FATE certainly appreciates irony. Like waiting until Britain gives up on snow and has carted away all the grit boxes before sending down a blizzard.
And now there’s the situation with the San Francisco sea lions.
When they arrived at the city’s waterfront in their hundreds – smelly and noisy and refusing to leave like unwanted Christmas visitors – the people of San Francisco tried everything to get rid of them.
Regularly hosing them down with cold water did nothing for their presence, or their pungency, so eventually the sea lions were embraced as a tourist attraction.
They were there for 20 years, appearing shortly after the Loma Prieta earthquake of October, 1989.
Now, just as a birthday party is being planned, most of them have decided to swim away.
Noisy, smelly and ungrateful – but a sad loss to Pier 39 where they would bask in the sun, safe from predators and providing a spectacle for tourists wandering past in search of clam chowder.
Scientists believe they have left to chase a food source, and many of them have turned up in Oregon, migrating there in unusually large numbers.
Meanwhile, Pier 39’s management team is moving ahead with the party planning, optimistic that there will be at least a few sea lions remaining for the event on January 15.
Hope abounds in a city where a movie star and her pro baseball husband had their wedding photographs taken outside the church they were forbidden from being married in; where the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California found a place in local government; where a bookstore was set up to sell only paperbacks so everyone could afford to shop inside.
But what if the sea lions never return – if the rich source of sardines and anchovies believed to have lured them to Pier 39 aren’t enough to draw them back?
Within no time at all, it will be hard to imagine they were ever there.
In 30 years, the story of the sea lions that arrived in the aftermath of a great earthquake and swam away during the Christmas before their 20th birthday party will seem like an urban myth, embellished and distrusted because it’s almost too good a tale to be true.
In the end, there will be few of us left who can talk of seeing the mammals stretching out their flippers under the Californian sun, unconscious of the ripe scent of their eau de manure, their honking carried on the bay breeze.
What else within living experience will one day seem like a tall tale, dismissed by our descendants as granny or grandpa going a bit doo-lally or transformed into an ancient myth?
A plague of chimera, half-lamb half-banana, chased out of Liverpool by a colony of penguins bearing brightly-coloured plumage?
A great stadium that vanished before it was built, where people could watch gladiators in blue before celebrating in a hall filled with pre-packaged banquets?
A city that rose like a phoenix from the ashes of buildings bombed in a terrible war and charred by riots – its people led by a tall man with grey flowing hair and a giant spider as his steed?
Or will it be the little things we’ve been taking for granted that will seem so unlikely to those who come after us?
Retiring at 65, the National Health Service, free education, seasons that obey the rules, David Tennant as Doctor Who . . .
ENJOYED reading this column? You can find more by Laura Davis at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/lauradavis
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