Monthly Archives: July 2023

I met Christopher (not his real name) at a bus stop because he had new leaf green suede moccasins

on which I remarked.  And we never looked back.  He is more or less my age, a hairdresser with a painful back and lives alone.  We became phone friends.  He has a network of contacts and callers, is one of the few people I know to regularly refer to a cousin and we exchange news and views and laugh as we can.  

He suddenly asked me about a restaurant and when I said I didn’t know it, he said “I was thinking of taking you and Ivor (real name, his longtime friend and an antique dealer) there for lunch.”  Why ?  “Because I missed his birthday, I missed yours so let’s have it now.”   My acquaintance with Ivor was limited to about 15 minutes, but Christopher swept that aside.  “If you like the menu, it will be fine.”

The restaurant was everything I would have chosen,

lovely food, splendid staff courteous without being crawly, a plain place with charm.  And we sat and nattered and ate and told stories – they are both benign and insatiable gossips – and drank a modest amount of what C calls “pink wine”.   Time off from the world.   Even the coffee was good.

We came out into the sunshine, for once coherent for a few hours, said goodbye to Ivor and Christopher and I went for the bus to take us back.    So far, pretty darned good.   The bus was full, the weather slipped a gear into humidity and several stops later, I got up, kissed Christopher goodbye and got out in order to breathe.

Briefly at peace with myself and the world

(not a figure of speech) I came on a family – mother and father, father pushing an ordinary buggy, mother in the flowing clothes of Asia, a smartly dressed five or six year old boy and a tiny girl, probably no more than two, dressed in singing red soft cotton, like poppies crossed with roses. 

She stopped and looked at me.  Both children had that fine clean black hair that looks like the feathers of a baby bird.  Big Brother stepped forward to reassure his sister who turned and examined me with enormous dark eyes – and held up and out her hand.   So murmuring “Hello, beauty” I took it and we walked, all of us without a word though some connecting smiles down a London thoroughfare of which I have never been less aware.  It just faded into backdrop.

At the corner of a block, I thought she would have had enough so withdrew my hand but was stopped by a little noise, onomatopoeic of disapproval, like a young rhinoceros. 

  (I know about this from a friend and also from seeing Attenborough with one in a reserve, I love rhino.)  Her brother stepped back, she took my hand again.   We walked some more .  Then she was willing to release me. Her brother came to stand by her, I thanked her mother who beamed at me, I told her brother he was a splendid big brother and went to the father, put my hand on his arm and said” Thank you.   This was truly a blessing.”

Last week I ventured into a book my father loved, having been afraid to look at it for years in case I didn’t like it, didn’t understand it and so on.  It all seemed very congruent, the encounter and the book (Kim by Rudyard Kipling), which teaches among many other things that the journey through life is inevitable.  It goes on even when you are not thinking about it.   And set in an India of antiquity, numberless creeds and races, over a hundred years ago, when pace was different anyway, what the Buddhist lama Kim meets calls The Way,  is less for seeking than pursuing.  You don’t find it, it finds you.  

Current difficulties have all sorts of different names but the impact of where we are up in the world – nationally and globally – affects many of us from different angles at the same time which is wearing, tiring, destructive of peace and contemplation with which the tired old spirit is restored.  The gifts of how this time was spent were intangible and invaluable, probably short in time but lingering in memory.

This sentiment came to mind as I was obsessing about a pair of boots I don’t need.  I said it aloud, after I had finished laughing at myself and how the boots were going to fix my entire winter wardrobe (all half dozen pieces of it) and accentuate my mature glamour (ha). 

I looked up the line and discovered it was a song by the great Chet Baker

– I can’t tell you a note of the music – but I knew the line wasn’t mine.  So I borrowed it.

The mind is a wonderful thing.   It’s worth saying that very loudly as the one sided debate (one sided because we are hooked on progress as a positive) about Artificial Intelligence grows ever louder and  AI looks ever more  like mass identity theft. 

Yes, there will be positive applications though even the people who pioneered it want laws and containment. That old adage about stable doors and bolting horses comes to mind.   Saddest words in the English language are “too late.”

