Monthly Archives: July 2021

It was too early to go to where I wanted to go so (untypically) I switched on the television where in a terrific clip from a film about the wildlife of the Andes, I saw

spectacled bears.  According to the voiceover they are the only bears in the northern Andes, not true bears and I have never seen them before.

Then the phone rang.   My son.  Always a bonus.

And eventually I left the house and in walking up the Kings Road , I met a man my own age going in the opposite direction.  Probably Middle Eastern, maybe Sephardi, balding, bespectacled and eating (I caught a whiff of it) the savoury version of an iced bun.

  “You’re really enjoying that “ I said smiling.  “Have a bit “he said.  So I did.  “ More ?”  I shook my head, we beamed at each other for a few seconds and parted.  I can’t remember the last time I had that sort of exchange.   

The thing I missed most in the pandemic – forget nightclubs and pints and pings – was spontaneity.  I am more than willing to co operate in any way I can but there is an emotional impact about planning everything which leads to an emotional cost and you can’t really avoid it.  Which is what I see a lot of behaviour as trying to do  -“just do this” or “do it this way” and you’ll feel better.  And what happens if you don’t ?  

On Sunday morning Matt Rudd in his column in the Sunday Times magazine advised that if you want to feel better, you should ignore everything to do with wellness, delete all your wellness apps -I quote. I bet I am not alone in feeling that yesterday’s slimming industry is today’s world of wellness.

A lot of people will make a lot of money out of it without getting to grips with the basics.  Somebody wrote that the most effective diet was a slow rhythmic movement of the head from left to right.  Too much of wellness – itself a baseborn term – is based on exploiting the need to belong to a select group and that money makes magic.  Speaking as one who is open to all sorts of mind and body connections, it is the marketing of those possibilities, without understanding what they are really about, that bothers me most. 

My happiest moment of contemplation last week was watching a robin ablute in the shallow terracotta bowl

I keep filled with water for the purpose.  Ten minutes of avian self absorption while I watched and thought of nothing but what I could see.  No guru endorsement, no reinvention of self and positively no jade inserts.

Last week was all change in our street.  After several reinfections, and thus rolling periods of isolation, Suse finally tested clear for Covid and went home to New Zealand, leaving me a handpainted card and a magnificent samurai-esque wrap for the winter.  Annie had already left to meet her family in Milan for a deserved holiday with them in Croatia (she’s just done her Master’s).  The pleasant presence of the people opposite is no more – they have removed themselves and their two young daughters to the country and the new people are not yet incoming.

I met a young woman and her mother unloading a car, she has just moved round the corner from the main street (“too noisy”) and bought five doors down. Whether “for sale” or “to let”, there is movement: we shall see.   I overheard one of the estate agents explaining that people who had fled to the country were now returning to London.   Hope springs eternal …  though I always think hope is very expensive.

The heat knocked me sideways, though now I am beginning to think about who will take my books, about cleaning the shelves, about where I have put this or that – movement which seemed impossible under the pot lid of last week.  

I met one of my shopping acquaintance who had the most lovely line for her crumbling spine – “Oh well “ she said “I always knew I should outlive my skeleton.”  I’m not alone in feeling that the structure of our lives has changed and there is only one way – forward.  

Even as I write it, I hear a soft trans Atlantic voice talking about connectivity.  Forget it. 

  What do you think of when I say bridge – Sydney Harbour ?  a game of cards ?   dental work ?   I think of Devil’s Bridge, a beauty spot local to where I grew up.  I think of being driven at 19 into New York City for the first time over the George Washington Bridge.  And I think of all sorts of connections I have made throughout my life with a few words, maybe a gesture and a grin. I thought the other day that if I had a gravestone, I’d like it to read The Last Bridge.

We live in a world of mixed messages.

When I was young,  I started out thinking about enduring emotional edifices and wound up knowing that emotional connection is something much closer to the gestures of the big cats I love.  It’s valid while it happens and it remains valid – unless supplanted by something equally truthful.

We talk about joined up writing

but much more important is joined up thinking.  And if thinking is disjointed, some of that may be to do with plain old human muddle or a missed opportunity,  and quite a lot of it is to do with reasons for keeping ideas separate, where they are  easier politically manipulated or used for commercial opportunity.

