Monthly Archives: October 2015

The ties of friendship between Pam and me are reinforced by worldclass worriting.
She whose domain is dominated by possession – she never stays anywhere else if she can avoid it – has rented the house to a film company and is currently both appalled and impressed by the amount of work the location team are putting in, and the number of things that have had to be moved or changed.
She hasn’t slept for weeks.   
Before this, she worried it wasn’t going to happen, that there was no work, that the lighting in the street had been changed and that BT really did stand for Big Tit (meaning foolish and ineffectual  – check historical slang) and the computer was going to die.
You will be pleased to know that we laugh at how much we worry – I am up there with her with a slightly different list of worries – but last night we both laughed out loud when she remarked “Do you know, I think I have worried myself into serenity?”

Hah!
Whatever else I am losing with age, nervous anticipation is increasing.

Sometimes as I lope through the darkened streets – before taking my life in my hands to cross the road already glutted with cars and killers on wheels (my experience of bikes is not good) I wonder why I do this every morning?
And I know – it’s to move my back.
And because I still enjoy newspapers – until there is a run of stuff so ugly and unkind that I wonder – do I need to spend this money?
Yes.  Yes.  For the exercise, for the crosswords and this week (23.10.15) for Peter Brookes’ cartoon in The Times (Page 31) which shows the PM, the Chancellor, Prince Phillip and HM all bending to form the steps into the aircraft, up which mount the grinning Chinese premier and his wife.
Cartoonists are clever and Mr. Brookes is among the finest.

So why, why a package of deals (including a nuclear plant) worth an estimated $40 billion to get into bed with China – when better heads than mine have been talking about the manufacturing slowdown in China, the dissident movement, the lack of accountability, the instability?   A country which is singularly unpleasant to its own.
But the deals are done.  Not a darned thing I can do about it.   And what that highlights is neurotic anticipation – mine.

Anticipation as in looking forward, say, to Christmas, is one thing.
What we look forward to in that context is reinforced by what went before.  But reading the future is not given to humans except the clairvoyant few.

Maybe this is the Chancellor at his most farsighted, ushering in improved if not full employment – bearing in mind that the impossible takes a bit longer.
Or maybe this is a gamble, a gamble with lives that don’t matter a damn to a man with private money.   He can leave if he doesn’t like what happens.   The rest of us will be stuck with it, unexplained.

As I have got older, anticipation has become less about what might be good and more about what might go wrong.    I can worry myself into a black hole over a train journey I have never taken, over being too much of this and too little of that, on whether I can make that dish I have never made, and over what I will do if it doesn’t work.

There are still two or three memories which cause me to grimace with pain as I lie there not sleeping.   But I don’t do a lot of repining.
Done’s done and the milk is spilt.  Let’s hope there is a cat around to lick it up.
I worry about what might be.
I did this before to a degree but as I have become older and more powerless,
I have learned only one thing about what might be: it might, and we shall just have to get on with it.
Whatever is coming will come, I will deal with it as Pam is dealing with the location disruption – you gotta? you gotta.  Get on with it.
Dealing with it – cooking the dish, making the train journey, surviving a future you can not imagine is easier than worrying about what might be.
I say “Into Thy Hands”, imagine the light on the sea in Crete and fall asleep.  Eventually.

…  as in “the elephant in the room”.

We used to ask “And how do you know there is an elephant in the room ?” to which the answer was “Because you can smell the peanuts on his breath.”
(Are elephants ever allergic to peanuts ?)
Leaving aside the issue of peanuts, there are several elephants taking up psychic space at the moment.

84 British bishops signed a letter to the government suggesting that the number of refugees offered a place in Britain should be increased from 20 to 50 thousand.
And yes, I am just a viewer watching what will be necessarily abbreviated news coverage but not once did I hear a word of sympathy for the number of people
(and it’s about the same number) who are going to lose everything, whether directly or by extension, when Redcar and Scunthorpe respectively close or reduce their steelmaking.

You can’t make a market where there isn’t one, I know that.  For years, cheaper imports have undermined the British steel industry, even in its reduced state, and this is the crunch.  So we may well see a whole chunk of the north east displaced by political apathy.  Millions of pounds of public money won’t answer.  When did forethought go out of fashion ?  What are MPs paid for if not to think ?

