Skating on thin ice of happy memories
A phone call and misheard name inspires a distant memory of something beautiful.
I’d like to apologise to John (or it may have been Ron) Murray. A week ago, you see, the phone rang. ‘‘Joe Bennett?’’
I admitted it.
‘‘My name’s John (or it may have been Ron) Murray.’’
‘‘John Curry?’’ I said.
‘‘No,’’ he said, ‘‘Murray.’’
‘‘Oh’’ I said, but it was too late. Mr Murray wanted to discuss the perfidy of Australian cricketers, which was the subject of last week’s column and which I had far from exhausted in 800 words.
Yet to the conversation I contributed only the occasional mmm. For I was distracted. The misheard name had sent me, as can happen to ageing men, down a memory tunnel. The tunnel was labelled: John Curry, ice-skating, beauty.
I have ice-skated twice. The first time I chaperoned a class of school children to a rink and they insisted I had a go. I rented skates, set off, thought I’d got the hang of it, then found myself horizontal and a metre above ground.
Landing taught me that the difference between ice and concrete is, from a hip-bone’s point of view, immaterial. obviously difficult, but you didn’t gasp at the skill, you gasped at the effect of the skill. You gasped at the beauty.
And as with all art, the limits of the medium set the artist free. Here was the whole of John Curry, the man himself, expressed on ice.
It isn’t given to many to convey themselves without restraint. What Waugh did with words, and Tchaikovsky with a piano, Curry did with a pair of skates.
You would have had to be dead of heart not to reach out to him with gratitude and delight.
One image stays seared in my skull, of Curry leaning backwards, his skates splayed, his arms outstretched, skating in a vast arc, cruciform on the rim of the world, relaxed and flawless and lovely.
When John who may have been Ron rang off, perhaps offended by my unforthcomingness, I went to the internet, though I was nervous
‘‘There’s a purity to memory that it is sometimes better not to disturb. Time distils things to their essence. That essence may not be literal, but it is truer than literal.’’