A rambling essay about midges, nuclear terror in the 1980s and the life saving practice of not following the rules
by Steve Xoh

I’m enjoying spring immensely. The combination of April sun and a cool breeze feels like the perfect climate for me to do things in minimal clothing but without overheating. I’ve realised that the in-between seasons of spring and autumn are my favourites as they avoid the extremes of summer and winter and instead offer a calm, transitional state.

And despite my weird enjoyment of perilous evening runs in the dark, I’ve really been enjoying running in the spring evening light. The only mildly unpleasant thing is that the warmer weather has brought big swarms of midges to the riverside that I suddenly run through. I’m calling them “midges”, but they’re impossible to identify while I’m running - they’re tiny and move in a chaotic, swirling way. But, as I haven’t noticed any bites, I’m assuming they’re some kind of non-biting midge or midge-like fly.

I find their crazy midge dance fascinating. It appears totally random, yet somehow brilliantly choreographed at the same time. In medieval times, these swarms were sometimes thought of as “dancing spirits” - souls of the dead moving through the air, or fair folk and unseen beings, more easily spotted at the threshold between day and night.

As I ran, I started to wonder about the origin of the word “midge”, which then led me to think about the musician Midge Ure and whether he might have been given that nickname because of his height and a tendency to dance erratically in a swarm. I was slightly disappointed to discover that neither of these things are true, and that his name actually came from an evolution of an anagram of his real name, Jim.

Thinking about Midge Ure then reminded me that, at school, I once did a project about his band Ultravox. The brief was to write about a favourite band or musician and, for some reason, I wrote a double-header piece on Ultravox and the Beatles. I remember feeling like a bit of a weirdo, as everyone else chose artists who were in the charts at the time, while nobody had heard of Ultravox and most people considered the Beatles to be ancient history. I can’t remember what grade I got, but I do remember that just before I handed it in, a friend of mine altered “Midge Ure” to read “Midget Urine” and “John Lennon was shot by Mark Chapman” to read “John Lennon was shot by Steve Chapman” without me noticing. My teacher wasn’t amused.

One of the things that captivated me about Ultravox, beyond their music, was the video for their song “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes”, which told the story of a nuclear meltdown leading to a catastrophic explosion that wiped out a population. I grew up with the threat of nuclear war seemingly ever present in the news and developed a strange mix of terror and morbid fascination with it. I remember watching disturbing films such as Threads, When the Wind Blows and The Day After on TV, which showed the full horror of nuclear war. As I ran, I found myself wondering what else was appearing in popular culture at the time in response to that ever-present threat.

When I got home, I did some research and was surprised to learn that the German pop song 99 Luftballons was also about nuclear war. Released in 1983 by the band Nena, it tells the story of balloons released at a concert being mistaken on radar for incoming enemy missiles, triggering a chain of events that leads to nuclear war. The English version, “99 Red Balloons”, which I would have heard on the radio, softens some of the sharper edges of the original, so it’s easy to see how my younger self wouldn’t have picked up on it.

Learning the meaning of 99 Luftballons reminded me of the true story of Stanislav Petrov, often described as “the man who saved the world”. Petrov was a Soviet lieutenant colonel stationed at a secret early-warning bunker near Moscow at the height of the Cold War. On 26th September 1983, the system he was responsible for reported a sudden incoming attack of US nuclear missiles. The protocol required him to pass this information up the chain of command so that a retaliatory strike could be authorised, but something in his gut told him it wasn’t real, and he chose not to report it as a confirmed attack.

Petrov later described his experience: “I had a funny feeling in my gut. All the data suggested that the alarm was real. If I had sent the report up the chain of command, nobody would have said a word against it. I made a decision, and that was it. There were 23 minutes of waiting. It was a very tense moment. I just sat there waiting.”

Petrov’s gut feeling proved to be right. The warning was a false alarm, triggered by sunlight reflecting off clouds that the system mistakenly interpreted as missiles. Had he followed the rules he was instructed to follow, all-out nuclear war may have ensued, potentially changing the course of humanity forever. He later said of the incident, “People don’t start wars. Computers do.” Having started my run thinking about midges, I ended it reflecting on how Petrov’s story is a powerful reminder of the importance of instinct. It is an important story of how rules, designed to protect and keep us safe, can sometimes lead to the disaster if human judgement is removed. Often, when we encounter the unknown or feel unsafe or out of control the default can be to add in more rules, more procedures and more policies. But this can end up with the opposite outcome where we are so rigidly bound that the importance of spontaneous human intuition is suppressed.

There is an important balance to strike here between freedom and structure. The academic Barry Mason wrote a paper entitled “Towards Safe Uncertainty” that has been a big influence on my work. Mason suggests that, as anxiously wired human beings, we instinctively gravitate towards safety and certainty, putting rules and structures in place to make everything as controllable and predictable as possible. But in reality, this often serves only to maintain the very status quo we are trying to escape. Instead, he proposes that we aim for a balance of “safe uncertainty”, where we hold onto only the bare minimum of essential rules and structures to mitigate the biggest risks, leaving everything else open to spontaneous intuition. I like to think of this as living in a state of “just enoughness”, where structure supports free and safe creative self-expression rather than quietly closing it down.