Monthly Archives: November 2018

So many people don’t reply. Large swathes of the business world have tossed acknowledgement and response as part of the deal. Even when a project is ongoing, maintained exchange is rarer than hens’ teeth.   When a friend’s much publicised BT broadband went awol and BT accepted that it was their responsibility, they made engineer’s appointments one-two-three – and defaulted on all three without a word.   So much for being in touch.

My last professional outing was hallmarked with politeness: I thanked my interviewer and the young woman who provided the social media conduit.   They responded. The producer emailed, and the name interviewer did too – family bereavement prevented her from doing the job – and of course I wrote to them.   All those courtesies took less than 15 minutes from start to finish. But before I ceased fulltime work (10 years ago), we were already aware of the ambivalence of communication.   The other side of communication is cut off.

“Warm Gun/Wall Street International Magazine”

It always was. I remember meeting in the street a man who had assaulted me, weeks after I had got away, and staring straight into his face without a word, daring him to speak to me. He didn’t. There is power in the stone face.

But right now I have three letters outstanding.   I wrote to a writer whose book I had ignored (out of blind prejudice) though she asked me not to.   Some time later, I was lent it, it’s a fine book, well written, so I found and checked a reliable address and wrote apology and appreciation. Not a word.

Then I saw a print in the window of H&M, discovered it wasn’t theirs but last year’s IKEA, they couldn’t sell it, it shouldn’t be in the window of the flagship shop or if it is, it should be marked “display only”.   I wrote to the company’s nearest UK office and three weeks later, it is clear that nobody with a brain could find five minutes and an envelope to write a polite brushoff like Dear Madam, I am sorry you were disappointed.   This matter has been rectified. Assuring you of our best attention at all times. Not a word.

And then I wrote to the gardener. He’s only round the corner but he isn’t great on the telephone : he doesn’t take it away from his ear long enough to get incoming calls I think. A week has passed …. Maybe he’s given up gardening.

But if we look at the this from the other side, the writer I upset may feel she cannot forgive me – why should she ? Time has passed, I disappointed her and she has moved on.   H&M have decided that they are not going to make any money out of me, so a reply is a waste of time.   And maybe the gardener has trouble, other things nearer the top of his list.

Just as when people withdraw from relationships via prevailing media, it may be as much to do with their own inadequacy as any disappointment in the other.   And the cutoff in the light of text/WhatsApp/mobile/messengering that colours social interaction today has become known as ghosting ie you make a ghost or you become one.

And though ghosts still have a presence, there are contexts for this. The most outstanding is that much of what is called communication is only on the way to any real communication at all.   People don’t cut off to spare your feelings or their own, they do it because it’s easier. It gives the illusion of control. However bad it makes you feel for doing it, you don’t feel as wretched as if you were trying to interpret how the other person really makes you feel or how difficult you find it to talk to them. You thought if you could put it in words, it would be easier and surprise surprise, it isn’t.   Technology makes communication look easier, it doesn’t necessarily make it feel easier. There is no short cut to emotional exchange. And if you are not getting what you want, and you don’t know better how to go about getting it, it may be less painful to cut off a finger than to risk a hand.

The terrible thing about life is you can’t stop and start again. You can reorganise your desk or the kitchen shelves, bury your pet or change your partner – but though you may sing “Stop the World, I Want to Get Off” you can only achieve that for a short time while you journey to the back of an increasingly accessible beyond or stand awestruck in front of a natural wonder.

“Lake Gattain in Kashmir”

And then life moves on, carrying its self incurred problems on the psychological cowcatcher like a heavy breathing train.

So when we make mistakes – and mankind has made some terrible ones – we can only work our way through recognition, acknowledgement and contribution, to some kind of resolution. And sometimes it all looks so overwhelming, the whole process short circuits. It is easier to think about something else. Which is why problems beget more problems.

How revealing, that as I recoil from a young mother teaching her child elementary conditioning to an amusing screen to keep her quiet on a bus yesterday, the same executives who have flooded the world with smartphones and all the rest of that techno hardware are paying a lot of money to have their children educated in a “no screens” environment, “not till they are 12 or 13 and recognise the device as a tool, rather than being led by it.”

