modern life

Faith (not her name, I’m working up to Hope and Charity)

has cut her hair off far too short but it’s clean and crisp. “Well” she said “I always wanted dreads – and now  – I have had them !”    Faith reminds me of Ellie, treasured senior secretary in my first office job at a paper merchants, plain and tall under a horrible lumpy hairdo – but once you had looked into Ellie’s eyes, you saw who she was and she was a good person – kind and helpful, thoughtful and plain spoken.   Never to be forgotten.   Faith has Ellie eyes.

Well, I’m here, this is modern life,

but some of it doesn’t fit with me.   Did I ever think I would see how long I could avoid the hairdresser (into the fifth month) and yes, I do have a hairdresser I like and trust.  But grown and ignored, my hair doesn’t look any worse that of the women who have it done, blasted to blazes and draped into ringlets..

I loved to look at clothes. Less to look at now.   A whole new lot of bad black, bad grey and dishwater beige, all synthetics, every shape you have seen before ?  Keep it.  I’ll find a pair of corduroys

and a secondhand sweater (I prefer second hand to used, of course it’s used, it’s a garment …)   

Once in a brief contract with the BBC, they insisted I had a mobile and I handed it back directly after close of play. 

I have never sent a text, WhatsApp or picture. Managing without a mobile is going to become increasingly difficult as the NHS to name but one ubiquitous public body employs apps that don’t jive with your computer (I have never owned a laptop either).  Booking a holiday or even a trip, ordering various things on line is becoming more difficult but bottom line, if you’re the supplier, do you want the money ?  You do ?  Then we shall find a way.

I have never got legless on white wine (or any other colour) with raucous friends, spent time in Torremolinos or any other “two weeks for the price of ten days” resort or been party to much less sung in karaoke. 

And I don’t feel I have missed a thing.   

No driver’s license either (though a secret yen for an Army jeep) and though I can see how much better for the environment bikes might be, I wish there were some way of making many of the riders more responsible. 

 My language towards them has deteriorated though in mitigation I bet I am one of few who ever thanks a bike rider for waiting at a green light.   You take your life in your hands crossing the road, too often the same kind of mindless violence that spikes drinks.

Whoever (bless) it was who said that if I hung on to clothes long enough, even the bashed up ones, they’d come back into fashion, spoke prophetic truth. I mourn the fashion migraine every time I see the Balenciaga name

invoked to some hideousness.   The Master would throw his scissors !    As the last great religion is money, the deal now is to sell along the line of least resistance rather than offering any kind of stylistic initiative to protect the profit margin. 

The price of the endless abbreviation and diffusion of complex ideas like immigration, wokeism, social habits and responsibilities too many to list is that too often we accept that if it can be summed up in six words, they must be right.  Desperate to grab attention long enough to sell a copy or keep us watching, concepts are contracted for easy access – and Devil take the hindmost. 

In the Parliamentary kerfuffle of last week, a friend (her politics are not mine) used Keir Starmer’s name like an epithet – as in  “And as for KS and the Labour Party …”  and I said ominously that I had read widely on this and still didn’t understand it except that it was the kind of parliamentary obfuscation and in-fighting that makes people feel that their vote is a waste of time (a) and (b) your preferred party has had 15 years in power and we are on our knees. 

Let’s talk about the weather.