It was March and the wind was blowing. But it was not “blowing.” It was scraping, scourging¹. It was so cruel. So unbecoming. Not merely did it bleach² faces and raise red spots on noses; it tweaked up skirts; showed stout³ legs; made trousers reveal skeleton shins. There was no roundness, no fruit in it. Rather it was like the curve of a scythe⁴ which cuts, not corn, usefully; but destroys, revelling⁵ in sheer sterility⁶. With one blast it blew out colour — even a Rembrandt in the National Gallery, even a solid ruby⁷ in a Bond Street window: one blast and they were gone. Had it any breeding place it was in the Isle⁸ of Dogs among tin cans lying beside a workhouse drab on the banks of a polluted city. It tossed up rotten leaves, gave them another span of degraded existence; scorned, derided⁹ them, yet had nothing to put in the place of the scorned, the derided. Down they fell. Uncreative, unproductive, yelling its joy in destruction, its power to peel off the bark, the bloom, and show the bare bone, it paled every window; drove old gentlemen further and further into the leather smelling recesses¹⁰ of clubs; and old ladies to sit eyeless, leather cheeked, joyless among the tassels¹¹ and antimacassars of their bedrooms and kitchens. Triumphing in its wantonness it emptied the streets; swept flesh before it; and coming smack

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