a piece of my mind

Posted on May 12, 2026 | Leave a comment

In my youth the word was hype

and it meant overwhelming ballyhoo and promotion till your teeth were set on edge and you wanted to cry for mercy – firstly pre-sell you must buy/look at/be the first to see/say, before a thing happened  (Jilly Cooper’s Rivals) and then the reviews.  

I suffer instant recoil from being told “the answer to everything is …”  I know the only way to sell generalization is to make it appear that this is the answer to the maiden’s prayer but the last thing in the world I want subsequently is white trousers, somebody playing at sex on a screen or Nigel Farage.  You may want this, I don’t. 

I used to say that I would like five minutes in a lift with Boris Johnson.

  I now know that, were Boris Johnson in a lift I wanted, I would avoid it.  I feel the same about Farage. I can’t get past that terrible hail fellow well met in a bar persona to the party.  If there is one.    I am not reassured just because he is fluent.   Talk’s cheap.   And he hasn’t put a price on the grand rethink he says he offers.

Whatever the Greens were, they are now something else.  There will be people of value among them but I read a line last week by a male columnist writing  “ I can’t get past how repelled I am by Zack Polanski”

and I am with him.   Wouldn’t trust him to the end of the street.

And the burden of most of the feedback on Labour’s local elections defeat is that Keir Starmer should “bite the bullet.”  

The problem is he doesn’t do bullets and the backbenchers seething for his departure forget that his success enabled their seats.  I am deeply tired of hearing about Labour infighting.

All those books about polo and rumpy pumpy that delight Jilly Cooper’s readers didn’t do it for me.  Don’t like the writing.  And being promised a penis for every breast uncovered – it will sell to somebody.  Not me.    My personal Cooper memory is more to do with her momentary warmth and kindness.

Who decides the shape of the weather forecasts? 

Given that it is widely agreed that weather systems are fragmented, why are we now asking whoever the broadcaster is to sum up the day that is passing, racing through the night, faster through the next day and tell us about what’s coming day three and four?  You can’t.  It’s meaningless, a breathless muddle of “it might ..” and “.. but there will be …” You don’t know.  Unless they make crystal balls part of graduating in meteorology.

Would some bright investigative reporter please start looking at the British Telecom walkaway 

before my  phone develops measles ?  Phone problems ?? Yup !!!  This weekend, on a landline, no outward calls and a voice saying “You do not have enough credit to make this call.  Please try later.”  I am reminded of the Bob Dylan line “With the stroke it will be 3.00 o clock/She said that for over an hour and I hung up.”   And the classic letter from the line provider “I do not know what is wrong with your phone.  I have used this system for five years without problems. “ 

File under “discuss”:   intelligent reassessment of AI,

like being made out of work  – that and all its other negatives.   And food shortages.   I saw one tv item on the first and two written articles which you wouldn’t see if you didn’t read a newspaper.     I read news because I find it more accessible that the repetition which too often passes for news or reportage.    Don’t tell me what you saw on social media – it’s about as reliable as the British weather – which is happily in no political party’s remit.   Yet.

I know I am old and I have lived too long though jumping off a bridge would upset those who  care for me.  And be horrible for everybody who had to deal with it.  

And this is only a piece of my mind, other bits shout hooray at three  blooms on the  rose  tree I was given  18 months ago, seeing  gathered young (6 of them,) having breakfast up the road in the sunshine, laughing and talking, life goes on …   

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missing bits

Posted on May 6, 2026 | Leave a comment

I was  brought up short the other day  by  two of my young neighbours in discussion about what there was on television.  They mentioned The Secret Garden (David Attenborough’s latest) and I said “The music spoils it for me.”  But they agreed – they both liked the music. 

  And I  (cynical old bat next door but one) thought “Yes, because you are used to it.”   Grew up with it, knew no other.  But I did.  

And yesterday a friend  told me  most unsettling stories about his experience with his GP re his skin and the A&E in  a local (if you have a car) hospital, about his eye.   And he said , not for the first time, that he felt everything was changing and declining round him.  He never thought he would feel nervous walking to the tube station and going two stops to his film club.  But he missed that security.

One of the things I thought I missed was the chance  to have a column in a newspaper.  And when I came to understand the  relentlessness of  writing  copy to a standard every week, I saw too how easy it was to fall into “ a knocking piece”  – moaning or  bitching and moaning, amusing if you could manage it but otherwise  a complaint or a series of them … columnists  did it a lot, and I didn’t want to.  

The world is full of things that  make me purse my lips so I look for the ones that make me smile. I grinned at a man in his forties making his way down the bus the other day and before he got out, he said  into my ear  “You smile !   How wonderful …”

Forget Pollyanna’s “Glad Game”.  

The world is full of big bad horrible things and I am helpless in the face of many of them.   And I am  more and more aware that whatever you say, with whatever degree of  sincerity, it can be perceived, written or talked about  as the opposite.   The  explosion of every kind of media has made that worse.   Everyone has a comment to make, with or without a name attached, and people glory in the confusion.  I don’t.

You know you are old when you bought a book, read it and let it go and then miss it – and buy it again.  Which I just did (Pied Piper by Nevil Shute).    Old verities …

And the pernicious use of the word “everybody.”  

Nobody is everybody. It’s marketing hype. I emphasise  again and again that we have different tastes and  now I would add that the herd mentality – “oh everybody likes a white wedding”  – won’t spare us where we are up to.

I have never liked white weddings, not even as a young child.  

I don’t know which offends me more – the pretence or the expense.  I could write a list of performers I won’t give house room.  Alan Carr (rapidly becoming the C in BBC), with all that glub round his middle or Ant and  Deck from whom heaven deliver me.   Voices like  nails on glass and self satisfaction enough to make you throw up.   Every time I see  some  reporter on camera waving his or her hands  around, I think of  my first piece to camera in Oxford Street and the producer’s voice in my ear saying “Put your hands down, dear.   You are not a windmill !”  Where is  he now when we need him ?

I have never been to a hen party.  I don’t think I missed much. 

Let everybody have their go – I am all in favour of it from karaoke to beauty pageants, from bungee jumping to the long slog to the break in opera or acting or starring (different !) or public life.

There was a lesson to be learned from the recent US state visit of the King and Queen. 

You can make the best of yourself – and I am all for that – but you are what you are.  And if you haven’t spent time finding out about that – you are going to miss that security in the days to come. 

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other people’s lives

Posted on April 28, 2026 | Leave a comment

Just because a film is old, it does not follow it is good.  What we want to watch changes,

in terms of how a film is put together as well as subject matter.  But I have had far more joy   out of Talking Pictures TV than other terrestrial stations.   TPTV knows its market and last night it promoted the return of a series I like very much with the immortal line “ back by public demand”.   You want to leap in the air and cheer!    Magical words.

Can you imagine how rewarding it might be – chastening too – if we had a some modest system of feedback

which wasn’t regulated, filtered and faffed about with just to give the powers that be our opinion on this speech or that film or that case – and somebody gave a damn?   In which feedback was regarded as important instead of just part of the process.

The old British series of Maigret, George Simenon’s detective, is so well done that I watch it every Saturday night unless  – as they say – I have a better offer.  But the French series  dominated  by an actor called Bruno Cremer

is wonderful.  

It is not about what weaponry can be used to torture and maim or the biggest budget this year in special effects – and yes, I recognize that  some of the best special effects people working are British and hooray for them.   Maigret is about  other people’s lives.

Leave to one side the writers of poison pen letters, meddlers, snooper and the self righteous – other people’s lives are often interesting

just because they aren’t ours.

I started thinking about this  because  I wondered  why I have reacted so strongly to the notion of “going back”  from school reunions onward.   And then in my mind’s eye I recalled details local to the house I was brought up in, who lived where, what I could remember about them and for a brief moment, thought about revisiting  ie going back.  And  pushed it away.  It will be  changed.  I will disturb my memories – just as 10 years of  holidays in Crete stand.  I am not going to revisit – it will be changed and I want to remember it as I knew it. 