I do not listen compulsively to news coverage because I have always read middle of the road reliable national newspapers (under threat), local newspapers (as and when) and responsible journals.  My news listening is reduced because I haven’t found a tone I can commit to and that includes sound, coverage and format.  So I may have missed something.

But in amongst the ghoulish coverage of the flooding in German, Belgium and the Netherlands,  I haven’t heard one connection back to the floods we had last year and before.   Although hundreds of thousands of acres is on fire on the west coast of America, I haven’t heard any comment on how that will affect the global atmosphere.  If you cast your mind back, we didn’t talk about how the burning off of oil affected the atmosphere during the Gulf Wars. 

  We don’t routinely bring together these positives and negatives together for fear of panic in the population.  Though the population on present showing only panics about getting into a football match.  And what was Japan thinking of in going ahead with the Olympics ?

While if those three wealthy tosspots Musk, Branson and Bezos (which sounds like a firm of entertainment industry accountants) want to go to the moon,

then may I hope they do and that they stay there.

On this planet we need trees, to help absorb carbon.  We have to get the plastic out of the water systems before we foul the oceans irretrievably.   But sooner or later – certainly in the comparatively wealthy west – we are going to think about food.  Food distribution in the UK is by truck and we don’t have enough truck drivers.  Food growth, its production and harvesting in this country will push up the prices.  It’s July.  Winter will come.  And erratic weather will compromise food wherever it is grown.  We have no national plan to encourage people to grow food. 

And with regard to the weather, let me tell you that – whether the weather is down to God or man or a lethal mixture – last Saturday is the first time in 77 years

that my skin burned in the UK.  And no I wasn’t lying in a park like a worn out sausage, I was walking through it and I only stopped at the bus stop and for once, for less than five minutes.  Thank heaven for natural yogurt.   Takes the sting out.

“We are all in this together”

is a wonderful idea.  It challenges all kinds of ideas but mostly credibility.  Because if we haven’t got the information, the joined up writing, the connection – then we are still sectioned off into groups which can be used for various kinds of profit.  Actually the human race is both better connected and still widely dissonant – how long, oh Lord, how long ?  

I suppose I like my recollections under control. 

Putting memory to one side, things like, say, school reunion? No thank you.  Book launch?  All those old acquaintances you thought you would never have to see again, in one room?  Hell.  The personnel of the radio station then as opposed to now?  Maybe half an hour …   Very few people shine back to back with stingy wine.  We all move on, some to better things, some to predictably stuck.   Is it an illusion that I am improved with age?  Maybe I am a pain in the neck….

Ever since I began having treatment on my eye, I have avoided (it’s as good a rationalisation as any) doing any big job at the computer.  The screen is very hard on the eyes.   But yesterday, I looked through the file I keep on annalog.

A middle of the road hoarder, there are things I can’t part with.  The edition of the Just So Stories

from which both parents read to me isn’t going anywhere, though dogeared and old and I may never read it again.  They touched it, it’s magical.  I can’t just give books away but I can thin them.

I do the same with clothes, with increasing severity.  I don’t keep what I don’t wear – much – except for odd things I am unaccountably fond of. 

I go through my few files regularly and throw things away, though the temptation of the desktop files is just to push things into them and forget it.   So yesterday I went through annalog.  I am very glad I did

because it made me grateful all over again, to Linda who pushed me into doing a blog and Dee who puts it up when I have written it and chosen the pictures.  Please don’t write chidingly to me about the technology.  We all have our weak spots, I have so many the soul is freckled.

Here I found the first person who ever wrote in response, against all the perceptions of who listened or read me.  There were the appreciations, the kind thoughts and enquiries, the comments on the substance of what I had written, the wishes that I was still on the radio.  And the heartbreakers – the people who wrote great big beautiful stories about their lives and their experiences and where radio fitted in to that, or why this idea or that image had so appealed to them.

You know that picture in various childhood stories – I am thinking of Aladdin – where the hero or heroine opens a chest of jewels – how they twinkle and shine!

   Jewels you don’t price, you just marvel at …    That was me looking at you and annalog yesterday and feeling enriched in a way that was nothing to do with money.  Kindness and consideration, and the wish to communicate them is beyond price or currency.

