Some people have a favourite number. This is likely because as pattern seeking machines, people want to see familiarity arise again and again. Their favourite number might relate to a birthday or some other important thing or event in their life. This is all well and good but I have a nemesis number.
Just like my irrational dislike of seafood because I do not respect anything that the sea wants me to eat, or my abject hatred of SUVs because they only produce bad driving, I have also developed an intense dislike of one particular number.
19.
My late mother in her wisdom said that you shouldn't hate something unless you want it dead. This is excellent advice because it forces you to reframe your dislikes until you are absolutely sure that you really want the thing that you propose to hate to actually die.
Now obviously my hatred of the number 19 is not to do with wishing the number out of existence; so this means that there is a very specific circumstance where the nineteeniness of something really makes me livid. That circumstance is bread.
As best as I can determine, the phrase "the best thing since sliced bread" is a slogan for the American brand Wonder Bread; following the commercialization of pre-sliced bread by Otto Frederick Rohwedder in 1928. That is dependant upon the invention of a bread slicer and herein lies the problem.
A loaf of bread which is sold in the supermarket is typically between 680g and 700g depending on how fancy the bread is. A loaf of bread should have 20 slices in it. 20 slices is perfect as if you make two sandwiches a day, then that's four slices of bread. Four slices multiplied by five days is 20 slices.
As Pippa from Robert Browning's 1841 poem, "Pippa Passes", when there are 20 slices of bread in the bag then...
"God's in his heaven.
All's right with the world."
When there are only 19 slices in the bag because the loaf has passed through the slicing machine only very slightly askew, then depending on whether you think that we are one slice short or one slice over, then this very small part of the world has gone very very wrong indeed. At least in this very small corner of the world, empires tumble into rubble and dust; the universe shrinks and the planets combust.
Oh howl, howl, howl, calamity. Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war.
There is no earthly way of knowing that you're going to get only 19 slices of bread in the bag. Nobody is that prescient that they can determine that a loaf of bread which is sold by weight, is one slice short, as that is an independent variable in relation to the sale of bread.
Oh go on. Laugh. Point and laugh if need be. Let me become the object of your sport and entertainment. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer but tragedy is when I cut my finger. Forget horror films on the big screen, like Saw, Mick Cronin's The Mummy, Resident Evil, or Werwulf, the tale of me standing in the kitchen having discovered that there were only 19 slices of bread in the bag is an R18+ story. No, this is one worse than an R18+ story, this is R19.
Here I am standing in the kitchen, unable to express my horror and disdain lest I wake up the house and cause a ruckus. Functionally I have no mouth and I must scream.
As I stand here in the kitchen, all my dreads and fears through all the years are met with me tonight; I am having the terrible, horrible, very bad, no good day.
19, you are my nemesis.
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