The north east was a wild place under Henry VIII and several hundred years later, it is still dominated by its own intransigence and introspection, rarely visited by major political figures, occasionally producing remarkable athletes or musicians or film makers – the ones that got away and so were entitled to a ticket to bring them home for a visit.  But as the musician Alan Price told me years ago “If you stay, they say you didn’t really make it and if you leave, they say you betrayed them.”

They are not easy people to help but they deserve at least public consideration alongside of every other needy person.  Suffering know no boundaries, weights or  measures – it just is –  it isn’t less because it is on the doorstep.

There are lots of real elephants in jumbo corner who are being shot and poisoned at some ungodly rate a day because of the buying power of the shooter and probably because of the increasing hold the Chinese have on Africa – China being the greatest consumer of animal parts for traditional medicine and ivory for carving – but as they are our trading partners, this has joined the list of what is not to be mentioned – human rights, animal rights, environmental pollution to name but three.

We once expanded our empire and now it’s their turn and as we once did, so they are now doing, wading through the bodies of the beautiful great mammals, leaving behind wreckage, trauma (to the young) and horribly frequent death.
Once Africa could recover from this. Can it again ?
More peanut breath re the National Health Service.   However naïve I am, I can’t see the BMA “stirring up its members” against the new contract proposed to junior doctors.   The junior doctors got all fired up without any help.  Would you buy a used car from Health Minister Jeremy Hunt ?  And nobody  – left right or centre – has been prepared to deal with the incredible cost of agency nursing on which it appears the safety of many wards depends.

While sugar coated peanuts have the German Chancellor – hitherto Europe’s reliable sensible clergyman’s daughter – shaking hands with the Turkish  President, offering to enable a pass into the European Community, just as stability in his country begins to slip – beating up on the Kurds again while they have offered rare coherent military opposition to the Daesh (Isis is the name of a British river – I’d like to reclaim it.)
Oh peanuts peanuts peanuts.

These are the big issues we can’t keep sliding past and hoping they won’t come.
They have come, they are upon us  and now we have to deal with them.
I wonder who is going to do that ?

Not the tea cup  – I mean bra size.
The bra is a sort of temporary restructuring agent which appears, much further back in history than I had expected, when a society begins to make money and projects some of its images of perfectibility on to its women.

I remember longing for my first bra a sign of growing up.  Then, as I recall, cup sizes were Bs and Cs: anything bigger was the subject of bated breath or nursing mothers.
Today bra cup sizes are increasing like giant vegetables.
This is not to be insensitive to women with heavy bosoms, a difficult figure to dress since the declining fashion for stays or corsets in the period following WWI.
There were bras before that – wonderful moody stories about pretty showgirls with two silk handkerchiefs (!) and indeed, however unreliable Wikipedia might be, the entry on bras is provoking in terms of time line and geography.

And there will always be women who don’t wear bras either because of the beauty of their bosom or sheer disinterest because increasingly the bra is marketed, either to fit what size you think you are, or what size they say you are – and they want to sell more bras.

“does this mean double breasted?”

I have only been fitted for bras twice, once in my forties and again, last week.
Marks and Spencer claims to sell a bra every few minutes but I confess I am not an M&S girl.   An unapologetic snob in this (as in gloves and soap), the first  French underwear I had came from a shop called Elegante, was made of flower printed black cotton.  The bra was built into a minislip which fitted like a dream and there were matching pants.
It wore well and was worth every penny I paid for it.
Then, there were several big shops specialising what we might call “underpinnings.”
Now, almost all of them have gone.

I was earning when I was first fitted for a bra so I went to Rigby and Peller, reasoning that if it’s good enough for Her Majesty, it’s good enough for me.   The wonderful Marie watched me climb into what I thought I wanted, regarded me frowningly in the mirror, muttered “Just a minute” and whisked away.
She returned with two other bras which didn’t look terribly different and suggested I tried one.  I did.   The improvement was visible.   “What have you done?” I asked.
“Two cup sizes bigger, one size down in circumference.”
I went in an undistinguished 36B and emerged a glowing 34 DD.

“Marilyn Monroe’s bra”

That afternoon I told a very elegant Iranian acquaintance – she said I looked radiant, what had happened? – all about it and she was thrilled.
“My mother is sending me 32 FF from Paris “ she said, “ do you think they can help me?”
I did.  They did.  She told me so next time we met.