Sometimes the language used to describe something changes but the experience of it doesn’t.

I spent the years of six to nine with foul phlegmy colds and chest problems then known as “lung shadow.” The industrial north east didn’t help, with wastes from steel mills to laundry to ICI. I was treated at home and I didn’t realise until much later how ill I had been. When you are ill as a child it’s your life.   Now I am hearing the whole thing all over again relating to poor air quality. The figures for asthma and other breathing difficulties are very high – yes in China but yes in Britain too. It’s always so much easier to point at the other country than to look at the mess that is being made in your own.

And campaigners for cleaner air muddy their own water by telling us half the story. The logical progression from early factories through coal burning fires to leaded petrol and lying car manufacturers is a bad enough story, well documented as it is. But nobody has yet explained to me why we have to get our pee in a froth over woodburning stoves or even the odd open fire when, all the way through Europe from the Nordic countries to the Mediterranean, wood is burnt as winter fuel.   Do all these countries refuse to collect data on damage to breathing ?   Do all of them have higher rates of upper respiratory cancers ? Do all those governments lie about air quality ?

This is the same kind of division of facts that gets the idealistic young diving for plastic (thank God) to clear fouled waterways and spare animals being starved and tortured by it, but so far has not motivated picking up litter, largely because of the sense of defeat about what happens to it after you have picked it up.

Some months ago I was asked what I thought about #MeToo and I wasn’t happy.   Over simplification and generalisation have been lifelong enemies: you can’t just say “man is the enemy”, any more than “woman is the friend.”   There are few absolutes in life and I don’t think that is one of them . So it is a biased sample of men in bad suits (most of the House of Commons) attacking Theresa May as she offers her best.   Hooray for the two women who remarked via TV vox pop that none of the people opposing Mrs. May could do any better, most of them hadn’t a plan though they did most desperately want their name in the frame and any advancement that was going.   If ever a woman needed #MeToo it’s Mrs. May – and she’d despise it because, with all her faults, she is a public servant and a professional – and she believes that she can’t stop and start again.

There’s a new book, the title of which says it all (Death of the Megafauna by Ross DE MacPhee, an Edinburgh born paleomammalogist at the American Museum of Natural History) for it occurs to me to wonder if I am more of a Woolly Mammoth or a Sabre Toothed Tiger because, either way, I am (horrid phrase) going extinct.

“I prefer this!”

Please don’t think that this is a whinge about not working any more. I rode those overcrowded trains three rush hours in a row to record something and I pass, thank you.   Nothing lasts forever – no matter how big, bright, wealthy or strong.   I had a great time and I still am, in a different way, though I’d be a liar if I said the difference didn’t bother me, more about meaning than money.

My friend Pam the Painter (one of my “characters”, read back to catch up) was once head of corporate PR in national TV. Occasionally she uses a dismissive phrase I always loved: “(s)he’d go the opening of an envelope.”   I was not a networker. When work came to me, I took it with both hands. Occasionally I put myself about but Borgian plotter I am not. So when work ended, it ended. I had a few tough years where I was not old enough for pension, I didn’t earn and realised painfully, that I had relied, in every sense, on work going on for ever. And it didn’t.   We might call this The Mammoth Moment.

But I am blessed with what my much appreciated first therapist called Hunting Dog Syndrome. When humans were evolving into so-called higher beings, they still had various animal attributes, one of which was something of the sense of smell we envy in dogs, whose heads rear to put the nose in line with new, whatever it is. In humans, if you push the head back too far and unnaturally brace the neck, you get tension headaches.   I had a lot of those. But Flood (his real name) gave me an idea which tied with another earlier one, and they were the basis of learning to live in the moment.

Getting paid mostly wasn’t part of the deal, but once I had figured out how to survive in this new way, I enjoyed it. It had unexpected freedoms eg., annalog is the logical extension of talking to myself, and into the mirror.   And if I could “reach” her … I could try with all sorts of people and I still do.

So I was shaken when, several years ago, I heard the handsome and personable Rachel Johnson tell an invited Athaeneum lunch that she was the last generation of journalists.   And I thought well, with those looks, money, connections and CV, you know something I don’t know and I began to think.

