not quite the town mouse*

Posted on August 11, 2026 | Leave a comment

I was never a Harrods 

girl.  I went and looked and came away.  I recall from the dim and distant past that the first thing I ever bought in Harrods was dusters for my sister, hardly a Harrods shopper.  She wanted the dusters but I wanted the bag.

Though I have lived in London ( except for 2 years in New York) forever,  I don’t know it like the back of my hand (which has changed anyway).  I know certain areas but they change, coming in and out of focus depending upon importance or relevance.   London

was always a vast city, including or excluding this or that depending upon your opinion.   And I have lived in the built up bits, not in the suburbs.  I like it. 

Yes I hate the mess but the mess is everywhere, a psychological condition which clearly indicates the low level distress in which many of us operate, many without knowledge or insight, guarded by the phrase banned in my family home – “don’t care.”  I do.  Hence AR ragpicker – 14 pieces  in the street on the way to the bus.

Nothing to do with garbage disposal.  Thoughtless people.

Last week, as part of using my renewed health and strength again, I went to my old favourite, Harvey Nichols.  No I never bought “everything” there, I did a lot of looking because it was worth looking at – what they had, how it was offered to me.   As good as a gallery.

Sadly – and I don’t bore easily – it was boring.  Layout to contents,  I didn’t like what was on offer.  I saw a lovely evening  dress for which I have no use and not another thing that lingered in the memory, up  to and including labels I admire.  The  several staff members to whom I spoke were agreeable.  So it’s not them.  It’s just all wrong.

And not a thing you could afford if you weren’t laden with money – there should always be something – so you can have the bag and the illusion of being part of it.

Maybe, I hear you say, the time is wrong ?  If you are worrying about the gas bill, you are not in the market for higher end ready-to-wear.     But  you know, a cat can look at a king. 

And maybe even admire the ermine trimming …   Just not there.  So I was interested to see Mary Portas talking about its putative sale and what’s necessary to move it forward from stuck in oh dear.

She came to HN from Topshop where she had notable success and it was hoped she could do the same again.  And she did. But this is all retrospective –  it’s about what was.  Is what is, so different ?  She notes in her comments. that 70 per cent of Generation Z would rather shop in a physical store than on-line.   I’ve always wondered about buying on line – cut. line, length, colour, shape, contents, suitability – and that weary business of sending it back if it isn’t right.

I have been  lucky on line (the stonking success of the first jeans I bought for years, from Land’s End, modest price, perfect fit and the  nicest woman on the phone when I rang to say thank you) and very very wary.  Not much, not often but then I was never at any age or with any money, a shop every week girl.  Shopping AR was targeted.  

I could always be sidetracked – but I did not go out to wander and window shop aimlessly.    

I do realise this is about as far from Harvey Nichols as you can get and being the next best thing to a nun  -just me – I haven’t even touched on menswear – though I tried to buy interesting coloured socks for a present and was sent elsewhere by the assistant.   

People have different relationships with clothes, as they have different relationships with people. They feel differently about shopping.  They don’t know what they think, they are covered  – in the cheap and it’ll do, to the expensive because it’s fashionable , because some “influencer” says so.  Modern shopping is the victim of the confusion that exists between “me, me, me” and “who ?”   In an unhealthy time I’d rather invoke rodent than ripoff.

  • Aesop’s fable of The Town Mouse and the Country  Mouse

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AR not AI

Posted on August 4, 2026 | Leave a comment

Whatever I say about director Christopher Nolan’s  version of the Odyssey (3 hours plus with Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland) doesn’t matter  because it is a world wide film sensation and should keep the studio doors open for a while longer – provided everything doesn’t go up in flames  which is very likely. 

A line from one of the spirituals of my formative youth refers to “God send a fire, not a flood next time.”    I was struck by a 16 year old French  girl who spoke good English  saying how fast the fire travelled and how afraid it made her.

Plus nationally we are desperately short of fire persons.  

Unsure of Mr. Burnham’s exact standing  in matters requiring  decision rather than intention, an awful lot of  that vast number of people  drawing benefit and doing not a lot must surely come to “earn your money” through fire service, street cleaning, rubbish collection.  Six weeks’ money max, then you can only draw if you do the jobs on offer.   And very few  “mental problems” benefit from doing nothing.

