The floor of the entry hall
of the house in which my sister and her two friends had taken up residence to further a small company was black and white marble. I was 14 and we had just driven through from Yorkshire to Hampshire. And I had raised my voice against my parents. “Are you going to fight all the way there?” They stopped. I don’t remember being invited into the conversation so I didn’t have the opportunity to tell them how frightened I was, that I had seen my mother hiding letters from my sister in her dressing gown pocket until she could read them and then offer them to my father as lunchtime post. And my father had taken advantage of my mother’s absence for her two evening shifts a week, to talk to me about how worried he was about my sister. And my mother. And now they were arguing.
When we arrived in that hall, my sister thought she was right and my parents thought she was wrong, and my father took me out of it into the garden for a while. Nothing was resolved. I’ve thought of that floor a lot recently.
I like black and white – print of course, prefer black and white check to black and white stripe, black and white films and photographs, understand oh deeply that everything is not black and white, and I suppose the most important aspect of the floor was not what it looked like but how well it fitted together.
I am looking, of course I am, for positives. I have just had to for a week while the internet provider chucked his weight about and the one of two positives I got out of that was when my own technical advisor pointed out that I was luck y to be able to speak to a person – widely now bots, AI and nobody to address. The other positive is that the machine has been regained – I don’t have the language for this.
I loathe it. Pam the Painter and I regularly bemoan the passing of typewriters, carbon and copy paper and the telephone – answered by a human.
Much of the reportage – whether in print, audio or visual – is either wonderful or awful. Shades of grey have been relegated to soft porn (50 Shades of) and it’s a black and white world except where people occasionally say what they mean, look at something from every angle and devil take the hindmost. But how many people have time to think?
I had complimented the writer I met years ago on how good she looked – some men and women look better in age (that’s not what I said). When she got over the fact that I remembered her and discovered my age, she exclaimed “But you must have had surgery” to which I replied (my mother’s daughter) “Don’t be silly. I am with Dietrich
– you don’t put a knife in my face.”
Mary Berry doesn’t mean much to me because I don’t like cookery programmes. But Vogue gave her the cover for her 90th birthday. That’s the white of it. The black is she only gets near the cover at that age because she is on television. Older people are out of fashion, the pursuit of youth leading to the delay and denial of death.
maybe Mark Twain, maybe our old friend “anon”.
The smart money does a lot of bet hedging and publishes the parlous state of the British economy two pages after their own economics editor suggests carefully that maybe we have the corner – take your choice.
And occasionally you even get what seems white and gets darker line by line as you read it (a profile of the US Vice President) in which the right things are said but don’t ring true.
I confess I do not like remakes – be it Bergerac, West Side Story or Cinderella. I understand that story lines are used and reused, of course I do, but if you have a stand out knockout original – leave it alone. And the bad reviews and indeed measured commentary on Disney’s 10 year, multi writer, withdrawn from its London premiere all umpteen million dollars of it, remake of Snow White, obviously heartfelt by the writers, made me into that horrid little girl who was punished for saying “Told you so!”
Annalog 