Where can you live but in the past? What is the future?
So I might express misgiving about people who live in the past but I accept that in order to go forward, I have to go back.
The future of my borough’s food waste collections includes six pages of colour printed leaflet explaining that in a couple of months I shall be given special food waste bags, a caddy for indoors and a bigger one for outdoors. I have read what I should put in the bag in the caddy and when I should put it out more than once and I am left confused and disbelieving.
I can’t remember the last time I cleared a plate into the waste – I clear my plate. I discard the heel of a loaf occasionally ie not more than every two weeks. Eat it up. Fruit and vegetables – hardly ever discarded, nor meat and bones. Eggshells once a week max if I forget to crush the shells onto the garden (thank you Phil). Dairy ? No, except for the odd washed out milk carton, along with washed out yogurt pots in the dry recycling. Rarely tea or tea bags, coffee bags never. Coffee grounds, down the sink or on the garden. Fishbones (lovely drawing) – never.
Yes I realise this says more about me than a lot of other people but I am still being given three bits of kit and asked to comply with an additional schedule. And if I find the leaflet less than clear, I can think of a whole lot of other people who won’t try to make sense of it, probably don’t recycle, just bung all the discard in one bag and probably will continue to do so.
So this is an exercise that looks like forward but leads backwards. Minus money.
Makeup heralds The New Matte. There is nothing new about matte, it’s been around for ages, it is an excuse for a rejigged colour range and prodding falling sales. If it becomes you. It renders me a death’s head.
Do you want to live to 120 – and if so, why ? The Nobel prizewinning molecular biologist Venki Ramakrishnan puts it in the same category as colonising Mars. I’ve never been very good about doing something just because you can. I like to think I have accepted that I shall live as long as I do – but all I can think about 120 is what will break down, how will it be shored up, the wider costs to the medical establishment (already faltering under sheer weight of numbers). I shall look even more like hell than I do on a bad day and be a miserable old b. The money will run out. And Mars to me is a
chocolate bar. I am much more interested in doing our best with this world than finding another to export all our troubles to.
The backwards of the title at this point is to look back at where I have been, what I did, who I met, how it was, what I learnt, how it felt, what it looked like. This is like a series of internalised books, pictures and print, of which I do not tire. Perhaps noticing things was a kind of revenge on having to wear spectacles for short sight at eight. Perhaps it was my personality. Certainly some of it was my parents – “Look” they urged “and ask.” I watch, I listen, I observe – obviously with omissions because I am tired or memory falters or what strikes you didn’t strike me and equally obviously because I want to see and a lot of other people either don’t or don’t want to be bothered.
Forwards gets harder, trying to see what my little best will do. So much easier to destroy and undermine that shore up and look at whatever it is again. That old maxim about “a day at a time” can sound trite and smug but if you take the good with you and go forward without expectation (I can’t transform the lives of those I know and love, no matter how much a I know and love them), then backwards becomes a hopeful way forwards. And it’s the only way to go.
Annalog 