There is an inevitability to almost everything I do.  My life is perpetually stuck on ‘repeat’, my pathway is a helix.  Year by year I come back round to the same place, in the same circumstances and, every time, as unprepared for it as the last.  Every year I think ‘this is going to change’ and every year it stays the same.  Every year I am oddly surprised by it.

I seldom do anything without preconsideration (that being a word I appear to have invented, but which precisely describes my habit of trying to decide whether I am ready to try and decide things – principally whether I am yet ready to decide.)  It doesn’t matter what, before I do it I will have spent many a long day trying to decide whether it is even the right thing to decide about.  Generally I decide not, but then I worry about whether that was the correct decision and decide to mull it all over again.  One day it might turn me to drink.  I’m not sure which drink yet; I will have to think about it…

Spontaneity never was my middle name – although it could have scarcely been any more embarrassing than the one my parents actually gave me (which I am certainly not going to divulge here) – and crippling angst, the name I probably should bear (if we are to believe in nominative determination) sounds as if it should really be the hyphenated surname of a B-plot Dickensian character, so I won’t lay claim to that one.

I would love to be one of those people who says “Let’s go and climb Ben Nevis naked except for flip-flops and a small tub of Vaseline,” but in reality, I am the one who is forced to go back to the accommodation in case I’ve left the gas on.  Spontaneity is all well and good, as long as you have time to plan for it.  People speak of the wonderfully spontaneous surprise meal on holiday for one simple reason: rarity.  The vast majority of spur-of-the-moment gestures turn out to be disastrous.  Words of love and affection are much more likely to be replaced by, “If you ever do that to me again…”  There is nothing quite so dispiriting as a spontaneous kick in the shin.

Yet every time I sit down to write there is an element of je ne sais quoi about it: I have no idea of where it all might take me.  Plot – such as it is – develops through time and only when it has fully established itself – inevitably at the very last minute – do I gather up the strings of my denouement and trudge of back to the beginning with a giant knot in my hands.  My eventual destination is about as adjacent to that intended as that of a Ryanair arrival point to the major city it serves; the former being linked to the latter only by having its name in parentheses and a ninety minute shuttle bus.

My life tends to be mapped out, but in reality it gets from A to B in the manner of a Rowland Emett invention: there is a point to everything, but never quite the one you were expecting.  The experience of déjà vu is so common simply because, in most instances, I have been there before, a million times, in exactly the same circumstances.  I can’t help but hope that something might come along to shake it all up…

…This week the world of science snuck out a little nugget which I rather think the scientists would have preferred to have gone unnoticed: they have calculated the actual size and shape of our Universe.  Does that little sentence not set a series of bells clanging within you?  This, after all, is the Universe that they have always assured us is infinite.  Unless somebody has, unbeknownst to me, redefined the word ‘infinite’, I think that not even I would waste the necessary navel fluff on speculating where it all might end when it patently does (or did) not.  That is before we even begin to speculate on the use of the phrase ‘our Universe’.  Does that not unavoidably lead us to presume that there must be others?  Belonging to others?  That this infinitesimal home of everything is neither infinitesimal nor home to everything?  That the end of it is, as I myself have always suspected, the start of something else?  And something else, and something else?…  Should I have renewed faith in my long-held theory that each solar system is nothing more than an atom; each galaxy a molecule; each Universe little more than an unwelcome zit on the Almighty’s conk?  Could I have been right all along?*

And what of these other Universes?  (I have always taken the word Universe to mean the one everything, but now must consider that it just means any one of many.)  Are they what science fiction writers always used to refer to as ‘parallel’?  Are we somehow in them all simultaneously, or are they totally independent of our own: devoid, to their eternal detriment, of us?  I cannot be alone in thinking that this multi-faceted existence might open up a whole new raft of opportunities for Darth Vadar.  Perhaps one in which the Death Star does not have such an easily detectable, yet fatal flaw. 

If these many other universes out there are, indeed, parallel to our own and you and I are, therefore, part of them all, it surely poses the question, “Am I equally ineffectual in all the others?”  Am I perhaps decisive in some, intelligent in others, able to walk past chocolate without yearning somewhere far, far away?  Did all the universes start together – making me the same age in them all – or did they start at different times, in which case, what was there before them?  Perhaps I have not yet been born on an Earth somewhere still waiting for the dinosaurs to kick up their heels; perhaps elsewhere I have evolved – oh yes, I watched the original Star Trek – into a vast, but insubstantial intellect with designs on James T Kirk’s all too substantial waistline.  Perhaps all the Universes started identically (Would there have been multi-Big Bangs, or just one Mega-Big Bang?) but, The Chaos Theory being the single unifying cosmic truth, they have all become completely different.  Is there a Universe out there where I support Leeds United**?  (I certainly hope not!)

It also worries me that science has yet to discover what lies beyond all of these Universes?  Until now I have only had to worry about what lies beyond our own.  (Well, that and the possibility of being reduced to the size of a super-heavy atom by a heretofore undetected Black Hole.)  In my life of ever revolving vexation and indecision, the only certainty is worry and the only thing that actually ever changes is the volume of it.  I am now faced with an exponential surge in stuff to fret over. 

But it’s nothing new, it’s probably the same every year.  There’s no surprise in that…

*No.

**An English football team who single-handedly tried to destroy football in the 1970’s and very nearly managed it.