Thing To Be Today: a pivot.

Changing direction is no problem if there's just the one of you (unless there's some idiot's wheeled suitcase just below your eye-line all ready to trip you up) but what if there are thirty?

Then, as armies and chorus girls have known for generations, you need someone to be a pivot. This is the person who stays on the spot while everyone else moves round them.

If you're a chorus girl you have to smile while you're going it:


Soubrettes at the Cremorne Theare, Brisbane, ca 1944.

 but in the military not so much:


painting by W B Wollen

...actually, in the military not at all.

(Hey, could we have one of those life-swap TV programmes where chorus girls and the Coldstream Guards do each other's displays? I wouldn't insist on the Guards wearing stilettos to do it.)

But being pivotal needn't involve any physical movement at all. It may be that some cunning wheeze such as digging up a road junction in the rush hour requires action from a host of experts and idiots (two categories not mutually exclusive) and someone is required to make sure no one goes off at a mad angle and wrecks the whole delicate operation. 

Yes, the pivot will be the essential bossy one who does hardly any work at all himself.

Well, I didn't say it was going to be easy or popular, did I?

Thing To Be Today: a pivot. This word might be something to do with the Old Provençal word pua, which means a tooth of a comb.