But I am  self evidently interested in other people from formal history to personal.  My friend Denning who  because he is a wonderful listener is often the recipient of stories – as  am I  – and we occasionally  say to each other  “Oh Lord, other people’s lives !”   But  you couldn’t say they weren’t interesting.  This person stayed in a horrible home while that one packed a bag, took whatever they could scrape up and left.  Gone. 

No going back.  Another life.

A couple of years ago in a candid conversation (they didn’t  “know” me and I didn’t “know” them) I sat with young neighbours by their invitation on my birthday and somebody asked me what I did when I worked.   I explained the radio station and the programme which established me and how I hated to have it or  what we used to call “problem pages” trivialized (a) because it matters to somebody and (b) because in amongst the ordinary stories, were some extraordinary ones. 

They pressed me.  I don’t need much pressing.  So I spoke about the man and his wife who could not  heal after the death of their nine year old daughter,  and non consummation.  Which I had to explain.  They asked intelligent questions.  And I pointed out that that kind of exchange remains rare.

My mother would have said  it was merely good manner not to ask questions, to wait to be told.   I might have rephrased that to “you open the door, I’ll walk through it”  bearing in mind that on radio, there were  certain things which for reasons of legality or responsibility were  better not broadcast  – because you don’t know who is listening. In all senses of that phrase.

But how people reach decisions, what they decide to do  and do, or don’t  and how that plays out remains fascinating,

one of the great mysteries. What is logical to one remains utterly unreasonable to another.   Decisions you or I see as inevitable are unreached.   What people suffer, impose on others or don’t learn from is an endless lesson – not in a book or on a course but  all round us – other people’s lives from which we learn or don’t and muddle through.  

From everything I have read, George Simenon was at best odd and at worst unpleasant.  His output was formidable.  My minor addiction to the major creation of his detective Maigret comes from  18 of his written mysteries – with one overriding common denominator: other people’s lives.

Aldous Huxley said “…ultimately unknowable”

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fallout

Posted on April 21, 2026 | Leave a comment

One of the things that fascinates me about journalism

is that somebody else – not often the person who is writing or speaking it – decides which way the item will be presented, slanted by need for audience, bias of producer, etc. and where we are up to in whatever story.

How can we go on being asked to be surprised at the depth of confusion and misinformation that surrounds Peter Mandelson? 

  It’s how he thrived.  You don’t need to be a major wheeler dealer, gay, a fixer or anything else of any weight.  Most of us know or have experience of somebody like that, from the “I just wasn’t quite sure about him” to the “No way, Jose!”      If he were a builder, you’d use him once but never again. 

Starmer is unpopular so he can’t do right for doing wrong.   It’s only 2 weeks max since I read an article which said, as he was going to be trashed at the forthcoming elections, he might usefully use the time left to make unpopular decisions, he was so unpopular already it wouldn’t make any difference to him and it might to us.

So he makes a decision – that’s difficult enough in the existing system of what I’d call endless chewing – bang. 

  And is promptly accused of throwing the head of the civil service under a bus.

Point of reference: making a decision has (at least) two sides and one of them is that somebody or bodies has to be in the wrong.    Unless you are the Faerie Queen.   And the Civil Service runs the country, never mind who is in power.

If there is a service to be rendered to British public life, it is to revise the system by which we are governed because it takes too long.  Or if it is to stay, we have to negotiate and accept a limited application of short cuts.   By the time all the considerations are over, the situation is likely changed.   Trump exploits this, Putin too (differently, same game) and Xi too.   

I began this week thinking “Oh, stop …”    Whinge, whinge, whinge about the state of our defences and no action.  This lamentably reduced military ability has been achieved over many years- when Labour and Starmer were not in power.

There is an old phrase “guns not butter” and successive governments, lulled into false security by peace, ran down the guns and distributed the butter – better housing and schooling, better medicine, more money around …    We are all very wise after the event.

The Armed Forces and the BBC have this in common: we over economised and wondered why the service faltered.   Neither organization connected with us, the poor devils who finance them. 

I can go on and on about television

(I don’t listen to radio – I confess I loved being part of it but don’t want to listen – never did) but I am bleakly cheered by more and more people complaining about the quality of scriptwriting and the gutlessness of production – an odd wonderful item is not enough when we all pay for this.   The repeats are like echoes down a well, repeating themselves and the programming is dire.   

The few good bits are tucked away later than most of the ageing population – which is the principal audience – stays awake.  

By the same token, the endless repetition

of the same complaints, and the same shortcomings – whether political or artistic – wearies us.  You can see why people switch off to football or snooker, to endless hooey about the Windsors larded with looking back at what once was,

But you can’t live in the past.  We are in the present.  And in that present, I have found joy in much better journalism that I knew existed which includes a piece about the Vice President JDVance and the memorable image “When you look … for Vance’s defining identity, the soul of his true self, there is nothing there, only a pile of receipts from… useful transactions.” (Gerard Baker, The Times.)    Which provoked a wonderful conversation on the bus last week with a CofE vicar, a girl in a wheelchair, a friend of mine and me – exchange, laughter and handshakes.

When did you last hear or see the word “soul” in a political piece?

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just so you know…

Posted on April 14, 2026 | Leave a comment

On Easter Monday with a still dramatically swollen, overheated and badly discoloured right hand (the one I fell on 3 April), I got the bus over the bridge to a small private hospital.   Everything was done. The helpful and tactful  Iraqi woman doctor checked the price of the package  before doing it, and I saw the trauma/hand specialist the  following day.  

No, not the NHS .  My choice.  Yes, more than I wanted to spend but better value investing in health.  Worth it.

So this is an advance apology for an abbreviated piece.  Can’t ask too much too soon of a fractured thumb.

And I have a separate question which has never been asked.

As the striking junior (now known as resident) doctors enter their 15th strike in 3 years,

and it is clear that apart from money, they have  concerns about  the way the NHS is run – structure, systems, etc., – is there any legal reason why they cannot practice outside the NHS ?

I keep waiting for a group to announce “Right, we’re gong to call ourselves Practical Medicine and work directly  for a scale of fees as of this date.”

No love lost for China but the initiative of the barefoot doctors

– look it up – under Mao’s revolution, captured my imagination. (Especially on reading that half the people who go to A&E don’t need to be there.)    In the Chinese experience, I am sure there were great mistakes – China is indifferent to the wastage of human life through famine or accident – but I am equally sure that great good was done in the back doubles of that enormous territory by  doctors with basic skills.

This country is nothing like so big but the numbers  now using the NHS are enormous.

And  I don’t want to read another thing about plastic surgery.  I worked for a plastic surgeon before the extraordinary social development which made people think that a different nose

or bosom or bottom would improve matters.   

I am all for making the best of yourself.  Have seen men and women transformed by the right haircut but my life changed when the man I worked for refused to touch my nose.  “It’s in perfect proportion” he said.  “Leave it alone” … and he made me gown up and watch  a rhinoplasty so that he could explain it to me.

Well, here am I – not the Charlie’s Angels model ie three pretty woman of  roughly 80 trying to be 50 forever which is a show biz thing.  I am not in show business or the image business or any other business but the business of living which for all its various and several complications, I still love.

And I love writing annalog – though perhaps this week, not quite so much.

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just me

Posted on April 7, 2026 | Leave a comment

I just had

a birthday  to which friends rallied, sent wonderful cards,  flowers, called (even from Milan and Portugal –  thrilling) and I started off laughing aloud in the kitchen as  the coffee heated a t 6.00 am (Pam the Painter’s card).  My son came to supper (apart from loving him, I like my son) and I  tripped on a shoelace and fell , banging my head and full weight under my body on my thumb – not broken thank heaven.   And not drunk – clumsy.   

