Читать книгу Of Me and Others - Alasdair Gray - Страница 5
Оглавлениеan epigraph
Everyone over middle age
regrets some loss that ageing brings.
My principal regret is this:
I’ve never tackled handy things.
Before King Louis lost his head
his hobby was repairing locks.
Byron, despite a crippled foot,
wrote epics yet could swim and box.
Sir Thomas Browne, Bill Carlos Bill,
were medical practitioners.
The Reverend Sydney Smith had skill
to doctor his parishioners.
One soldier wrote great words for tunes.1
One housewife writes tremendous books.2
One postman publishes cartoons.3
One mural painter welds and cooks.4
One sweeper of streets can etch and paint.5
One banker played the bagpipes well.6
One fisherman became a saint who
holds the keys of Heaven and Hell.7
Ruskin swept stairs and weeded plots.
D. H. Lawrence scrubbed the floors.
Count Tolstoy emptied chamber pots.
Why do I flinch from household chores?
Frosts’s farming was not infamous.
Melville and Conrad sailed the sea.
James Kelman drove an omnibus.
No honest toil excuses me.
1. Hamish Henderson
2. Agnes Owens
3. Stuart Murray
4. Nichol Wheatley
5. Alan Richardson
6. Former manager of the Glasgow Byres Road Clydesdale Bank
7. Peter
