“… A small piece of advice
That took twenty-two years in the making
And I will break it for you now
Please learn from my mistakes
Please learn from my mistakes
… Let’s dance to Joy Division
And celebrate the irony
Everything is going wrong
But we’re so happy”
Haggis /Murphy / Knudsen
Very often the blog you’re reading isn’t the one I’d originally written. Very often this is for the better. If I find myself whining when I’m writing, I carry on , to get it all out of my system and then delete it. This week’s blog was going to be about ‘Unintended Consequences’ and , among other things , such as Jimi Hendrix success due to being kicked out of Little Richard’s band , contract law, and Operation Cat Drop.
I love Operation Cat Drop !
In Sarawak, a district of Borneo, in the late 1950’s, well intentioned officials started spraying the thatched roofs in remote villages with DDT , a once wonder chemical that won the Nobel Prize for it’s developer Paul Herman Muller. They were spraying the roofs to kill malaria carrying mosquitoes, whose larval grubs lived in the thatch. It was very successful. It infected the grubs, and they died. So did the lizards that usually ate the grubs. So did the parrots that normally ate the lizards. And then so did the cats, who had a feast of dead parrots, before dropping dead.
The lack of cats led to an explosion in the rat population. Rats seemed impervious to DDT. The Sarawakans, who hadn’t asked to have their houses sprayed with DDT in the first place, were now facing famine as the rats were eating both the crops in the fields and the seeds for the following season. Sarawak is very remote, so some bright spark decided to parachute cats into that part of the island…..14,000 of them ! This was named Operation Cat Drop.
Opinions differ on it’s success, and on the number of cats parachuted, with numbers ranging from 23 to 14,000. It was probably 23, but 14,000 sounds much better.
Ironically, DDT itself, after winning the Nobel Prize , was used with wild abandon in the US on a multitude of farms, and was eventually banned itself in 1972.
But that’s all irrelevant now really, as I’m writing about Rhianna, hats, and Sonder.
Almost 20 years ago Rhianna had a hit with Sonder Replay. At least, I heard it as Sonder Replay in my head , and that’s what I always sang it as.
Our John asked me to write a blog for him at work about delivery times for Christmas. This took some thinking…and then randomly Sonder Replay came on my Spotify ‘Just For You’ list. So I wrote this :
Back in the olden days, July 2011, our sales of the Carhartt A18 knitted beanie took off one weekend like a rocket. This rocket was propelled by tabloid photos of various popstars, such as Rhianna , and Harry Styles wearing it. We thought this was great !
The Celtic Tiger was in a home for the bewildered, crying for it’s mother, and it was difficult to sell anything at all. So a bump in sales was heaven.
We thought it would last a week or so.
Then a month or so.
But as Christmas 2011 approached demand was unending and we were straining at the seams. Our Mum, Dad, and neighbour, Mrs.Turley were set up in our board room packing individual orders of Carhartt beanies , and we were getting pick ups from An post, DPD, FedEx, and UPS daily.
But as Christmas got closer, bizarrely, cold weather began to have an impact on deliveries. We were dispatching them as normal, but couriers in The UK, and all across Europe were now having difficulty delivering them at their end.
This would seem understandable and an acceptable feature of ordering things in December.
Not to Franco. Oh no, Franco was a besotted Italian teenager whose very life depended on receiving a neon yellow Carhartt beanie for the love of his life , Lila. Obviously we didn’t know this immediately. As we dispatched each replacement delivery with a different courier, but they were all stuck in various Napoli warehouses, Franc would email to say still nothing, and add a little more detail about Lila, and his love for her.
On the one hand this was lovely, but on the other hand we were dispatching 1,000 individual orders a day , and fielding as many calls and queries about delivery status.
But out of all of them , Franco’s stood out.
We learnt that Franco had spotted Lila in the Piazza Bellini that summer with her friends and had after many weeks plucked up the courage to ask her to go for a coffee in the Fuorigrotta. She said yes, beat him at bowling, and introduced him to Rhianna’s music. He was upset that he couldn’t afford to buy concert tickets, so when he saw that he could buy the same hat Rhianna wore for his Lila, he saved up and bought it for her from us for Christmas.
He rang and emailed every day for 2 weeks.
We were as upset as he was.
We’d sent 5 hats in total, each one with a different courier, none had arrived. We’d even asked a contact in Aer Lingus if anyone would take a package to Naples for us…this was frowned on and then explained to us that asking passengers to take a parcel on board for a ‘friend’ did not have a good history.
The day before Christmas Eve Franco called.
There had been a thaw.
All five hats had arrived !
We were delighted.
After Christmas we emailed Franco and asked what Lila thought of the hats.
He said she loved it !
We had brief notions of being invited to the first Brix wedding , the speeches thanking the special guests here today from Monaghan, whose dedication to service, and Carhartt, had brought about this day…..
Then he told us that as he had 4 hats he wasn’t expecting he gave them to Giorgia, Bianca, Chiara, and Aria.
He was now the most popular boy in Naples.
There is no moral to this story.
It’s just an opportunity for John to moan about last posting dates before Christmas..
And then completely randomly , yesterday I was listening to a history podcast and they mentioned ‘Sonder’, and for the next two whole minutes I was dying to discover the connection between fragment Papyrus 46, the oldest written Letter of St.Paul, dating to 175 CE, and Rhianna. Alas it was at this point, after looking it up myself that her song was called Pon de Replay, and had no connection to a dusty parchment in the Chester Beatty library.
But I did look up what ‘Sonder’ is. Basically, it’s the realisation that every person you meet, pass in the street , friends or complete strangers, is living a life every bit as complex and fantastic as yours. You may look on them as extras in your play, but they may look on you similarly. I find it very liberating.
I started to think of people having conflict, falling out over very little….actually that’s not fair either, one person might consider something trivial, and someone else may be passionate about it, and your cavalier attitude causes upset…possibly. And quite possibly they should get over themselves… you see the constant contradictions.
I always try to see all sides.
I smile a lot.
My smile is almost always met with another.
When I started looking up ‘Sonder’ a chap called Jamie popped into my head. This was for two reasons. Firstly I’d just run a hilly 5k following his ludicrous training plan, so he was fresh in my head, and secondly he is a sonder person. I see him at training sessions encouraging everyone. He mentions everyone by name, smiles, pats you on the back , encourages you, lies to you , “You’ll be well fit for this run , Paul”, but in a nice way. And I thought , he gets it , he knows we’re all here for different reasons. We’re all the heroes of this run.
Today we were running/hiking 14k around the Dublin Mountains, up behind Johnny Fox’s. I was the last one in the group to reach the next turn. When I reached the top of a delightful path called ‘Bone Shaker’ Jamie asked if I was OK. I said that I was fine, not tired at all, I was last because I’d stopped to save a baby orphan fawn that had broken it’s leg…and fallen down a well. Jamie laughed. But I knew he was thinking ‘Well you’d have had bloody time to do all that, the length we’re waiting on you.’
It was a Sonder moment.
When I asked Eileen to take the photo at the end before we all parted ways, he said “This isn’t for your *amazing blog , is it ?” , and I may have said ‘No’.
I lied.
Sonder is now my favourite thing.
I am lucky to be surrounded by Sonder People.
Toodles,
Paul
P.S. Jamie did not refer to my blog as *amazing… he used a quaint anglo-saxon term…
P.P.S. This The Wombats, for all my Sonder People.