Last week I had lunch with Petra Boynton, a social psychologist whom I first met over the telephone when she was going to do a piece for the Telegraph on agony aunts (she was then theirs). It didn’t happen but she and I did, to my great joy, for she is a good woman.   I don’t see her often. She is married and has two sons and is always working at something.   We have occasional long enthusiastic telephone conversations in which we swap bits of our lives.   And catching up, she told me that she had contributed to a documentary which was marked out for praise at a sort of awards ceremony involving a lot of other documentary makers. One of the things they all discussed was that there were fewer media outlets, the ones that existed really were usually not interested in stand alone film making unless it could be tied to a celebrity, so publicity for the product was nearly impossible.   And I said that was why I still read US publications and moreover, one of the more cheerful things about the US midterms was that Katty Kay (Beyond 100 Days, BBC4) said radio all over the country was the go-to medium. We agreed – can’t stop the clock, the role of the voice, the forgotten warmth of more human media – and she gave me a book. And when I saw what she had printed in it, I cried and cheered.

*NDY = not dead yet

“Natalia Makarova”

Coping with Pregnancy Loss by Petra Boynton published by Routledge.

Ugg, a range of overpriced sheepskin

Lincolnshire Longwool

boots, sort beyond fashion: on the positive side, warm and soft and flat and on the bad side, too flat, too warm and no support for the foot. Every so often I read about how little sheepskin is worth in the UK and then see some other price hike for sheepskin slippers, all too often from abroad. Ugg is part of Australia’s revenge for historically sending our felons there .   My slippers – British sheepskin, weatherproof soles, a fraction of the cost – came from Westmoreland Sheepskins in Harrogate (Yorkshire forever).

I ‘m never going to get used to children sitting down while grown ups stand in the bus.   Of course if they are ill or fragile in some way, fine. But what happened to the adult sitting while the child either stood close by or sat on an available knee ?   Nor am I going to accustom myself to the (mostly) women who settle on the outside of a two seater bench, only to look askance when you ask if you may have the other side of it ? Or, they fill the other side of it with an enormous handbag which they clearly don’t want on their laps where it will crease their clothes.   Pity.

I am never going to get used to the streets full of people running in all weathers, but having their groceries delivered by somebody else, their houses cleaned by somebody else, their dogs walked by somebody else: all the things we thought of as exercise in earlier generations.

I am never going to get used to the “holier than thou” attitude of all too many cyclists. Bike is a four letter word.

And although I understand that most of the rest of the world seems to think that dragging the ubiquitous wheelie behind you is some sort of mark of belonging, I am never going to get used to people shopping with them.

I have just about come to understand that for some, a small fluffy dog is a soulmate but I’d rather not trip over it or its lead because you want it to express itself unchecked. Your foufine has less brain than I and is much more easily comforted.

I am never going to get used to the idea that giving offence is a matter of such dread that we settle for boringly bad communication (initials anyone ?), for example, an hour of being talked at in terms which may have been English but the level of jargon made it unclear. The surgeon for whom I used to work was associated with the Gender Research Unit at the Middlesex Hospital. I am not unsympathetic. I defend your right to express yourself, even though much of its more florid forms might have been called social inadequacy, but I am not going to get used to a lack of enthusiasm being automatically interpreted as a criticism .   That level of defensiveness is a psychological problem, regardless of sexual orientation.

I am not going to get used to a very large number of women between the ages of 40 and the rest of it who can’t smile. I used to think this was due to an overuse of Botox or perhaps paralysing constipation but now I fear they belong to that growing number of people who think any form of pleasantness is a waste of time if it doesn’t get you something.

I am not going to get used to the new model of weather forecast, which used to involve a short round up of advice on the evening and end of the day, and then propose tomorrow.   Now we rush through today and tomorrow and start talking about the rest of the week. Since it is scientifically agreed that our weather is ever less predictable, this is probably pointless and comes pretty close to wishing your life away. I don’t know about the following weekend if it’s Monday or Tuesday and I doubt if most of the presenters do either.

I know the above makes me sound like 100. Believe me, sometimes I feel it.

A fox’s footprints