We were  drowning in cake (the Italian Columba, dove shaped

and M&S Lemon Drizzle) and even lousy  television programming turned up the goods starting with  David Attenborough’s treatment of wildlife in a British garden – not my garden, impoverished  by the Peabody light which has now been on 24/7 for three years repelling everything that isn’t underground – and anyway tiny,  or yours, if you have one.  A socking great expanse in Oxfordshire, the desmene of a very old house (nearly 1000 years).   Fascinating and quite lovely.   But oh the music…

Look, if it really is my BBC – that sententious boring  campaign  (“Everything we do is because of you”) – can  we have  some input to it ?   In my favourite tv column every week, I read complaints about music.  It  disturbs perception.  Why do you think they put it in supermarkets ?    Here is the choice – don’t watch: put it on mute or turn the sound up and down because you’d like  some of the voiceover: or suffer.

I’ve got to the stage when a whole programme with very little music is a triumph.  Old films are often very good for soundtrack  without music.   I respect  Attenborough’s work and life and ability but not enough to put up with  an hour of being cued into emotions.  It’s insulting.

Stop telling me how terrible it is to be overly dependent on your smartphone

– yes you know it negatively  influences those younger than you and the young suffer all kinds of social and mental maladaptation as a result.  That’s if they have survived the latest toy giving  which is basically tablet before teddy bear – and no, I don’t mean pills.   But you are addicted…

I don’t have  a smartphone.    I loathe the concept of the mobile phone.  24 hours a day availability to me sounds like madness by invitation. 

  My ex husband told me  he could not have built his eventually very  successful business without the phone in the car and I understood. But how we have gone on from there terrifies me.  And the unholy alliance and crossover from screen to  phone and the idea of social media … no no no. Switched off from Facebook on 

 Defining my life choices by what any number of strangers says sounds suspiciously to me like asking an audience of couple of hundred for clothing and style advice.   Wouldn’t contemplate it.  Start from a different place.  Me.  

a sense of self

My shape, my needs, my interests, my weaknesses, my  choices (lots of quiet and white hair).   And every day, almost without exception, out of that security, I meet people, talk to people, cherish exchange and have  such good experience that it sets me up for one more day sharing a world with the madman Trump.   Because, be sure, that’s hard to live with.

I could list my pleasures  though they are only ever mine.  I could tell you truthfully that having  enjoyed remarkably  reliable health for many years, two years of on/off health problems, complicated  by the unavoidable advance of age from which no diet/lifestyle/heritage will insure you though luck,  good choices and a few  bob may help – that’s been lessons.  In multiple.

I am delighted and grateful  that the NHS finally came through for me  vis a vis my eye, and in the persons of two such kind and competent technicians.  But I regret bitterly the hooha I went through for 3 months. 

I  cheered for the piece on Sir Jim Mackey new chairman of NHS  England whos e strategy seems to be to do with thought not money.  I read a book I liked so much I bought copies for friends (Operation Heartbreak) though I know that recommending books or films or any other kind of art is a risk because you like what you like. 

But you won’t know what you like if you  constantly defer to what some devil you don’t know is thinking. Maybe AI is an abbreviation that really stands for Anti Social Intercourse. Or maybe it stand for Absolute Inanity. 

It’s all right. Just me.

shining

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through not round

Posted on March 31, 2026 | Leave a comment

Upon writing annalog – which I still define as writing copy and most others refer to as a blog –  I wonder whether I am writing for you or for me.   Often and mostly, it’s both.  But I have written stuff, read it and thought – well that’s what I want to write – and then had unexpected feedback or I have written what I thought would appeal to you as well as me and the silence has been deafening. 

I have written before about the wonders of the subconscious mind

– and- in all humility about trying to begin – my phrase is  “to find a way in.”  Above and  beyond the list of things we all have to worry about in the wider world, we all have troubles from the small to the considerably larger and we have different ways of dealing with them.

People  talk about “getting round” a problem.  I commit myself to going through.  This is not because I am better or brighter or tougher, it’s because it works as a philosophy better for me.  It involves making a decision

and taking at least some of the responsibility for the fallout.

