Here’s another routine that if I was a stand-up, I would do. But I’m not, so I’ve written it down instead:

This year, all being well, I will finally get my degree. Only a few more essays and an exam to go.

I came back to higher education as a mature student, being in my thirties, which can be strange and socially awkward for some people, but not for me! I still tore up the town on Freshers’ week and drank my fair share of discounted drinks, oh yes – I mean, I study at the Open University so when I say town, I mean my living room, and the discounts were two for one on Cabernet Sauvignon from the local Bargain Booze, and when I say ‘tore up’ I mean I watched the hell out of the ‘Game of Thrones’ on box-set, and it wasn’t really Freshers’ week, just every week really – but it’s more or less the same thing isn’t it?

Anyway, I’ve been studying philosophy, which is a fascinating subject, it really is, but I do find it spends a lot of time asking the really big questions, like ‘is there a God?’, ‘what is the true nature of the self?’, ‘can we trust our senses to interpret reality when they can be deceived by nature and dreams? And therefore do we have any reason to believe anything exists at all other than our own consciousness, ergo cogito sum, do I think, and therefore, am I?’. But I sometimes wonder if the smaller questions in life might not be more illuminating, such as ‘why do we all go “wahey!” every time someone drops a glass in a public place?’

It might not sound like the cutting edge of philosophical study, but sometimes, looking in small and seemingly insignificant places can shed great light on otherwise dark places, a bit like finding a torch in a sock draw. And also, despite a lot of people thinking that philosophy is an inherently un-testable, highly theoretical subject, there are actually a lot of avenues for empirical research we can look at here. For example, it seems to me that the actual shattering of a glass is in some way tacitly connected to the utterance of the sound ‘wahey!’ in any instance. I can’t recall the last time I was sitting in a pub or restaurant and I heard the sound of a small plastic beaker bouncing off the floor and a group of total strangers all collectively cheered. Can you? No. Because it doesn’t happen.

So what is it specifically about the dropping of glass that causes this phenomenon and moreover, do the circumstances in which the glass is dropped impact on the resultant behaviour? Here’s a thought experiment for you, a popular tool in philosophy where we hypothesise a scenario and then think about how it might play out, and what implications this could have:

Say we’re in a chemical biological testing facility, and a man walks past holding a highly contagious and deadly strain of flu in a glass beaker. The man drops the beaker. It smashes. Does everybody in the laboratory go ‘wahey!’ before they break out into screams of ‘oh my God! We’re all going to die!’ and start sleeping with each other? Granted, we can’t test that theory literally, but we could mock it up, film it, and pass it off as a new cutting edge comedy series for the likes of BBC3’s new ‘online’ digital output.

Also, do factors like scale, volume, distance and number of participants make any difference? If we change one of these parameters, does it have a significant causal impact on the result? For instance, if I drop a small shot glass, 50 metres away from a solitary unaware subject (so as not to skew the results) will she just let out a little ‘wahey!’ to herself? Will she just think it, but be inhibited by the lack of social context in which to express herself? Or will she run away from the man who is slowly advancing towards her repeatedly dropping larger and larger glass objects and filming her? From this we can find if it is a matter of degree, a sliding scale as such, of ‘wahey!’ behaviour (that from here on I shall call W-behaviour, cos it sounds more academic), or if there is a critical mass and combination of factors required to elicit said W-behaviour.

And what can we learn from all this? Interestingly, we can learn that after studying philosophy for the last few years, I am prone to over-thinking. Which just goes to show, if you put a torch in a sock drawer, you may just find those pants you thought you’d lost.

It’s all connected.