The idea of mind can’t be measured or defined or if so, in several parallel ways – remember, parallel means running alongside, never meeting.  You can have a political mind alongside an artistic mind ( see the obituary of Milos Kundera), a broken mind (good luck Huw Edwards and his straight backed and face it wife) alongside a mind that was “always good at the job.”.  You can have a mind for mischief (don’t confuse that with benignancy) like Elon Musk or a mind for business like Jeff Bezos.  You can have a visionary mind like Michael Bukht who started me in radio or a mind for manipulation (too long a list). 

Or you can just be soppy like me and decide that this, that or the other thing would make all the difference.

I do not fall in love too easily with people.  Not for me the glance across the crowded room – probably hampered by short sight.   I do not look to be transfigured by somebody else.  The door to me is open but that doesn’t mean I may not close it.  I thought about that the other day when I saw a woman I have avoided since her last full frontal hectoring at me made me roar and break out in hives.  I thought when I saw her recently that I was ready to say just that politely if she asked – don’t like being spoken to as if I were a difficult child, I am 79, I can chose and I chose not.  Too old and too ugly, smile and walk away. 

I could hear my mother cheering from the back rows of angels fifth class.

I fall in love with colour.  Several times in my life I have bought entirely the wrong thing because it was the right colour.  Now I walk away muttering “Leave it alone, it’s just that colour …”    

I am in love with books – a book drunk – but if you have ever read annalog, you’ll know that.   But I am not in love with all books by any means.  I have a friend who reads by just letting the words move in front of her eyes.  Not me.  My school taught reading with understanding.  Twice in the recent past I bought stuff which was too intellectually remote – one a book on Ukraine which I really wanted to read. But the pages passed before my eyes, nothing engaged me, I couldn’t get in. 

So I gave up.  

Falling in love suggest the cloak of permanence over the reality of change.   Like being crazy about a certain kind of food – and then deciding one day you have had enough of it.   Or a habit wears itself out or you decide that you will change it and – you know what? – the sky does not fall on your head.  The perfume you always swore by is suddenly old and declasse.

Falling in love as per the title for me is always about something I can buy to make myself more  whatever it is I think I am not,  ie antique earrings, boots – it was the colour (ash khaki) – a miracle cream … but I have learned that if I do not succumb, somebody else will, I will be rescued from my fixation and  life goes on. 

 

I loved Singin’ In the Rain, I still love Singin’ in the Rain.  “Why does it have an apostrophe ?” I asked my mother gravely. Answer:”It’s American, darling.”   God love my mother.  And after Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor dance meisters, I love Jean Hagen,

Lina Lamonte to you, with the tortured voice dubbed by Debbie Reynolds, the main theme of the story being about the coming of sound to Hollywood.  And right up there is the visit to a lah-di-dah voice coach who tries to render the sound of Miss Lamonte a little more raffinee – as in “And I can’t (long a) staaaahnd it”.  Which she offers back as “And I caiehrrnt stennd it.”    There things I can’t stand either.

I don’t like the construction “bored of”.  

Bored by, bored with – not bored of.  First heard some time ago, it is now inevitably used (because this is how speech travels and changes) as a construct in print.  Hilary Rose no less used it in the Times the other day, some sort of a seal of approval.  Not mine. (JH)

I try to be patient with “Not a problem” instead of  “thank you” or “you’re welcome” but am heard to mutter “Of course it’s not a problem – it’s your job.” (JH)

When I took over half a bottle of prosecco to the girls next door ( my lunch guest was driving so  we had drunk a glass each), I took it with a temporary metal cap and asked if they would bung it through the door when they had finished.  I even reiterated the request in an email exchange with the teacher among them.  Not so far.  Can’t be bothered. (JH)

It’s terrifying that I can’t get a straight answer out of the fifth GP about one of the things the doctors want me to take after Destruction tapped me on the shoulder (see annalog/at a stroke).   No, I don’t want another prescription.  I want a straight answer.   I am not quite up to Jean Hagen with this

but I am getting there.

A remarkable teacher, my father would insist “Answer the question.  Not what you think I asked or what you want be asked – but the question you were asked.” 

  Yessir.   Over time I have watched a lot of people on tv wriggle, blag and lie – misbehaviour and anything to do with politics, public life and Westminster makes this worse.  I call it Westminsterspeak.  It is designed to evade rather than communicate so you can call Keir Starmer boring  (I wish he’d axe the Sir) and I don’t care. Sometimes, he answers the question and how refreshing is that.

I am repelled (JH) by the uniformity which seems to govern makeup and fashion which is presumably something to do with social media, mostly as anti social as it can be.   Better faked and drawn in heavy eyebrows (Groucho lives !) than the ones God gave you , false eyelashes  the consistency of shinguards. Flattened hair and flabby mouths. And to match this, the generalisations – all women, all men, all of us –  everything sold to us as wonderful and iconic( I should think icons have headaches, they are so often invoked) super super super from the weather to yet another not quite good enough series, script chosen because it lends itself to social media.   How many supers before it backfires ? 

There is a book in preparation about the death wish of television, product and programming.

Years ago in a tv studio Britt Eklund said “Every girl wants to look like Barbie !”    and I had to swallow not to contradict.  Barbie was blonde with a little nose, and her bosom under her chin.  I was dark and aquiline, and you could haul bra straps till tomorrow morning and mine wouldn’t sit there.  If you are at war with yourself, you have lost your first reliable ally.  Making the best of yourself may sound terribly old fashioned but it’s a lot more rewarding than trying to reinvent yourself like the kitchen extension made flesh.

We are closing down jobs with people in favour of unreliable technology and overwheening AI.   So how are the hundred and thousands without income to eat ?   Jean Hagen Lives !           

unbearable

This is the heading over a review of Pulp,

a band reunited after x years, designed to provoke, ensnare and hopefully to get you to read what’s written.  The editor of the broadcasting reviews and correspondence in my tv guide encourages his staff to be similarly snippy and crisp.  Beats the hell out of talking about everything as if it’s wonderful because it isn’t. 

But it made me think.   Response to shock, bad news, horror and just plain old disappointment  adapts down over time.  If it doesn’t, there may be more to it than you wish to examine or you’re just plain old fixated.  Life is peristaltic action, only goes one way.  You may not like that way

but there isn’t another.   Whatever horror and pain you carry in your memory, tomorrow is another day – even if they seem unendingly similar.

Walking home the other day, I looked with appreciation at the quiet street where I live – and realised I have lived there longer alone than I was in my long, immensely important to me, second marriage.   It was the first time I had thought about that.

 When I shared with readers the tenth anniversary of annalog, I had not thought about till I thought about it – if you see what I mean.  It was the first time I marked ten years.   A decade.  Gosh.

Until I went to South Africa, I thought I knew about the animals.   I mean, I knew their names, roughly their size, some idea of their colouration.   I learned more about colour and shade in South Africa (yes, this was before Amandla) than any film or book could tell me.   Forty years later, I remember grinning like an idiot, it was so wonderful.   Riding round the Kruger Game Park sitting (highly incorrectly) in the window frame of the Peugeot, one hand gripping the luggage rack, the other in the book on birds I had just bought.  Nothing prepared me for bird life in SA. 

  First time.

Discretion forbids any detail on the first serious boyfriend (long married, I hope happily and with daughters with whom I hope he is rather more thoughtful than he was with me) but there was only one, the first time that a man I really care for, said very quietly “I should have married you.”  We were at lunch with a lot of other people, I had just got married to somebody else.   He was famous for the beauty, intelligence, standing and wealth of his connections which I remarked, saying I would never have done.  But years later I saw him enter the foyer of a big public building, mark me and head towards me.  I rose to meet him and we stood in a long wordless embrace.  Outside time, inside space, the first and only time.

That kind of embrace is shared by Virginia McKenna and Peter Finch at the end of the original A Town Like Alice, the splendid conclusion to a gut-tearing film, when you love somebody above and beyond, so much that the kiss and the rest of that very enjoyable stuff comes second.

I remember the first time I passed an exam, it was Friday 13^th and my parents were so delighted that I asked them why ?   “Because you can,” said my mother.

The first time in a broadcasting studio, it felt like home – and residually, it always did, even in less than able or pleasant company.    And the first time I had my hair “done” and was so disappointed, I was rude to my father for teasing me about it .

The first time I understood wonder was the night of my son’s birth, the closest most of us get to the miracle of creation, every girl her own stable.  And the first time I understood hate (though I had been on the end of enough of it) was when a response to a programme about backstreet abortion – before the law was changed – found me likened to Myra Hindley. And I was immediately defended.

Years ago, I read or heard it remarked that every child was an only child, a one off.  So, I suppose, every important event is a one off.  It may happen again, it won’t be the same and we remember, even in shadow, the first time.