But times change, bodies change and the industrialisation of manufacture involving thousands of units makes sales imperative.

The woman who fitted me in Peter Jones last week was tactful and patient.   And as I have said before, I have been conditioned into trusting the John Lewis Partnership over many years.
However I know that as the years have gone forward, my muscles are the same age as me or older and a few pounds have gone on. (And JL isn’t the same either.)
The evidence of my eyes suggested that the shape was good though
“c‘est un vrai balcon” (veritably, a balcony) – or as my father would have said mischievously “With all that before you, you’ll never drown!”
But 32 FF!

This is based, explained the saleswoman helpfully, on using the closest set of hooks for 4 months, second set for 4 months, last set for 4 months.   We did not discuss what I call the fried egg syndrome (ie spread) that had clearly taken place to get me from DD to FF – and who cares what size the labels say if it looks all right – but I did wonder how we went from a more comfortable (say) 35 inches round me to 32?
I was tempted to say “in your dreams” but apparently it’s to do with the elastic, and a sense of constraint that made me want to giggle.
They do say that when a woman is dressed to kill, her first victims are always her feet. I am consoled by the thought that a tight bra is less miserable than tight shoes and less compulsory in the wearing.

Thirty five years ago, I sat in a Salvation Army Citadel to shoot the last of a series of six programmes about programmes about faith and belief and how those ideas applied to the agony column.   And an old man taught me a wonderful lesson.
“Faith is a bridge of glass” he said.  “You don’t know it’s there till you put your foot on it.”
Never mind what you call him, for me, the Presence is there.
An American friend used to refer to him as The Man Upstairs.
The gender of the address is less important than the respect – I know radical
feminists who refer to the Goddess.  It is another face of the same thing.
Atheists, leave now.

From time to time, any of us may have a bad day. It used to be called being blue but the blue has darkened.
For some, depression is a major part of a personality, a condition or an illness.
But I am talking about the days when, for any of a variety of reasons, any or all of us might feel pulled down.
Sometimes we have an explanation for this, sometimes we don’t.  The air of our troubled world is fraught with conflict, smoke, illegal emissions, the endless hum of electricity and duplicity.   The one you love doesn’t call back.   Your child is in trouble, someone is unwell, things you thought would run smoothly don’t…
Happy (or at least happier) are those who can ignore what’s going on, work their way round the impediment.
I am not one of them.  “Don’t think about it” doesn’t work for me.

Is the glass half empty or half full?   It doesn’t matter. It’s the same glass.
Life is awful and wonderful usually within seconds of each other and often puzzlingly.
There must be a logic but it isn’t a human one.

“I never thought of you as a Christian” somebody remarked in affronted tones.
I am not.
“But are you Jewish?”  Through my antecedents.  Reading yiddishkeit (of Jewish matters) has consoled me for the sense of dislocation I often felt.
I think God is a good and powerful monosyllable, even if it’s unfashionable.

At my secondary school, we sang a hymn at morning assembly.  (TV
programmes on singing together reiterate the sense of community it offers).  Somebody read aloud a short extract from a thoughtful book (including the Bible), the headmistress made her announcements, different prayers were offered from time to time, concluding with the Lord’s Prayer.   But there were only three Jewish girls in that white generally Christian school.
Nowadays in major cities we have children of umpteen nationalities all piled in together, learning some form of English as the common language but with the constant presence of other tongues, other ways, other beliefs.

If there was ever a time for respectful inclusion, it’s now.  You believe what you believe, I believe what I believe – the form of belief is a human invention.
The Presence is what unites us.
But we have sectionalised and broken away into a kind of stamped foot specialism, ie “my belief is better than yours” and with such good intentions.
We intended to honour and to make allowances for difference, but the difference has splintered into something much more sinister, encouraged by all those languages, many or most of which are only spoken by their natives and their children.

I had a really bad morning recently and looking awful, feeling awful, I was cheered to find something I really wanted in the charity book shop where I heard a young woman’s voice bemoaning the facial work in which the singer Cher had invested.
(What follows isn’t as far fetched as it sounds, Cher and I are of an age.)   And she
segued out of that into examining my skin – which was right next to her, saying kind enthusiastic things about that grey skin I had brought down the road, trying not to think about, bemoaning the lack of a corduroy veil.
God she was good.
And so is God.