My Dad can be a funny old sausage sometimes. In the twilight of his time with us he has continued a lifelong ability to make me laugh, intentionally and otherwise. On one side, when we see him now in his nursing home it is nice to see him enjoying an ongoing banter with the carers and laundry/cleaning ladies; several of them drop in for a chat as unlike many of his fellow inmates he is still interested and able to make conversation. Unintentionally though, he does come up with some classics.

One of these is the mysterious conspiracy of ‘them upstairs’. My Dad’s explanation for any perceived delay in anyone coming to tend to him after he has pressed his ‘attention’ button –  never far from his hands now that he has realised what it is really for – is down to the machinations of the mysterious cabal that rules the ‘upstairs’ (cue pointing upstairs as one might to heaven). Apparently these mysterious masters control the poor workers (the carers) and therefore responsible for any delay in service. I think it is fair to say we have still managed to keep a straight face most of the time at these conspiratorial revelations, but sometimes we struggle. It is utter nonsense of course. He is referring to the nurses who are based on both levels of the home (in fact, as my Dad has not been outside his room, he has not realised that the ground floor nurse’s station is just outside his own room. The response times for assistance I have seen – and I’ve been in enough over the last few months to judge – are pretty fast and effective, and my Dad has nothing to complain about. It is mainly because he has no real sense of time these days, and he does not really understand the division of labour between the care staff and the medical staff, and conspiracy thrives in an environment where there is limited information or rife misunderstanding.

Conspiracy theories, or more broadly, the ability to believe things in the presence of hard facts to the contrary never cease to amaze me. Now let me be clear what I mean here. I’m talking about empirical, simple questions. Is the Earth flat? Did the moon landings happen? Does the Loch Ness Monster exist? That kind of stuff (In my opinion, no, yes and yes – everyone knows since the 1970s that Nessie is a Zygon bred cybernetic hybrid, duh). It is entirely clear to me how people can believe in higher powers or ghosts or in ‘alternative medicine’ as the history of human existence in my opinion is defined by an overreaching fact that there is more to the world then we think; that’s also the joy of science as it rarely proves to be as simple as we first thought. I like to keep an open mind because I find life is a lot more fun that way.

But on something that is sitting in front of you screaming its reality and to still not see it; that I struggle with. I guess the simple truth is that we are as a species excellent at deciding to not see the things that upset our world view. If pressure is applied to that world view then we surround ourselves with others that share that view as a defence and reinforcement – if you had been looking at my Twitter feed in June 2016 you would have gone to bed, as I did, feeling confident that common sense would prevail over the EU referendum. Which just goes to show I am as guilty as anyone else in not seeing a reality I would rather not see.