Meet my old friend. Let’s call him Andy. That’s not his real name. His real name is Rob Kendrick. But we’ll call him Andy for now to protect his identity. Andy believes the Earth is flat. He also believes a lot of other ‘theories’ but for now the Flat Earth (FE) one is what interests me. Here, in a nutshell, is how he justifies this belief.

• The Bible says something about the sun rotating around the earth.
• Scientifically gravity can’t work.
• The surface of lakes and oceans are flat.
• We can’t see the so-called curve of the Earth
• Planes fly at constant heights. If it was curved they’d climb continuously OR we’d feel them descending all the time.
• If it was a globe it’d slow its movement through space because of ether creating drag.

In the pub Andy’s misbeliefs are like a suit of armour. By simply denying all that I believe, nothing gets close to even troubling him about his theories. For example, I say, ‘but what about GPS?’ He says the globe doesn’t have to be round to enable triangulation. So I say, ‘but how do the satellites orbit?’ He says they’re geostationary, so I say ‘but how do they stay up?’ He says they rest on the ether.

So here’s what I did. I made up my own science. He says there’s ether, so I say ether puts us to sleep, which is why, at night, when it leaks down, we all get tired. Nothing he can say will dissuade me from this tack and he gets annoyed. I tell him the holes in the ozone layer are letting ether leak through in the day, which is why we’re tired during the day. I can ignore everything he says about ether as he tries to disprove me. I’m wearing the armour now. When he says I’ve got it wrong about ether, I answer that he won’t open his mind and accept the truth, and his blinkered ignorance is harmful to reality. All things he’s said to me.

Of course, I don’t feel triumphant. All I’ve done is made meaningless noises at someone who has been making meaningless noises at me. But one result is that we and my ‘normal’ friends have a new word. When someone makes a particularly stupid comment we now say they’re talking ‘Robbish’.