cORNISH pASTY and wEAKLY lEGS7*

Why is it, mused the man in the hat, that Beckett has all these crazy people riding bicycles, some with hats, others hatless, and some with weakly legs and trouser bottoms clipped with elastic bands and scotching? They sit on benches with pigeons and Cornish pasty wrappers, thumbing through discarded newspapers and other people’s hastily eaten lunch. Why do they never get where they’re going, and when they do, forget where it was they were going? Do they go anywhere, he thought, anywhere at all? Where do they go when their gone, hopping on their bicycles and peddle madly away? Do they go anywhere but there, where there is nothing but away from where they are, sitting on benches eating spoiled sandwiches and black pickles, thumbing through torn newspapers and pasty wrappers? Where do they go, he pondered, with those garish elastic bands cinched round their trouser bottoms, weakly legs pumping up and down, peddles greased with Brill Cream? Beckett must have been mad himself, he thought, quite mad indeed, making crazy people do crazy things, all that nonsense and peddling, getting nowhere, nowhere at all, nowhere but where they already are, which is nowhere at all, nowhere. The man in the hat, finding the heat quite offensive and unpredictable, sat on a bench and unwrapped his lunch, a pea meal bacon sandwich slathered in hard brown mustard, a stalk of celery, and a rasher of cold white sausage pocked with gristle and rosemary. He ate unhurriedly, the sun burning a hole in the circlet of his head like a magnify glass. The sun is too hot, he muttered to himself, and what’s more, cursedly offensive. Give me a mutton gray sky and the smell of rain in the air any day, I find this sun shininess quite improper and unpleasant.