Monthly Archives: January 2023

The lovely long curly wavy hair I had as a child may have looked nice but it was hell to keep knot free.   Getting the brush or the comb through other than superficially day to day involved my mother gritting her teeth and me growling and howling and many tears.   The sweetener was chocolate. 

  “It’s a food” opined my mother, breaking off two squares.   “And if it’s good enough for Captain Scott, it’ll do you.”  

I have hardly any sweet tooth but I habitually kept the plain chocolate in a plastic box in the fridge, for occasional use.  Pam the Painter who has a sweet tooth is gratifyingly impressed.   But then one day, when the Italian sweet rusks I bought to eat one of for breakfast became too expensive, I tried a much cheaper product, a similar thing, lighter, made of oats and edged with plain chocolate. And began to eat one with my coffee for breakfast.    The point of this is not to bore you rigid with the chocolate component of my admirably sensible diet but to point out that I stopped buying bars of chocolate.  I bought the chocolate edged biscuits and had one for breakfast, at that end of the day  when I can burn anything, rather than a couple of squares in the evening when I can’t.  

In Saturday’s Times magazine I read the following : “Our ageing population is one of the greatest threats we have ever faced – but what if we worked out how to keep people healthier for longer?

Raghib Ali has the answer.  The former A&E doctor needs just one in ten of us to sign up to one of the biggest medical trials in history.  Prepare to be recruited on your next weekly shop.”

It’s a fascinating piece because, instead of writing yet another lament about strikes and the burden on the NHS, this talks about how research is setting out to accrue data which can be used to employ clever medical insights the other way around, not to keep the elderly from dying, but to prevent them, younger, from getting ill. 

It used to be common to talk about how difficult it was to get men to go the doctor – always supposing you can currently get an appointment.  A chronically ill friend waited 8 weeks to see a GP and left in tears of frustration. So let’s put aside getting to see a doctor and presume you can.  The people who won’t go, won’t go, because they are afraid of what they’d learn, because they might be faced with bad news and worse still, their own responsibility in trying to get better.

Not wanting to hear bad news, being scared, not wanting to have to change but hoping for a magic wand – that’s a personality – whichever sex. 

And I will never forget how taken aback was the young clinical research fellow who tried to brief me when I first went to Moorfield for eye injections.  Between the  complex terminology, her strong accent and a mask, we weren’t getting very far till I heard a word and stopped her.  “Are you asking me to take part in research ?” She agreed, she was.  “Then yes, yes.”  She was astounded and when she explained, so was I. 

People don’t like to take part in research, they fear intrusion, indiscretion, being treated less well than they might otherwise be.  I waved it all away and had the great pleasure of meeting her again two years later, the first four injections in her research project, the rest in Moorfields outpatient clinics. Bless them.

Social transition is almost always slower than we like to think.  People look at a longterm project which might benefit them and delay – till after the holiday, when I’ve done the kitchen.  But the wheels are coming off the cart of  a particular model.

When Snowdrop tells me about his mother  going to yet another appointment, for yet another prescription, but nobody ever sits her down  and tries to make a picture of what’s gone before and build on it, it is a dramatic illustration of our over dependence – unhealthy dependence  – on a particular model eg., go to the doctor and get a prescription. 

I don’t know what is involved in this project,  I am probably too old to be useful but I am – as my father used to say – putting my hand up in church.  If I can be useful, I’m going to be and I am sending the article to the Princess of Wales

who is avowedly interested in benefitting the younger.

To sign up, go to ourfuturehealth.org.uk and investigate biobank.  

Given her own she was born the daughter of a

princely Prussian house.   She married a British double barrelled bully and after a long time with many ups and downs, he has gone to glory (where he will bore the saints) and she is facing being alone.   Alone is always a challenge unless you are one of nature’s loners.   Yesterday she remarked “ I just feel so unsettled.”   And I asked why wouldn’t you ?  She said “You feel it too ?”   I said I did.  Yesterday I watched the news on Al-Jazeera and if you wanted clarified the idea of the world in uproar, there it was.  I lasted a few minutes.   She agreed and we worked our way round to how we survive.

Years ago Johnson and Johnson

manufactured pantyliners and as she would talk about most things, I was asked to address the local sales force.  Informed about female hygiene, I knew how such an accessory  might be useful.   I also knew from what I had heard that they were planning to sell it to everybody all day everyday upon which I remarked unfavourably.   Shutting of ventilation from the area has never been advisable.  “And you’re promoting anxiety.  We don’t need any help.”  And we surely don’t now.

Excessive unease is part of the dictionary definition of anxiety.   Judi Dench once famously remarked that there was such a thing as good stress and I am sure that you can be nervously wishing to do your best, whatever the context,

and the anxiety will resolve into the realisation of something good ie he’s lovely, you cleared the high jump or you got the job.

The anxieties of the present age get under your nails and into your soul.

For years, the consolation was to go out and buy something, even something small.  But small and modest is in shorter supply than it has ever been, even supposing it’s effective.   And you hesitate – the ordinarily moneyed hesitate – to spend money on anything you don’t have to have. 

Food prices continue to rocket.  Two of the most famously inexpensive supermarket chains are now putting their prices up. 

Every kind of work structure costs more – more to clean, more to light, more to heat, more for tea and coffee, more for unguents, more for waste.  If you can keep work.  Over the shoulder for many leers the malign ghost of unemployment. 

It’s easier to hide your troubles when times are easier.  You can evade them, go out, go to the movies, a concert, an exhibit, have one two three drinks and stagger home in a taxi.  None of that, not now. You watch and make the money go round.  There’s one more wash in the bottom of the box of soapflakes.  Another month to get out of those shoes.

And much as I long to be able to support – even if only by looking – I have never seen such ugly lines as is offered to women in what are called fashion stores.  I had an hour or two looking around last week and it sent me home to count my blessings and change my scarves.  They are what I call “standing still clothes” – shoes too – OK if you’re slight, young and modelling but absolutely incongruous if you are wearing them and moving in them. 

    The psychological interpretation of standing stock still and hoping not to be noticed comes to mind.

Years ago just after the Japanese tsunami, I met a Japanese woman in the local branch of a dress shop I liked.  Of course I asked after her family and she ended our short conversation with a bow such as I have never seen, though read about.  A couple of weeks ago and 12 years later, we met again.  She remembered me, I remembered her.    And we spoke about the world, bad news and my determination to find the good and think of the beautiful as a means of spiritual survival.  In conclusion, she reached out and took one hand of mine in both of hers.  “You live your life” she said. She said it twice with an emphasis on “your”.  We looked at each other, she bowed like a leaf.  I said I would. 

 

There are lots of things you can do alone

though you may prefer to do them with somebody, what you want and what you get being two different matters.  The magic of the programme about the relationship between songs in Scotland, Ulster and the States was that it featured songs travelling, being rewritten and reinvented, addressed and sung by people who had played instruments for so long that the instrument had become another arm, another tongue – an extra bit of the person.  But you can still perform music alone.  The ballad singers who began to move the music sang in the street.   I’ve done that.

Last week I wrote on a wet Saturday, trying to make sense of the time but this Saturday is quite different.  It took well over a year to persuade me that I could write what I call a column and other people call a blog.  Column has the remnants of a professionalism I cherish, anybody can write a blog and I mutter to myself “I am not anybody.”  That is not quite as conceited as it risks sounding.  I am deeply convinced of individualism.    Even when it is a wagtail

trying to cross the road (yes really, this morning – and of course I saw it through the traffic, making encouraging noises in the rain.)

But I didn’t know how long I could keep up the idea of a weekly blog to my standards.  All sorts of people write columns, not all of them very good.  To chose the subject(s), complete the form, select the pictures and turn up something I could put my name to every week was demanding.   And yes I have before now written and put the copy aside only to look at it in the cold light of day and shake my head regretfully.  Not good enough.   And I have to be able to stand my ground to my own taste when I don’t get feedback. What I write is a closer to “op.ed” (opinion/editorial) than a popularity contest.   