It has been a horrible couple of years.   And of course people vary in their different perceptions about what was the worst of it – or what is the worst of it.   The true and sparkling wealth of what I read yesterday is not to do with agreeing, it’s to do with the expression of individual opinion and the room for it.

Like the woman who rang in when we did a programme on being allowed to die, to say that her husband had, she had terminal cancer but she did not want life taken from her.  “How do you manage?”  I asked.  She referred to pain management, prayer and gin.  She was wonderful.

Or the man who heard me opine that loneliness might be something innate, a predisposition, and wrote to me about it.  I don’t think I persuaded him but he was interested enough to ask and at least we both called it what it was – a word which people shy away from – because, I think, it indicates that they fail – they can’t reach you.   If we were both boats,

perhaps for a few minutes I was alongside.

The most wonderful thing about radio audiences is their longterm fidelity.  Over and over in the jewelbox of memory, writers referred to 20, 30years – and not only did they remember, and stick with me – they transferred significant loyalty from one medium to another.  Yesterday was a day when you couldn’t make me feel broke.  You made me rich.  Thank you.

“Do you think there was

 

already tension between Harry and William before Meghan came along ?”   Thus the breathless intro to yet another article about the Royal brothers.  If tension were completely absent, they’d be unique among siblings…  and as Judi Dench remarked, there is such a thing as good tension.  So this is all conjecture and maybe.  I hope it sells newspapers because I can’t think of any other way it is of use.  And when I mentioned something related to Buns the other day, he said “I don’t care.”  Oh dear.  I was brought up to believe that “I don’t care” was the beginning of the end. 

Though it may have a more flexible meaning too like when you become so saturated with something (like me with the BBC 6.00 news) that you just push it away, and for slightly different reasons, often Channel 4 News not far behind.  IDC doesn’t mean I don’t care about news, it means I don’t care for the package in which it is being offered to me.   I’ll find out about things some other way, via Al Jazeera or RTE or the news channel, my chosen papers, anything reliable (I don’t count social media) that has moved me on from relying on it to reacting against it.

This is not a plea to throw the baby out with the bathwater. 

 

It is a plea to take the baby (the news) out, put it somewhere warm and dry, drain the water (the setting and the cliches) and re think. The BBC News Channel featured Katty Kay and Christian Fraser together for an hour, notable for the fact that they talked intelligently with an often unexpected range of guests, often US news (Kay was based in Washington DC) and as a watcher I was more interested in the content than the style.

I was electrified when Manny (a devoted teaching assistant to children with learning difficulties) said  he didn’t care in putting his foot down with colleagues but this is a more positive use of the phrase.  Through a combination of factors, he was everybody’s good guy for years to the detriment of his own interests.   No more Sugar Plum, self respect in the ascendant. 

 

Hooray for him, a constructive don’t care.  But of course he does care – viz and to wit – the sleepless night after he had made the related decision.  What he means is he is ready to consider his part in all this alongside everybody else’s rather than constantly seeing other people’s wishes as necessarily more important.

A fragile woman, complete with stick, was shoved aside in parking by a swollen ego in pink shorts.  When she remonstrated, he was loudly disagreeable.  “I should have turned the other cheek ..’” she wrote to me.  Only if it works for you. 

 

I can see a context for most things, but honestly, I have never had much sympathy for this cheek turning thing.  I desire above all things to be agreeable if I can but if you set out to be disagreeable with me, I feel free to respond.  Take the high moral ground and put it elsewhere, just as well sainthood was never on my list. 

In Peter Jones on Friday, a shop assistant in his fifties rallied  waiting customers  with unnecessary volume – “Cards !”   I approached, very carefully distanced – such unpleasantness may be catching – and asked “You would like me to pay by credit card ?” He assented – “It’s so much easier.”  I said levelly “It also causes people to spend money they haven’t got.”  “Well” he said “it’s all about self control and power.”   “What an interesting conversation to have in Boris Johnson’s Britain” I said.  “Thank you so much”, took my lemon oil polish and left.   IDC.

There isn’t very much I don’t care about –  not in the sense in which a naughty child might say it.  There are things I don’t care for, which would put me at some variance with large numbers of the population – but I can’t help feeling that once you seriously don’t care about this or that or the other thing, you have closed the door on it.   And I prefer the possibility of the door ajar.