It’s amazing what I find lurking in the primordial soup of my brain
During the early days of my relationship with my husband, he took me home to meet his family. Somehow the visit evolved into a game of Scrabble.
With four journalists at the table – my new fella, his brother, their father and myself – serious professional egos were at stake. Almost three decades later I still recall, with considerable satisfaction, the crushed faces around me after I won.
My victory came largely thanks to me knowing the meaning of the word “ylem”. That’s the primordial soup from which all matter is supposed to have derived, since you ask. Until that moment this was just one of many pieces of seemingly useless information stored away in the annals of my brain that I couldn’t begin to tell you where or how I had picked up. Yet, suddenly, it had popped out from nowhere to earn me the grudging respect of my future in-laws.
Scrabble is a fantastic way of putting the random facts and obscure bits of knowledge we gather through life to good use. At the weekend David Eldar won £7,000 and the title Scrabble Champion of the World thanks to his ability to confidently place the word “carrels”, meaning a cubicle desk, to score a deciding 74 points. Other words on the board at the end of this nail-biting lexicographical showdown included “wifeley”, “dotting” and “troelies” (no, me neither).
It seems an odd bit of knowledge to have at your fingertips, but I’m sure Eldar’s very pleased with himself that he did. A friend of mine has only ever won one thing in her life – two free breakfasts at a hotel in Greece after she correctly answered the tie-breaker question “What’s a baby turkey called?” (it’s a poult) in a general knowledge quiz. She insists she hasn’t a clue where that piece of information came from.
The earliest random fact that I remember being made privy to is that you burn up more calories eating celery than each stick actually contains. As a child of the Seventies, I found that almost mind-bending.
My own more sophisticated millennial offspring greeted the same revelation with nonplussed shrugs and the question: “Why do we even need to know that?” My best answer – “in case you ever think about living off it” – seems much weaker now than it did when I was 10.
Still, who doesn’t get a kick out of telling others something they don’t already know? Best of all, as long as you deliver a random fact with enough conviction (and keep your audience well away from Google), it doesn’t necessarily have to be true.
For example, the 11-yearold has insisted since being tiny that when dogs pant they’re actually laughing, claiming to have learnt it off a dog trainer she must have dreamt she once met. The child must surely know better than that by now, yet she still trots this out as fact whenever we pass an overheated mutt. But beyond raising a quizzical eyebrow, I’ve no intention of being the one to take that away from her.
Not least because I’ve got a whole library of dodgy “truths” up my own sleeve that I’d hate to have challenged by her or her two older sisters. These are magically recalled whenever I want to scare them off doing something that I know their father wouldn’t like – and somehow always seem to end with the words “which is actually one of the easiest ways nice middle-class girls end up in prison”, delivered with as much solemnity as I can muster.