Although in these stages I am alone, and I enjoy them – I’d never have kept it up for ten years without you.  No social media, old fashioned PR or any other kind of promotion – and I am shamelessly proud of that – It’s our tenth birthday,

yours and mine.  The first annalog was 14 January 2013 and here we are.  I wish you a dazzling self replenishing birthday cake, with candles and sparklers that never wear out.   And thanks from the bottom of my heart for making a dream I did not realise I had come true.

We often hear about the power of the circle in the negative, but what goes around, comes around can be positive – and I have lived to be told what the radio programmes I fronted did for the people who derived something from them.  They had one advantage – the magic component of voice. 

We diminish this to our cost. 

This week a woman wrote to me, about how something I had said had affected her life. She married and had children very young but pulled herself out of years of work as a carer, to go back into education where she became the first member of her family to go to university, continue to work and study and is now a research scientist. She wrote movingly about how she had stayed happily married, how her life’s journey had changed things for the better for her and her family.  She thanked me for my wise words (her phrase) and how they had made all the difference to her family (her words).  I was staring transfixed at the screen. 

This was clearly an annalog birthday present.

If my voice is not present in annalog, then clearly the inference of it is.  Whoever is reading is very real to me and it seems clear that I am equally real to you, hence the circle.   And because you read me and I had ten years to do it in, I was able to learn a shape and pursue it into similarity and variance.  Ginny once called me a wordsmith and I love the idea of me with small silver hammers making verbal shapes and learning all the time.  Happy  birthday.    

 

I am writing this on Saturday morning, when I expect to be out and about .  But it’s raining

and I can’t see that getting wet in a country awash with infections, and all the attendant difficulties in treating them, is a wise thing, the susceptibility of age, and so on.  There is a terrible nervousness for which I have no logical explanation which says I must go and buy food – as if I would starve if I didn’t.  No I am not a secret hoarder and I have only gone hungry through mismanagement and inexperience, and that a very long time ago.  But the anxiety is real enough, and has to be arm-wrestled into quiet through what we used to call common sense,

now as rare as hen’s teeth.

As the television news media collectively has become less impressive, more repetitive and flies increasingly under the banner of  “nothing sells better than bad news” – I have taken to a newspaper.  Well, I started with three, came down to two and ditched one over a year ago when, after three approaches and a personal introduction, the editor didn’t acknowledge, let alone reply.  So I am down to one.  Not Holy Writ but reasonably informed and not extreme, I do well with it for the most part but I seem to spend a lot of time avoiding certain images.      

There are faces I don’t want to look at, my initial distaste reinforced through repetition.  

There are images that may be politically popular but I don’t like them.  I am prepared to be told that I am culturally indoctrinated – who isn’t ?  The form of mine is more benign, generous even, than a lot of other people’s.  And when I was showing my son my commonplace book, into which nothing makes it unless it is very important and lasts,  I found “Beauty refers to a high level of coherence existing everlastingly in the world.”  Of course your view of beauty isn’t mine, though we might share certain kinds of image or idea … and as I wrote this, a card arrived, a Japanese woodblock of morning glory from John, who wrote “I was in the Ashmolean last month and this gave me as much pleasure as all the amazing artefacts.”   I can see why.  It cheered me up no end,

I love a woodblock – linocuts too. 

It was particularly welcome because of the conditions described above but also because we are in the seasonal dearth of good cards.   We’ve just had Christmas and New Year,  a certain level of birthday is probably fairly constant, there is that group of enthusiasts like me who like their cards blank so they can be used for apology, enthusiasm, acknowledgement and so on but they were thin on the ground yesterday  when I had an all purpose and a birthday to  find, and not much to choose from.

