All Aboard

Last night, a tiresome attack of insomnia lured my poor rambling mind into a vast rabbit hole of circumspection, based on a few random statistics I had stumbled on earlier in the day …

Just for starters, I had to acknowledge that I, this particular Me, am the bloody be-all and end-all known environment to approximately 90 trillion microbes. Just like the other seven and a half billion humanoids on board our planet, microbes outnumber My Very Own cells by ten to one. The buggers live all over us, inside and out, however squeaky clean we may consider ourselves to be. Hmmm …

So it seems I’m lugging around approximately five pounds (two and a half bags of sugar) of assorted nameless oddball aliens for whom I now feel a degree of responsibility, and possibly also an element of gratitude. We rub along most of the time in relative harmony, for it would seem we can’t live without one another, and that we carry among us the seeds of our own mutual destruction. Hmmm …

Now and then however, they make themselves known, as was the case a few months ago. Having identified malicious invaders, my little guys seized command most emphatically, disabling Me sufficiently for us all to need to retreat for a few days to the next realm of environment known as My Bed, in My Bedroom, in My House, etc, whilst the battle raged. Then My Cat joined us, along with his vast cohorts of feline passengers, to offer consolation and reinforcements until the crusade was over.

Yesterday, the lads and I piled into the roving environment that is My Car, to negotiate the greater outdoor habitat, First stop was The Dentist, where many of us will have flinched, and probably succumbed, to such sterile surroundings, but all were united in the consummate trauma and grief of the ensuing extraction of one of our oldest components. Later, we were to wonder where Mike the Molar went, and whether dentists have significant contracts with the Tooth Fairy. But afterwards, we had to press on without him, in order to obtain our survival supplies from The Supermarket. Here, in spite of the constraints of masks and hand-sanitising, much mingling inevitably ensued as we ran the gauntlet of all the opportunist airborne, shoeborne, trolley-riding, shelf-lurking, globally trafficked, checkout-pouncing, magnificent microscopic aliens who inhabit Planet Morrison. The Good, The Bad, and for sure, The Ugly. No doubt a few of our chaps boldly jumped ship along the aisles, but I can’t help but wonder how many gleeful stowaways piled into the boot to join us on the journey back to the glorious central hub of My Pantry.

Hmmm … so we’re all inescapably slopping around together in this massive cosmic soup - every one of us made of stardust - clinging to one another on our tiny planet in some dusty little crevice of the universe … zzzzzzzzzzzzzz