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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after Aesop

Posted on June 2, 2026 | Leave a comment

When Clarice comes to clean

(help since the back injury in January) at least half of what she does is social services. I know it, I said it and she laughs at  me with delight.  We share  a sense of humour, a wish to communicate, she is passionate about voice (as in radio) rather than vision, works like a Trojan, has been to hell and back, and we do really well.  I know and admit how vital voice is to me.  There is real affection – aren’t we lucky ?

So when she arrived this sweaty Wednesday, I asked her if when she had done the basics, if she would help me empty the linen chest (authentic)

because I no longer knew what was in it.  Yes, I could have done this myself – about a third of it – and then had to pause which makes such tasks interminable. 

So we began – not so difficult, a bit of cleaning out, but it led in to the wider cupboard under the stairs.  Which is where I said “What’s that ?” and pulled out a neatly fastened  biggish  box – “Oh, it’s the squirrel trap.”  She burst out laughing and I told her how when my son was living with me, a squirrel

got stuck in the kitchen, roosting behind the washing machine.   No good moving the washing machine – son did that – squirrel bolted, only  to return  like a flash from wherever else it hid, when we had left the kitchen.  This went on for  two weeks.  

I don’t know where it did the necessary and I am not going to go there.  There was no odour, how lucky were we ?  But it retired behind the machine, we could hear it. 

Eventually I went on line to The Trap Man and to this day  don’t know whether I intended to catch the beast or just to psych myself up that I could if necessary …

We were both going out, son went off before me, when I had what Clarice called my Hansel and Gretel moment.  I put a small plank on the  radiator top , not wanting the beast to break anything or be discouraged.  I covered this with a thick old towel.   I opened the sash window at the bottom and I sprinkled  almond flakes (I am an almond addict)  from the front of the washing  machine, up on the top of the radiator, across the sill, and out of the window: went out, prayed and came back.  Shut  window, listened.  Quiet.  Did that several times that night till bedtime.   Shut back door and kitchen windows with care.  Not a sound. 

  Bye bye squirrel

So I never used the squirrel trap.  Since Clarice and I  realigned the  cupboard under the stairs, I have tried to donate an unused humane squirrel trap to  the local RSPCA who don’t do wildlife (!) and two wildlife organisations who don’t do  replies to emails.  Next week I shall try and return it to The Trap Man.

I do not have  several saucers each  with some tiny  edible portion in the  refrigerator – but I do hate waste.  And the trap is unused.  Good as new, etc.

I fought the fight against mice at one stage – they  move to  pastures new when where they have inhabited is being repaired or redeveloped. 

And they made the squirrel look like a walk in the park.

Again, I didn’t want to kill them,

I just wanted them to go away.   But just when they looked like staying for ever, three things happened. 

I think they began to look for some where  more welcoming, maybe more  food – I cleared everything away as if my life depended up on it, I always do.  Secondly  I bought a benign ie unkilling trap  and one got stuck in where it banged backwards and forwards for a long time during the small hours until ARaeburn rose,  yes of course night clothes, but added essential equipment ie slippers, specs and rubber gloves.     

I filled a bucket with  cold water, put it outside the  backdoor, picked up the trap and submerged the whole thing.  When I told him, my son was appalled.  “You killed it !”   Darned right.   It was me or the mouse. 

And they left as of that night.     

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IJDGI*

Posted on May 26, 2026 | Leave a comment

If  Andrew Thingummy

is innocent of all wrongdoing,  why doesn’t he  arrange to see  both the  British and US authorities, attended by a lawyer, and answer questions?   This is known as “helping the police with their enquiries” and would go down well in support of the House of Windsor and the rest of us.  Those who give a damn.  * I just don’t get it (see title).

So – barely two days of heat – and it is already a problem and not a pleasure: I know that it can be tough for this, that and the other group  and many elderly people (me) – but this infernal desire to miserable-ise sets the teeth on edge.  

Not everything is a problem,

the world is not against most of us,  and almost everybody I know – regardless of gender, sex, education, personality and experience – is pretty good at dealing with stuff that even might not be entirely favourable ?   Stop whining.  IJDGI.

This train of thought all started because I saw a woman in Kings Road whose looks I  admired, told her so and  (she’s Irish)  we commenced to talk.  And she was the first person new to me who said  spontaneously that she couldn’t stand Chelsea Flower Show.   Her reasons were very similar to my own – the hooha, crowds of people  with their phones out, taking pictures rather than looking at anything, all local businesses not making extra, completely screwed till it’s over, 

and more bad shorts in one place than you have ever seen. 

If the Chelsea Flower Show is really so important – the British  being now rather more a nation of gardeners rather than shopkeepers – why doesn’t it charge at the gate  for the Royal Horticultural Society  – RHS box £1 per head (as in flowers )– and stop pretending to trendy with  drag queens and sex toys ?  Oh – that’s what you do in your garden …  to each to his own.

