Monthly Archives: March 2026

through not round

Upon writing annalog – which I still define as writing copy and most others refer to as a blog –  I wonder whether I am writing for you or for me.   Often and mostly, it’s both.  But I have written stuff, read it and thought – well that’s what I want to write – and then had unexpected feedback or I have written what I thought would appeal to you as well as me and the silence has been deafening. 

I have written before about the wonders of the subconscious mind

– and- in all humility about trying to begin – my phrase is  “to find a way in.”  Above and  beyond the list of things we all have to worry about in the wider world, we all have troubles from the small to the considerably larger and we have different ways of dealing with them.

People  talk about “getting round” a problem.  I commit myself to going through.  This is not because I am better or brighter or tougher, it’s because it works as a philosophy better for me.  It involves making a decision

and taking at least some of the responsibility for the fallout.

We have different levels of power and influence in the making of decisions.  We are different people, we experience things different ways.  

With my anxiety level rising unevenly through 3 months – which is a long time to feel powerless in a personal situation –   I could tell you a long unhappy story about my latest round with he eye hospital.  I have written about Moorfields before ( eg annalog/shruti and the tiger, and others)  always with praise and appreciation.  This latest round has come as a shock to me and a shock that goes on being shocking.

Friends have said I should write about it.  I am not sure.   It risks being a whine – hell, it is a whine.   On several different levels.  But I am near moving on, towards through.   Better an account of that, than the misery of not knowing.

The news media recounts with more and less clarity the ongoing destruction of various wars. 

All of the people involved don’t know.  If they are among the decision makers, they only know  this  decision or that.  Whether it will be positive or not,  they do not know, cannot know.  How or what they decide will play out and what the effects – short, medium and long term – may be remains unknown too.   You will notice a conspicuous lack of names in this writing – we all know the names, we have different feelings about them, but they are the major players, the rest of us exist in varying degrees of powerless, and we wait.

Alongside, the international and national political situation, there have been several books about human pain,

how it is perceived, what it really is, how the current impact of Big Pharma and its witchy pills makes them a fortune and leaves us further powerless.  I remember how people latched on the idea of a name for what ailed them, in the hope that if you could name it, you could treat it and thus banish it.  It works sometimes but not always and we are endlessly told the names of things in the superstitious hope that that will ease the pain perhaps or improve the predicament. 

Pain is part of the human experience, physical, psychological and they are often interrelated.   If you can’t feel pain you are in another kind of trouble.   No signal that something is wrong – again, in the mind or the body or both.    And you can misread the lack of signal as badly as you can a signal – and get it wrong.

And the most experienced doctors  can get it wrong too.

There is endless diagnosis of where we are up to in the history of the world

  – pages of intelligent and informed writing about the countries that are involved, how and why, what it may mean, how it will play, and on the world stage too often, the answer is war.

I can’t go to war with the NHS and the eye hospital.  What I learned is nowhere to fight.   Friends have been generous and supportive.   I have to go through this.    

the hand in mine

Who’d be a Royal?  

With his father still in treatment for cancer, his wife only recently cleared – all in the teeth of his children who, although screened from it, will hear a great deal more than their parents would wish– the Prince of Wales was asked what he believed in ?   There must have been a moment when he thought “ oh, spare me” but he is the forthcoming leader of the established (Christian) church and he must answer.  And so he did.

I beat him to it.  I was stopped by a young man, perfectly clean and decent, with a stack of hand outs, in Kings Road, Chelsea with   “You look like a very spiritual person.” This is when I should have run.  “ What do you believe in ?”

Choice: walk away: tell him to excuse you: evade as in “Well mostly CofE …”: or answer.   I answered.   “I believe in the Face of God.”   He asked “Where do you find that ?”   So I told him the story of the robins who nested in my little garden, laid eggs, fledged young, took them away to evade the cats (always other people’s – not mine) and brought them back on an unforgettable lap of honour where I said “I saw the smallest most beautifully coloured feathers.   Face of God. And when in doubt – leopards.”

So then he did his pitch including of course nice people and vegetarian food, pressed the leaflet into my hands  by which time I had channeled a remnant of my mother’s formidable charm saying (glance at watch) “You must excuse me”,  gently moving away, leaflet disposed of in due course.

I wasn’t offended, or insulted, but I recall  vividly  a young man to whom I was talking on a bus several years ago who said  “There is no difference now between the public and the private.”  And I said at the time “That’s the beginning of the end.”  

