The shoulder, elbow, knee and ankle, an intricate system of pulleys and weights and cogs and lubrications: when they worked you wouldn't think twice, but when they didn't you knew about it. One hot London afternoon in the early 1980s the left knee of my uncle Heinz stopped working, and as we walked across Regent's Park every animal in London Zoo surely realised something was wrong. It was the noise: unhealthy, unnatural, unforgettable. It was as if a comedy oak door (creeeeaaaakkkk) had fallen on pine cones in the frost (crrruunnnchhh). The mechanism had gone. Heinz's lower leg was wooden, and some part of it—perhaps the attachment to what was left of his original leg—needed linseed or cod-liver oil and bedrest. Heinz's leg had been blown off at the end of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, and if only I'd known it needed so much maintenance I'd never have set out on that walk, or at least made sure we didn't get lost. I learnt a lesson that day: modern wars are about oil, but for Heinz the peace was about oil too.
