In these troubled, self-quarantined times, reading a book seems like a very good idea, and although War and Peace beckons, there’s also an urge to dig out something that you haven’t looked at in a good many years. And so I’ve found myself rereading The Dog Chairman, a collection of writings, some of them very short indeed, by Robert Robinson. It’s a book I used to keep in my loo.
Robinson doesn’t get much respect these days. If people remember him at all it’s likely to be because of his bad comb-over (are there any good comb-overs) and his tendency to be a clever dick, on programmes such as Brain of Britain, Stop the Week, and Call My Bluff. He was also anything but inimitable, and he has been much imitated by everyone from the Not the Nine O' Clock news mob, to Fry and Laurie (seen at the top of the post) to Mitchell and Webb. But I like his book a lot.
Back in the day I used occasionally to see him walking in the streets around Broadcasting House, and he was always wearing a hat, whether to hide the comb over or because he worried that the wind might ruin his comb over.
Anyway there’s a piece in The Dog Chairman titled ‘Watch Your Step’ – it’s a nice bit of people watching, observing how people walk. ‘Top end of the social scale, people walk as though they aren’t walking anywhere in particular, bottom end of the scale, people walk as though they only had one destination. Bottom end, people walk as though the movement were being rented rather than outright owned, top-end walks are always freehold.’ I think this is more or less true and he continues, ‘You can no more disguise your walk than your handwriting: I knew a ballet critic who’d been a policeman, and he always walked up the aisle at Covent Garden as though he were going to take Giselle’s name and address.’
I like that. But I do wonder who the policeman turned ballet critic was. How many can there be. Any ideas? Or maybe just made it up.