We have different levels of power and influence in the making of decisions.  We are different people, we experience things different ways.  

With my anxiety level rising unevenly through 3 months – which is a long time to feel powerless in a personal situation –   I could tell you a long unhappy story about my latest round with he eye hospital.  I have written about Moorfields before ( eg annalog/shruti and the tiger, and others)  always with praise and appreciation.  This latest round has come as a shock to me and a shock that goes on being shocking.

Friends have said I should write about it.  I am not sure.   It risks being a whine – hell, it is a whine.   On several different levels.  But I am near moving on, towards through.   Better an account of that, than the misery of not knowing.

The news media recounts with more and less clarity the ongoing destruction of various wars. 

All of the people involved don’t know.  If they are among the decision makers, they only know  this  decision or that.  Whether it will be positive or not,  they do not know, cannot know.  How or what they decide will play out and what the effects – short, medium and long term – may be remains unknown too.   You will notice a conspicuous lack of names in this writing – we all know the names, we have different feelings about them, but they are the major players, the rest of us exist in varying degrees of powerless, and we wait.

Alongside, the international and national political situation, there have been several books about human pain,

how it is perceived, what it really is, how the current impact of Big Pharma and its witchy pills makes them a fortune and leaves us further powerless.  I remember how people latched on the idea of a name for what ailed them, in the hope that if you could name it, you could treat it and thus banish it.  It works sometimes but not always and we are endlessly told the names of things in the superstitious hope that that will ease the pain perhaps or improve the predicament. 

Pain is part of the human experience, physical, psychological and they are often interrelated.   If you can’t feel pain you are in another kind of trouble.   No signal that something is wrong – again, in the mind or the body or both.    And you can misread the lack of signal as badly as you can a signal – and get it wrong.

And the most experienced doctors  can get it wrong too.

There is endless diagnosis of where we are up to in the history of the world

  – pages of intelligent and informed writing about the countries that are involved, how and why, what it may mean, how it will play, and on the world stage too often, the answer is war.

I can’t go to war with the NHS and the eye hospital.  What I learned is nowhere to fight.   Friends have been generous and supportive.   I have to go through this.    

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the hand in mine

Posted on March 24, 2026 | Leave a comment

Who’d be a Royal?  

With his father still in treatment for cancer, his wife only recently cleared – all in the teeth of his children who, although screened from it, will hear a great deal more than their parents would wish– the Prince of Wales was asked what he believed in ?   There must have been a moment when he thought “ oh, spare me” but he is the forthcoming leader of the established (Christian) church and he must answer.  And so he did.

I beat him to it.  I was stopped by a young man, perfectly clean and decent, with a stack of hand outs, in Kings Road, Chelsea with   “You look like a very spiritual person.” This is when I should have run.  “ What do you believe in ?”

Choice: walk away: tell him to excuse you: evade as in “Well mostly CofE …”: or answer.   I answered.   “I believe in the Face of God.”   He asked “Where do you find that ?”   So I told him the story of the robins who nested in my little garden, laid eggs, fledged young, took them away to evade the cats (always other people’s – not mine) and brought them back on an unforgettable lap of honour where I said “I saw the smallest most beautifully coloured feathers.   Face of God. And when in doubt – leopards.”

So then he did his pitch including of course nice people and vegetarian food, pressed the leaflet into my hands  by which time I had channeled a remnant of my mother’s formidable charm saying (glance at watch) “You must excuse me”,  gently moving away, leaflet disposed of in due course.

I wasn’t offended, or insulted, but I recall  vividly  a young man to whom I was talking on a bus several years ago who said  “There is no difference now between the public and the private.”  And I said at the time “That’s the beginning of the end.”  

I was taught that privacy was important – almost a right – subject to abuse, surely, and highly relative.  But animals sometimes seek privacy and we’re only animals. 

I remember a favourite actor saying that as soon as you begin to be known  people start asking how you vote, what you believe in and who you sleep with ?   The Pof W poor devil – as other Royals – has always been known – I am not sure whether than makes the burden of public life easier or not.

