Anakana Schofield

Churchill runover

Today I was contemplating how to recover from the awful sight of the accident I witnessed on Sunday, as it has made me very jittery and I keep seeing the poor cyclist airborne. I’ve been observing how shock physicalizes into certain muscles in the body and working with those muscles, while recognizing the need to not do very much, except drink ginger tea, meet my daily responsibilities and wait until it passes. This being nothing compared to the poor man who took the flight.

I am very lucky that my daily life and my co-habitants can facilitate this. None of us are adverse to lying around reading and we need plenty of down time which we treasure, even when heart rates are not higher than usual.

And sometimes subjects converge in interesting ways. My son was watching a documentary series on Churchill for some research. For whatever reason I started in 4 parts in on Part 1 by accident. It began with Churchill and Michael Collins and the treaty and moved through his poor handling of the 1926 General Strike and woeful attitude to breaking the miners and on. It then moved into his 10 year period where he was out of politics. He travelled to America on a lecture tour and lo and behold the pictures informed us was hit, quite seriously, by a taxi in New York. He wrote an article about it and earned a much needed (read extravagant lifestyle) five thousand pounds.

I went in search of the article and lo agus behold encore this was what I found

I have been squinting and one paragraph on the left hand side of the piece, but have a hard time making out the words.

It may read:

“There was one moment — I cannot measure it is time — of a world aglare (?) a man aghast. I certainly thought quickly enough I am going to be run down and probably killed. Then came the blow.”

When I read it or squinted it, I unfortunately could hear the blow.