BROKEN PLATES

I heard a sad tale the other day from a friend whose collection of fine pottery had vanished in a thousand shards when the dresser shelves of her new kitchen collapsed. Apparently each shelf fell in turn on the one below, triggering what I now know to be called a 'progressive collapse.' A clean break you might mend with glue but something shattered is beyond repair and yet larger shards still have the ability to trigger memories and associations. But who keeps broken and irreparable pottery? Well, I suppose some people do, but my friend didn't and its despatch to the dustbin became an occasion of great woe.

She told me that her perception of the world had retreated into slow-motion as the progressive collapse was taking place and I can well imagine the feeling for something similar happened to me once, too. My pottery was Bridgewater, rather than the antique Swansea pottery of her case and only one shelf figured in my story: a sorry account of an attempt to repair hairline cracks in the kitchen plaster during the course of which I had leaned - lightly of course - on this display shelf with its cargo of collectables; one end then became detached and the entire contents slid off the shelf one after the other smashing to smithereens on the tiled kitchen floor. Like lemmings leaping off a cliff I thought later.

You might ask why I did not spring from my ladder on which I was perched and rescue some of the finer pieces. But I was afflicted by the same slow-motion paralysis and could only watch dumbstruck.

What is this slow-motion effect that you get when watching a disaster unfold. What triggers it? Is it a surge of adrenalin? Or what other mechanism? I've never seen this discussed. But it is quite common. I must have experienced the effect several times in my life but I remember it most notably during the one occasion when I rolled a car, a manoeuvre that involved climbing a bank and then executing a sort of barrel roll before finding myself back on the road again and the right way up having executed a perfect 360 degree flip.

This must have taken no more than a second, two at the most. Yet I can remember the radio playing until the car was upside down and then cutting out. The battery, I thought, correctly as it turned out. Two seconds seemed to stretch into two minutes and then I was back again where I had started. And so was time.

I should add that the accident was entirely the fault of a lack of maintenance by South Glamorgan County Council, as it then was, who presented me with a cheque on the basis that we both maintained the fiction that it came from the goodness of their hearts, rather than a collapse in the roadway the size of a horse trough.

Wikepedia says "that during accidents, our brain receives massive amounts of data to process and it alters the way we perceive time. It is a mechanism developed by our brain during evolution to increase chances of survival so that a person undergoing an accident can get enough time to make a decision and react appropriately," which may be the case, though to me it seems unlikely. My own experience of this slow-motion effect is accompanied by a feeling of powerlessness. In so far as one reacts at all one reacts instinctively. And when I do suffer an overload of information - an opaque report for instance - rather than getting me more time, my brain sends me to sleep.

Anyway, slow motion effects aside, the original sad tale caused me to dig up the history of the Swansea pottery whose days of glory matched pretty well those of Napoleon. Its trade mark back stamp is a half horseshoe with the name 'Dillwyn' indented inside it after its owner - Lewis Weston Dillwyn - a remarkable man who combined his pottery with being a naturalist credited with the identification of various new species of algae and a Fellow of the Royal Society to boot with being an MP and Mayor of Swansea. Despite the name, his father had been a Pennsylvanian Quaker from Philadelphia who had returned to England during the American War of Independence.
Such is the knowledge that comes from broken plates.