Living in daily peril of acting inelegantly

Nov 14 2007 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

NOTE to self: if setting foot in Cambridge, go nowhere near the Fitzwilliam Museum unless you have seen all your numbers come up on Saturday’s Lotto draw.

If you’re the sort of person who trembles more violently than the highball tumblers while walking through the glassware department of George Henry Lee’s, then you, too, would be advised to heed this warning.

For three 17th-century Chinese vases have just been returned to display after being smashed into pieces by an unfortunate visitor.

The story of how these priceless antiques came to meet their maker (or rather their re-maker – a ceramic restorer by the name of Penny Bendall) would strike fear into the already quaking hearts of the butterfingered, clumsy or merely unlucky.

While walking down a staircase, 40-something Nick Flynn tripped over his shoelace and took a tumble, crashing into the ceramic vases. Such was the force of the collision that horrified museum workers found the fragments of these irreplaceable Qing Dynasty pieces spread across 28 different steps.

From this, Flynn learned a very important lesson – that if you can’t be trusted to keep your shoelaces tied then you should always go for Velcro fastenings.

Then again, as a colleague found out on Saturday, having literally fallen head over heels for a pack of Continental meats in the Marks & Spencer food hall, you can have fewer shoelaces in your wardrobe than a prisoner on suicide watch and it still won’t prevent you from the occasional Bambi impression in public.

Which got us thinking . . . how useful it would be to have the same powers as one of the characters in BBC2’s hit series Heroes.

If you tripped up on a wobbly pavement slab in your lunch break, laddering your tights and strewing your most intimate items over the floor, then you could hide your embarrassment by turning invisible.

Even better, you could just fly away from the gawping rubberneckers, creating a diversion and removing yourself from the scene of shame at the same time.

But the one thing that would be really beneficial to those cursed with clumsy genes would be the ability to heal yourself when broken. No longer would we have to take stairs carefully or decline offers of circus skills training (it’s amazing what people try to get you to do for a Daily Post feature) because we’re inclined towards inelegance.

Superpowers will have to stay in fantasyland unless, like in Heroes, humans will evolve into greater beings at some point in the future. But there may be another solution.

Scientists in Spain are trying to find a way to tackle gracelessness in robots. They are spending the next two years creating an artificial cerebellum – the part of the brain that controls motor functions – which they believe will help androids become more co-ordinated.

With the help of electronic engineers, physicists and neuroscientists from universities across Europe, they are designing microchips that will imitate the nervous system.

Great news for robots with catwalk ambitions, but what of us mere mortals?

Well, scientists hope the project will teach them more about how the human body works and may provide clues to the treatment of diseases such as Parkinson’s.

Judging by the Darwin Awards, which are given posthumously to those whose deaths are caused by stupid and avoidable accidents, inelegance is a great danger to the human race – so wouldn’t it be a useful tangent to the research going on in Spain?

In the meantime, however, we clumsies will just have to console ourselves with the fact that, no matter how many times we’ve sprained our ankles, pulled our shoulder muscles or tripped over our own feet, we have never, unlike a 2007 Darwin Award nominee, thought it was a good idea to steal the supporting steel girders from a factory roof.

Nor would we attempt to cut through an electric cable with a pair of pruning sheers like a 2001 Darwin winner.

And, of course, we now know better than to walk near a set of priceless vases when there’s any chance of tripping.

lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk