It is not from an excess of arrogance that I feel entitled to nominate myself as a champion, deserving of recognition and a prize. It is simple reality that drives me to express my willingness to accept such a prize. I feel I deserve it. I have, throughout my life, striven, even if against my will, to create situations that enabled me and continue to do so -- to shatter objects.

This is never done through fits of pique or any kind of misdirected anger, selecting inoffensive but very fine and extremely useful malleable or friably delicate, readily broken household things of great use, sometimes prideful use, and quality. It is as though within my subconscious resides some demon whose hatred for whole utilitarian objects directs me, someone who appreciates the wholeness of things, to become its malevolent vector.

I became an unwitting tool. Never have I ever deliberately decided to break something. But often, nonetheless, I do. And when I say often, I most certainly do mean often. And sometimes it comes in spurts when not just one object comes to grief under my care, but a succession of such events, leaving me in a quandary of disbelief.

Cups and saucers, antique oriental vases, decorative pottery, they all cringe when I hove into view. Take teapots, for example; in a period of one single week I managed to break the tops of three teapots in rapid succession. I value teapots. They are hugely useful to me, a devoted tea-drinker. Why on Earth would I ever undertake to smash anything as useful and reliable as a teapot? Answer: I would not.

Yet there is that about me that clumsily manages to smash all these things that make life pleasurable. This morning, after breakfast, in my usual hurry -- wait! that's it precisely ... it is my congenital urge to hurry things along, as though to catch escaping time and re-set it in a measure more convenient to my individual needs, that has led to my sorrowfully long record of breakage.

And as I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, this morning represented one of those infamously klutzy occasions. I was carrying two of our breakfast bowls to restore them to their place of rest in a cupboard between uses, when I dropped them, and they shattered with a huge explosion of sprinkling china all over the breakfast room floor, which is a lovely checkerboard of contact-unforgiving ceramic tile.

Understand now why it is that I qualify unreservedly for the title of champion klutz?