I’ve never been in the loop with  any kind of  professional performers, I mean the ones who do whatever they can to keep going.  But  in success –  I do think relentless exposure – now more exposed and more relentless than it has  ever been – skews perception and consciousness.

A recent article about the so called (not ever by me) “supermodels” took the form of an interview with one of them

– as disagreeable, charmless and as leathery as elderly cow thigh.   She obviously didn’t want to do the interview, or got into it and wished she hadn’t – and so do I.  But she clarified something for me – stages of exposure.  

There’s your moment, however long it lasts: there are middle stages – often more than one where you  go off the rails, get back on them and learn something (oh I do hope you learn something): and then there is review, when you are for one reason or another looking  back.

There are many  who get stuck in  stage two, endless recycling of  ineptitude, bad habits, sin and redemption.   I get very tired of “look what I suffered.”  Yup.  Sure.  Anybody  ever ask where you are in this –  surely, powerless as a child – but older ? Don’t you have a responsibility in this ?  Or is responsibility a word so old fashioned that we don’t use it any more ?   The  victim of circumstance is rarely the whole story.  

See it, learn from it, accept that (as actress Samantha Moreton says in an interview this weekend as good as the aforementioned model’s was bad) the past is always with you. 

She isn’t quoted as adding  “… but you can’t live in it” – but I will.

My past is very much part of my present and I presume that will continue to obtain going forward into the future.  I am as soppy and sentimental as the next person, maybe more than many  but I was taught to look and to see, to ask questions,  to watch, to understand (took a long time) the value of being a witness which is what I am writing about.  In this  context, it is nothing to do with the law or breaking it.  It is to do with the Great Law life itself.     

Don’t misunderstand me when I call it the Great Law and think that I put life above everything – I don’t. 

Death is part of life, however you get there.  But I do think if you are going to live, you must learn.   And I am  endlessly moved by watching how people learn and what they learn, and by extension, what it means to them.

For example, it is  just as hard to be a handsome man as a beautiful woman .  So it’s thrilling when the Jude Laws and the Robert Pattinsons are  eventually allowed to act – and found to be rather good.  As long as you are “just” beautiful, you are in grave danger of turning into a presence rather than a performance.  

There are faces and feelings you respond to before you can define them – like a dog sniffing acutely and the hackles go up. Not much you can do about that except be mature and reasonable, and nobody is always so.

But you can notice and think – and no machine can do it better.    

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fashion

Posted on July 28, 2026 | Leave a comment

Once  it  meant clothes.  But an early miniskirt revealed that my legs were too short from  knee to ankle.   If it ended fashionably above the knees,

I looked like a foreshortened lampshade – and  worse with a skirt (break in the middle to non existent waist).    I could work round a shorter dress once I had discovered a becoming shape  , the only time I found anything in Vogue I had already bought.

The first psychologist I ever met described clothes to me as  “the exteriorization of self”. 

And I wish  a few more people would look at  and dress what is there, instead of what they wish were there in blind hope of transformation.

There are fashions in everything and  thank you God, I am past doing more than listen or look and make up my own mind to the imponderables.   As in – any camera  adds 30  lbs.

Re director Christopher Nolan’s film of  The Odyssey. 

It’s already  taken gazillions at the  box office and  involves  two or three actors I am always interested in.   I have read its praise (film critic) through to a professor of classics  criticizing the script, emphases and omissions.  If it is as much about anxiety as she found it , it is outstandingly fashionable  – worry and  weirdness.  

But nobody has mentioned the obvious.  

A book is a book is a book is a book, and a film is a different medium.  There are books I  can’t imagine filmed and would rather  the makers didn’t try. I can see the pitfalls, I have seen enough bad scripts commissioned and earning  somebody a living.  Incoherent, shapeless and without style.

If the root of the word fashion is to do with making, it developed historically to include style,

the way in which something is made.   These are quite separate ideas.   I’d like to think Homer earned his breakfast, supper and tea while amassing and writing the stories for which he is known  – I am sure he was but one of many jobbing poets – but any film director, especially  one operating out of  what’s left of an enormous industry, needs to make money on the deal.    

Believe me,  I was married to a film maker.  It’s a very expensive medium – and he didn’t make money.  Five years with a clever man who didn’t recognize that if he couldn’t show a profit, the next budget would be even harder to raise.        

For a very long time, I have walked round  the very word fashion. 

Suspiciously.   Seemed to be about flesh on dreams.  Expensive.   But dreams are only ever that  and one will succeed another.   So, I may consider it but am not easily swayed.

Music:  I don’t listen to much music.  I have learnt to enjoy quiet, almost  certainly a reaction to a noisy world coupled with the rising sensitivities of age.  

The music  that I like remains the music that I like.  There are still sounds and voices that excite me, I could care less who else approves of it, whether memory or innovation.

Too often fashionable experience is governed by how much money you  have to play with.   “I won’t spend £78  plus on a seat for something I am not interested in” remarked a neighbour recently .  I’d have thought  she had the money and would spend it happily to see the latest thing.  Apparently not.  

Same with restaurants and food – because you may like the  surroundings while finding the menu not to your taste.  Eating out is expensive.  Hence the success of the pizza and  the joy in a friend’s voice  telling you “We could meet at …it’s even affordable !”

The phrase  “reassuringly expensive” applies to all too many of the new and existing brands of makeup though  I cannot see wearing makeup in 30 degrees of heat.  Put it on, sweat it off.  Throw money down the drain.

Fashion seems to depend on  desperately wanting to be different, then acknowledged for that difference till the  difference extends to enough people to make you feel  you can safely discard it.  Nobody ignores fashion – it’s in the air we breathe.  But as breath  comes in and goes out again I confess, I am more interested in my own taste than  somebody else’s fashion

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bmc

Posted on July 21, 2026 | Leave a comment

Andy Burnham? 

Don’t know, fingers crossed  – beyond my control (bmc).

There am I watching the beginning of the original Stagecoach, the only one worth watching for my money, by John Ford using a young not yet mannered John Wayne,

and it disappears.  bmc

The head of the Board of Governors of the BBC says that  – for the BBC to survive – most households will have to  pay the licence fee.  Why has not serious decision been made years ago about what can and cannot be paid to its presenters ie a ceiling payment, no higher than … No well is ever without bottom, especially one funded with public money. 

Which is a pretty dry well right now.

 And  Cate Blanchett, Clive Myrie, Claudia Winkelman and Alan Carr – allegedly faces for the fundraiser – are singularly unpersuasive  ie three employees and a star.

And (while I am on this soapbox) who are those loyal licence payers (like me) ?   And if you are going to keep them, PLEASE could you start programming intelligent and interesting product before 11 or 12 at night and on into the small hours. 

Much of what I have been interested in, every film I have thought I might see for the last God knows how long has been after 10.00 and going on till 2.00 am or something equally unattractive.  It is a typically BBC disconnect

which goes like this. 

Apparently most of the licence fee payers are older so the state broadcaster (complete with disclaimers and apologies) schedules  anything thoughtful, innovative or provocative in the small hours – to protect the young or nervous who might be upset by it ?   bmc.

BT tells me on Friday 3 July they will send an extension cord to put the handset (yeah, I am that old) where I want it.   There is no demur, nobody says  “not a good idea.”

It arrives and is fitted.  Follows a week of  calls cut off, no dialling tone, nobody can get through, completely haphazard. 

Sunday 12 July I make  three calls to BT: one, I have warned the  “guide” about my problems, cuts off.  The guide does not ring back.

The second says she will email some useful information – we check the email address: nada.

And the third informs me courteously that “of course it won’t work unless it is plugged in to the hub” (the other side of the room).  

I am writing to the Chief Executive but without much hope.   “Customer service” is more than fine words which if you remember,

butter no parsnips.  It is logic, help. A concerned friend   advises “tell them your age, health problems, living alone.” 

I did that on 8 June when I began the negotiation. The disruption to one of few gadgets beyond hairdryer, fridge and washing machine with which I have ever bonded makes me steam.  But what do they care ?  It’s about money.  And bmc.

In a conversation with a young  woman yesterday, she asked  if I did anything special to my skin and I said that, misgivings about her aside, Chanel was on to something  with “Less is more.”    I do the minimum and occasionally I have a breakthrough  with something  else, something new. “Don’t look for a whizzbang miracle” I urged but it is  bmc.  Miracles and fast answers are the modern equivalent of the three wishes your fairy godmother 

allows.

Also  beyond my control and a great deal more attractive, is that my local Waitrose is closing for a 2 month refurb.  The manager says I will like the new store.  I say – do what you like with the store, just keep the staff.  We say  goodbye, see you in September yesterday.  I can face this bmc  firstly because I have to – a change is a change is a change, even temporary – and secondly because  several stores in the same area have to update their technology to deal with the changing climate.  Hooray.  

 Also bmc are  uneven paving stones  over one of which I trip and fall  to be rescued by a couple who couldn’t have been kinder or nicer.   Write to the council ?   AI, not a human in sight.

On a bad day  bmc makes you feel rootless,  faceless, denied.  On a good day you just smell the roses, even now on their second  flowering.

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gold among the dross

Posted on July 14, 2026 | Leave a comment

The silly season is a bit delayed but still straw-seizing

through vacations and warnings off, thanking  heaven for an horrid murder, admirable police response and victim admiration unto sainthood.  But there were treasures.

The Bayeux Tapestry arrived overnight without fuss and was installed,

first time out of France for hundreds of years. 

The family Sussex  went to  Highgrove to meet the King and Queen in an operation which must have required  the combined  skills of embassy and secret service, so we were spared breathless  accounts of what she wore and what he said.  Blood may indeed be thicker than water

but it is still only blood.

However  both the stitchery and the Sussexes were moved in  with an economy and privacy which makes me feel much better.  That power to do things without over dramatization was one for which our country was rightly famous.  Gold standard.

There are things to be said and things not to be said – I admit this ruefully, having reacted just like my mother to a memoir of a long and feeling relationship with Prince Edward, predating his marriage to Sophy.   It’s a kind of reverse therapy  situation.  You pay for therapy.  If you write it all down and it makes you feel better and sells, you make money.   

Nothing wrong with money – it’s what you will do to get it. 

In marked contrast (no I haven’t read the book, I don’t intend to – call me Miss Prunes and Prisms if you will) David Roberts wrote a lovely tribute come think piece about the natural but rare death of his little son Finny (see ForFinny.com) and the number of people who can’t or won’t mention the child.  It is a story of preventable unhappiness hence my willingness to back any fundraiser in favour of the Preventable Deaths Tracker and hooray all over again for the art of communication.  Gold.

When you love,

death does not take away that love.  It may change the terms, the perception, the proportion of it to other things, but it doesn’t vanish.  Why should it ?  A generous and constructive love is A Fine Thing, one of the best.   We don’t hear of it often – gold, pure shining gold, amid the dross.

So when I read that James Ellroy, the famous demon dog of LA 1950s crime fiction using in his new book

a character called Fred Otash, I did a doubletake.   Such a particular name, he told me -Lebanese out of Boston, when I met and for a few weeks had the acquaintance of FO.   I was working for Forum, owned by Penthouse, he was sent to meet me in LA, to guide me round  local media.  You can argue that I wasn’t important enough to trouble with, had no relevant connections – and that would be true.

But he was thoughtful and kind and funny, warned me away from Penthouse and explained why over the telephone in Chicago.  Clearly I didn’t know him long enough to know him if you see what I mean  – but his behaviour was gold to me then and now.  Unthinking kindness ie gold.

It’s interesting how taste may change, or not.  I recently rewatched a film I had always liked (The Train), and got much more out of it than the first time around.  I wonder if I shall have the same experience with the 1952 version of Moulin Rouge,

made by John Huston?  It’s on twice this week

 In wanting to know more, I pulled it up on Wikipedia and found Huston’s unwonted tribute to two British brothers who had been his producers on The African Queen – this was the follow up – and for one of whom I interviewed a hopeful secretary.  You could call it a fingertip golden brush with fame  – my speeds weren’t good enough but I was thrilled to  have been interviewed by a film producer !   Though it took me years to understand what film producers do (thank you Ed Zwick).

And my neighbour who kindly included my heavy stuff on her order in this heat – and yes, I do think of the people who make this service possible. 

And my  goddaughter who – in the midst of all the demands of her own and her work – always thinks of me. 

Gold, I tell you.

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facing up

Posted on July 7, 2026 | Leave a comment

After many adventures, my radio friend nicknamed Buns has got a place to live in a famous seaside town.  There were endless difficulties … and now he has unwanted company.  He and others have discovered they share territory with a drug supplier and his front steps are where customers wait and leave behind all their mess.

The local police are busier with problems they can solve  – this isn’t one of them.  A local town councillor has taken the disruption on board.  But there is no  “problem?/resolution” miracle.  Modern life is untidy.  Buns will fight and it may be good that he has something more tangible than what he has to overcome in the long awaited apartment, but who needs it ?   

In one  of the supplements of the delivered newspaper (thank you to all concerned), there is a cover story about the son of a famously addicted father who has driven himself nearly to death by drug addiction, aided and abetted by excessive drink.  And a phrase Buns used on the telephone came back to me.  “I know they have their problems” he said” I just don’t want to be part of them.”

There is something missing in me about all this, there always has been.  There were no deep conversations about addictions that I can remember before being in my twenties.   The nearest phrase was “heavy drinking” but I had no picture of that ever being more than unpleasant.

When I read (and I do) about young people spending 16 hours a day at the screen, or see a tiny thing of two with his first computer, I recoil.   I find it unsettling that in order to criticize this abuse, you have to follow the same exposure to the same media but  – like snakes – not let them bite. 

Stuck with the perception that the snake can always bite

and will be poisonous, I have never been involved with drugs beyond taking a prescription appropriately, disliked myself drinking too much for two or three periods in my life, so stopped – and loathe with passion the idea of something meaning more to me than life itself.  However difficult, frightening and bloody.

I recall being struck breathless when somebody else said of an acquaintance “ Oh he’s more himself with smack than without it.”   That was an insight.

Somewhere in me was the conviction that escape was through not round.  And cornered

is where most adults are from time to time . 

You see the relationship on which you have depended for years for what it is.  It doesn’t so much falter as explode.  You run out of money.  The person you thought you could turn to – for advice, for love (doctor, solicitor, therapist) – turns out to be every kind of disappointment up to and including villainy.  You don’t know anybody including yourself.

You are stuck with yourself and you don’t like him or her very much

which is why you looked for somebody or something else in the first place.  It sounds so neat.   Dealing with it is every kind of untidy, expensive and exhausting beyond anything you  have ever imagined.  If losing yourself is bad, finding yourself a person you don’t like very much is worse. 

But this is all what you are stuck with –  you.   

No answer in a bottle or a twist or a pack – you are you and you will have to come down to that when the escape wears off.   It took me  years to realise  that most of us (I say this because I so dislike and distrust writing “everybody” – you don’t know  everybody and you never will) are part of and contribute to the things that hurt us most.  Me too.

There is no “fix” beyond  a series of accommodations, some really joyful.  I remember being in my early 20s, sitting on the floor by the bed, going through my address book with a rock in my chest facing a weekend when I might be stuck with “Her”.  This weekend was warm and clear,  I had some  lovely phone calls, I reread a historical novel I particularly like.   I watered the garden and dozed and watched something I like on tv.   The world was outside and I can face myself.

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grace

Posted on June 30, 2026 | Leave a comment

 My mother was the middle child of three sisters whose teasing father referred to them as Grace, Disgrace and Candlegrease. 

As a very little girl  I thought this wonderfully irreverent and funny.

Grace was what was said before meals, though we didn’t.  My father thanked my mother after every meal.  

I am sure I heard the opposite “disgraceful”.   And I do remember that occasionally  I heard  “graceful”  – usually of a dancer, and I do remember discovering that Ann and its variants meant grace. 

The first time I noticed grace used  to describe someone, it was Amy in the books of Louisa Alcott (best known for  Little Women and Good Wives), which I vaguely  attributed  to long skirts and good manners.

You might hear “having the grace to do the right thing”  and I focused on whatever that right thing was, rather than grace.  I didn’t think of it in connection with me. 

Through ongoing social change, big and small, changing roles, expectation and how those are defined, I have been ageing.  Beyond fortunate, I had first hand experience of that before it came to me – relatively elderly parents.   And beyond coming to terms with it, they didn’t fight it. 

…not so you can be rush off and be tweaked – to the memory of my lovely mother

It was a reality to deal with, coloured by general expectation, personal choice, physical limitation. The phrase that best described this aspect of my parents is making the best of themselves  – and it.

I am heartily sick of the pursuit of youth.   I am all in favour of changes that work for you – I have seen elderly men enhanced by better colours or different lines, a changed haircut …   I remember Bruce the Canadian filmmaker who initially dyed his hair because his partner was younger, gave up, went silver and promptly looked younger and more glamorous.   You can dress young and look silly, and dress younger and look wonderful.   Much of this now focusses on looking “hot” because that’s sex – but as  I said to a rude man years ago “Nobody  ever took me for a fella.”    

Improved health is all well and good but obsession –  with  strenuous exercise, step counting, diet, etc., etc.,  to look 20 years younger,  and how people go on about it – is  BORING .

Live out of where you are up to, remember body texture – and let me introduce you to one of the great gifts of age – grace…

Grace is what you  exercise when a young person  (I have had girls do it too) offers you a seat, or holds a door.   You don’t huff and puff about how dreadful you must be looking.  You smile your best Elizabeth II grin, say thank you with all the charm you can muster, go through the doorway or take the seat and forget it.  You have just done what the Jews call a mitzvah – a good deed.  The stressed young feel momentarily cherished for remembering some aspect of their even younger youth.  Costs nothing, mutual benefit, direct response.  Unbeatable.   

Last week an old friend, met through my son when she was in her teens, rang.  She works like a fiend, is a carer to her  disturbed mother and needy twin, so two jobs.  “I have a day off” she said.  “I’ve got the car, do you need anything.”   I said come for tea, which we never got to – it was too hot.

She brought bread for the freezer, a covered container of a wonderfully herbed salad, four peaches (“ooh” fruit), this and that and bits and the two things I had asked her to bring because she had wheels.  We talked and talked and unbidden, she told me why I mattered to her, what I did in those far away days that made the difference. 

When she left I sat in a chair and thanked heaven for the grace I didn’t know I had had or shown to her and for her grace in telling me about it now. 

No there is no mention of the World Cup, Andy Burnham or social media in this  article.  What I have written about is a largely  intangible, hard to define, human attribute, which costs nothing and makes giver and recipient feel better – even all these years later.  

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date matters

Posted on June 23, 2026 | Leave a comment

Is there a room in which sits a committee somewhere, where  it is decided which day

to dedicate to bulbs  or the celebration of Andy Burnham’s mother (yes of course I am being snide ) While we don’t know, supposition is endless and endlessly unsatisfactory.  Why do we find it so difficult not to know ?  Or to wait and see ?

21st June is  the birthday of the Prince of Wales,

the 250 years’ anniversary of the independence of the United States of America, and Father’s Day.  

You can’t argue with a birthday: it is the date on which you were born. Somebody will kindly supply it if there isn’t a record. I remember discovering  Name Day in a Russian novel, which is the day you are christened.  Nations choose days of celebration to unite the populace (lots of disagreeing citizens in the US at the moment, but all patriotic) and Father’s Day is one of the dates I query.  How did we get there ?

I am not very good at an excuse for expenditure.  I have had wonderful times and wonderful clothes but not  because somebody else

thought I should – wedding, reception, block party.  My son asked me when he was 10 or 12 how I felt about a Mother’s Day Card and we had a serious discussion. 

I said I thought it was a commercial spinoff of Mothering Sunday in the calendar (as far as I knew)of the Anglican Church and I didn’t care for what had become a kind of nakedly opportunistic commercialism.  It became a standing joke between us that he might ring  me on Mother’s Day  but  he didn’t send a card.

But  because he is facing all kinds of stuff this year and I wanted him to know I was thinking of him, I bought a Fathers Day card this year.  As a matter of  really trivial downturn one is in the range of cards available to us. 

Most of them are twee or rude, few “mean” anything so I went back to the oriental imagery he and I both admire and bought him a print of plum blossom to wish him all the positives.

To people with  unsatisfactory relationships with their fathers, from difficult interaction to physical abuse or absence , Father’s Day may be anything from uncomfortable to irrelevant.  It is irrelevant to me to because I don’t need an occasion to remember either of my parents and my father was key to my growing up.  Not that my mother wasn’t  – but  even she acknowledged that that Pa and I  had a bond.   I have previously described my parents as my friendly ghosts

– they are very present in my life.   Looking for a day to think of them specially, I’d chose their birthdays  or their wedding anniversary on Christmas Eve  

I don’t need a day to remember

all the men and women who worked and gave their health and physical soundness and lives for me to live through two world wars, and every other social upheaval you can think of.   I don’t want to be reminded of the Titanic going down – it was a vanity (unsinkable indeed) and it is a mausoleum. I wish people would leave it alone.

I love personal birthdays – mine, my friends – but I keep  a note of those in the desk diary without which life would be shapeless.  Neither party animals or big present givers  – we just remember and write appreciatively. And there are personal reasons to remember, like me and Friday  13th  of anything which I had always been taught was unlucky – but was the day I passed the 11 plus.  Still gives me a wry smile. 

This “day” of one thing or another may be a way of structuring time but it remains a mystery to me, devoted as I am to a day a t a time – one of the biggest gifts of my later life.   And I  still want to  know  who decides these  dates and why, why some are well know (like the US celebration) and why some are revealed in a “500  hundred words on National Darning Day” as a filler in the paper.  Every day is special to somebody.  

by Anthony Heywood

  • and elephants are lucky!

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always

Posted on June 16, 2026 | Leave a comment

It’s the word I wish my ex husband hadn’t used on our wedding day because by then (I was  34) I thought I knew there was no always.  Nothing – nothing – is unchangingly forever as  always  suggests. 

You hear people talk about the mountains and the sea – always.  But the mountains and the sea change – often affected by  humans – sometimes not –  but change they do.

Tastes change.  There was a long period in my life when I couldn’t get up without a cup of tea – actually a mug.  I am currently right off tea. 

There were a couple of women of whom I was aware when I was growing up, who had shoulder length hair with a roll at the front and the back, 

flowery dresses in a shape I didn’t recognize, hard red lipstick and  (if they used it)  powder  blue eyeshadow.  She who took no prisoners  (Ma) snorted.  “Still dressing late forties” she said.  “Think they haven’t changed.” 

I asked – of course I did – first of all, because she was my mother and secondly because  she obviously meant it – and from my mother (young as I was) I learned that skin changed colour, that hair changed texture, that what  became you at one age wouldn’t necessarily work at another.

My mother could see and she could think and  she inspired me to  do likewise –even though the evolution of personal taste wasn’t a given and certainly not an always.

For years actors (all sexes) 

were what I concentrated on.  I wasn’t really  interested in sport, heaven knows I was clumsy.  I loved films and later theatre.  Occasionally as time went by, I noticed set design, or through costume the look of the thing but not coherently.  Not for years.  I was seduced by stardom as many of us are.

There was what I learned to call an aesthetic in all this  – I liked a certain way of looking or moving or being – what I came to perceive much later in life as a “line”.   Which became as I grew older a greater perception like being sure that Audrey Hepburn as the lead in War and Peace 

wore the wrong shoes … not that they weren’t pretty,  but historically wrong.   Not  even with a budget of millions was there an always. 

And  as I grew up  (a slower process than I could ever have imagined) I have realized increasingly the importance of the script.

I don’t go to the cinema – I probably stopped when it became less accessible and people talked and ate and used their phones there.      Theatre is  gobsmackingly expensive – I pass.  So what I see is what is on terrestrial television – yes.  I am one of the reliable forkers-out who keep it going.

And if you had told me that I would watch the  English version of Maigret (1960s) with Rupert Davies and Ewen Solon  as respectively Maigret and Lucca

– I would have doubted it.  But I have – with real appreciation because of the shape of the scripts.  Makes you want to stand on a chair and cheer.    I won’t try to sell you on it because what became my Saturday evening always is coming to an end.   Next weekend’s episode it says in the usually reliable tv guide is last in the series.  

I could never have said before either that I had come to believe in the permanence of a tv run, no matter how long, nor that I now knew  that I was deluded – ends come, things pass, other things emerge.

Here is an always:  whenever I write  annalog, I long to be funny and witty and upbeat  or passionately intense and impressively serious.   Neither of which come under always.    I get what I get, and you get it if I can accept I have done my best this week …

The song says “… and I  will always love you.” And there are people from whom my love is an always until I am gone.  I will always  be interested in – yes I could give you a long list which of course changes focus as do I and you and the times we live in.  

I have such respect for that little word always –  it has a kick like a mule.  Makes you think.   Always.   

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words and pictures

Posted on June 9, 2026 | Leave a comment

I like to think that I saw the term“journalist” as  achievement

but it’s not true.  I thought journalism was not quite good enough writing and I wanted to be a writer.   I never made it to the writer I wanted to be but I borrowed journalist to go with broadcaster because I got so sick of being described as an agony aunt – as it says on annalog – loved the job, hated the description.  Because it devalued the intelligence, honesty and willingness to learn of the people who spoke to me on air for years.

This is all now history.  We don’t make radio like that any more.  There are those of whom I am proud to be one who are still in love with words but there are also those for whom word is a four letter thing.   I am not sure whether they practice animal noises, bird calls or are just silent.   I meet the ones that speak and I love the fact of the exchange, no matter how small.

Yesterday a handsome slightly overweight woman with tumbled black hair got on the bus with a teenage girl who had white skin, blue eyes and black brows.   Mama and I grinned at each other, and I asked where she was from, observing eyes as dark as mine.  “Spain” she said.  I said “God love you.”  They both smiled.  “And she has her papa’s colouring?”  I asked.  “My father’s” said  she proudly.   “Here we would say she’s a Celt”

I said. “And you?” she asked.  I gave her the brief version, adding “great neck, filthy temper.”   And we all laughed.    The magic of words – and age, which frees me to use them, and experience, which makes me trust what I can do with the voice that will ensure you hear what I mean.

I can’t persuade most of you to buy newspapers.  You haven’t time to read them and it’s an expensive business.   What I can tell you is that when I have a series of interesting well written items in whatever day of the week paper it is, I am delighted.

This is all to do with writing, not what but how it is written so there is a wonderful account by a man who has written a book about Alexander the Great in which his journey to writing it is alongside reinterpretation as history is unearthed and changed – up to and including his own bout with cancer.  

I prefer not to rethink my vision and version of Alexander (I spoke at the Hay Festival years ago beginning that my inspiration was a young Greek man about whom very little is known – “and you can see something of my problem!”) but the word for the piece was   “accomplished.”

I acquired The Correspondent through the local bookshop, admonished “Do try it – it’s flying out of the shop!”  There is a sketch of the author Virginia Evans

interview with Laura Hackett

in today’s review and that’s about the journey to being a writer. 

There was a time I my life when I read about Marilyn Monroe compulsively.   I will always remember sitting beside my mother as she responded to a closeup in “Let’s Make Love” with “Oh, that poor girl, the pain …”  and I was dumbstruck. 

I asked at the bus stop what she meant and she explained that beauty and talent and success are not gifts from the fairies: they cost.  How it made me think.  Always an admirer of the power of photography, there is a new exhibit of Monroe based round who took what pictures, when – proving conclusively (in one the best pieces he has ever written) that the Sunday Times art critic gets it: that camera magic is innate, whether you are subject or photographer.   

And yes, Monroe had a small surgery, probably paid for by Johnnie Hyde on the bulb of her nose and the chin, we could call it “golden plastic.”  You’d never know if you didn’t know.  Which is what reconstructive surgery sets out to be.  And no I have never had any – though I have watched it done – and I cherish the woman who got up to come after me on a bus I was leaving, to tell me how wonderful I looked.  “Thank you” I said, beaming into her face.”  Just me and God!”

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