It is hard for the modern youth, with their pockets full of electronic calculators and self-adhesive stamps, to understand what it was like during the Great Gravity Shortage of 1975.
It began in mid-November. The Minister of Levitation announced that due to a leak in the Earth’s core near Birmingham, the local gravitational constant was dropping by three percent per week.
—We must conserve our down-pull, he told the house, whilst hovering approximately four inches above the pavement.
—From Friday next, gravity will be switched off between the hours of two and four in the afternoon, except for heavy goods vehicles and bookstore owners.
Life under the Ration
At first, we thought it was a joke. I went to the pub for a pint of mild, only to find the landlord, Mr. Crumble, anchoring the beer barrels to the floor with heavy iron chains.
—If I don’t, he muttered, —the stout floats to the top of the room and the customers have to drink it off the ceiling with straws. It ruins the wallpaper.
The next day, the gravity ration cards arrived. Every household was allowed:
- 16 ounces of downward pull per person, per day.
- Half-gravity allowances for domestic dogs (which didn’t care anyway and spent the entire crisis sleeping on the undersides of tables).
- Special permits for plumbers, who could not get the water to go down the drains without government assistance.
My aunt, who lived in a particularly low-gravity sector of Rugby, had to wear lead-lined slippers just to hang out the washing. One afternoon, a sudden gust of wind caught her cagoule and she drifted into a cherry tree, where she remained for three days feeding on starlings and small clouds until the fire brigade could find a ladder heavy enough to sink through the thin air.
The Return of the Weight
By February, the leak was patched with a mixture of wet cement and old copies of the Daily Mail, and things returned to normal.
But we were changed. Even now, when I feel a sudden draft, I instinctively grab the nearest sideboard, just in case the earth decides to let go again.
If you are ever in Coventry and see a cow tied to a heavy iron peg in the centre of an empty field, do not ask the farmer why. He remembers. He remembers 1975, when Daisy drifted over the church steeple and was mistaken for a very low-flying helicopter.