Diary – 12 May 2012

Bidden to the Barbican for the Bauhaus exhibition, I trekked from the eponymous underground station. I noted that there are many steps from the platform to the street, perhaps a little steeper than the norm, for I kept catching my crutches on them. Across the road, the narrow steps into the Barbican — a mean afterthought by a rotten architect — I know to be very steep even for a man fully fit in wind and limb. Beyond the serried tower blocks there are more steps, more generous to the lame in every dimension, and down — though they will be up on the way back and there are a hell of a lot of them. They are unswept and crumbling, their only redeeming feature a scattering of daisies in the cracks. Reminded of Walter Pater’s writing of Botticelli’s Venus ‘powdered all over in the Gothic manner with a quaint conceit of daisies’, I prayed no busybody with the necessary broom will remove this small triumph of nature over the most brutal urban architecture that I know.

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I grow accustomed to the crutches — and on a good day I scoot about quite merrily as though in seven-league boots. The push and lift are good for my shoulders, I persuade myself, though not as good as driving a straight eight Daimler without power steering (straight eight means eight cylinders in line and, in my case, long ago, a capacity of 5.5 litres and a dry weight of two tons or so). Power steering is the curse that enables little women to drive large cars — without it, London would never have needed a congestion charge. But NHS crutches are ugly aluminium things, functional in a Bauhaus sort of way, and in my mind I redesign them in the natural-material elegance of ebony and cane, echoing the ski poles of langlaufing in my youth.