carrot and a saucer of sugar for your reindeer. MERRY CHRISTMAS again.

I didn't get the Millennium Falcon (please note the correct spelling of Millennium - who knows how many drafts it took to get the right?), as I think that I only mentioned it to my parents about a week previously. I'd only seen The Empire Strikes Back that half term at some cousins', and hadn't seen the first film at all, so they had no idea that I would suddenly ask for this. My parents had actually bought me a fischertechnik construction kit, and I remember some not too subtle brainwashing that night about what I should expect Santa to bring.

But what was this electronic detective game that I was asking for? I don't remember ever seeing such a thing on I Love 1980. Perhaps my Mum had said that I should suggest an alternative present to Father Christmas, and I had cleverly asked him for something that didn't actually exist to ensure that I then got my first choice (which was itself quite hard to source, regardless of the fact that they had already bought me my present).

The only other question is what on earth was I doing writing to Father Christmas at the age of ten? That I was typing my letter should perhaps have been some kind of clue to the fact that I should have been growing out of that kind of thing.

Alas, this was the only such missive that my parents found. I'd love to know what I'd asked for in other years. I expect the originals are all filed away in Lapland, but I won't disturb Santa now as he probably likes a rest at this time of year.

Customer Service Centre
South West Trains
Overline House
Blechynden Terrace
Southampton
SO15 1GW


Dear Sir/Madam,

I am writing to draw your attention to this picture that I took at Kingston station recently. As you can see, the sign reads “We regret that owing to a fault no information can be displayed at present”. This is confusing because this statement is itself information, so therefore the information that the sign is displaying (that it cannot display information) is incorrect.

By displaying the information that it cannot display information this sign represents a paradox – in fact, a dot-matrix version of the liar paradox that dates back to Greek philosopher Eubulides of Miletus in the fourth century BC. Another example of the liar paradox is “This statement is false”.

Perhaps you are employing paraconsistent logic and believe that the statement can be both true and false. Or maybe you are using situation semantics whereby the “negation liar” statement can be false without contradiction. Or perhaps your employees have to spend most of their time making the trains run rather than engaging in philosophical discourse. They obviously didn’t have that distraction in Ancient Greece.

May I suggest that you reword the sign to read “We regret that owing to a fault no information can be displayed at present (apart from this bit of information, obviously)”. You may have to replace your dot-matrix displays across the network with ones that have an extra line each, but that would be a small price to pay for logic. (I feel that putting the part in brackets on a separate line that you scroll up to would confuse matters further.) This will then not perplex any passing philosophers, and thus not cause them to miss their trains when they begin to question whether the 18:49 to Waterloo actually exists anyway.


Yours faithfully,

Salvadore Vincent