Once More With Footnotes

actually throw up listening to. So odd corners of the car fill up with cheap compilation albums. That's reality's story, anyway. But I'd found myself developing the superstition that any tape cassette, if left in a car for about a fortnight, turns into a "Best of Queen" album. Friends say this is ridiculous. They say their cassettes turn into Bruce Springsteen compilations.
     
                  Okay, it's a gag. I hardly believe it at all. I've found the rational explanation. Like th e whispering in our old house; I traced that to starlings roosting under the eaves. If you want a definition of the word susurration, it's the noise starlings make at night. And the great beast that stood behind me, breathing heavily, while I was reading o ne day; someone down the street was mowing their lawn with one of those old-fashioned push mowers, and the noise was bouncing around, hitting the corner of the room behind me, and sounded, with the clatter of the cutting stroke and the freewheeling of the chain, like — well, like some horrible beast. The twenty seconds it took for me to analyze the sound without moving my head seemed to last a whole lot longer.
     
                  Let me tell you about the nuclear power plant built on — well, nearly on — an Iron Age burial mound. Pixies' Mound, the locals called it. And during the course of its construction the station workers got into the habit of blaming everything from a lost hammer to a major project delay on the malign influence of the Pixy (apparently someone had accidentall y driven a lorry over his mound, which is the sort of thing pixies really hate). Of course, they didn't believe it. And as a joke, when the station was finished, the contractors presented the first station manager with a model garden gnome — the Pixy. And it was put in the station's trophy cabinet. And a story sprang up that if it was ever moved, something would go wrong on the site. And one day it was put in a cupboard. Three weeks later a freak storm swept up the estuary and flooded the pump house to a dept h of six feet, knocking four reactors and hundreds of megawatts of generating capacity off-line.
     
                  TV crews came out the next day to film the clean up and, yes, one of the work crew mentioned the Pixy, who was duly exhumed from his cupboard for his moment o f celebrity. Ho ho ho, the pixie curse shut the station. Ho ho ho.
     
                  In those days you could still be funny about nuclear power. It made a good story on the TV news, and headed up quite a decent piece about the speed with which the station had been brought back on line.
     
                  The story went round the world. Somewhere in early in its travels the vitally important "ho ho ho" element got removed. And we got letters from everywhere. What was then West Germany led the field, I seem to remember. "Please tell us more about the creature that shut down a nuclear power station," they said.
     
                  I was told to draft a suitable form of reply, and I have to say it was a pretty good one.
     
                  It talked about the concept of gremlins, and how lots of trades created little superstition s and mythologies. But as a PR man for the place, I became aware that not everyone on the site was one hundred percent behind my cheery statements saying that, of course, we didn't actually believe it. They were engineers. They knew about Murphy. They were n't about to upset no pixy.
     
                  In fact, I had a conversation with one senior engineer, in the shiny, bright, and modern power station, that went like this: "You can't say that no one here believes it. "
     
                  " Do you want me to say that people here do believe it, then? "
     
                  " No. Say it's just ... a story."
     
                  And later one of them said, "I wonder what legends will accumulate around this place in a thousand years time, when it's just a mound. The villagers will probably say that at midnight you can see a team of physicis ts walk their rounds." And we agreed that, if people didn't think very carefully about warning signs, a dead and buried nuclear reactor would make the classic cursed tomb: not long after breaking into it, people would die mysteriously.
     
                  That impressed me. I didn't know engineers could think like that.