I was brought up short the other day by two of my young neighbours in discussion about what there was on television. They mentioned The Secret Garden (David Attenborough’s latest) and I said “The music spoils it for me.” But they agreed – they both liked the music.
And I (cynical old bat next door but one) thought “Yes, because you are used to it.” Grew up with it, knew no other. But I did.
And yesterday a friend told me most unsettling stories about his experience with his GP re his skin and the A&E in a local (if you have a car) hospital, about his eye. And he said , not for the first time, that he felt everything was changing and declining round him. He never thought he would feel nervous walking to the tube station and going two stops to his film club. But he missed that security.
One of the things I thought I missed was the chance to have a column in a newspaper. And when I came to understand the relentlessness of writing copy to a standard every week, I saw too how easy it was to fall into “ a knocking piece” – moaning or bitching and moaning, amusing if you could manage it but otherwise a complaint or a series of them … columnists did it a lot, and I didn’t want to.
The world is full of things that make me purse my lips so I look for the ones that make me smile. I grinned at a man in his forties making his way down the bus the other day and before he got out, he said into my ear “You smile ! How wonderful …”
Forget Pollyanna’s “Glad Game”.
The world is full of big bad horrible things and I am helpless in the face of many of them. And I am more and more aware that whatever you say, with whatever degree of sincerity, it can be perceived, written or talked about as the opposite. The explosion of every kind of media has made that worse. Everyone has a comment to make, with or without a name attached, and people glory in the confusion. I don’t.
You know you are old when you bought a book, read it and let it go and then miss it – and buy it again. Which I just did (Pied Piper by Nevil Shute). Old verities …
And the pernicious use of the word “everybody.”
Nobody is everybody. It’s marketing hype. I emphasise again and again that we have different tastes and now I would add that the herd mentality – “oh everybody likes a white wedding” – won’t spare us where we are up to.
I have never liked white weddings, not even as a young child. I don’t know which offends me more – the pretence or the expense. I could write a list of performers I won’t give house room. Alan Carr (rapidly becoming the C in BBC), with all that glub round his middle or Ant and Deck from whom heaven deliver me. Voices like nails on glass and self satisfaction enough to make you throw up. Every time I see some reporter on camera waving his or her hands around, I think of my first piece to camera in Oxford Street and the producer’s voice in my ear saying “Put your hands down, dear. You are not a windmill !” Where is he now when we need him ?
I have never been to a hen party. I don’t think I missed much.
Let everybody have their go – I am all in favour of it from karaoke to beauty pageants, from bungee jumping to the long slog to the break in opera or acting or starring (different !) or public life.
There was a lesson to be learned from the recent US state visit of the King and Queen.
You can make the best of yourself – and I am all for that – but you are what you are. And if you haven’t spent time finding out about that – you are going to miss that security in the days to come.
Annalog 