Cards mean different things to different people but while I am prepared to send you the gift you’d like rather than the gift I would like to give you, I can’t send you a card I wouldn’t put my name to.  Unreconstructed snobbery, personal taste and aspiration to the importance of the aesthetic  described in the quote above by Barry Lopez.

image of coherence

I keep articles, images, books and I go back to them, absolutely sure that this happens when the time is right.  And it only has to be right for me.  Which is how I came to be re-reading The Incredible Journey last night, the story of how three animal companions cross the wild land of Canada to go back home and meet their returning  human family.   It was written in 1961, I’ve read it before – but not with such understanding.  I believe in re-reading.  You see something else …  and the written pictures are wonderful.   I wonder how much of that wild world remains.

Like most city slickers – and I have lived by choice in a city most of my life – I like my country quite wild.  And while the news labours this death, this shock, this regrettable, I want to save more land and plant more trees.  That would make me happy.  Even on an overcast and miserable Saturday.

Denning had a rotten

Christmas.  He has a disabling back problem (one of thousands), takes heavy painkillers which bind.  They did, he took senna and blew his bottom off, making him proper poorly – from which he was rescued by a dear friend who, after two days of temporising, took him by car to the overworked and wonderful A&E.  And for the first time, on New Year’s Eve afternoon, he watched Zulu (1964).  Ignoring the fashion to pour scorn on anything redolent of empire, Zulu tells the story of a battle, of course pointless and bloody,  gave Michael Caine his atypical breakthrough and features large numbers of Zulu playing themselves.

I’d watch the whole movie for a terrified soldier who asks “Why us, sarge ?  Why us ?”  of Nigel Green’s colour sergeant,

who replies “’Cos we’re ‘ere, lad, ‘cos we’re ‘ere.”   Motto for 2023: ‘cos we’re  ‘ere.

The price of Christmas trees was like lots of other things prohibitive but I was given flowers – pink roses and lilies from one source, dark red and syringa from another while Lydia sent me mimosa and alstroemeria, still going strong. 

The cards came through and I was ashamed I had faltered in sending more once I’d asked my postman to look out for a big envelope due by Royal Mail, would he put it under the bin ?  “Of course “ he said “ but there’s no delay in this street, Anna …”   I gawped at him. 

“I can’t have all that hanging around, it’s Christmas.  So I went back and loaded the cart again, and did another turn.”  His daughter is at university, I hope she is as proud of him as he of her. (The envelope was under the bin with the chit through the door saying “BIN”, bless him.)

My granddaughter gave me her first ever Christmas card and my son coined the best name for that odd sag of days between Christmas and New Year – Twixtmas – when he came to see me for a belated present swap and protein boost,  he having poor devil

a foul cold. 

He gave me a book I had asked for by Neil Oliver who presents history intelligently and likeably on tv called The Story of the World in 100 Moments

which is, as he says in the introduction, ridiculous – because yours are yours and mine are mine .  But I like the writing and I am always provoked by choice and this is no sillier than 100 favourite tunes or 100 favourite poems – they always miss out something you would choose.

And I gave my son a year’s worth of political cartoons which will I hope provoke the odd giggle, that or he will be sick with tears.

I met three young women collecting for a local scheme for adolescent mental health, my eye caught because the smallest started to smile at me before they spoke and then did that charming thing of putting her fingers over her mouth, the movement of course drew my attention.   And we laughed about them only wanting money and I said spontaneously to them and their slightly older mentor “I’m sorry , we screwed it up for you, the country is in a mess.  I hope it will come again and you’ll have a better chance” whereupon they beamed and shook hands with me.

When I went out to get the paper on New Year’s Day, there was the usual sprinkling of bikes, beside one of which was something I couldn’t make out – so I crossed the road, to a neat little pile of pizza boxes.  I returned home, got the bags the council gives us and people despise if they are distributed, but nick if you pile up outside your door (I do).  Happy New Year wrapping somebody else’s rubbish.

But when I waved to the bus driver, he waved back, beamed and we swapped thumbs’ ups. I went to collect my paper, and I forbear to compile a list of things I never want to hear about again, because it will be different from your list.  Oh heavens I wish you well, I really do .