Hello there, my name's Waterfall Pixiedust III, and I'm the Emeritus Professor of New Age studies at Lowestoft University. Personally I detest such labels, as they are merely the means by which modern society seeks to shoehorn individuals into its repressive and highly arbitrary system of classification. But, that said, I am undoubtedly a professor; my students all call me professor; I have a certificate hanging on my office wall, clearly stating that I am a professor; and I usually find that I can more easily get a table in a restaurant by refusing to allow the staff to entertain any doubt over the question of whether I am, or am not, indeed, a professor. So please, while I know that I may appear to be more laid back than your average academic, don't let that fact deter you from affording me due respect, or addressing me as 'sir'.
Now then, during the past few years you may have noticed that there has been a resurgence of interest in what has been called 'traditional wisdom'. I'm talking about those familiar old proverbs, sayings and beliefs that we are accustomed to reciting parrot-fashion during the course of a conversation. You know the sort of thing: a stitch in time saves nine, never wake a sleepwalker, or it's bad luck to smash a mirror with a black cat on Friday 13th. More often than not, we don't really believe what we're saying. Usually we're just talking to someone incredibly dull and have to resort to aphorisms because we can't be bothered to make the effort of carrying on a real conversation. Now, new research carried out recently by my team has questioned whether these superstitions contain any element of truth.
"Investigating Old Wives"
In undertaking to examine what had hitherto been matters of rumour and superstition, I first had to devise scientific methods of collecting the raw data. How, then, does one go about investigating old wives' tales? The answer seemed obvious - by investigating old wives. To this end, members of my team were requested to bring their old wives to work so that I could study them under laboratory conditions. We began by sterilising them, labelling them, and then injecting them with a special dye, which would show up under ultra-violet light. We also performed the same procedure with the man from the newsagent's round the corner, in order that we might use him as a control.
Then it was time for the serious questioning to begin. We wanted to know the answers to some fundamental questions regarding key elements of traditional wisdom. For example: is it really bad luck to walk under ladders? Does shaking hands with a chimney sweep bring good fortune? If you shook hands with a sweep underneath a ladder, would they cancel each other out? And when cows lie down in the pasture, does it mean it's going to rain - or are the cows just knackered after a long day spent milling around aimlessly and eating grass?
"The business end of a fractional distillation tube"
I have to be honest and admit that the results of this initial research were not promising. Many of the old wives became disorientated and confused, and were unable to satisfactorily answer our questions. Some even became tearful and abusive, and one in particular - Mrs Edna Primrose of Norwich - had to be physically restrained after making threatening motions at us with the business end of a fractional distillation tube. It was most depressing. We had learnt nothing from our test subjects, although the man from the newsagents was most co-operative, and informed us that he was currently running a 'two for the price of one' promotion on chocolate digestives. Nevertheless, we were forced to conclude that the experiment had been a failure, so after having all our old wives humanely destroyed, we moved on to investigate another avenue of research.
Perhaps, we considered, we had made a mistake in confining our investigations to the laboratory. This was confirmed when I learned that my researchers out in the field had been having considerably more success. They had been charged with evaluating the basis for the familiar country saying 'red sky at night, shepherd's delight'. To this end, they had visited over a hundred and fifty farms in the area to investigate what the shepherds were so bloody happy about. What they concluded was that most agricultural workers were basically simple folk who were fairly easy to please. In fact, they even came back with a couple of lesser known sayings to add to the project's database: grey sky in the evening, pig herders beaming, and blue sky in the morning, dairy farmers over the bleeding moon.
"Bush-ridden"
Fascinating though this information was, what was still lacking was hard experimental evidence and so we decided to stop pissing about, return to the laboratory and put in a solid afternoon's work. Our first task was to determine whether a bird in the hand is indeed worth two in the bush. We therefore obtained a number of birds - some handheld, some bush-ridden - and tried to float them on the stock exchange. The reaction of investors was disappointing all round and no clear trend emerged.
Undaunted, we doggedly pressed on. Eager to answer the question of whether time really does fly when you're having fun - and mindful that we needed to make significant progress with regard to using up the department's budget - we all jetted off for a week in Disneyland. Although time did seem to pass more quickly for my team and I, the sensitive atomic chronograph that accompanied us recorded no change - even after we had taken it on several of the more sedate rides. Clearly, our stopwatch was not having as much fun as the rest of us, but plans for a return jaunt with more exuberant equipment was scuppered when University chiefs started to get unnecessarily obstructive over our expense claims.
"Abnormal swelling"
With this line of inquiry closed, the final phase of the investigation concentrated on the claim that if you feel your ears burning, it means that someone is talking about you. Volunteers - mostly old wives - were asked sit in the laboratory with their ears attached to an array of highly sensitive measuring equipment. This equipment was designed to record not just the amount of heat produced but also abnormal swelling and changes in the conductivity of the skin. We then adjourned to another room at the opposite end of the building and talked about the subjects in an abusive and derogatory fashion. This kind of conversation flowed quite freely - we were still pretty pissed off about having the return trip to Disneyland cancelled, so tempers were running high.
Following these experiments, we looked at whether the same process might work in reverse. To test this hypothesis we exposed our subjects' ears to blowtorches, hairdryers and crimping irons to see if people in an adjoining room would start talking about them. They didn't - at least, not in any statistically significant way. After testing over five hundred volunteers and disfiguring half of them, we had to concede that the results were at best inconclusive, and at worst excruciatingly painful.
After two years of intensive research, expensive holidays and well-publicised court cases, the project eventually came to a disappointing end. And our conclusions? Well, it seems fairly obvious that the term 'traditional wisdom' is something of a misnomer. It's nothing more than a crock of primitive, simple-minded mumbo-jumbo, and the wisest thing to do, in my not inconsiderable estimation, would be to disregard the lot of it. Take if from me, if there's a red sky at night, it's probably just pollutants from the nearest chemical plant. A bird in the hand is actually worth sod all and the only way you're going to recoup your investment is to put it in a pie. And, to be honest, if you're ears are burning it's highly unlikely that anyone is talking about you, and more probable that your head is on fire.
