Monthly Archives: February 2018

Brian (not his real name) who is one of the kindest and most practical men alive arrived to organise my new passport. I admit, I have been putting it off and putting it off but when he asked me why, I told the truth.   “I am afraid of the pictures” I said.   “Oh Anna” he said with that mixture of patience and exasperation denoting affection. I am not proud of it, but it is the truth.   Most of the time I am quite good friends with my face but images of it require process and process frightens me. The first lot were too dark so Brian came back and reshot lots more, one of which was acceptable to the Passport Office.   One or two were even acceptable to me !

Let me be quite clear about this. I do not spend my life being afraid of old age.

“the wonderful Simone Veil in old age”

It comes to us all.   I never knew either one of my parents without wrinkles and they were attractive people.   I do believe that what is inside shows by the time you get to the end days and if you have spent your life in disappointment and displeasure, that’s what shows on your face – never mind clothes, treatments, or any other of the so called aids pushed at us from every direction, men or women. (I promise not to go into one about hair colour but if you want to see panic in the streets, just withdraw the supply of peroxide.)

A couple of years ago, I walked into a woman round the back of Bond Street. I apologised while she said “Oh but you look wonderful – of course you’ve had work done !”   “No” I said.   “This is God.”   I don’t think she’d say it now. I am older, things have happened but it is so difficult to have a candid discussion about this. You can only see what you see and think what you think, and you must know that there are only people who want to know what you think if it agrees with their notion of things or is flattering.

There are people who dread old age, whose lives were so spent as to give them meaning and without the work they loved, they are cut adrift. There are the good looking who don’t care, the good looking who do care and the good looking who are too busy to do more than get on with their lives which is probably a sub division of the first lot.

The camera image complicates all of this. I am sure there are wonderful pictures of anybody you have ever admired for their looks as an older person. Very few become ugly. There are some who were much better looking when they were younger and there are the magic few who, like wine, improve with age.

But the culture admires youth and so many people subscribe to what they see as the image of youth, believing that it must work for them, the snake oil of the present day. And it rarely does. You want to teach classes in colour because bad black is a killer to the youngest and freshest, let alone those who are just copying the same. And there is a lot of it about. Black eats light and nothing could be less becoming.

When I jib at having my photograph taken, it is after many years of bad pictures. Yes, there were some good ones but not many.   Think of it – hours and hours of bad photographs – three hours with a photographer from a national newspaper who, when I asked why it was taking so long, replied “I am trying to make you look feminine !”   How hard I learned that what I wore in life didn’t necessarily work in colour or shape on camera.   I shall never forget myself in a voluminous taupe wool number, floating past a television monitor : I looked like a misplaced dish of coffee ice cream. Thank heaven there was time to change.   In sum you either work with what you used to have or with what you have now and, even if frightens me, I do try to live in the present.

My mother, that’s her, third cloud on the left centre back most days, will have her hands over her ears but really – I Told You So*. It is an insufferable phrase, she taught me, even if it’s true. Much better to draw breath, shut up and smile quietly.   (I wonder if ma knew what Schadenfreude was ?) And most of the time I do. But two things last week were too much to bear in silence – though I am very grateful for the public airing of both of them.

The first was some British scientific research indicating that there may be (quelle delicatesse!) a correlation between the consistent ingestion of over processed food and certain types of cancer.   The combination of this being science, taken out of context into the public domain, and British prohibits saying something simple like “cut down on over processed food”. That would be seen as prejudicial – to the food industries making a fortune, convenience food in general, buying patterns, the pace of modern life, and the poor.
Of course we don’t call them the poor nowadays, we call them poorer (and they are, than anybody) and we’re all confused about how to differentiate between your being unable to earn more than a certain amount of money, the cost of everything going up round you, what you are entitled to (entitlement alone deserves a whole book) and how much is your fault – enter the politically correct thought police.

