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.
•••
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.
•••
Lose weight is the advice of my cardiologist: ‘It will make everything easier.’ I see his point when I visualise a stone as 14 lb of shopping, but losing it is difficult when my only exercise is on the damned crutches and I am as tempted by strange cheeses as was St Anthony by naked women. On encountering — there is no better word for the event — a Mont d’Or in Waitrose, I succumbed in a split second. It looked evil. Its odour was that of a man on a long pilgrimage. An alien from the Haut-Doubs, it is circular only because it is shaped by a shaving of dark pine and trapped in a wooden box. Removed from this support it collapses, its leprous skin cracks, and its oozing innards creep in all directions, as mobile as a heavy syrup and as elastic as a fondue. In me it induced a state of ecstasy; my dogs it drove quite mad.
•••
Why is there no English cheese to match it? In Hexham (like Doubs, border country) for an undeserved literary event, I wandered the market place where there were local cheeses on a dozen stalls, pretty enough, but so mild as to be tasteless. Embarrassed at having tried so many, ‘Which is the strongest cheese you have?’ I asked a big strong bloke, and he commended one clothed in a mould as blue as a small bird’s egg, claiming it to be blue inside this party dress. And so it was, but its flavour was as strong and interesting as a sugar-free marshmallow.
•••
But if the cheeses were a disappointment, the local tonic water was not. I am addicted to tonic (the quinine in it is a prophylactic against cramp) and Hexham, to my great surprise, produces a version infused with herbs and fermented. It is astonishing. I could compose for it a panegyric of the ilk written by Christie’s for investors in fine wines — ‘impulsive and forthcoming, sweet despite its tannic grip, honeyed with fragrance, a touch of balsamic character with rich and lingering aftertaste’. I would much rather drink it than champagne, even Laurent-Perrier.
•••
Perhaps I should travel more. The train took three hours to reach Newcastle — three unbroken hours with a book. On the outward journey I read the catalogue of Leonardo: Anatomist, the current exhibition at Buck House, and now know far more than I need about the human body. On the return I read The Final Journals of Keith Vaughan, who to some small extent I knew half a century ago and found quite difficult, distant and disagreeable; now that I know so much more I realise that I was unfair. I am particularly intrigued by his (very late in life) recall of love affairs, often unrequited, uncluttered by sentimentality but full of longing unfulfilled. I have been doing much the same, though he was in his mid-sixties and I am in my early eighties; is such sweet melancholy the indulgence of all men in their dotage?
Brian Sewell is the art critic of the Evening Standard, and the author of Outsider.
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