Welcome, one and all, to this week’s Society Diary, which is going to be radically different to last week’s Society Diary because…
Actually, it will probably be pretty similar to last week’s Society Diary.
There’s no point wasting time on this nonsense, though. We’ve got some crucial information for you this week. Stuff you can learn literally nowhere else. Unless, by some unlikely happenstance, you’ve read the top story on the BBC for the last three days.
Before we go any further, Diary knows what you’re thinking. That picture’s not of Tinder, or poo, or a date.
Well, that’s true. That’s the zombie apocalypse, of which more later.
Tinder poo donations raise cash for charity
So first of all, the facts of the matter, which are not in dispute.
A student in Bristol, Liam Smyth, went on a date with a woman he met on Tinder. Things progressed well, and they retired to his house to watch a documentary about scientology – an amatorial sally that Diary has never previously considered, but has now added to its list of sure-fire seduction techniques, should this column ever find itself unattached from its significant other.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, the young lady concerned went to the loo, only to discover that it wouldn’t flush. In a fit of panic, she fished the poo from the lav, and flung it out of the window, only to discover that she had not flung the offending article into the garden, but into a narrow gap between two non-opening sash windows. The poo was now sitting, irretrievable and ever-present. A silent witness to her crimes.
Having discovered this awful truth, and having shared it with Mr Smyth, she decided that the only option to abate her shame was to clamber, upside down, into the space between the windows and retrieve the poo.
Only to get stuck.
Diary would like to pause, now, just for a moment, to contemplate the horrendous awfulness of this situation. The unbelievable crimson embarrassment you would feel if you had got yourself stuck upside down in a window on a first date trying to retrieve a poo you had unaccountably thrown there by mistake.
What, then, has this to do with charities?
Well, obviously the young fellow involved had no choice but to phone the fire brigade, who removed the window, the woman and the poo, in no more than a few minutes. In the process, Mr Smyth was left with a £300 bill for a new window.
Evidently we can assume that the unnamed woman was not herself, er, flush with cash, because Diary’s reaction in this position would have been to hand over all the money needed to replace the window, plus as much more as was needed to make sure he never told a soul.
Instead, the couple set up a gofundme page to pay for the window, and threw themselves on the mercy of the internet. Now the internet has responded as magnificently as you might expect.
The window’s been fixed for free, and the donations have provided enough money to let the couple make a, er, substantial deposit with the charities of their choice. They’ve picked out the Firefighters’ Charity and Toilet Twinning, which helps set up loos in the developing world.
So that’s good, then.
Oh, and yes, there has apparently been a second date.
Zombie apocalypse: are you ready?
Apparently, only 11 per cent of the country has a zombie apocalypse survival plan, according to new research by YouGov.
Anyway, Diary did some research of its own, and found that there was a worrying charity angle to this. There are no charities dedicated to preventing the zombie apocalypse. Not one.
This is a clear gap in the market. Why have we got hundreds of charities dedicated to curing cancer, and yet none intended to stop this impending calamity. Diary is off to register one immediately, on the basis that there is a clear public benefit to preventing this serious problem.
Although Diary has given this subject some thought, actually, and this column feels that if a zombie apocalypse does ever occur, it’s probably not that worrisome. The human racer would be fine.
Let’s examine this issue in detail. First we’d have to set some boundary conditions. The first question is how long after being bitten by a zombie would someone themselves become a zombie? And the second is how formidable a zombie might be? How hard to kill, how fast-moving, and how mentally agile?
Diary will assume for the purposes of argument that we’re dealing with the standard-level zombie here: overnight transformation, human-level speed, inability to navigate through a locked door or climb a wall, and able to keep going following the loss of a limb, but not the removal of the head.
There’s also the thorny question of the origin of zombicism. There are basically two alternatives – magic, and some kind of virus. Let’s use the preferred narrative option of most modern stories, outside of Game of Thrones, which is the virus.
Okay, with these parameters in place, do we really think that zombies would succeed in wiping out most of humankind and replacing us as the dominant species on the earth, as they have in the Walking Dead.
To be honest, it doesn’t seem likely. After all, to start with at least, we’d outnumber the zombies hugely. They obviously have the advantage that every time they succeed in breaking the skin of a human, that human would effectively change sides, so we’d have to kill them at twice the rate they killed us, and they’d be much harder to kill.
But on the down side, zombies are stupid, disorganised, and unable to use tools. They’d be stopped by a wide ditch. Humankind has repeatedly found itself in conflict with much more dangerous unarmed opponents, in much more hostile environments – polar bears, for example – and outcompeted all of them. It’s not physical prowess but nous which made us the dominant species on the planet. We’d just outthink them.
And then there’s energy. We all know that zombies seek out brains to eat, but do they actually need those brains to sustain them. This depends on the origins of the zombie. We come up against the law of conservation of energy. Zombies would need to obtain energy from somewhere – presumably food – to keep moving. Since they cannot eat the humans they kill, without halting the spread of the virus, what are they eating? Surely the need to obtain sustenance would occupy most of the zombies’ time, and prevent the disease from spreading.
So scrap that idea. Diary won’t be starting a charity to prevent the zombie apocalypse, after all.
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