The Restoration of Otto Laird Read Online Free PDF

matter. Otto’s powers of recall were not what they had been, for one thing, and he struggled to keep up with all the changes in terminology, especially now that his voracious appetite for books had waned. There were moments when he didn’t have a clue what Pierre was writing about. Well, now was the time to draw a line. He must put a stop to it, once and for all, and either re-establish their friendship on a sounder footing, or abandon it altogether.
    He picked up his pen.
    Dear Pierre,
    Thank you very much indeed for your latest letter. I should say at the outset that I agreed with everything you said – something of a first, I know. Your argument was beautifully crafted and I have little else to add. In our games of intellectual head-tennis, you take game, set and match every time. You’re a clever old bugger, aren’t you?
    Sorry if my opening remarks appear flippant – I realise you were probably expecting a more considered response. But I’ll have to ask you to show some compassion and forgive an old friend his crassness. I’m rather frail these days, you see, and losing my mental sharpness. Many of your more subtle arguments are simply lost on me. These are my shortcomings, of course – not yours. I’m sure that your discourses remain as lucid as ever. But my mental energies are somewhat depleted nowadays, and those that have been left to me are largely dispersed in concerns more pressing than a long meditation upon architecture as a tool of political control. I have to deal with this pain in my gut, for a start, and I also find myself teetering on the brink of mysticism – an odd thing for a man of science, I realise, but I’m trying to work it through.
    In short, I’m no longer the coherent and articulate figure of old, bursting with a passionate commitment to social transformation and global justice – the person you befriended in the late 1950s, in other words. My ambitions these days are more modest ones. I want my stomach to hurt less, I want Anika to be happy and I want to design a building that’s as perfect as an egg. That’s about it. Oh yes, and I want to try to save Marlowe House from destruction. That’s the rundown tower block in south London, by the way, not the mystifyingly fashionable one out west. They announced a few days ago that they plan to demolish it.
    I know you’ll welcome my attempt to fight this decision, but I feel duty bound to confess that the reason I’m trying to save Marlowe House is not because of the high ideals it once represented. I could pretend that’s the reason – it would certainly make me appear nobler in my intentions. But any such claim would be less than honest. No, I want to save Marlowe House for other reasons. For itself, and for myself . Because I think it’s a good building and I’m still rather proud of it, despite the decades of neglect, its terrible reputation for crime … and three generations of yobs, pissing in its stairwells. Yes, despite all these negatives, I still think that Marlowe House is a building worth saving. It probably has something to do with Cynthia as well. I haven’t really thought about that one, but I expect it’s the case. She played a large part in its design, after all, and I think she would probably have wanted me to do something. Finally, I’m doing it just to keep myself occupied, to wake myself up a bit, and maybe ward off some of this encroaching senility. I know there’s something not quite right with my mind, these days, although it’s so hard to tell what exactly, when one is living on the inside of these things.
    I danced with a butterfly recently, you know. Can you imagine? An elderly man, prancing round the forest like a wood nymph. I nearly gave myself heart failure. And I’ve started taking my clothes off at inappropriate times. Poor Anika got a terrible fright the first time it happened. So I think it’s