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On the 4th day of June, in the year 7460 – according to the Byzantine calendar – an event took place the real significance of which was barely conceived at the time. Nevertheless, we can be reasonably sure that the conception of the Jeremy did, in all likelihood, happen while his parents were indeed stark naked. After all, although not entirely beyond the realms of possibility, it seems unlikely that the Jeremy’s father – despite his generally conservative British attitude – kept his socks on during a warm African night in June. However, this fact has never been verified – it seems an indelicate question to ask – which adds a modest amount of mystery to the event, don’t you think?
His conception was significant in as much as the creation of any child is significant. Of course, the creation of children does not absolutely guarantee the continued existence of our species; there may be some catastrophic event – perhaps a cosmic process – which kills us all off, or we may even manage to make ourselves extinct through some lunacy of our own, a possibility which seems to be gaining ground in an apparent race to oblivion. But for many of us, creating children is the best and possibly only way to make a meaningful contribution to the future.
Later in his life, the Jeremy would struggle with the morality of the argument that, in certain cases, the best contribution to the future some persons could make would be not to have children at all.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. He wasn’t even aware of his own existence yet. That happened some days after the closing ceremony of the Spermatazoan Olympics, so graciously hosted by his mother.
In true Olympic style, one sperm, who at the start was merely another contender among many, having proved beyond doubt his absolute fitness for victory – over a long and gruelling course – thrust himself headlong into his moment of glory with a cry of, “Long live the embryo!”
As challenging and arduous as the course may have been, this Prince of Sperms was but a sprinter carrying the baton of life to the marathon runner who would be the Jeremy.
We can safely leave it to qualified scientists to determine the exact moment that his awareness began to flourish. For our purposes, the knowledge that there was such a moment – a moment at which he began to feel – which inescapably occurred at some point between the Prince’s victory and the emergence of the Jeremy into the outer world, is sufficient.
What was it that he felt? His very first sensation? Did he feel warm? His environment was undoubtedly warm by our standards, but to judge warmth he would have needed some experience of different temperatures against which to make a comparison. His mother’s body was working hard to maintain a Goldilocks environment for him, one in which conditions were just right, where variations were kept to a minimum.
His first sensation didn’t really do justice to the word. It was nothing more than the registration of the state in which he found himself – the norm, the baseline, the point of reference by which he would notice changes as they happened.
And happen they did, and he was duly aware of them. But at this stage, it was very much a case of things happening to him, rather than him making them happen. He was pretty much a sitting duck at the mercy of his surroundings. And, as it happens, he looked much like a duck at a similar stage of development, too.
However, life was easy. He didn’t have to do anything much at all, except grow at an astounding rate. But that also just happened, without any conscious effort on his part. Indeed, very little seemed to be under his control, but it would not be long before he could deliberately dip his toes into the deep waters of human endeavour, by literally wiggling them.
At first, his source of knowledge about his environment was restricted to the detection of movement. But as time passed, his other senses began to awaken, and in due course, he was able to make his limbs move, blink his eyelids and hear sounds. Most of these sounds were of his mother’s body gurgling away as it carried out its normal digestive processes, but later on, he began to detect sounds from the external world, a world of which he had no comprehension.
The Jeremy inhabited a perfect playground, where he felt safe and secure. But, as the saying goes, ‘all good things must come to an end’. And what an abrupt end it was. One moment he was playfully kicking with his lower appendages while simultaneously attempting a spot of rolling and tumbling, the next his world had literally collapsed around him. And before he had time to come to terms with that, he found himself being forcibly pushed towards a gash in the now fluid-less sack which had so recently been his haven. He struggled violently against this unwelcome turn of events, but no matter how hard he tried, he was powerless to prevent it. It seemed he was about to die!
“Waarrrghhhh!” he screamed (and had this event occurred at any later, vocabulary-rich date in his life – as if that was possible – he would still have screamed ‘Waarrrghhhh!’), in precise expression of his feelings.
And so it was, that at a few minutes after midnight on the 11th of March, in the year referred to in the Christian calendar as 1952, the Jeremy found himself forced into a cold and uninviting world.
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