The Norm Chronicles Read Free Page A

that little bit inconvenient that it doesn’t exist.
    Norm’s life-course shapes the order of the risks here, as we discover how well numbers can guide him, from beginning to end. As for which to include, we chose whatever seemed interesting and personal. There’s little, for example, about risks in business – or Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), as it is known – about which more than enough is said already.
    To add to our ambitions, we hope that the different perspectives here create a book that everyone from all sides of the argument can read and enjoy on the path to mutual understanding. Although by trying to reach everyone, it has occurred to us that we might reach no one. It’s a risk.
    Finally, a couple of hazard warnings: first, people are learning moreabout risks all the time, so it won’t be long before there’ll be new data. This fact is not just awkward, it’s relevant to the argument. What kind of trust can you place in numbers that don’t stand still?
    Second, in places this is almost a mini-encyclopaedia of hazards. There are a lot of numbers here, and they are more fun to dip into than read in one go. Even so, the statistical evidence could go on and on, and we welcome readers’ arguments about all those extra stats that we left out. We had to stop somewhere.
    So the scene is set. Stories will be pitched beside stats, reason will tangle with feeling and impulse, belief will quarrel with evidence. We looked hard at the data and threw them at an imagined life where objectivity doesn’t always get a look in, let alone prevail, sometimes in spite of Norm’s best efforts. In short, we have brought together as many oppositions around risk as we felt we could in one book and in the process hope to start – or restart – reflection on that mighty clash of world-views. There’s also something or other going on in a sub-plot about asteroids and the end of the world.
    We’ve already stated our own conclusion about how all this ends. But what that conclusion means, whether the argument stands, how or whether the two sides can be reconciled, is ultimately, of course, for you to judge, as you also explore where you stand on danger, if you dare.

1
THE BEGINNING
    H AD HE NOT POURED GIN in the fish tank in a stupid reflex flick of the wrist when he tasted it – because the thing is, he hated gin – the whole story would never even have begun.
    It wouldn’t have happened if the fish hadn’t died, either. Or if he hadn’t felt bad for crashing the party in the first place and twigged that the other girl knew who he was and might tell on him. But for all that, he probably never would have been standing there the next day saying sorry.
    ‘Erm, the fish …,’ he said.
    ‘Yeah, the fish,’ she said.
    ‘Dead?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Right. I kinda knew that. I think it was me.’
    ‘Uh huh.’
    ‘So, erm, how much is a fish?’
    ‘For one fish? … dinner.’
    ‘What? … dinner?… Oh, OK! Yeah, dinner. But like, not like … not for every fish?’
    ‘Hey, come on, fish killer!’
    ‘OK, OK …’
    ‘Though to be honest … they weren’t my fish. But it’s either dinner or I tell my brother it was you and as he’s a psychotic axe murderer. You don’t want that.’
    ‘Right. Sure. So … how many fish?’
    ‘Forty-two.’
    ‘Forty …?!’
    And had they not then discovered a shared love of Sudoku, sailing and an original sound recording of Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’, plus that he really liked her smile and she liked his hands and had a fascination for the strange birthmark on his right ear, well …
    ‘Incredible,’ they often said afterwards.
    ‘What are the odds against meeting like that?’
    ‘But “forty-two”! It wasn’t even true.’
    ‘Exactly!’
    So it was only after a heap of happenstance, a whole cocktail of accidental, it-could-all-so-easily-have-been-different events that they met again and talked and fell in love and had a baby – after he