Monthly Archives: March 2018

In New York in the sixties, the man who supplied drugs was the candy man. Now, he’s the sugar man: zucker is German for sugar. Was ever Mark Zuckerberg well named ? And who are these two billion people whose life he dominates, not to say controls ?   Two billion sheep, I fear, which is a lot of noise and a lot of sheepshit.

Hooray for Frances Mcdormand who stood up and said “I have a problem with conformity.”   Yes, she has a wonderful voice and the remark back referenced the part for which she won but even so, great to have somebody speak up for individuality. I prefer my society to be a cats’ cradle of well established basic principles admixed with a lot of generosity and some considerable thought.   “Everybody’s doing it” sounds like one short step from totalitarianism. If everybody’s doing it, I don’t want to: blame my parents.

I thought as I watched President Trump’s press secretary Sarah Huckaby Thing that surely somebody could have dressed her better for the image of the US President, which is what she represents. But then, if the deal is that you wear what you wear and force it on the eyeballs of the world, that sounds quite a lot like this President.

Last week could win a prize for sad bad news – the Rohinga, Syria, trade wars, Facebook, housing, the staggering NHS. The weather was the usual spring pick-and-mix, the weather forecasters’ brief now to do with selling hope rather than interpreting meteorology. I have been in the anteroom of a project for so long, I have spiders’ webs all over my feet and I don’t like spiders.   And though I wish them every kind of well, I am tired of hearing about the Windsors before the wedding gets here.   Easter is coming and the only gift we can rely on is endorsed confectionery and jammed traffic.

You know we are in a flat spin because we are writing about sex again, as if we had just discovered it. And on the usual swings and roundabout motif, it is either everything emanating from Hollywood rot and rewards and/or a re- evaluation of how man and women relate, to which let me add this little story. I know there are those who don’t believe in friendship across the genders but I disagree.   People are as they are and getting alongside is always interesting and often moving.

There is a man who lives one street over from me. We’ve seen each other in the street for years and said hello. He has a nice jokey way with him. Occasionally, I saw a woman, clearly not well, getting into or out of a car where he lives. From time to time, we met to walk together a little way, exchanging raillery about the headlines or the state of the streets. One day last summer I met him at the bus stop and, though he was perfectly pleasant, he had, as the Irish say, “drink taken.”   I was very gentle with him.   I could take a guess at some of what was wrong, but I didn’t know and you can’t live people’s lives for them.   And then I didn’t see him.   You can live very close to people and not see them for weeks.

The other day coming back from getting the papers, I met him, walking carefully, swaying, and I waited to say hello.   “I was just thinking about you” he said, the words slurring.   “And what have I done ?”   I asked, smiling.   He smiled back wisely.   “Not a thing,” he said.   “Not a thing.” Pause.   I asked imbuing my voice with every respect and kindness I could think of “And how are you ?” He considered me. “I’m all right” he said and repeated it. I looked him straight in the face. “You’d say that if you were dying” I said. “Ah” he said and crossed the gap between us. “Thank you for that, thank you” and he kissed with infinite care first one of my cheeks, then the other.   There was no smoke and no booze, just the smell of clean clothes and regret.

“Flower xrays by Nick Veasey”

The actor’s face came up on the screen and I could remember his first name but his second took about four hours to arrive.   I can’t recall what the prepared aubergine dish I found in the local convenience store was called although I think I’d recognise it. And The Times publishes three old, odd words a day, some of which I cherish enough to put on a list in my notebook – only last week, I got sidetracked and I can only remember of the word I wanted to keep that it was of old French derivation, began with “a” and was something to do with stonemasonry.   I haven’t quite the gall to ring the stonemason’s helpline – yet – but the actor is Timothy Dalton, the smoked aubergine is baba ganoush, and under the rules of yesteryear, I would write to the compiler of the list of old words, secure in the knowledge that she would eventually get my letter.   Sadly, I am no longer sure this applies.

