Potential for an ecological cascade effect in our village
and our three body problem
The village is getting more and more tourists, we are starting to wonder if the light is worth the candle. Especially as we have to spend so much time explaining the village and it’s workings to them.
Something that is often noticed by the visitors is how our weather always seems perfect. Speaking frankly this is a pain as the explanation is obvious to us but seemingly completely opaque to them. No, really, it’s simple. A long time ago we came to understand that in a deterministic non-linear system things are very sensitive to initial conditions. Eddy Lorenz came on holiday here in the village in the early 70’s and enjoyed discussing this sort of thing with us in the Bellender Arms. He put it all together in some mathemetical models and wandered around the village looking for inspiration for a name for this effect. He came up with the ‘dog and postal worker effect’, the idea being that because the postal worker got chased by the dog they couldn’t deliver the letter which contained life changing news etc etc. We were unanimously opposed to this name, especially as it just sounded like a common or garden cascade effect. Then he came up with the ‘dog mess effect’ after seeing a tourist slip over on the mess his own dog had just made, we considered this too crude. Eddy ended up sitting on the Terrace of the Bellender arms tucking into a local, organic, vegetarian sausage and chips when his sausage disappeared having been stolen by an enterprising seagull, he was very cross.
“The seagull effect!” He shouted “the flapping of a seagulls wings when amplified through a non-linear deterministic system can become a storm elsewhere!”
Sandra and Sacha, the current village Goths, who were playing organic darts at the time of this outcry went out to ask Eddy to stop destroying their concentration. On seeing Sacha’s butterfly tattoo Eddy calmed right down and his face lit with joy.
“The butterfly effect,” he breathed, “wonderful, thank you so much.”
We were lucky I suppose as both Sandra and Sacha have a lot of skull, pentangle and grim reaper tattoos, who knows what the butterfly effect might have been called.
You can imagine the time it takes to recount this story each time a tourist asks about the village weather, most of them have never even heard of Eddy Lorenz. Anyway to get to the bullseye of this explanation we show them our village weather management system which is above the toilets in the Pub. Basically it is a very carefully positioned hairdryer that we take turns switching on and off at the correct moment to cause some initial conditions, butterfly effect style, that means it will rain during the night and be sunny all day, with occasional woolly clouds passing over of course. For a bit of variety.
Simple enough really.
Anyway, I have detoured away from the surcharge of visitors which is becoming a burden to us all. We are getting to the point where we are confronted more and more frequently with Poincarés three body problem, which you are familiar with. In our case it involves 2 guardians and a child, two adults and a dog, or two dogs and an adult/child who get separated and then spin around lost on diverging orbits which become more and more chaotic and unpredictable. Constance elaborated a variation of the Poincaré formula replacing G, which is of course gravity, with IC which is of course icecream or more specifically the local ice cream parlour. This place seems to act as a strange attractor bringing a slightly odd solution to Poincaré’s three body problem. Maybe he should have got out more and gone for a locally produced organic ice cream.
I’ve detoured away again. Tourists a bit of a burden, as I’ve mentioned, which is why we had to reorganise how we run our affairs. Over the years we have experimented with every known type of political organisation including quite a few that we made up in the Pub. We tested one of the latter systems a few years ago. We called it Urticacracy named after everyone’s favourite plant which some silly arse named Urtica dioica but is more widely known as stinging nettles, because they do. The system was very easy to run: if anyone had an idea concerning the village, a change here, an improvement there and they were so convinced by their own idea that they were prepared to run naked through a nettle patch; well then we’d just let them get on with it.
We have now, faced with the flood of tourists, decided that the post of Mayor was to become a rotating one and whoever was Mayor for the month would welcome the visitors and chat with them. This was a big relief to us all and gives meaning to the mayoral position which frankly dates from long ago and we only keep the post because we don’t know what to do with the 16 century Mayoral chain of office. Of course we all have different characters so the welcome offered to the tourists will be quite varied. Mathilde says she will use her sheepdog to herd the tourist groups around the village as quickly as possible. The visitors will probably enjoy it, so that’s nice. Mathilde, however, refuses to wear the Mayoral chain which is a shame.
These visitors who flock in, haha, to see what we are up to because our village has a “reputation”. Apparently we are seen as ‘radical’ and most of us feel a bit offended by this description as we just feel that we use a lot of common sense. Straightforward thinking and no wooliness as Henriette says, always been this way in the village.
Henriette just told me that I should write about our reputation, and how we got it, in the next chapter, coming soon.