The Dulwich Park Vortex Theory

I’ve noticed an extraordinary thing: the joggers in the park seem mainly to go round in an anti clockwise direction. Strangely, this is in accordance with the bathtub vortex theory which states that water going down a plug hole in the northern hemisphere will swirl in an anti clockwise direction while that in the southern hemisphere will proceed in a clockwise direction.

Dog walkers seem to exhibit similar behaviour i.e. when they enter the park gates they are more often than not inclined to turn to the right rather than the left. However dog walkers are less reliable observationally than joggers because they have to periodically pick up poo, search for their dog in the bushes or stop and have a chat with other dog walkers. They talk while staring and smiling at each other’s dog while the dogs mill around sniffing each other’s bums, and when they set off again you can’t remember who was going in what direction or which dog is which and you have to abandon the whole experiment.

Curiously, the users of the recumbent bicycles seem to counter the theory. I might have made a miscalculation but it seems that the majority of fans of the low-slung velocipede proceed in a clockwise direction. But here’s the weird part, the wheels of their vehicles are spinning anticlockwise in accordance with the bathtub vortex theory. However, a lot of recumbent users don’t take things sufficiently seriously perhaps because they are six; they mess about, crash into buggies, stop for ice creams and generally forget which way they were going, so they are also unreliable in experimental terms.

This does though raise a fascinating question: Do joggers in Sydney and Adelaide all run round their parks in a clockwise direction? Is the earth’s spinning such a pull on us that we have been blindly complying with larger forces all this time? Do we have any choice? Are we just hamsters in a wheel doomed to scuttle either one way or the other depending on whether we are up north or down south?

I ran all these theories past my wife the other night and suggested that in the interests of research we should invest in some high powered binoculars and a paintball gun for marking the dogs and their walkers, but she said, maybe I was spending too much time staring out of the window and not enough time working, and did I want her to ‘phone the Maudsley? When I tried to explain it all again I just started going round in circles.