The endless invigilation of my life repels me.  I learned over many years the price of fame

or notoriety or royalty – and you can have it.     Stories about the high price often exacted in the first  two out of three of those alternatives is too high for me. I sought an understanding and acceptance of what I had – in my life and in my belief system.

I haven’t been a Christian in more than expectation, nice stories and confusion.   I could never get my head round the Trilogy.  

by Andrey Rublev

It sounded suspiciously close to religious schitzophrenia.   But I could see – even if I could not understand – the wonder round me.   How you healed when you had had an injury.   Plant life, bird life, animal life – wonderful documentaries, the behaviour of animals.    I admired science but it was based on proof, not acceptance.   I sought what I could accept.

The endless miracles of natural life are enough to make me rejoice often.  Yes, I can see man’s inhumanity to man – but that’s mankind, often a conceited, blind and silly creature.  And if this is the highest brain form – what price cruelty to children and animals, obsession with  being right –  which comes through different religious forms ? 

My God – yes, I call him God –  is there – there when lights transform the sky, there when young are born and old die, there is every act of kindess and grace, there in every act of cruelty  and stupidity, there in difference and infinite variety, there when I understand that life is highly imperfect  but it’s all I have and I celebrate every single bit that I can of it – up to and including “God get me through this madness with Moorfields” and make me a  better person. 

The rest as the old Irish nuns say I offer up.  

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Really?

Posted on March 17, 2026 | Leave a comment

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy !

It’s only taken  40 odd years  for me to get there and find myself named in the same sentence as Helen Mirren and Meg Ryan.  How I laughed!

40 years ago I was interviewed by a journalist called Andrew Billen for the London Evening Standard,

in connection with something I was doing on tv.  I can’t remember what and unless it was something of particular interest, I will have done my best, taken the money and gone home.  I remember something of what I wore and certainly where we met. 

Mr. Billen didn’t like me.  I made the mistake of trying to talk him into it, as in “go on, you do really”,  and  probably bored him.   When the  piece was published, he referred to me as being  “almost asexual.”  I am not sure after all this time about the “almost”  but I am certain about the asexual. 

And I was quite put out.

Sex and sexuality had been one of the few securities of my life.  Now apparently that was up for question.

When I spoke to the my endlessly thoughtful manager,  she asked what had happened and I told her what I have just written – that he didn’t like me and I got my response wrong.  And we discussed why I did that and what I must learn from it.  End of.  In those days, old newspapers wrapped chips.

So on Friday morning all these years later, Andrew Billen wrote a piece about the upcoming chat show of Claudia Winkleman, in which he referred to what a tricky beast the chat show is with reference to those who failed, those who succeeded and those who didn’t get a look in – writing “Even the naturals stumble.  Parkinson’s old school chauvinism bombed with several female guests.  Helen Mirren, 

Meg Ryan and the agony aunt Anna Raeburn (he jocularly asked her “your place or mine?” only for her to remind him that he was married).”

I am so glad I had my youth when I did.  Just for the record Mr.Billen, I didn’t find Parkinson anything as much as enormously able and professional.   I didn’t see that interview  in which I am the spam in the sandwich between Rod Hull’s fabulously malevolent emu

and the wonderful Billy Connolly until it was rerun a couple of years ago.  And I wouldn’t have seen it then had not Pam the Painter suggested with some force that I did.

Parkinson behaved beautifully to me, his manner was his manner – and he was good.  He made us all shine. You can disagree with  somebody profoundly but there is a place for the fight – and it wasn’t in my judgement on a night when I had a terrific time.  And it shows.  The thing that most  impressed me, watching 50 years later, was how happy I was.

In the Winkleman piece, I am thrilled to have been mentioned in the same breath as Mirren –  a year younger than me and a very very good actress – and Ryan,

a mere stripling in her late sixties and a very good actress – but don’t infer any sense of late stage generosity.  I was in the clip that came up next when Mr. Billen was looking through background on chat shows.