I first saw Judy Parfitt (Sister Monica Jo in Midwives) in Villette (1970), I’d seen her in all sorts of things down the years and I finally met her in the corridor of a now defunct radio station 30 years later. I was in Park Lane when I last saw her aboard a bus. She waved – and called me by name.   I wrote to her care of her agent.   Not even an acknowledgement. I wrote appreciative to the Sunday Times blonde columnist who began with film and went on to tv. Not a word. According to Linkedin, the woman who compiles the lists of old words has 13 jobs, and I don’t want to bother her. But I want that word. If I could work out the right question to ask the search engine, it could help me.   So far I can’t and it can’t.

What the mind mislays and retrieves is fascinating, not just what but why.

“Guilio Camillo’s Theatre of Memory”

I have today recalled who won the middleweight bout against Sugar Ray Robinson in 1952 (Randolph Turpin) and the name of the Philistine city state that was home to Goliath (Gath): it features in one of my favourite Biblical quotes “Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in Askelon/lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice/lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.”   It is a very long time since that came to mind.

As you get older, words and names float to the surface of the mind, like aquatic feathers, lovely in themselves but often attached to nothing you can see or hear or – crucially – remember.   And in the interim, as I get older, words in their pure form, of themselves, whether in sentences, as names, in my ear, on the screen, however I find them, matter more and more. We used to swap beads at school but words weigh less. They are like the paving stones on the road of my existence. I keep looking at them, wondering why this one is chipped and that one smaller, why that one is so odd or appealing.   Hence my pleasure in The Times list and in finding some time last week a word I had never heard (insectile) and a word I hadn’t heard for years (raffine with an accent right to left over the e) in a tribute to the late couturier Hubert de Givenchy (I pulled up the writer and wrote appreciatively.)

“an all time great”

Words have associations with the past of course, words and intonation, and they recall situations and stories. I was quite shaken when the fairy godmother (Estelle Winwood, long gone to glory) spoke caressingly and playfully of words in The Glass Slipper (1954) – I thought that was unique to my mother.   But since she took me to the film, we included those favourites in our shared vocabulary.

Only last week when Snowdrop wrote to say (among other things) that his SO (significant other) was working too hard and he hoped he wouldn’t push it to collapse, did I recall Ma pronouncing its “collops” – emphasis on the first syllable – to take the sting out of it. Like dang-eroos for dangerous – so I was warned off, but lightly. Wilful mispronunciation, wonderful words.

Instead of asking its long serving staff to work at tills alongside the automated version, don’t you think it would be a good idea if Waitrose (the grocery arm of John Lewis) divided its functions so that half its stores were called not Little Waitrose but Waitrose Auto?

Waitrose Auto would have no humans on cash desks, everything automated, a desk for its online shopping outlet, computerised notes on stock running out and complaints, devoting itself to making that run well ?   The other stores could feature humans on the cash desk – every cash desk manned (for the first time in several years), humans to refer to and be called Waitrose Service.   Asking your alleged shareholders – whose bonus was cut for the fifth year in a row – to work in the presence of machines designed to take their jobs – has always seemed insensitive. Little Waitrose sounds twee and counterproductive – if it’s little, it has a small product range and almost certainly won’t have what I want.   I would avoid Waitrose Auto like the plague but it would be much more use to the casual trade, to people rushing in for loo rolls or a packet of digestives, people who like machines. (The staff in my local Sainsburys either babysit me through the robotic till or wave it aside – “It’s always going wrong !”)

I go back 40 years with John Lewis.   I bought my son’s baby gear in a store they then had in North London and though I had a John Lewis card, I didn’t shop much there.     Nowadays I live the other side of town and buy my mascara in Peter Jones.   They’d never get rich on me. But I was taught to shop at Waitrose and they have rarely let me down. And now I can find my way round a couple of branches so shopping there becomes habit, though I actually buy less and less.

One day I was in the dispensary at Boots – another even older brand name with some of the same running problems – and heard a woman talking about shoplifting in Waitrose.   In Waitrose – really ?   “It is epidemic” said my informant. If you’re not a booster, you don’t think about it. But the reason that it goes unchallenged is because management is trying to do everything at the same time. A busy Friday morning will only have 2 tills manned out of 8, we’re all impatient and want to get on, the sandwich trade (otherwise known as the starch sag) is on the go and trying to beat whoever is coming after, there are people flooding in and out of the store, All you have to do is stand quietly and watch … and do you see !   Best place to hid is in plain sight. And I watched a young man steal breakfast out of M&S which was (I hate to say it) a lesson in confidence: target (bread, eggs, milk), bike, gone – security puffing in pursuit.   Do you think the thieves are all social misfits or just fed up with queueing?

