I t’sbeen one of those days. The sharp corner of the kitchen table bumped into me, the shed ceiling lowered itself to knock me out as I tried to extract my bike, and – of course – my toast landed butter side down. What is it about inanimate objects that they always seem to have it in for us?
At least I now know what to call it, for a few years ago I learned that there is an actual word for the secret malevolence of the things around us. This is ‘resistentialism’, a term coined in the 1940s by the humorist Paul Jennings who announced it with the slogan Les choses sont contre nous, ‘Things are against us’. It’s a riff, of course, on ‘existentialism’, with the Latin res, ‘thing’, thrown in.