Cue Camera Action!

 

So there is a satellite to hurtling to Earth

It will break up, they say. It will break up into smaller pieces.

It is likely to land anywhere between “57 degrees north and 57 degrees south of the equator”, sometime around the twenty-fourth of September, they say.

So I guess I won’t be the only one wearing a hard hat that day.

The chance of it landing on top of my hard hat, or yours, is just “1 in 3,200”, they say.

And only two hours before it lands will NASA be able to issue any more accurate predictions as to which particular hard hat or unshielded skull might need to raise a defensive umbrella.

With a motto of ‘Cowards Live Longer’ I should be gathering up kith and kin and dashing off to the island of Skye in Scotland, which has a latitude of 57 degrees 15’ just out of the danger zone.

There is after all plenty of time to do so, but I won’t.I’ve watched too many disaster films. I know that my role is to stay put and to ignore the geeky scientists just like the extras do in films.

Then when the two hour warning is given, my role is to go screaming into my car, before joining the honking gridlock of the M1 motorway.

Escape of course would be impossible.

For the safety of seagull encircled Skye is much further than two hours distance from here.

Only if the film’s hero jumps into my car with some sort of hand held tracking device, and then directs me away from the road and into the fields would I have any chance of survival.

But only if I can drive fast, soar over ditches and turn the wheel hard enough to miss the washing machine sized pieces thumping into the ground around me.

Chances of  a hero with such a tracking device jumping into my car… er zero.

Chances of meaty chunk of metal landing on top of my brainless skull even with its hard hat… er very high. 1 in 3200.

I’m not a lucky person.

If there were two pieces of paper in a bag, one that said ‘You’ve just won a million pounds’ and the other completely blank then my hapless fingers would inevitably curl around and the blank piece of paper.

If there is one mud puddle in a field  the size of England then I’m the one who would straight  into it.

So if there’s a satellite hurtling to Earth…

Oh hum!

Cue camera, action!