The Pied Piper

I was like the Pied Piper of Hamlyn, W. says, with my Adam Ant dancing in that restaurant in Wroclaw. First, the postgraduates followed me in my Adam Ant dancing – the dancing from the video of 'Prince Charming' – the Polish postgraduates, who had been brought along to meet the British delegation of philosophers. Then the other members of the delegation, scholarly types, most of them, usually pale and withdrawn, soon they, too – the younger ones first, and then, more reluctantly, but giving a sense of liberation, the older ones – rose to follow me in my Adam Ant dancing.

And didn't our Polish hosts themselves, so generous in organising a meal in our honour – didn't they, too, feel moved to join us in their own rendition of the Adam Ant dancing from the video of 'Prince Charming'? But they sat smiling instead, drumming their fingers, perhaps wondering if there wasn't a British tradition – a British philosophical tradition – of Adam Ant dancing at the beginning of a conference.

And when we sat down, breathless, faces flushed, after our Adam Ant dancing? When we pulled our chairs back up to our table, ready for our dumplings at the dinner held in our honour, the visiting academics? W. felt a new kind of lightness, he said. A new dizziness. For what had he known, hitherto, of pure joy? What had he known of the sense of abandonment that marked pure joy?

Henceforward, I blazed a trail ahead of him that he knew he'd have to follow. Henceforth, it was joy that sprang ahead of us – ahead of me, and drawing me on, and now ahead of him, too, and drawing him along – a kind of laughter unattached to anything in particular.