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‘Avoid the world,’ Kerouac said, ‘it’s just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.’ Well, the diagnosis might’ve been premature, but you can’t fault the science. When entropy reaches a universal maximum, nothing can be anything, or do anything, or mean anything. Our universe will not see out its days by barrelling towards some big, climactic, Revelations-style ending, but by slouching through an increasingly meaningless jumble of dispersing elements, then limping on towards the most bland, uniform, entirely generic middle you can possibly imaginable, and dying there.

This is all a little bleak, I realise, but it’s important to get the facts down on paper. It’s also important, and maybe even a little heartening, to say that there’s a speck of scientific fairy dust to be found amongst all this gloom and collapse. You see, entropy and the arrow of time are not driven by a hard constant – like, say, the speed of light – but by probability, and probability alone. What I mean is, there is no rule specifically saying that everything in the kitchen can’t fall, bounce or somehow shift from a messy state to a neat state by sheer chance. It’s just that the odds against such things are so astonishingly, incredibly, mind-bogglingly, unimaginably huge, compared to the usual ‘neat to messy’ movement, that for practical purposes we say it doesn’t ever happen.