You get such mixed messages about shopping – an Ocado handout trumpets “Don’t waste time in the supermarket.”   But the circumstances vary.   If you’re young, working all the hours that God sends, with one or other kind of dependent, trying to run a home, I can see getting the shopping done.   The one thing I have is time. And I need exercise (walking and carrying), a bit of conversational exchange, to venture beyond my four walls.   Not only do I not want to do everything via the screen (I’d rather pick my own lemons thank you), it isn’t in my health interests, physical or social. I prefer old fashioned shops – counters, same faces – it is the continuity that makes me cherish markets.

I know very little about retail.   The nearest I got to the grocery trade was being a secretary to a food pr. And I am sure it has changed like everything else. But how can an enormous concern like John Lewis be millions of pounds adrift?   You can’t blame the Brexit torpor – this has been coming for years .

John Lewis’s slogan: “Never knowingly undersold”

How do I think of what to write?   It varies. Perhaps I see something and respond to it: it hits me, I hit back. Or – I have carried something around in my mind and it comes to the surface. Or somebody says something, or points something out … and the seed sits in my treasured subconscious until thoughts trip out of my fingers on to the screen. And I make sentences. I have learned over time to respect mental processes over which I have no control : just because I appear not to be thinking doesn’t mean I am not, and the forcing house of writing annalog once a week – what I call my homework – has produced its own discipline.

But I have to be careful. The only tabloid editor I ever worked for shouted at me in exasperation “There is a subject in here, if you would just get to it … !”   And I have come to balancing as on a high wire, between following my nose, thinking aloud, and trimming to get to the point. The shouter was the same man who described journalism as a craft, a trade, something you may have had an inkling of but you made into something by doing it again and again, learning the shape of the thing and how to mould it differently.  Sidebar: I have no news background so I think whatever I do is quite different.

In the days when I did daily radio, I was bored to sobs by the endless repetition of the news and I still am.   Rolling news is a killer. It depends for interest on what you the viewer/reader/listener is interested in and whether that is the focus of the news of the day, or on what they call “breaking news” – big stories.   The compulsion to find a big story may lead to misinformation – doesn’t happen often but it is unsettling when it does.   After all, if this organisation which is telling you what is going on in the world gets it wrong, what hope for everybody else? And entirely too much “talking up” – who might get the medal? who might fall off a chair and break his neck? who got the most snow?

I write about the inside, the continuum, what is particular. I write about experiences but I also write about how they feel. I write stories so that you not only hear what happened but think about how that might be lived through.   I told my son’s brother, his best friend, that I had described him as a child of pain. It wasn’t meant to be intrusive, just precisely descriptive.   The only audience I am talking to in all this is myself.   Can I believe what I have written ? Does it speak to me ?

I read all the time and in her broken nights, augmented by the radio on softly, Salad (so called because she is an even worse typist than I) heard an admired writer say that you can’t write if you don’t read.   You read to learn, you read to learn to avoid, you read inescapably, like a kid scratching a healing graze.   Only the graze of writing never heals and you go right on rubbing at it, opening it and re-opening it like Maximus’s scar in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator.   It’s not a new thought, the reading and writing equation, but like Van Gogh spending years learning to draw plaster casts before he drew from life, you have to have that discipline in order to ditch it and through both learning it and putting it aside, go on to something else.

It is not simple when you think of one thing to write about but it is simpler.   Sometimes you get several ideas that come in a crowd and if you’re lucky you can weave them together into a harmonious whole. But that’s rare.   Mostly what happens when you have several ideas is you spend hours trying to get them to interrelate and then more hours choosing which ones to dump.   So you develop ways of following the thought through and watching it peter out … like a disappearing river down a pothole. And then you start again. Neither prayer nor crossed fingers meets the need of a hammered sentence.

“Michael Johnson at The Copper Works, Newlyn”