David Charters: Each human being is sprung differently

May 13 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

YOU will find after many years sniffing the air of these shores that each human being is sprung differently. Some like to soar to unimaginable heights. Others prefer the rub of solid earth under their brogues.

Let us now consider the responses of three people approaching a hurdle blocking their way.

The first is my late mother who is wearing a brown bonnet, or “lid” as my father would have called it, secured to her greying hair by a pin of such an alarming glint and length that you wonder if it had seen action in the Zulu Wars.

“Och, noo,” she says with the Scottish accent that had clung to her like the paint on a kirk door. “I can’t be doing with this. Why would anyone block the path with a totally useless object. I expect they think that somebody else will come and take it away for them. So selfish.”

With that, she squeezes past the hurdle and continues to waddle to the old cafe, where the fug is ceaselessly recycled by the weary ceiling fans, which seemed to wheeze and gasp for the British Empire – over gossiping ladies smearing their coffee cups with lip-rouge, while shifting their ample bottoms on green leather chairs studded with brass.

The second person is our dear Aunty Gwladys, who, as if by instinct, on spotting the hurdle draws back her left leg. It is finished with a foot, which, though fully an inch and a half shorter than the other one, if measured to the tip of the gnarled big toe, has been hardened into a hammer on the shins of hundreds of fellow shoppers.

It is reliably reported that, for the only time in her life, the curate’s angular, narrow-nosed wife used angry words when her leading ankle met the might of Aunty Gwladys’s steel-capped ballet boot. “You dirty brute,” she is said to have shrilled, before beginning a month’s penance in the basement of the Vicarage.

After a single glance at the hapless hurdle, Gwladys simply kicked it to the Liverpool bank of the Mersey, persuading the Tranmere Rovers manager of the day to reach for his cheque book.

Once restored to its place, the hurdle trembled to the accelerating advance of Sebastian Coe, now Lord Coe, the man whom we must all thank for attracting the 2012 Olympic Games to London. He, of course, leaps over the hurdle, bumping his head on a star, proving yet again that he is a man for any challenge. Then he fades into the golden sun without a hint of dandruff on his collar.

But we can’t all be perfect.

Hold on a moment. Is that another figure, slim and demure, stepping lightly towards the hurdle? By jove, surely not – it’s my wife.

“Shield my eyes from that wretched hurdle,” she pleads. “It’s orange. Didn’t the men who put it there realise that it would clash with the grass? I daren’t even think about the colour schemes in their houses.”

She reaches in her pocket for a little box, which I am told the thrilling young ones call a portable phone. “Is that the council?” she says. “Well, I want a rubbish lorry to come at once to remove an unsightly hurdle from the path. There is not a moment to lose, as Sherlock Holmes used to say. The hurdle wounds my soul and distresses my eyes. Remove it.”

Balance is one of the main differences caused by the variations in our spring. I, for example, have never been overcome by the urge to mount a unicycle with a long stick on my forehead, which will reach an upright stance, if I tilt my head back as far as it will go – so that I can pile plates on the stick’s far tip, while pedalling frantically to keep the wheel spinning on the ground. But others find that this activity carries them to within a whisker of Heaven. They would wave to the angels, if their hands weren’t outstretched to help keep them balanced.

Unfortunately, I have never had a sense of balance. Even when walking, I cannot have one foot off the ground for more than a quarter second, lest I should topple over. When I first managed to stand, sympathisers asked themselves whether they should inform the papal committee which deals with miracles.

“Perhaps this is why I have never driven a car. I’m temperamentally unsuited to the wheel,” I say, nodding sagely.

But now that I have my travel pass for the older person, what need have I of a car? I can travel from Birkenhead to Bebington on the train without paying a penny. Isn’t that a whisker away from Heaven?

* LISTEN to David Charters on his picture podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk