Annalog

I don’t remember being so wary of Hallowe’en before – do evil spirits need encouragement ? – but yesterday, on the way home from Specsavers, there was a boy in the most terrific scary suit, obviously home made, funny and horrible.  I said  “Oh wow !”  – his mother beamed with pleasure, and he gave a small skip  – which I am sure he would deny as childish to his friends. 

Annie who is my adopted Italian granddaughter sent a note from Milan

wishing me well for Samhain and I had an end of year angel –  25, tall, Polish and  helpful.  This was my  first  consumer experience of Specsavers  – and Julia  deserves  stars.    Modern time  being too often about  consumption  rather than experience, we are now pushing forward,  on the way to Guy Fawkes , pretty short on pretty and pretty long on  more noise than a mortar attack.  Heaven help the animals and the nervous.

I wonder how many people know that noise is the old way (instinctive  and learned) of counteracting fear.  It doesn’t always work but it makes you feel better.   I am in the other  group about noise, I wonder what  it covers or  seeks to distract from, what it means, what I should take from it.   And of course I have wonderful memories of both  occasions –  turnip lanterns and “mumblers”  for Hallowe’en, while November 5  brought a selection of dazzling  fireworks in the back  garden with several neighbours and their children and then round to them for second and third goes.

There was  a bonfire on the corner up the road

and the adults roasted  potatoes and sausages in the ashes, talked about who made the guy, and  got rid of big garden waste like branches and prunings and privet.

On 31 October, I went to Specsavers in desperation after a  close friend told me that her father had had an eye infection similar to my own and the help he received at his local optician.   Yes I know I sound like a fussbudget but I am the end of the small list of what I thought would help – the NHS dermatology appointment isn’t till 20 November – I cherish my eyes

and though they are better, I wanted reassurance.

I admitted to myself  before I went in the door, the worst could be another muddled disappointment. This has been going on since September. I was assessed for the appointment by a Romanian, Julia the optometrist was Polish.  (At this point insert  a cheer for Europe.)  I had typed the whole story including medicines prescribed privately – expensive  but I was very frightened – who I had seen, what they said and that I was prepared to be  told to go away.  Instead I got  commonsense  up to and including – are you listening, Moorfields? – the reintroduction of the drug that may have been the problem.  With enough explanation to sound reasonable. 

Four useful practical comments.

The  drainage expert ( plumbing adventures are a whole other story, of course at the same time –  we like a challenge !) had a wife waiting three  weeks for a biopsy  – negative  thank God.   And no this isn’t  potshot at NHS.    This  is  “thank heaven we have them”   but they are under significant measurable pressure – so rushed that bits get missed out.   And  therein lie all sorts of problems.

On the bus back there  was a tiny girl in a completely over the top red leather dress – and the figure to go with it –  with a tall charming boyfriend- she was from Cheshire and he was a medical  student.   She mopped her brow and looked at me appealingly – “We had to run – and my makeup …”  “You don’t need it” said I , sounding exactly like my father.  And got them to talk , cheered for him, shook hands with them both and thought – as I walked home  through the quiet of early evening – maybe the evil spirits come later and I got the tail end of the good ones ?   Do I need to understand that I just had a positive experience ?  No –  I just gratefully accept, and go on.    

It stands for No Thank You.  Any variant of thank  you is pretty dated.   I have never forgotten the silly girl whose her boyfriend said “It would be nice if you thanked my mother, she’s gone to a lot of trouble” to which she replied “Oh I don’t like saying thank you.  It makes me feel obligated.”  

On the contrary, I use  it as a bridge, punctuation, conclusion.  |I have had a lot of help in my life and it has not occurred to me that, proportionately, grateful was a terrible thing to feel.

Faced with all sorts of heavy duty happenings,  let’s start with –  you are an ordinary   member of the public and you just don’t know.

  No matter what political system  we are discussing, it is predicated on your compliance and relative ignorance.  Of course there are impressions and impressions are shaped  by personality and life experience, who influences you, what you feel, what you think –  and that can change.

I doubt we would ever have heard of Charles Spencer if his sister had not  married the then Prince of Wales, now King.   And  29  years of fester is a good example of fixation.   Do we see mistakes more clearly when looking back? 

Just other people’s ?  Or our own too?

I am not a great Royalist.  People are people, some you like , some you don’t.  It’s to with face and  images and the latter are manipulated by clothes and contexts for a start.  And I am very aware of placement – how you look, who you’re with, what you do, gesture – because reading and interpreting that is a living for many.  

So response to the long ago death of Princess Diana is   – for me – best characterized  by letting her rest in peace. 

Her life was unquiet for a whole slew of reasons I am not  going to discuss  because so many other people have.  Here is my  position: it was long ago, it is at some level a private matter.  Do I want  anything to do with a book  by  the lady’s younger brother, a muck raking exercise I’d bet he has never mentioned to his older sisters ?  Bad taste.  NTY.

There was an item in the press  this week about the  difficulties which followed  surgery abroad  –  this time on eye lids, but in the recent past on  breasts and bottoms.   Heaven knows who you’d trust with penis enlargement… we won’t go there. And young men turn to silicone too which may be a benign substance  but if it’s wrongly placed, it’s in the wrong place.  And you will want it moved.

We used to talk about an extension to the house – a new kitchen, another bedroom,  a shed in the garden.   Now many of us endlessly discuss what used to be called plastic surgery

as if it were something to do on holiday and when it goes wrong, we bring it to the  beleaguered overworked overextended NHS for help and resolution. 

If you can take what you see as a fixable problem abroad  for a certain sum of money, the same cost should be mandatory to rectify it here – paid over  several months if necessary, but paid.   In what is an increasingly medicalized society, to the detriment of the  training, commitment and hard work of many medical practitioners, I don’t see why anybody who pays into it or works in it, should be used like this.  NTY.   

Why can’t we let  the Pope and  Macron  have differing points of view without referring to the  Pontiff’s “snub” of the French president ?   Couldn’t we just have  two grown  ups who have to represent difference ?  You mean , for a political visit to be judged successful, it must end in total consensus ?  

NTY.

Why is it wonderful to have opened special Christmas  counters in September ?  NTY

You can understand why people  shun  conventional media  which endlessly  chews over AI, the state visit of the Chinese President to the USA,  Zack Polanski and Nigel Farage, what Andy Burnham said  – leavening our  helplessness with endless stories of bad news, malpractice and conjecture, the end of the world as we know it.  

What I want to know is where we go from here.   I am about as far from Pollyanna as it is possible to be but the endless recital of ugly ?   NTY.

I don’t know anything about  merchandising

but  when you have a multi outlet chain, it stands to reason that  different things will sell better in different areas, the  success of shop layout may vary –  bigger works better in an area of  socially mobile glamour , smaller where there is a stable  population, more to do with what you can afford than impressing the neighbours. Some  boom with  automation,  some prefer to have  at least a few humans so you can buy  2 items, change one,   discuss a problem – why this is still out of stock after three weeks, etc. – it’s the personal touch.

And I am convinced,  of course I am, that the personal is what makes the difference – through the staff to the customers and out of the door – to bring them back again.

Since 18 July when  my local Waitrose closed, reopening  18 September – I have had  to  deal with Etsy goofs,

systems  with more knots  than a sea scout manual, and the NHS , accessing a new letter from whom yesterday took  20 sweaty minutes.  I tried buying a sweater from H&M  yesterday, to  be charged five times over, couldn’t clear it,  threw the  whole thing out, swore and started again.   It’s only easier when it’s easier. 

Mostly  it makes you long for the transaction that took place in the dry cleaning and tailoring outlet this morning – enter, go behind curtain to change into  garment to be altered, pinned into place,

given receipt, agree date for collection, have a nice day.     Apart  from being one bus ride away and much closer than  any other branch, MLW (My Local Waitrose)  has got its size and  its  esprit de corps  off to an art form.  It works for us, it works for them , they work for us.

Every name that follows is fake, everything else is real.   Winifred embraced me at the door – she makes me think of the women of whom Nelson Mandela said “When you strike them, you have struck the rock.”   I went to find Matthew  the manager who had promised me that everyone who wanted to come back, could – to offer congratulations. Enzo kissed me on both cheeks.   Miranda who calls me Miss Anna hugged me  – “how lovely to see you” we kept saying to each other  – and it was she who told me “Oh we quite  enjoyed where we were – you know, a change  and all that – but we missed the customers !” 