The second was some American research which indicated that what are described as “ordinary household products” contain micro organisms which are just as likely to compromise your lungs (and the planet) as anything a busy road can serve up, starting with traffic jams, diesel engines, petrol fumes, every kind of dust and waste. I can’t be the only person who quails at the mention of the word “aerosol”. Something has to be added to make whatever it is come out in the form of a spray. Something else has to be added to stabilise that, for shelf life. Both these putative alternations have to be minimised – another additive ? And so we go on. You have never thought about it ? You’re not supposed to. That’s why they call it “sold”.

After the company changed hands, I recall that a favourite facial cleanser was repackaged. “It’s exactly the same” said the salesperson when I hesitated. “I doubt that” I said quietly. She looked at me as though I had bitten her. “But it is” she insisted and when I pointed out that what you scooped out of a jar was not the same texture as what issued flowingly from a tube, and you’d have to change the formula to make it work like that, she stared at me. “Are you in the business ?“ “General Science at 14” I said” thank you” and left.

I look at those ads about “nose blind” which is a very funny idea but spraying your room to make it smell better ? What ever happened to opening a window ? Soap and water ? Sweeping up ? Soaking sweaty exercise clothes before washing them, preferably in a mild solution of bicarbonate of soda and cool water ?   When Celia Cigarette was still smoking, she bought one of those lozenge fitments for the electrics (“just light it and the air is perfumed for up to 24 hours”).   Well something happened to the air all right and Celia’s doctor asked if she were using such a product – not his first prejudicial experience of such a thing among his patients.

I looked through the list of ordinary household products and I use very few.   I looked through the list of overprocessed food and most of it doesn’t even visit my kitchen. It seems that as I live alone, what others consider usual if not essential, just isn’t to me.   And the moral of the story lies in the only time I have been treated with steroids which were to be taken strictly to time, via sort of puffer though you couldn’t see, smell or taste any difference. But something happened and I got better.

ITYS.

The house on the curve of the street was once owned by a disagreeable dipsomaniac. You never knew which way she was going to jump and she wound up hammering on my locked door with half a brick. In this connection I met the sort of officer who gives me hope for the Met. “Do you “ she asked with admirable calm over the telephone ” want us to send somebody over ?” “No” I said. “But I want a record made and I’d like a copy of it. Once is once. If she does this again, I am coming after her.” The document arrived, I kept it pinned on the notice board till fate intervened and Mrs. Disagreeable moved out.

A bush of glamorous red and yellow roses grew to one side of the house (Mrs. D was a great gardener) and my revenge was to steal one.   I could not often afford flowers and there was nobody to miss one. In the first year after the new family moved in, I asked the lady of the house if I might have one and she said yes. She was gracious and I never asked again and I think of this, when I buy flowers which I mostly do from Son, Dad and Nan* (three generations of flower pitch) who now have a tiny shop tucked under an archway locally.

Like all sorts of cash crops, flowers are often forced so I don’t buy them regularly. Affected by heat and cold and frost and travelling, they don’t last five minutes. But yesterday Dad had white anemones.   Irresistible. Accurately, he had white and blush blooms and when I chose them, instead of just wrapping them up, he selected a mixture, laying them very carefully flat on paper, put in two beautiful long stemmed tawny pink roses, and turned back to me.

“Man I know came in this morning” he said. “His daughter died last week. She was 13, on the Saturday. And he wanted to give everybody roses, sort of a happy memorial to her. So I’m giving them to my regulars … “ I caught my breath. “We hade five women on the forecourt this morning, weeping about it, and that wasn’t what he wanted at all. So I’m giving them to you, to make you happy.” “How lovely” I said”, thinking what do you say ? Dad deprecated: “ ‘s just a coupla roses” he said. It was Chanel who said less is more.

Long ago true love was the name of a song and a boat in the musical High Society and Valentine’s Day beckons, set aside for the worship of one of the world’s oldest miracles, with champagne, chocolates, frillies and red roses.   I confess I shy away from codification by common agreement and the heavy hand of merchandising. ( Can’t drink champagne, pass on frillies, not keen on red roses and like to choose my own chocolate.)   Though I do believe in true love between people, whether of the three wonderful months or thirty years variety. True means real and love is a small word of infinite variety and application. You can truly love all sorts of things in all sorts of ways from loving kindness through mad passion to deeply felt visceral affection, your country, a parent, a partner, your job or your pet.

