John Butleron finding God - and the devil - in the details.
Did you know that you can tell whether the fuel cap in your car is on the left- or right-hand side without getting out of the vehicle? If you have tried dragging a surprisingly short petrol hose over the roof of a surprisingly wide rental car, then vainly attempted to bend the handle back down, so you don't have to fit the nozzle into the opening upside-down, you'd probably like to know how to do this. The nozzle-and-fuel-tank thing might sound like an analogy for the wedding night of a virgin, but it's much more straightforward. So here I am, like a nerd genie, ready to grant you this one tiny wisdom.
Look at the dashboard. Find the icon of the petrol pump. It's the one that lights up when you're running on empty, the one that caused you to pull into the petrol station in the first place. If the nozzle is on the left of the icon, then your fuel tank is on the left of the car. And vice versa. Alakazam.
Now you can glide into the bay and fill her up without a second thought, feeling at one with your environment, part of a community of people who know a thing or two about a thing or two. No more reversing a large foreign vehicle out of a tight space, turning it 180 degrees like an oil tanker, then reversing it into an adjacent bay while strangers honk - strangers who already know where their fuel caps are.
When I discover any such minuscule design flourish I am reassured of my place in the world. It's how Robinson Crusoe must have felt when he saw a plume of smoke rising from the other side of the island. Someone has been here before me, and they have mapped the terrain. I am not alone. Such attention to detail assures me of a much greater truth: that this car will never break down.
I'm not alone in my appreciation of minutiae. Alan Partridge repeatedly opened and closed the CD tray on a hi-fi during a trip to Currys. ("Nice action. That is very nice action . . . I've got one of them myself.")
One of my favourite possessions is a money clip. It's cheap enough, and unremarkable to behold, but I much prefer having a slim volume of cards and notes in my pocket to having a fat leather wallet - I feel sleek. Who doesn't like feeling sleek?
In fact, I don't like having any clutter in my pockets if I can help it, which is why I love this money clip so much. I have a recurring but non-fatal medical ailment that requires me to carry a pill around at all times, and on the front of this money clip is a small silver cap that unscrews to reveal a little place for . . . a pill. Superb.
There is something enormously comforting to be found in the tiny things - and something enormously discomforting when the tiny things are not up to scratch. I remember reaching my seat on a full flight once, only to find that the seat belt was broken. The cabin crew assured me that everything would be fine, but as I was shot into the sky at 300km/h, with the broken strap draped lamely across my legs, I saw this tiny failing as hugely portentous. How could we hope to stay in the air if the people in charge of the aircraft couldn't fix a seat belt?
There is a saying about this that I always mix up. It's either "God is in the details" or "the devil is in the detail". There's quite a difference between the two. When you sit up at a bar stool, pull yourself closer to get comfortable, then smash your knee cap off a coat hook hidden beneath the counter, you realise as you rub your knee and hiss in agony that it is the work of Satan. No one took the time to sit down at this stool and question the wisdom of putting coat hooks at knee height before they hammered them in. Leave this bar or be damned. You can be sure that their pipes are unclean.
For those in love with detail, Ireland can be an intensely frustrating place to live. Our country is not ergonomic, and it has millions of tiny, anti-logical quirks at every turn. We're forever being banged on the elbow by weird bits sticking out of the side of things, forced to stretch awkwardly for strangely located switches and handles, and shunted around in ineffective queues shaped like cycling pelotons.
Many other European countries feel smooth and intrinsically designed, but trying to figure out why Ireland's idiosyncrasies are the way they are is like trying to figure out what the Cocteau Twins are singing about. It can't be done.
We should probably embrace our idiosyncrasies, and learn to love the fact that they are how they are because that's who we are. Our driving licences are double-sized, printed on cheap laminated paper, and unable to fit in a wallet or a money clip. They don't seem to fit anywhere naturally, but there is no particular purpose to this shape. They could just as easily have been printed on A2 paper, or been completely spherical.
They aren't plastic and shaped like credit cards, because we're not wired that way, and I can learn to love that.
Any country capable of making credit-card-shaped driving licences would not also be capable of producing a writer such as Flann O'Brien, so I'm proud to fold my driving licence in two.
John Butler blogs at http://lozenge.wordpress.com