It’s been a good while since I’ve posted, <\/p>\n Childhood friends will remember that I <\/span>Fortunately, <\/span>This
\nchiefly because limited mobility has made it difficult to get to London and
\ntake part in the capital’s cultural life. It seems that I need a new knee. I
\nwish I could say that I wore out the old one by exercising it too much, by
\nmarathon-running or even ballroom dancing. But of course, however exquisite,
\nthese would be fibs. The truth is that the absence of cartilage in my right
\nknee is the result of a car crash I had in 1957. Not only was I the bad driver,
\nbut the parents’ car I totaled was a design icon, a 1951 Raymond Loewy
\nStudebaker. <\/span><\/p>\n![\"Booker](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/Booker%20shortlist%202010.jpg?resize=553%2C369\")
<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\nspent about 10 months in hospital conditions, and that my leg was only saved
\nbecause clever surgeons performed a then-radical operation attaching a metal
\nplate with four screws to what was left of my shattered femur. I might have
\nhoped that, five or six years later, when I was called up to be conscripted
\ninto the US Army, this injury would make me ineligible. But no, the Army
\nsurgery protocol said that the only remedy for injuries like mine was
\namputation. I had a leg; ergo I could not have sustained the injuries described
\nin my medical records. QED (it was very <\/i>radical
\nsurgery). <\/span><\/p>\n
\na sympathetic medical examiner (who happened to be the father of schoolfriends,
\nand a mate of the surgeons in question) discovered evidence of asthma in the
\nsame records (though I don’t think I’ve ever had an asthma attack), and I was
\nexempted from being drafted into the 101st<\/sup> Airborne Division, which
\nmarshaled at Fort Campbell, KY, and was then sent to Vietnam. <\/span>This also prevented me from facing a
\nmoral crisis, because I was probably the only kid in Kentucky then who knew
\nabout the “police action” in Vietnam, and I was so opposed to it that I might
\nwell have refused to go.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nis an awfully long-winded way of saying that the reason I am on crutches for
\nthe rest of the month is that my current young Oxford surgeon insisted on
\nremoving the souvenir metal plate before doing the new knee. He allowed me to
\nsee the trophy as I was recovering from the anaesthetic, and I deeply regret
\nthat I wasn’t allowed to keep the beautiful sculptural object, which was not
\nonly unrusted, but even shiny despite its 53 years’ attachment to my person.
\n(In Britain such objects have to be incinerated – something to do with the
\nprions that are suspected to cause BSE and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and the
\nfact that nobody yet knows what a prion is and how it behaves.)<\/span><\/p>\n