Natural Law number 397
YOU may recall I was going for a Nobel Prize. For Science. On the basis of my discovery of a number of natural laws that have hitherto gone unnoticed.
They include such things as:
- The slowest queue at the checkout shall always be the one you have just switched over to.
- Even if you surgically remove the subjects’ eyelids, they will always have their eyes shut in family snapshots.
Now I have a new one: Any picture hung on a wall will remain square with its surroundings only as long as you keep looking at it.
I have done significant studies over many years, but — like many of the world’s most important discoveries — I found this one by accident.
When I wrote the original version of this law it stated: No two occupants of one house will ever agree on the correct definition of ‘vertical’ or ‘horizontal’.
But it’s not us – it’s them!
I’d bang the hook in the wall, hang the confounded picture on it, and by the time I’d folded the stepladder it was swinging like a drunk from a lamppost.
I never realised it was a natural phenomenon until my wife and I had one of our mature, adult discussions about it…
“And another thing… I’m sick to death of you knocking the bloody pictures crooked as soon as I’ve nailed them up!”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she cried. “I don’t touch them. You’re just cross-eyed!”
“But I use a spirit level!”
“Huh! Spirits maybe. Level – never!”
“Are you serious… that you don’t sneak up behind me and give them a nudge?”
“Don’t be pathetic. I have better things to do.”
Since then I have engaged in serious scientific observation. I can now report that even the most passive and benign image is rendered malignant by the simple act of enclosing it in a frame and hanging it on a wall.
Doesn’t matter whether it’s a butterfly or someone wearing a halo – if you blink it will be swinging like a monkey from a tree.
I believe this has been going on since the beginning of time. We just didn’t notice it in caves and houses that were made of rocks and tree trunks. But now our walls are scientifically straight and clinically smooth it’s impossible to ignore.
Maybe they’re not malignant. Maybe they’re just very sensitive. Maybe it’s enough to knock them sideways if the cat arches its back or the dog farts. Maybe it’s the dust settling on them.
Or maybe we have become more critical. That’s a real possibility. There was a time when the only picture on the wall was the Queen, or something embroidered by a dead aunt that was enclosed in a homemade frame so out of square that it was impossible to get it straight in the first place.
But now the art on our walls is as prolific as The Louvre. We have so many photos and paintings decorating our lounge room that we don’t actually need the walls at all. Indeed, the only purpose served by the little bits you can see between the pictures is to make it emphatically clear that the bloody things are crooked!
And picture hanging has become a precise art. The hook has to be positioned with all the scientific accuracy of a space walk. The problem, though, is that no one has yet worked out how to account for the sag in the picture wire that will always leave your favourite picture hanging one centimetre lower than all its neighbours.
Whatever the reason, I’ve had enough. I have declared war.
I’m going to use glue.