“DON’T step on the new carpet,” chimed my wife and the melody of her tone rose several octaves on the words “new” and “carpet”. At that juncture, in what has often been a troubled life, my pale and cold-tipped nose had been leading the way into the lounge, followed by my eyes, which blinked twice in bemusement, as I absorbed the full meaning of this instruction.
Between the outer fluff on my first slippered foot and the armchair, whose comfortable folds were eagerly awaiting the arrival of my lacklustre buttocks, there was an open expanse of floor, every inch of which was covered by the deep pile of the carpet. How was it to be crossed? Now, I knew how those thirsty pioneers felt when they approached the Utah desert in their covered wagons. But they had the advantage of being allowed to touch terra firma on their way to the Promised Land.
What was the distance between the chair and me? The calculation was a tormenting one. Two brain cells loomed from the void and began a frantic dance – sweating, hopping, wheezing, whizzing abacus beads and somersaulting, watched from the side by the third. “Come on, you can do it,” called this doughty cell, his scarf aloft.
Indeed, they could. “Good heavens, sweetheart – that’s about four yards,” I said, nervously, but by then my wife was engrossed in a glossy brochure devoted to curtains and my anxiety was not heard. She must have expected me to clear the distance in a single bound, twisting in an anti-clockwise direction in mid-air for the landing. Well, even in my athletic prime, when I could chase the number 64 bus between stops and gain sufficient momentum to leap onto the back platform while gripping the chromium support-pole, I had never attempted such a clearance. I looked behind at the space in the hall between the staircase and me. “Not much of a run- up,” I mumbled to myself, darkly. But then I remembered a character from childhood, who would have solved the problem in a way guaranteed to delight my wife. The Mighty Mekon of Mekonta was the implacable foe of Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, in the Eagle comic’s tales of outer space. Of course, the Mekon was green with the eyelids of an amphibian, but that’s hardly a barrier in these politically correct times. Think of Simon Cowell. The point was that he hovered on a miniature flying saucer because his body was too feeble to carry a huge head, packed with demonic schemes for dealing with Earthlings. So, physically, we had much in common.
A couple of days back, when browsing for a few glorious minutes in a second-hand bookshop in the village, I had been reintroduced to Dan Dare and Digby, his sidekick, whose unquestioning loyalty compensated for a certain dullness of wit. On one of the shelves was the unmistakable red jacket of an Eagle annual. It had been published in 1952 and featured stories about Dan Dare; Black Dirk, the mediaeval warrior; PC 49, the incorruptible copper; Jeff Arnold, the cowboy in Riders of the Range; Harris Tweed, the bungling special agent, in conflict with the evil Spaghetti gang. This was another age and there were long articles about building a model railway, rearing silkworms, creating a “jet-powered” dart, making “Whirling Willy”, the hunting boomerang; and how to keep unusual pets. Perhaps it wasn’t the age of innocence that we remember so fondly; but it was a time of patience and deeper appreciation, when people expected their pleasures to come more slowly and to last much longer – like the ever-changing colours of a gobstopper.
But on the carpet’s brink, there wasn’t enough time to make a flying saucer. “How do I reach the chair?” I asked. “Walk nimbly around the edge of the room and then, when you arrive there, sit with your feet in their air, so as not to disturb the pile in front of the chair,” my wife said, the lovely turquoise of her eyes glowing in anticipation. But I was far away – landing my spaceship on the strange planet of Mekonta.
