This evening we watched The Way Things Go, a 1987 art film by the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss. The latter died in April this year, so the viewing had a sort of timeliness. The film is probably the artists’ most famous work. Over some thirty minutes we watch a series of chain reactions, the one after the other, spread out along a thirty or forty metre length of some inside space. Some of the causal sequences seem obvious and inevitable (a rocket fuse, for example). Others at first seem possible at most and only later become probable and then inevitable (gently swinging weights and rocking tyres, for example). Created in 1987, it is a metaphor for all sorts of things. It is, at one level, comic and, at another, a stern warning.