I have been thinking a lot about my mother recently.  When I was a child and turned up panting with the whichever dog was current, she’d say “What’s the matter with you ?  Think you missed something ?”   When you’re a child, that’s curiosity.  Nowadays it seems to be the terror that you will have missed the latest trend – whether in eyebrows, speech, chins or clothes –  and thus your chance at being  “in”.

If I had rung her about the Evening Standard, she would have dismissed it.  Maybe that’s why I didn’t.

My mother, whose own mother was not kind, was herself bright, penniless,  better than pretty and took no prisoners, and brought me up like that with love. .  She was never “in”.  Nor I.  I danced to a higher power.  She did it her way and I did it mine and her way was a big contribution to the possibility of even a corner of the overcrowded public and media world. 

Everybody in public life  – which means any life – is misunderstood or misrepresented once in a while.   You get on with it   You live.  And I did.

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you can dream…

Posted on March 10, 2026 | Leave a comment

Do you think if I feel absolutely wretched with streaming cold, I could dance like Gene Kelly? 

One of my favourite  film  moments is  when he dances in the pouring rain to the title song of Singin’ in the Rain.  Somewhere along the line I read that he had a temperature and so on, but the show must – and did – go on.

Sadly my guardian angels don’t do swaps.  You get what you get.   So the only dancing is my fingers on the keys.

Generalisation

is I suppose inevitable but I prefer it tempered,  as in qualified by  “most” or  “many” or even “it seems that…”  I loathe hate and detest  “all men” just as much as I detest  “all women”.  You couldn’t possibly know them all, don’t be silly.  So though historically, though men are heavier, stronger and more aggressive and had to be for the race to survive, from Eve on, women were part of the way we live too.

So this week – drowning in images of the current President and his yeasayers, I looked to the distaff sides and found small  goodies.

Reese Witherspoon

was apparently less than keen on  acting and now has a successful career as a producer.  Her daughter is beginning to make headway as an actress.  To quote RW  from a podcast I haven’t heard “ better to pursue your talents rather than your dreams.”   I was really struck by this. 

If you are the sort of person who will only know if you prove it to yourself that what you want won’t happen, I can see following your dreams.  Though a very average  5 ft 4ins (sorry, metric free zone), slim enough but not wand thin, I wanted to be a model. 

Marie Lise Gres

My mother bless her chased up hard earned money to let me attend a short modelling course where I was kindly disbused of any hope I had in that direction.  I emerged and got on with life.  I would like to think I reimbursed  my mother but I  bet  she waved it away..

However lesson absorbed.  Never mind all that warbling about  impossible dreams – live the possible ones.   And I did.  And you learn – not always slowly or easily  – but you do learn.  I used to hesitate about explaining I worked for a women’s magazine in case it sounded exclusive of men.  And then I was told, more than once, that men read those publications to learn about women.   

I learned too that though John Wayne

might be quoted as saying “Men are men, and women are women, and I can’t think of a better arrangement”, life was actually  quite a lot more complicated and various than that, and this was long before apparently compulsory  discussion about gender and choice and hormonal knitting patterns. Men and women were very different one from another, via enlightenment, personal experience, education and personality.  And they were all people.  Some you liked, some you wanted to biff in the ear – and not always divided along lines of gender.

You may not be old enough to remember that a faction felt that feminism was a misled idea because women didn’t like other women. 

Let me be the first to argue that there are women – as well as men – I don’t want to eat with.  Duplicity and ill manners and worse are not gender specific.   You learn to pick your fight and how to fight, and when to give in, when to quit and when to shout hooray.

As a woman writing about the Tate Modern  show for Tracey Emin

did last week.   Apart from being a really helpful overview |(good ? bad ? irrelevant ? I didn’t know) it showed you a woman who did what she wanted to do – she made art and put her money where her mouth is –  into a rundown seaside town where she created an art school and a training kitchen and café for the long term unemployed.  “I live art, work art, facilitate other people to do art” she is quoted as saying.  “I have come home.”  62 years old, followed her talents.  Know your dreams for what they are – dreams -and don’t confuse them with realities. 

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