‘A dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind…’ - March 30 - 11.24am - 2022

Philosopher Stephen Law suggests ‘How to Explore Weird Things’

So yes I felt a tad disappointed. After all, any event whose title claims ‘How to Think About Weird Things’ is sure to attract a kaleidoscopic crowd of Venusians, Greys, Klingons or participants from the ‘Real Housewives of…’ tv series (or at least their Earth-bound groupies). Right? Er… no!. Instead, a very ‘normal’ audience sat very normally waiting to be transported to worlds, planes and dimensions of unimaginable weirdness. And things indeed got off to a cracking start when a man whom I assumed to be our speaker stood up, walked over to the microphone and stared at us with great solemnity. Just like those wonderfully formal but eerie introductions to such classic Sixties American sci-fi series as ‘The Twilight Zone’ and ‘The Outer Limits’, here stood a gloriously austere, impressively grave and brilliantly earnest individual, immaculately, tastefully and ‘economically’ attired, whose welcome sounded practically…hell, Churchillian (deep, full of resonance and loaded with Conan Doyle jeopardy, it was pitch perfect for the occasion). Settling then into my chair, I sat back and prepared to be ‘transported’, Enterprise style, to some strange yet exotic locale, bound by neither time nor the laws of physics. Imagine then my surprise when he simply thanked us for turning up, pointed out the fire exits, asked us to turn off our phones and sat down, never to utter a word again. Meanwhile, our actual speaker, philosopher and academic Dr Stephen Law, genially steered us through the rights, wrongs and faux pas of believing in every fuzzy black-and-white photograph, camp fire reminiscence and misidentified radar blip that might lead us to believe that ‘The Truth is [indeed] Out There’. Great fun!