Different Lives

Click graphic to view on external site. It also has a transcript if the text is too small to read.

 

Someone posted one of our school class photographs on that web site – the one that would rather show you things it thinks you’ll like or agree with. 

 

There we are, over fifty years ago in our school uniforms, thirty-one adolescent teenagers, seventeen boys and fourteen girls with hopes and dreams and insecurities, some smiling, happy in their skins, others serious or awkward, the way we were. Should it be there with names listed? No one asked for consent. Some names are wrong. Some are missing. I’m just a question mark. Good! Was that really me?

There’s that nasty bastard whose main pastime was punching others in the face whenever he felt like it. Look, he’s left a comment. He must think no one remembers. You can see him now in his profile pictures with his arms round different women: “single, sixty, keeps fit”. He’s older than that. Hell! With his piggy eyes and thick ape-neck he looks like Harvey Weinstein. Too many hormones. Avoid! He probably thinks this post is about him.

Let’s not make it so. There’s the clever kid who got into Oxford, another who became a games teacher and the thin chap with glasses who was rubbish at sports. 

That lad killed himself on a motor bike. Went round a bend too fast. Slow tractor, plough blades on the back. Cut to pieces. We shed buckets over his empty desk until the teacher moved us round.

Look at the girls! Aren’t they lovely, every one. I hope they can see past our round shoulders, big noses, spots and collective gormlessness and think we’re lovely too.

Those three were scary, and inseparable. They all went to train as primary school teachers in Sheffield. That one became a social worker. There’s the blonde girl I dreamed about, who they paired me up with in a swimming lesson because there were unequal numbers of boys and girls. “Forget that she’s a girl,” yelled the swimming teacher when I was supposed to stand between her legs and support her thighs while she did back-stroke arms. I never dared speak to her again. And there’s the pretty girl with freckles who sat close and wrapped her leg round mine and asked if I knew of any dances I could take her to. How might things have been different if I’d said yes? Dream on. 

Dream on indeed. The chance of life! In theory, any possible pair of those boys and girls could have married and had children (married, yes, they wouldn’t have lived together then). Actually, one couple did. They went to America. What about the others? How many different pairings of sixteen boys with thirteen girls? Sorry, fifteen boys: I forgot about the motor bike. I make it 195. If each possible pair had an average of two children, then there are 390 different possible children who were never born, and three in America who were. 

Nearly four hundred sentient individuals like you and me, never born, never will be, never laughing, weeping, wanting, loving, having days of wine and roses. Never having children of their own.

Should we multiply that by 450, the number of eggs a woman ovulates during her lifetime, any of which might have been fertilised? That’s over 175,000. Should we multiply it again by another billion, the estimated number of sperm cells a man produces each month, any one of which might have fertilised one of those eggs? What’s that? A hundred and seventy five thousand billion. 

Who would these unborn souls have been? There would have been musicians and artists, drug addicts and dictators, scientists and imbeciles, leaders and thinkers, and billions upon billions of ordinary people like you and me. Some might have been bloggers. Each with a unique sense of  “me”. If any had been my children, they wouldn’t have been the children I have, they would have been entirely different children, and the two I do have would never have existed. Could they really never have been born? Could some have inhabited different bodies? No, there aren’t enough bodies. Are some stuck somewhere in a queue, in limbo?

A hundred and seventy five thousand billion distinct individuals who were never born. Three who were. From one school class.  

The numbers are bigger still in the wider world, as the linked graphic shows. It estimates the odds against any one of us existing as we do, as the equivalent of two million people each rolling a trillion sided dice and all coming up with the same number. 

It happened for me. It happened for you. “Now go forth and feel and act like the miracle that you are.” 

Sungold

Question: if packets of tomato seeds contain an average of ten seeds, what is the chance that one will contain just four? I will come back to this later. 

Thirty years ago, the most popular television gardener in the U.K. was Geoff Hamilton. Here he is on the cover of the Radio Times wearing the same Marks and Spencer air force blue shirt as I had (Radio Times also lists TV programmes but has kept the same title since 1923).

In 1996, he wrote a column praising the virtues of Thompson and Morgan’s orange ‘Sungold’ cherry tomatoes:

        Ever since I first grew Thompson and Morgan’s cherry tomato “Sungold” I’ve rejected all others. For me, it has just the right balance between sweet and acid that makes it melt in the mouth. Mind you, I can’t afford to be a stick-in-the-mud, so I shall try others…

The column has been folded at the bottom of our seed box ever since. Sadly, Geoff Hamilton died shortly after it was published. He may not even have got to try the Sungolds he grew that year. His gardens at Barnsdale, Rutland, remain a much visited attraction.

They are pretty expensive as seeds go. They only put a small number in each packet, and, being F1 hybrids, they don’t re-seed themselves true to type so you have to buy new ones each year. Nowadays, they work out at between 30 and 50 pence per seed, and would probably be more if the patent had not expired and they were still only available from Thompson and Morgan.

We followed the advice and bought some, and, being able to afford not only the seeds but also to be sticks-in-the-mud, we have since rejected all others too. They are as good as Geoff Hamilton said. 

To return to the question I started with, about the probability of getting only four seeds in packets that have an average of ten. After pondering for some time, I’m afraid I still don’t know the answer, and neither do you unless you work for Johnsons Seeds of Newmarket, Suffolk, and can say how accurately the seeds are counted and whether packets are just as likely to contain more than ten seeds as less than ten seeds (in other words the spread and skew of the seed-count-per-packet distribution). I don’t think the question can be answered without this information. So let’s just guess the answer is: “very unlikely”.

What I do know is that I was pretty annoyed when it happened to me. About a month ago I opened a packet of Johnsons F1 Sungold tomato seeds, average contents ten, and found only four seeds. I am not sure when and where I bought them. I got them early last year, forgetting I had some left over from the year before.

I complained to Johnsons and after a few weeks received a replacement packet, but in the meantime I had bought another new packet to get things started. Tip: have a good feel of the packet before buying. Even if the seeds are too small to count, you can certainly detect the difference between four and ten.

Here are this year’s seedlings on their way from the house to the greenhouse to be moved into bigger pots. I always grow six seeds on the assumption they won’t all come up, but, as you can see, this year they did. Now, what are the odds of that?