I was taught that privacy was important – almost a right – subject to abuse, surely, and highly relative.  But animals sometimes seek privacy and we’re only animals. 

I remember a favourite actor saying that as soon as you begin to be known  people start asking how you vote, what you believe in and who you sleep with ?   The Pof W poor devil – as other Royals – has always been known – I am not sure whether than makes the burden of public life easier or not.

The endless invigilation of my life repels me.  I learned over many years the price of fame

or notoriety or royalty – and you can have it.     Stories about the high price often exacted in the first  two out of three of those alternatives is too high for me. I sought an understanding and acceptance of what I had – in my life and in my belief system.

I haven’t been a Christian in more than expectation, nice stories and confusion.   I could never get my head round the Trilogy.  

by Andrey Rublev

It sounded suspiciously close to religious schitzophrenia.   But I could see – even if I could not understand – the wonder round me.   How you healed when you had had an injury.   Plant life, bird life, animal life – wonderful documentaries, the behaviour of animals.    I admired science but it was based on proof, not acceptance.   I sought what I could accept.

The endless miracles of natural life are enough to make me rejoice often.  Yes, I can see man’s inhumanity to man – but that’s mankind, often a conceited, blind and silly creature.  And if this is the highest brain form – what price cruelty to children and animals, obsession with  being right –  which comes through different religious forms ? 

My God – yes, I call him God –  is there – there when lights transform the sky, there when young are born and old die, there is every act of kindess and grace, there in every act of cruelty  and stupidity, there in difference and infinite variety, there when I understand that life is highly imperfect  but it’s all I have and I celebrate every single bit that I can of it – up to and including “God get me through this madness with Moorfields” and make me a  better person. 

The rest as the old Irish nuns say I offer up.  

Really?

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy !

It’s only taken  40 odd years  for me to get there and find myself named in the same sentence as Helen Mirren and Meg Ryan.  How I laughed!

40 years ago I was interviewed by a journalist called Andrew Billen for the London Evening Standard,

in connection with something I was doing on tv.  I can’t remember what and unless it was something of particular interest, I will have done my best, taken the money and gone home.  I remember something of what I wore and certainly where we met. 

Mr. Billen didn’t like me.  I made the mistake of trying to talk him into it, as in “go on, you do really”,  and  probably bored him.   When the  piece was published, he referred to me as being  “almost asexual.”  I am not sure after all this time about the “almost”  but I am certain about the asexual. 

And I was quite put out.

Sex and sexuality had been one of the few securities of my life.  Now apparently that was up for question.

When I spoke to the my endlessly thoughtful manager,  she asked what had happened and I told her what I have just written – that he didn’t like me and I got my response wrong.  And we discussed why I did that and what I must learn from it.  End of.  In those days, old newspapers wrapped chips.

So on Friday morning all these years later, Andrew Billen wrote a piece about the upcoming chat show of Claudia Winkleman, in which he referred to what a tricky beast the chat show is with reference to those who failed, those who succeeded and those who didn’t get a look in – writing “Even the naturals stumble.  Parkinson’s old school chauvinism bombed with several female guests.  Helen Mirren, 

Meg Ryan and the agony aunt Anna Raeburn (he jocularly asked her “your place or mine?” only for her to remind him that he was married).”

I am so glad I had my youth when I did.  Just for the record Mr.Billen, I didn’t find Parkinson anything as much as enormously able and professional.   I didn’t see that interview  in which I am the spam in the sandwich between Rod Hull’s fabulously malevolent emu

and the wonderful Billy Connolly until it was rerun a couple of years ago.  And I wouldn’t have seen it then had not Pam the Painter suggested with some force that I did.

Parkinson behaved beautifully to me, his manner was his manner – and he was good.  He made us all shine. You can disagree with  somebody profoundly but there is a place for the fight – and it wasn’t in my judgement on a night when I had a terrific time.  And it shows.  The thing that most  impressed me, watching 50 years later, was how happy I was.

In the Winkleman piece, I am thrilled to have been mentioned in the same breath as Mirren –  a year younger than me and a very very good actress – and Ryan,

a mere stripling in her late sixties and a very good actress – but don’t infer any sense of late stage generosity.  I was in the clip that came up next when Mr. Billen was looking through background on chat shows.

