Michael Hofmann - One Lark, One Horse

Nothing required an account of me And still I didnt give one.

I might have been a virtual casualty, A late victim of the Millennium Bug. No spontaneity, no insubordination, Not even any spare capacity.

The luncheon voucher years (the bus pass and digitised medical record always in the inside pocket come later, along with the constant orientation to the nearest hospital). The years of sir (long past mate, much less dearie), of invisibility, of woozy pacifism, of the pre-emptive smile of the hard-of-hearing, of stiff joints and the small pains that will do me in. The ninth complement of fresh stale cells, the Late Middle Years (say, 1400 AD on the geological calendar), the years of the incalculable spreading middle, the years of speculatively counting down from an unknown terminus, because the whole long stack shale, vertebrae, pancakes, platelets, plates wont balance anymore, and doesnt correspond anyway to the thing behind the eyes that says I and feels uncertain, green and treble and wants its kilt as it climbs up to the lectern to blush and read thou didst not abhor the virgins womb. The years of taking the stairs two at a time (though not at weekends) a bizarre debt to Dino Buzzattis Tartar Steppe, the years of a deliberate lightness of tread, perceived as a nod to Franz Josef thinking with his knees and rubber-tyred Viennese Fiaker.

The years when the dead are starting to stack up. The years of incuriosity and novarum rerum incupidissimus, the years of cheap acquisition and irresponsible postponement, or cheap postponement and irresponsible acquisition, of listlessness, of miniaturism, of irascibility, of being soft on myself, of being hard on myself, and neither knowing nor especially caring which. The years of re-reading (at arms length). The fiercely objected-to professional years, the appalling indulgent years, the years of no challenge and comfort zone and safely within my borders. The years of no impressions and little memory. The years of I would prefer not and leave me in the cabbage.

The years of standing in elevators under the elevator lights in the elevator mirror, feeling and looking like leathered frizz, an old cheese-topped dish under an infrared hotplate, before they kindly took out the lights and took out the mirror, and slipped in screens for news, weather, and sponsors handy messages. The years of one over the thirst and another one over the hunger, of insomnia and sleeping in, of creases and pouches and heaviness and the barber offering to trim my eyebrows. The years of the unbeautiful corpse in preparation. The years to choose: sild, or flamber ?

That rather sprawling foursquare spelling. Always in my mind half associated with the hirsute 14-year-old I saw in the newspaper who sued his local education authority to keep his beard, out of a sort of medical necessity. Derrick. Derrick.

Clean-shaven, Welsh, heavyset, lugubrious, his steel-grey hair apparently parted by a steel comb. Tracksuit bottoms, graphite racket, retired from something or other, maybe ex-army. A plangent sonorousness. If I have it right, India. A grandfather in spe, then fact. He was shy, I was shy.

At the height of things he fed me clippings from the Telegraph, and we talked about militaria (I was translating Ernst Jnger though not in time for him). Some village-y gene had given him the atavistic habit of standing outside his front door for hours arms crossed, surveying the scene. Perhaps a swagger-stick to take the parade. He knew the street as I didnt know him, spent years setting plants and persecuting graffiti in a tiny doggy flowerbed under the railway bridge, played tennis on the corporation courts, kept an ear open for the local scuttlebutt. Like a hardy perennial he stood there under his wifes hollyhocks now both under the ground, massive heart attack (he), years of chemotherapy at the Royal Free and Easy (she), buried from St Dominics down the road, the orphaned court, the problematic flowerbed improbably flowering, the neighbours shuffling past the hollyhocks (pink), more local connections than Ill ever have.