Greyhound for Breakfast

The guy with the crutch

A gangrenous patch on his right leg had resulted in amputation. The people at the hospital gave him a new one which he got used to quicker than most folk in the same predicament but something happened to this new limb and now he no longer had it. For a while he moved around as best he could, making do with a walking stick of sorts; but it was not easy and he was a guy who liked travelling about the place. One morning somebody found a broken crutch and gave him it and somebody else made a cross-spar and nailed it properly down for him. This meant he was back mobile again and he used to tell folk the crutch was as adequate as anything. But eventually he stopped telling them that and soon he stopped telling them anything at all. From then on, whenever I caught sight of him, he was carrying a plastic shopper that contained most of his possessions; usually he was trudging to places over stretches of waste ground, although trudging is the wrong word because of having the crutch and so on he used to move in a rigorous and quite quick swinging motion.