We fail! But screw your courage to the sticking-place, / And we'll not fail!

MACBETH, William Shakespeare

Lady Macbeth is what you might call a go-getter. But some days we just don’t feel like getting our legs over vaulting ambition’s rearing horse.

Shakespeare’s line is structured like a horse with a rearing head and a whisking tail. In the middle is the ‘sticking-place’, which requires courage to get over. Our hands struggle to find a suitable arrangement; on a horse this might be the neck, and of course this is the meaning of sticking-place: the long slippery neck where the slaughtering knife is stuck trying to complete its bloody work.

At school they made us vault the horse in front of the rest of the class; we stood in a line inside the cavernous gym - the only room where money was ever spent, because physical confidence might at least lift us from our humble origins — and waited our turn. And of course I failed and ran straight into that hard pelt-of-a-thing with wooden legs, or whatever it was that stood in for a horse, and flung myself at the immoveable shadow terrorising my mind’s eye.

One day I was sent home from school for failing to land well — two or three of us were — the designated failures. We limped off home swishing our donkey-tails between our legs. Next time, we’ll not fail! we said to ourselves. In some remote corner of my dreams I still say this to myself.

This line from Macbeth is shrouded by the shadow of failure. ‘We fail . . . . [long necked horse] . . . And we’ll not fail! But if you begin with the shadow of failure, inevitably you fail. For an artist, failure can be a creative act. It is a means of revising, revisioning, starting again. At least this is howI see it now. But Lady Macbeth is in a different order of time and space, a matter of life and death. She is demanding that Macbeth, her husband, get his hands dirty; cleave to that neck and stab, stab, stab! Deal with the blood and gore, face it down, look death straight in the eye and so achieve your dream; their shared dream, of taking the Scottish crown. There is only that long neck in-between them, that snorting, foaming, furious horse.

For all the kids who tried to take on the vaulting horse of life at Elm grove Junior School, Littlehampton, circa 1982.