The only person I have known who smelt wonderful in Chanel Five
was my sister. I smelt like enthusiastic dog vis a vis lamppost. I can’t remember – was I more crushed or more embarrassed ? Anyway, never again. A wistful niff in the bottle promised like the lure of the sirens but I left it there.
When I spoke about something two or three weeks hence, my mother would say “Don’t wish your life away” . I didn’t understand then, I do now. When I was so wipeout ill at Christmas last – a benchmark of all sorts for me – I had to reevaluate me and time. “Time masters you” said my father. “You don’t master time.” Where I was then, you enter time.
Like a mood or a building – to learn anew. And if that’s the image in your mind, it lingers.
This Sunday morning, so enjoying the preceding evening with Joan Hickson as the definitive Miss Marple (BBC4), I permitted myself to look at the tv programme for next Saturday to find yes, more of my Marple but also an episode of Beck.
Chickens will not be counted before they are hatched. It may be cancelled for something like a pop concert or an netball championship … You see, it’s always personal.
Not another whinge about tv scheduling, the Karate Kid on a loop, segments of Midsummer Murders so old they have whiskers and can only have sedative value but I forbear. That’s not what I want and it’s always personal.
I shall not complain again about quiz shows
and how not to make documentaries because it is always personal but so is paying a licence fee for the unwatchable and the endlessly repeated. A correspondent to my favourite tv column remarked that the BBC was charging us for programmes already made and shown (x 6 !) which was financially questionable.
I forbear to bitch and moan about wildlife programmes which feature the presenters in preference to the beasts. I shall not attitudinise about the style of some (not all ) documentaries, the lack of curiosity which must drive their making – up to and including questions asked and not answered to keep the flow of bitesized bits moving (Channel 5’s The Secret Life of Trees). It’s always personal.
Pam the Painter and I discovered the difference in our tastes long ago and she described in detail a recent visit to Dungeness
(look it up) as fascinating and made it so for me in the telling. She is unlikely to watch BBC’s European editor Katya Adler (pause for cheers ) interviewing Germany’s former Chancellor Mrs. Merkel – but she listens to me explaining why I was so interested, my interpretation presumably doing for her what hers does for me. It’s always personal.
Levels of toleration and interpretation in the evocation of style and period varies. I remember Wal ringing to inveigh about the china in Downton Abbey – “ how could they ?” Well, he was a Thomas Goode’s expert and I remember walking into a French museum with a room of full of china on the right about which he knew a great deal. Other people’s expertise seizes the imagination.
I like my detectives to be more involved in people than guns. I accept the idea of guns, and the other day I saw a bit of a Western I have never seen (The Big Trail , directed by Raoul Walsh in 1930 – not a typo – with a backstory at least as fascinating as the cinematography and the first named appearance of a 23 year old John Wayne, long on masculine beauty and short on mannerisms) – I was really delighted – something new in the antique department.
The French language Maigret on TPTV is a joy in professional integrity (casting, script, story, period and location) but I accept – it’s always personal.
And as I said to the very helpful woman at Barclaycard (lost and had to be stopped) five calls in with endless “just call our app” , “if you take my money the old fashioned way, you can help me when I get into old fashioned difficulty and no AI can do what you’ve just done, thank you so much “ – it’s always personal.
Annalog 