The preferred English method is one leg at a time, say every ten years, each leg elastically stretched backwards over the head for as long as possible, just to make sure. Actually, it’s agony, but it’s kindly intended to reassure those parts of the turtle that never wanted to turn in the first place that nothing’s really changed. Intellectually, it’s one way to express notional fairness to both sides.
But turtles could do far more than turn. Poems on the Underground, launched in 1986 by Judith Chernaik, brings poetry to London Transport. On a great working day with archdeaconry colleagues, I spotted this, from her collection Carnival of the Animals:
Under the mottled shell of the old tortoiseAnd, on St Joseph the Worker’s Day, still on the subject of change management, I see somebody the other side of the pond has been plotting the demise of a very dangerous, if influential, candidate for high office:
beats the heart of a young dancer.
She dreams of twirling on table-tops
turning cartwheels,
kicking up her heels at the Carnival ball.
“Oh, who will kiss my cold and wrinkled lips,
and set my dreaming spirit free?”