  Panan, whom I first met as a boy and shared books with, a dazzler,  greeted me  and reappeared  five minutes later with flowers.   Of course I know it’s the company that pays  – it’s also the company that thinks. Slava and I shared not a word, just a long meaningful embrace.   She is still a long way from home  …

There was a young man playing old  folk rock on a guitar, glasses of wine,  happy excited voices, some new people  but a lot of what  you might call shopping familiars – people you see there day in, day out,  week after week, the people who ask after you when they notice they haven’t seen you for a bit.  As the staff noticed when I was taken ill – that was moving.  They see so many people.   And then up came Rosie  who when I last saw her, had to have dental work done and was  very nervous about it – all done now.  And when I said  what a welcome, she grinned and said “Well for you it comes at a price –  we want you to give us a good write up”.      

It is a wonderful thing to feel that you can have all the items you  always want, as well as new lines: that the frozen stuff has been tucked into newly efficient self effacing wall cabinets, priority still given to fresh fruit and vegetables (one of the very few places that sell  cooking apples – and  no not for pies : for stewed apple which I now sweeten with marmalade instead of sugar.)   

I wish you could teach more people that if you don’t give, you can’t get back.  It doesn’t follow that because you’re nice, everybody is nice to you.  But it is a position of strength.  Think of the  niceness diffused  out into the atmosphere.   Social investment, never wasted.   And you can only afford nice in a big set up like MLW, if  the way the thing runs is more of less correctly positioned and  you can go from there.  In other words, the  professional makes possible the personal.

Of course this comes

in various stages – when you go to secondary school or university, when you  pass your driving test, when you get yourself into a first class financial screwup and sort it out yourself.  Or have your first cigarette, expensive, bad for you but lovely.  You have  cigarettes, I have  a rare  YSL or Chanel lipstick because the colours always work for me and I wear them till they are gone.

Growing up  goes on and on,

much longer than you expect if you are open to it and I am.  You  remain so because it is the light in the sky and at least some of the keys to one of the kingdoms.   Not shut cupboards – open doors.

News is a fascinating business because there are so many people involved in discovering,  packaging and bringing forward issues  the rest of us haven’t thought about, don’t know about.“I wasn’t  listening”  Nigel Farage is quoted as saying which sums up both  the  enchantment and the danger of Reform – not listening to anybody  but themselves.      

There are always  stories that appeal to you and those you shove away, not of interest.  There are what we might call “sleepers” – stories that have been around for ages – like the woman who  killed her three children in the US.  This has highlighted the isolation, exhaustion and sheer unwellness of multiple early motherhood ie several children under (say) 9.

What I have yet to read about  is the  husband’s part in all this and how  extraordinarily slowly  social history  changes.  This is the week that one of the most committed American feminists Gloria Steinem

died, the end of a life devoted to a life you could live ie not everybody wants to be married, have a husband and have children.  Hardly new but clearly still new to some.  You and a partner – that’s one thing – but if you are not going to do children well, don’t have them.  Wanting them is not the whole story – it’s why you want them.  I have sat with men and women who have known from their earliest beginnings that they were not wanted.

Growing up means choosing a version of events to which you can commit.   I was brought up to go to work.  It has shaped and fed my life and made me grow up.   I didn’t set out to have one child, it’s the way things worked out.  But I would rather have one with whom I have a relationship of meaning,

still, he 45, me 82 – that’s my growing up, perhaps some of it, and commitment.

Growing up means you can buy all the sleeveless  things you like, I can’t wear them they don’t  become me and I would always rather have  long sleeves rolled up.  Even in my recent stay in hospital I didn’t see a woman in a nightdress that became her.  

I cheered for the tv critic who lambasted  cop shows on tv – choosing is growing up.  I would rather switch off the worst tv programming it has ever been – mindless repeats, cop and game shows – and read a book.  Or do a crossword, Or go for a walk.   Or the clean the kitchen cupboards, anything rather than sit there, glazed, in front of nothing I want to watch.     

Growing up involves facing what there is – not what you wish there was.  Friendship changes as you grow up.  

I have just filed a friend of many years because he can’t do change.  It has to be as it was because (a) that’s what he wants and (b) he can’t hack it any other way.   It had been coming for 2 years.  And it came.   One more step on the pavement to maturation.

There is no final point in growing up, you don’t “pass” as in an exam.  There is a series of markers where you reflect on steps forward.    Growing up doesn’t mean growing old – though that comes to us all.    Growing up is the journey and great quote from Elliott Gould it is always now.