As ITV3 is rapidly becoming Midsummer Murders TV, 

could we set a date to run the whole series from Nettles start to finish (series 13, ep 8) through  Neil Dudgeon in sequence ? Apart from patronizing us into the ground (“oh they’ll watch anything”) it’s irritating and very  shortsighted, guaranteed not to improve customer relations.  IJDGI

Couldn’t we have a  series on WHY people want to watch torture, rape, murder, cruelty to children, cruelty to animals ?  It’s mostly a cuttings job ie extracts from other programmes, it needs a good presenter who can be both serious and amiable, not necessarily at the same time, and as such, wouldn’t cost the earth, especially if you reserved the right to name all the  successful series who wouldn’t contribute without a fee ?

The idea for  IJDGI came from Giles Coren,

talented son of talented father (Alan) for whom I worked at the long defunct Punch magazine in one of the bonuses of my professional and personal life.   “Oh” said  a colleague uncomfortably.  “ Aren’t they all men ?”   They were and they were terrific – amusing and agreeable, talented, not a wrong move. 

Which  brings me to GC asking whether a swan can really break a man’s arm with its wing ?  and I was transported back to Albert Park in Middlesbrough (I was about 6) with my mother when I saw my first male swan with his wings outstretched. 

He was so beautiful that I went forward – I wanted to touch him – till my mother very gently called me away and echoed this piece of folk wisdom, so often repeated we think it is true.   But this is an I Do Get It because (according to the British Wildlife Magazine) it’s an image of the strength of the swan. Not a reality.  Or at least not a documented one. 

If I read another article about somebody who had  a horrid home or difficulties on the way, I will refer them to  the designer Alice Temperley(“I’ve had my breakdowns over the years  but I have kept them private”)  and a number of musicians and performers interviewed recently who have hinted at accepting who you are (not Mick Jagger)  and enjoying life all the more for knowing it.   Context – written or spoken – is key.      

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how you say it

Posted on May 19, 2026 | Leave a comment

In the background of all those cries and shouts and  traffic and machines we call the noise of life   – you may hear a faint munching sound.  

Which is AR eating her words.

Last week I swiped at British Telecom (not much point in rebranding a brand) – but that was before  I had spent a weekend with every outgoing call interrupted by an automated loop saying “You do not enough credit for this call – please try later.”   My internet provider is not  available over the weekend.  So I got through it.  On Tuesday  I rang BT.  Maybe too eager   – but they were polite and it was a start.

I do not come out of this affair well.  Woolly at the knocking knees, I am intimidated by technology and  shamingly take the line of  least resistance. 

So we shall see  … but I made a beginning. 

Among the background noise I referred to at the beginning, is  a string of names  – Ed,

Angela, Andy, Wes – interchangeably cacophonous, while offering the equivalent of  new  nail varnish on a bitten nail.  Who was it said “better the Devil you do know, than the Devil you don’t” ?  Well every  opinion piece I have read for a start, some with  considerable overview. 

Like many of us, I just feel the victim of this, misread, misrepresented even though we all paid into the kitty for years and years, long before  Starmer was born or thought of.   And recent history proves his problems aren’t different from the last six Prime Ministers  except in the  vexed issue of personality and communication. 

There are ways to say things and if public speaking is part of the job, you have to find out how to say them – and still move forward, speaking warmly and communicably as you go  on defining what you mean.

However vexed the example, there is a way to stop the boats. Nobody will make that decision.  We hide in a lazy wilfully blind so called Christian ethic which ignores where we are.  We’re drowning in debt.   And charity begins at home.  And I can’t think of worse publicity for Christianity than if Tommy Robinson now calls himself  born again.

So why did we wind up with two conflicting marches on the same day in London

and a £4 million  police bill to anticipate trouble and keep us all safe and the city moving ?

Postal movement last week brought me a cardigan  that has taken so long to get here, I thought they had gone out to find a sheep –  and a  mystery package, a large extremely expensive atlas sent from the Times Bookshop with no paperwork at all.  I have rung and been told it’s a gift and that the TB will let the sender know it has arrived,  is much appreciated and that I would like to thank whoever properly.

And then I marched into the large Specsavers

near me and explained myself.  They didn’t make the  spectacles, but  would they tighten the side pieces because they were loose and driving me mad. Only at  customers risk.  I agreed and was waved to  a counter where I met Jitesh – his name was on a badge.  

He fixed the  specs including using a tiny screwdriver and the improvement was a joy.  I thank ed him and said “What do I owe you ?”  

“Nothing” he said.  “Just give me a smile !”  So I smiled, as  my headmistress used to say, like a hungry tiger and as I went past the  helpful receptionist, I said very quietly “ I don’t think you’re a receptionist.  I think you are a fairy godmother.”  Her head whipped round, anticipating trouble, asking “why ?”   I said the glasses are fixed,  you were helpful, Jitesh was charming and no money changed hands.  “Oh madam” sha said clasping my arm and beaming, “ you are so welcome.”

Case in point.  Just because I said  thank you appreciatively, it doesn’t follow that I won’t be back, playing merry hell if the specs  fall apart.  Everybody involved knows that.  Why doesn’t  Westminster ? 

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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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