Open Writing

For the general assemblage of letters no one approaches Shakespeare. He is the Tower of Babel with stained glass windows on every floor. But stand on me, the man is no mathematician. Seven Ages of Man? EIGHT, and still counting.

Forget mewling and puking, ignore playing hookey. Dismiss bearded like a pard, whatever that is. A sighing furnace I will give him. A world too wide for his shrunk shank? Oh, if only that were true. Twenty-one airborne stone give him the lie. Spectacles on nose, pouch at side, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. I have done all that.

Not a word, you notice, about falling over. These days I do it all the time. Show me an escalator and I will show you a prone position. Wet grass and I am as Nureyev in modified leap.

In a city of dreaming spires I spiralled, ambushed by a kerb no bigger than an agate stone on the forefinger of an alderman. A crowd scattered before my stately edifice as I crumbled like a mill chimney, or, more accurately, a pot still.

I have a certain expertise in the architecture of falling over. You begin with a fond farewell to the perpendicular, the next and most graceful move is a panic stricken hover. Walking stick at the High Port, cap dislodged, spectacles awry, you plummet like a stout Stuka dive bomber, finally to sprawl like a homing pancake.

And that is when you discover how badly this country needs immigrants. In Peterborough two Indians, a Turk and assorted Poles combined to snatch me from the ravening jaws of an escalator. This week Poles were once again in the vanguard rushing to retrieve me from a recumbent posture. Thanks are also due to a brace of Pakistani ladies and a gentleman I took to be a forgiving Iraqi, which was pretty decent of him when you think what we have done to his country.

VIVE LA DIFFERENCE, say I. If it weren’t for immigrants, I could be lying there yet.