On Things That Go Up and Down.

I want to know why cereal packets don’t have little plastic toys in them any more. That’s one marketing ploy I would heartily endorse.

They used to when I was a kid. My favourite was a submarine, about an inch long, which had a receptacle underneath where you put bicarbonate of soda (I think.) By some mysterious means unfathomable to a nine-year-old (and still unfathomable even now,) the bicarb reacted with the water and caused the little vessel to submerge and surface repeatedly. I had several of them in different colours, and used to play with them in the bath.

I was sitting in the bath tonight thinking how much I would like a little plastic submarine that went up and down. I decided it would stop me musing endlessly and pointlessly on the meaning of life, and that would be a Very Good Thing. But, of course, it didn’t stop there.

It struck me how splendid it would be to have a big, grown up, radio controlled submarine that I could take down to the lake in Ashbourne Park to garner admiring glances from the girls doing A-levels at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School.

‘Ooh, Mr Beazley,’ they would squeal enthusiastically. ‘We think it’s ever so clever how you make that thing go up and down. Can we come and help you play with it?’

And I, of course, would give due deference to my advancing years and the touching innocence of modern youth, and decline the temptation to indulge in banter of any kind, especially the double entendre variety.

I digress. The prospect of having a remote control submarine was a most engaging one until I began to forecast the possibility of problems. Once it was submerged, you wouldn’t know where it was, would you? You wouldn’t know whether it was about to hit a concrete pier (or even a concrete peer. Have you ever met a peer? Most of them are pretty dense, especially the life peer variety like the creature known as Coe. Sorry; haven’t got over the Olympics yet.) You wouldn’t know whether it was about to be swept over the sluice to begin its journey to the grey North Sea, or whether it was being lined up for a full frontal assault by a big fish. Not, that is, unless it had a camera mounted in the bow which was sending pictures to the console. And then we’d be talking money, wouldn’t we? Big money.

I went back to musing on the meaning of life. It’s cheaper.