There is a language to flowers and whether they grow wild in the hedgerow or are cultivated in pots or gardens, over time they came to symbolise different things until superstition darkened them as it darkened which gems decorate what colours we wear.

You love ? You love. Love is personal. Your love isn’t mine. Funnily enough, by using the word more, we have not learnt much more about what it means. So we look for things that symbolise how we feel. What you can afford comes into this, personal taste, fashion and so on but really what you’re looking for is an image of your love.   Flowers come in many shapes and colours, die and come again, smell special– you can see how they fit into the picture. And if (as the song says) only God can make a tree, you can see He had a field day with flowers.     

* not their names

Daisy doesn’t like the telephone. I am not sure if this was always so, whether she associates it only with work or bad news but she prefers the email and she is one of several people whose needs dictated that I learn to use the screen. The rules of engagement – as the degree of involvement – vary.

Avi only uses the screen once a day. She opens it up in the morning, deals with what is there and by midmorning, it is closed down till the following day.   She doesn’t like the electronic presence and prefers the telephone.

Nearly 20 years ago, BBC Radio 4 brought together a man who had written a book about Bette Davis with a woman who had written a monograph on Joan Crawford. Which is how a tall aquiline greying man came to stand over me in the lobby and said “Hello, Joan” to which I replied “Oh hi, Bette” . We did well on air, went out for coffee and stayed friends.   One way and another, I see him every couple of months and we email variously.

Six weeks ago, a man who said he was 33 wrote me a note about my professional presence favourably mentioning my face. (One of my favourite New Yorker cartoons shows two dogs conferring, screen on the desk, one saying to the other “Nobody knows if you’re a dog on the internet!”) I replied to acknowledge his remarks. He emailed occasionally. Mindful of not knowing who he was, I replied carefully until he wrote “Do you have a partner?” to which I replied “Not since the second marriage to someone I loved broke up 18 years ago. Another life.” I have never heard another word.

Daisy is a dear friend and her husband is ill. I’d like to ring but I know that it might easily be as wrong as tugging her sleeve when she is pouring hot coffee ie it might do the opposite of help. The rules of engagement are governed by estimating when to accept and when to push.

When Ginny turned up on my doorstep, laughing and happy with Jo, I thought I was looking at a marriage made in heaven but x years on, it has become denial, disappointment and unacknowledged power games. Emerging from a relationship of investment takes courage and time but once she had broached it, I stood square behind Ginny. All too often, “we’re staying friends with both of them” means we can’t be friends with either of them. And she made the transit out acquiring painful personal knowledge. So it has been wonderful to see her sense of humour flourish, her friends rally and her ability to say “it was a bad day” followed by “but at least I didn’t have to pretend about it!”

Because sometimes you can’t accept.   My first husband was always a man in pain, very bright and insightful about all sorts of things but not himself. In his mind, women fitted in with the stove and the bed. So, when we met again after 30 years and more, and I thought we could be friends, it was not what he had in mind.   I called up my courage and told him “You are one of the people I care for and there isn’t much I wouldn’t do for you but if you think the road from the kitchen leads to the bedroom, forget it.”   To which he tellingly replied “You are a sexual being, you will always be a sexual being. You can’t just switch it off.”   “Ever heard of acts of will ?” I asked.   But he pushed and side swiped until I withdrew completely.   I couldn’t accept his way and he couldn’t accept mine.

Whether we are talking about friendship or its extension, there are places to go and places not to go. The great challenge is judging when to go there. There are places you feel you must go, the relationship can’t go on until this is discussed but the other fellow won’t have it. And there are people for whom the very word “discuss” means hitting the table and shouting, though you planned to be nothing if not reasonable. It is the issue that shouts.

*The rules of engagement are the internal rules or directives among military forces (including individuals) that define the instructions, conditions, degree and manner in which the use of force (or actions which might be construed as provocative) may be applied.