I suppose eventually the mysteries of metrication will all fall into place and I shall plunge confidently into 96-centimetre bras and Christmas cake recipes calling for 125ml of chopped walnuts. But for the present, it joins one whole area of my brain labelled ‘M for Mystery’. A growing area, as life becomes more mechanised, computerised and standardised. Why must it become so standardised? Another mystery. How, for example, will adding six assorted letters and numbers to the tail end of my address cause a letter (I am assured) immediately to zoom to its destination? Who, or what, decodes it faster than a chap reading the word ‘Surrey’? And why, in that case, does my weekly airmail letter to my mother, which in the Golden pre-postal code Age, regularly took three days, now take somewhere between ten days and three weeks? Life is full of mystery.
There is a magic door to our local supermarket that suddenly glides open at my approach. Well yes, I know that lots of doors do that these days. But in this particular case I do not have to step on a magic rubber mat for it to do so. Nor, search as I may, can I find any trace of a magic electronic eye. Or even a little chap secreted about the place, working a lever. I’ve looked for him. On many an occasion I’ve sidled around that entranceway, clutching my bags of groceries, and peering very thoroughly indeed at every inch of flooring, wall and ceiling. But not one sign can I find of what it is that triggers off that sliding door. It occurs to me, as I write this, that the sight of a heavily laden woman, lurking about in doorways, scowling thoughtfully at walls, may possibly have hitherto been on your mystery list. Unless you happen to be that man in the beret and cycle clips who silently joined in, the other morning, and shuffled around behind me glaring at any bricks I’d missed.
I wish he’d been around the day I saw the UFO. I’ve always been given to understand that if you stand around in a public place staring up at the sky, everyone else’s eyes will just naturally be drawn upwards. So when I looked up and saw this red object flying steadily north to south over our local shopping centre one fine October afternoon, I assumed that all the other shoppers would grind to a halt and share the experience. But they didn’t. They all just hurried past and stared at me. It was a great relief when my husband turned up and saw it too.
We still can’t find anyone else who shared the experience with us. ‘Pale red and silky, it was, rather like a flag-draped jeep,’ we tell everyone. ‘No it wasn’t a kite or a plane or a weather balloon or a trick of the light.’ David even adds that it had glaring head-lights. If you know my husband, you’ll agree that he never says things have headlights, glaring or otherwise, unless they really do. If you also know me, you’ll understand how much I wish I could say it was a great big, weird, scary, musical, sky-filling, mind-bending close encounter of some kind. But it wasn’t. It was just an ordinary sort of red silky jeep-shaped thing (okay David, with headlights) chugging north to south over our shopping centre.
‘Probably Father Christmas doing an early trial run,’ said a waggish chum. But I know what I saw. And it is still the greatest mystery of my entire life. Of course, not all the mysteries I encounter have such exciting potential. Most are closer to the prosaic. Such as why, when I ask the butcher for a pound of mince, he always weighs it and says: ‘Pound and a quarter near enough?’ By the law of averages he should surely sometimes get it right. Or even try to palm me off with less.
And for mysteries I could also do without, how about the fierce lady last week who scrambled aboard my bus. All the seats were full and I was the lone standing passenger, holding on to a pole about half way along the aisle. Glaring intently, she pressed herself tightly against me and lunged for the same pole. When my arm went dead I shuffled a bit further along to another pole. More glaring and lunging. So I moved down the other way. Along she came. I think the other passengers quite enjoyed the sight of two women, one angry, one bemused, apparently doing some sort of slow gavotte from pole to pole, but I still don’t know why we did it.
Or take that mysterious caller who used to ring us at the same time every evening for ages. We got so used to picking up the phone and hearing these pent-up wheezy noises that we eventually got quite chummy in a one- sided sort of way.
‘Huuuuh-heeeeh,’ he used to pant.
‘Hi there, Heavy Breather,’ we’d reply cheerily.
He tended to ring off quite quickly after this. Nor did he seem to care for David’s clever technique of picking up the telephone and saying absolutely nothing. What a shock to a heavy breather to dial at random and apparently get connected to another one.
But the most hurtful mystery of all concerns my son’s school lunch box. For one whole term, those who took their own lunches were plagued by a mini-thief who went round rifling these boxes. What I’d like to know is why this rotten kid always stole the shop-bought cakes from Dan’s box and left the home-made ones. Perhaps some of life’s mysteries are better left unsolved.