I have been thinking a lot about my mother recently.  When I was a child and turned up panting with the whichever dog was current, she’d say “What’s the matter with you ?  Think you missed something ?”   When you’re a child, that’s curiosity.  Nowadays it seems to be the terror that you will have missed the latest trend – whether in eyebrows, speech, chins or clothes –  and thus your chance at being  “in”.

If I had rung her about the Evening Standard, she would have dismissed it.  Maybe that’s why I didn’t.

My mother, whose own mother was not kind, was herself bright, penniless,  better than pretty and took no prisoners, and brought me up like that with love. .  She was never “in”.  Nor I.  I danced to a higher power.  She did it her way and I did it mine and her way was a big contribution to the possibility of even a corner of the overcrowded public and media world. 

Everybody in public life  – which means any life – is misunderstood or misrepresented once in a while.   You get on with it   You live.  And I did.

you can dream…

Do you think if I feel absolutely wretched with streaming cold, I could dance like Gene Kelly? 

One of my favourite  film  moments is  when he dances in the pouring rain to the title song of Singin’ in the Rain.  Somewhere along the line I read that he had a temperature and so on, but the show must – and did – go on.

Sadly my guardian angels don’t do swaps.  You get what you get.   So the only dancing is my fingers on the keys.

Generalisation

is I suppose inevitable but I prefer it tempered,  as in qualified by  “most” or  “many” or even “it seems that…”  I loathe hate and detest  “all men” just as much as I detest  “all women”.  You couldn’t possibly know them all, don’t be silly.  So though historically, though men are heavier, stronger and more aggressive and had to be for the race to survive, from Eve on, women were part of the way we live too.

So this week – drowning in images of the current President and his yeasayers, I looked to the distaff sides and found small  goodies.

Reese Witherspoon

was apparently less than keen on  acting and now has a successful career as a producer.  Her daughter is beginning to make headway as an actress.  To quote RW  from a podcast I haven’t heard “ better to pursue your talents rather than your dreams.”   I was really struck by this. 

If you are the sort of person who will only know if you prove it to yourself that what you want won’t happen, I can see following your dreams.  Though a very average  5 ft 4ins (sorry, metric free zone), slim enough but not wand thin, I wanted to be a model. 

Marie Lise Gres

My mother bless her chased up hard earned money to let me attend a short modelling course where I was kindly disbused of any hope I had in that direction.  I emerged and got on with life.  I would like to think I reimbursed  my mother but I  bet  she waved it away..

However lesson absorbed.  Never mind all that warbling about  impossible dreams – live the possible ones.   And I did.  And you learn – not always slowly or easily  – but you do learn.  I used to hesitate about explaining I worked for a women’s magazine in case it sounded exclusive of men.  And then I was told, more than once, that men read those publications to learn about women.   

I learned too that though John Wayne

might be quoted as saying “Men are men, and women are women, and I can’t think of a better arrangement”, life was actually  quite a lot more complicated and various than that, and this was long before apparently compulsory  discussion about gender and choice and hormonal knitting patterns. Men and women were very different one from another, via enlightenment, personal experience, education and personality.  And they were all people.  Some you liked, some you wanted to biff in the ear – and not always divided along lines of gender.

You may not be old enough to remember that a faction felt that feminism was a misled idea because women didn’t like other women. 

Let me be the first to argue that there are women – as well as men – I don’t want to eat with.  Duplicity and ill manners and worse are not gender specific.   You learn to pick your fight and how to fight, and when to give in, when to quit and when to shout hooray.

As a woman writing about the Tate Modern  show for Tracey Emin

did last week.   Apart from being a really helpful overview |(good ? bad ? irrelevant ? I didn’t know) it showed you a woman who did what she wanted to do – she made art and put her money where her mouth is –  into a rundown seaside town where she created an art school and a training kitchen and café for the long term unemployed.  “I live art, work art, facilitate other people to do art” she is quoted as saying.  “I have come home.”  62 years old, followed her talents.  Know your dreams for what they are – dreams -and don’t confuse them with realities. 

no more bad news

Dear Readers, old and new, passing through or always do !

I have not written this week.  I wanted so badly to write funny and uplifting and there was no more chance of that.

I could tell you about personal troubles, I could write my opinions about this and that and I could recycle the frightening position we are in nationally and internationally.  But I cannot feel you need to hear this again,

So please excuse the old bat, currently at roost, recovering.

Take a deep breath, go for a walk, enjoy every minute you aren’t working, green buds, and the beginning of meteorological spring.

Till soon, with great appreciation.