I recently heard
something truly brilliant about cake mixture.
No. Stay with me on this one.
Apparently, when instant
cake mix was first marketed it was a total flop. The trouble was that it was too easy. The early variants needed nothing added
to them to make your cake, you just poured it out into the right sized tin and popped it into the oven.
It was only when you
had to add eggs and milk to some dehydrated powder and mix it yourself that the
stuff took off. More work, more
washing up. How on earth can that
be?
To me it’s all about
ownership. It’s human to want to
put some effort in, make a mark, even if it’s just adding milk and eggs and whisking. It’s what gives us a mental stake in
whatever it is - just try handing out organisational tasks to children, they lap
them up. As regards the cake, weighing,
measuring, judging the state of the mix takes (a modicum of) skill in a way
that just pouring gloop into a loaf tin doesn’t. Previously your oven, given the tricky task of actually cooking it, would have had a greater sense of ownership.
Of course, the option
of just buying a cake is (and was) always open, but somehow that doesn’t carry
with it the same expectation of being a stakeholder in its creation. Ownership, sure. But not stakeholdership, whereas buying
old style cake mix gave you ownership but also a frustrating delay whilst you
added effort but not a commensurate degree of finesse.
There’s probably a PhD
in this, which is probably what somebody has done and I was reading about.
Whilst on the subject
of human nature - and, as Harry Hill so correctly observed, you can tell a lot
about a person’s character from what they’re like - I recently went to see the
Tour de France as it raced across the flatlands of Cambridgeshire. Me and, apparently, at least a million
others. On a Monday. (And, yes, Cambridgeshire isn’t in
France, but I’ve always liked the organisers’ seeming inability to do
geography).
Two hours driving, two
hours stood by a road watching out for red ants whilst being besieged by thunderflies,
all for twenty seconds or so of racing.
It shouldn’t have worked, but, oddly, it did.
Why?
Something to do with
being human in a large group of fellow humans sharing an expectation, sharing
an experience. Not a crowd of
individuals, but a crowd that has magically become more than the sum of its
parts. Not just an ‘I was there’
but an ‘I was part of it’ moment.
Not quite religious, but definitely on that spectrum.
I’ve read one theory
that, as Thatcher fractured society so completely, robbed of the sense of
community that our predecessors would have got from, well, their community, we
now seek out ‘gatherings’ and ‘events’ whether they be Glastonbury or sport to
make up for it. Maybe, maybe not.
And the relevance to
science fiction? - other than the
fact that waiting for the Tour as the several hundred support and sponsors’
vehicles zoomed past in the two hours prior reminded me of nothing more than
the hicks standing at the roadside waiting for the lights in Close Encounters.
Well, sci-fi's read by
people, humans, and as such it has to be relevant. I don’t mean relevant as in Star Trek’s loosely disguised
coverage of racial and sexual politics and other 1960s dilemmas. I mean that as writers we have to
populate our stories with humans who are recognisably human regardless of when
and where our stories are set. We're always writing for 21st century Earthlings, an audience who we're still finding out about, let alone our characters.
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