We physicists know a thing or two about the relationship between heat and friction. The thing I know is that there is a relationship. Had I not given up physics at 14, I should probably have found out what the other thing was, but there you are, you cannot be everywhere at once.
Anyhow, if God had wanted us to know everything, he would not have given us the British educational system. Free will is the Almighty’s way, and who am I to argue with that? Especially since I gave up divinity the same term. Offered the choices, I shrewdly guessed that my life would be better served by an ability to decline amo and list the principal exports of the Gold Coast, and I have not been proved wrong.
This does not prevent me from taking as today’s text the observation that heat produces friction. I have of course heard that there is a body of opinion which holds the opposite view, but that is no more than you would expect from mere theorists. They ought to get out and about a bit. And what they ought to get out and about to is more lunchtime drinks parties, now that the ozone has, as I understand it, gone through the greenhouse layer, and there’s more to come, say the weathermen.
For we have suddenly become a race which drinks al fresco. We have people over at noon, and we usher them towards lawn and flagstone, and we fill their right hands, and they amble about among shrub and tub, and the sun thrums down upon them, and they chat and chortle happily enough, and all is more or less as it was in the blissful days before it was 82º and still rising. And then the friction enters the soul.
Do not get ahead of me: I am not about to address that homicidal irritability which comes to lesser breeds when the mercury goes up. These are civilized folk of whom I speak – should the sun-kissed talk turn to, say, Heseltine or Latvia or the Booker Prize, they do not take swings at one another, they do not fumble beneath the sweated seersucker for Colt and life-preserver, they do not roll amid the petunias, their hands locked around one another’s throats.
All that happens when the hot weather strikes is that they say things outside which they would never dream of saying inside. The only part, indeed, which the heat plays is to put them where they can do the saying. In the old, cold days of yore, you had people over for summer drinks, and they stared out at the drizzle for a bit, and then they got on with the sluicing and the small talk. What they never, ever, did was criticize their surroundings. They did not say: ‘Did you realize your carpet has got moth?’ Or: ‘I know a bit about furniture, and that chiffonier is unquestionably fake.’ Or: ‘It’s time you had that rising damp seen to.’ Or: ‘I’ve sat on a few uncomfortable sofas in my time, but this one takes the bloody biscuit!’
So why should it be that the simple act of shepherding them out into the sunshine should have the effect of stripping from them all pretence of civility? Why, as you are topping up his glass, should a guest nod downward towards his feet and observe: ‘Yes, well, you realize of course that the only way to get rid of all this couch-grass is to dig the whole thing up and start again?’, the man on his right chuckle and say: ‘Never mind couch-grass, as far as I am aware couch-grass doesn’t fall on you, have you taken a look at that chimney of his, I give it six months, tops’ and the man on his left chip in with ‘Yes, I noticed the chimney when I was looking at his guttering, you ought to have that guttering seen to, half the brackets have rusted off ’?
Why do their wives then join you so that one can point out that if you don’t do something about the leaf-curl on your eucryphia it’ll be dead by tea-time, and another shriek ‘First things first, have you seen the thrips on his gladdies, you’d think he’d never heard of Malathion!’ while the third inquires icily whether you have something to bang her heel back on with, and her husband smirks and says, ‘I warned you about that path of his, didn’t I?’
Forgive me, I only observe this, I cannot explain it. To me, psychology is an even more closed book than physics.