A new Neptune-sized planet has been discovered, lurking beyond Pluto, after a prolonged study of unexplained orbital patterns. This method of detection has a precedent. As long ago as 1846, the French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier wrote to the physicist François Arago, saying “Sir! Surely you can see there must be a ninth planet, if only because of terrible irregularities in the behaviour of Uranus.”
Sadly, the letter, which had inexplicably been written by Le Verrier in English, even though both boffins were French, was read aloud to Arago by his housekeeper, and the incensed physicist, who suffered terribly with haemorrhoids and so assumed Le Verrier was attempting to satirise him, was never to speak to his mathematician friend again.
(To clarify, Arago had thought that when Le Verrier wrote “Uranus” he was actually talking about Arago’s anus. But this was a misunderstanding caused by the letter’s being in English, and then having been read aloud by Arago’s housekeeper. Had this letter, which did exist, been read off the page by Arago himself, Le Verrier’s intentions would have been obvious. But Arago wouldn’t touch it, see, because he had some cassoulet or something on his finger that day and didn’t want to get it on the letter in case it made a duck-flavoured mess.)
Meanwhile here on planet Earth, the prime minister David Cameron revealed last week that sink estates are to be demolished. He is, however, unable to reveal the future location of their former residents. These feckless humans are an inconvenient and minor element of the regeneration process, like those tedious newts that have to be seen to be transported to other waterlogged areas when begrudging builders tarmac over an ancient wetland.
It doesn’t matter. Prime inner-city real estate, clogged with a profligate underclass, can now be freed for redevelopment by interested parties. Old street names will haunt the rechristened work-live landscape in a precisely ordered pantomime of provenance. And the definitions of “affordable housing” will doubtless be redrawn once more, to maximise the investors’ return. Perhaps the Conservatives can look to the French, as they investigate ways of storing their own troublesome tenants.
In Calais this week, the migrants’ camp was bulldozed, and the desperate people who lived there were rehoused in shipping containers, as if they were a cargo, ready to be transported. But to where? To anywhere, as long as it’s not anywhere we have to look at them. If the French had known how things were going to work out I expect they would have let Queen Mary keep Calais after the siege of 1558, instead of securing victory from a decisive move by their artillery into Fort Nieulay on 3 January of that year. But, hey, hindsight is 20:20.
On her deathbed, Mary said, “When I am dead and cut open, they will find Calais inscribed on my heart.” When David Cameron is dead and cut open, they will find no heart, but, if they check his pockets, they will find Calais written at the bottom of a very long “to do” list, just underneath “fix catflap” and “try to make space for more me time”.
In a related development on Wednesday, the British astronaut Tim Peake uploaded to the internet a film of himself explaining how he goes to the toilet. If I did that I would either be questioned by the police or be given my own breakfast show on Xfm. But apparently, because Tim is “in space”, his toilet procedures are a matter of public interest.
Once upon a time, journalists would have had to hack a phone to know as much about a public figure’s private doings as Peake has disclosed voluntarily. Seeing the exhibitionist space traveller’s toilet talk in the same week as the newspapers carried blurred photos of Chris Evans vomiting into a layby, I longed for the old days when celebrities were still glamorous and mysterious.
One doesn’t have to reveal everything. Keep them guessing. Maggie Moone was never photographed being sick next to an Audi R8 V10, and the exact nature of Arthur Negus’s toilet routine remains something to be fondly imagined, rather than detailed intimately on the worldwide web.
Despite his lavatorial indiscretions, Tim Peake remains a persuasive brand ambassador for space travel, declaring on his departure from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in December, “This isn’t a one-off mission. We have a serious project in the European Space Station to land on the moon, install full sit-down and wall-mounted urinal trough facilities, and use the satellite as a stepping stone to the solar system, going to the toilet along the way whenever needed, in whatever tubes and cavities are available.”
I wondered why we had suddenly invested in this crazy dream of long-distance solar human conveyance? And then the news stories aligned, like planets in a perfect orbit, as if guided by unseen hands.
Planet X, as astronomers are imaginatively calling the new world, is at present a stale and unprofitable wasteland. The question is, who owns it, and how can it be monetised? What environmental restrictions, if any, have interfering Brussels bureaucrats put on its exploitation? Would Planet X be governed by idiotic EU human rights regulations? How soon will the sort of extended solar journeys Toilet Tim has posited be a genuine possibility? Is there any legislation in place preventing the former inner-city sink estate dwellers from being temporarily rehoused in the same shipping containers currently used in Calais? And would there be some way of yoking these shipping containers, and their French counterparts, together in some kind of loose wagon train arrangement, behind a long-distance spacecraft of some kind?
The idea of sending the unwanted and irredeemable dregs of human society to a supposedly barren, largely unknown, probably inhospitable and impossibly faraway place seems cruel. But today Australia, for example, has transcended its degrading origins to become if not a fully fledged civilisation, then at least a place that gave us the Up & Go Australian breakfast drink, and eventually became mildly embarrassed by Tony Abbott.
Would it be so very wrong to give those whose poverty both shames and inconveniences us a chance of a life which, if not necessarily better than their current one, would at least be markedly different to it, involving, as it would, an impossible struggle for survival on a hostile and remote world of ice, tilted at a chaotic angle, revolving slowly in a vast elliptical orbit, far far away from our embarrassed gaze?
A Room With a Stew – Extra Marathon Night is at the Royal Festival Hall, London SE1, 14 March
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