Jack Tame: My law of selfish idiots

It was a eureka moment. Just like Archimedes in the bath, Newton under the apple tree, Fleming staring down at his agar plate, or Mendeleev dreaming up the periodic table, it came to me in a moment of profound lucidity.

It was 10:47 p.m. on Thursday night. I was lying in bed, trying to sleep after a long and stressful day in the office. As I closed my eyes and rolled onto my side in search of that blissful restoration, the fireworks started again.

I say again because the handful of neighbours insisting on continuing their Guy Fawkes celebrations at this late hour were really dragging out the final stanza. It was as if each of them was down to their last two or three fireworks and, instead of lighting the fuses and setting them all off in one grand crescendo, they wanted to savour every single pop.

They would light a firework, it would disturb half the neighbourhood, and then they'd wait. And wait. And wait a little more. Just as you were about to drift off into slumber, boom, they'd light another one.

Boom.

There's nothing quite like a burning sense of irritation to ensure you have a terrible night's sleep, which made my eureka moment all the more astonishing.

And though I know I should probably be debuting this theory in one of the world's top economic journals, I've decided to begin by sharing it with you.

Fireworks, I have realised, are fun-stealers.

They are enormous fun for the people letting them off, but that fun is directly proportionate to how much they're annoying everyone else.

The same rule applies to jet skis. So much fun for the person on the jet ski, so annoying for everyone else.

Fun, as it turns out, is not like most other forms of energy. Energy, of course, cannot be created or destroyed, but fun can be. Fun for you or me doesn't have to come at the expense of other people.

Think about the joy you get from reading a really good book, or kids jumping on a trampoline, or playing with a bubble wand. Think about the happiness that comes from having a proper belly laugh with your mates. That fun isn't costing anyone else.

But there's a certain kind of fun that presents as a public nuisance, and once you've seen it in one place, you see it everywhere.

Take fireworks. Take jet skis. Then add the following: Bluetooth speakers at the beach. An obvious example, right? Plenty of fun for the person with the speaker, deeply annoying for everyone else.

Boy racers with modified exhausts. Again, fun for the person with the car, annoying for everyone else.

And here's a new one for me: people who use drones in public places. It is such a punish when you go somewhere picturesque, beautiful, and quaint, only for someone to start buzzing a drone around in front of you. Again, so much fun for the person with the drone, so annoying for everyone else.

There are plenty of ways to describe this phenomenon. F = kA is my favourite equation: the fun had by the person with the thing is equal to the annoyance multiplied by a constant.

But I need a snappy name.

If we're building it off fireworks, I suppose we could call it the Second Law of Thermodynamite. Or, more simply, the Big Bang Theory. Or what about Tame's Law of Selfish Idiots?

Nailed that.

And then, who knows? Perhaps in years to come, instead of celebrating Guy Fawkes, we'll be celebrating my Nobel Prize.