This is the title of a song from the musical Kiss Me Kate a rework of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, music by Cole Porter, lyrics by Bella and Sam Spewack which launched in 1948, to be revived at regular intervals. Though contextually, it is quite funny, I wonder if you could sing this now without somebody getting windy.
Rights are very “in”. I don’t hate men. I married two, had to do with many and bore an incipient third. I preferred to some to others, but while I can say I found this one tricky or that one unsettled me for some absolutely instinctual reason, I see them as people and I like people – not always trustworthy, often disappointing (me too) but people are always interesting.
On the bus a man sat down,
hat, glasses, stick and a carrier from the Saatchi Gallery so I asked what he had been to see and he told me, showed the book he had bought on the artist’s work. He was a retired paediatrician.
He told me that when he was a newly appointed consultant at Great Ormond Street, he skived coffees and took the paper home from the consultants’ room because everything was going on the mortgage. Things improved and then declined over a long time. He told me that a year after becoming a consultant, he resigned from the BMA and has been an “outsider” ever since. “But this ? I’d worry about my patients” he said. Pause. “And what do you do ?”
I think
I said that after many years as a journalist, for the last 10 I had written a blog called annalog. He looked a question. I said “Because I’m Anna and I am very analogue” and spelt it the way I write it (which originated with a man.) We got off the bus, we said goodbye, he said he was going home to look at the site. I just wish I had written down the name of the artist whose work he introduced me to because the Saatchi Gallery website is coy to the point of uselessness.
Mishugas by Jacques Lipchitz, the Israel Museum
(Another man – sorry, Charles.)
A neighbour haunts the street, can in hand, speaking in a strangely hectoring kind of way with a sexual undercurrent I find repellent. The big square postman has had a round with pre cancer and his wife too. This is the man who on his own time delivered stuff last Christmas, “of course” he said, when I thanked him. He remarked unbidden “ I can’t stand that fella. Sticks to me all the way round the block, as if he were interesting – and I don’t like the way he talks to women, not at all.”
I remember the first professor I ever met, a book of whose I had read. We met in a television studio – I was so scared, you’d have thought the gallows beckoned – and I remember his grin, that he was courteous to me and made room for me for the few minutes we had before and after transmission. I smiled at his name on bookshelves for years.
Of course you remember politeness, it has no sex, and you particularly remember people who were kind when you were beginning, when whether they knew it or not, it wouldn’t have taken much to undermine you and knock you aside. I met plenty of those and my revenge is that they do not linger in the memory – the experience maybe but the person is gone.
I remember the plain solicitor with a beautiful voice who rescued me from a contract very much not in my interest. Good doctors, wonderful plumbers, the best hairdresser I ever had who left for LA over a weekend (I hope he was in love !) without saying goodbye: the divorce lawyer saying “Wipe your mouth and walk away.”. I remember my son’s secondary school teacher who was so practical and helpful. And sitting next to David Kossoff whom I had seen in A Kid for Two Farthings, who talked to me while sketching the man opposite on a card he gave me when he left. He signed it “for my Anna.” Half the sky.
From the trenches in Ukraine
Annalog 