“Another interesting piece “ wrote SR generously “I don’t know how you do it.” Neither do I. Years ago, I wrote about the balancing act between trying to charm
the Muse into kissing your brow and pursuing her with a hatchet. When I faltered, Snowdrop reminded me of this phrase. “Only someone committed to writing would think of that, the tension in the idea…” He was a senior academic, he must know … and I trust his taste in life, never mind writing. I continued to learn to write.
I learned there were ideas that came and you worked on them. I learned that you sat down at a blank screen as you once sat before a blank page and stuff came out of your fingers, in sentences. And how to hammer it
into a slightly different shape.
I learned heartfelt appreciation of and respect for the subconscious mind. I had it anyway but I would wonder “Where did that come from ?” But it came.
Last week I met the first person who ever wrote to encourage me with annalog. We have stayed in touch for all that time and never met. It’s like a radio friendship but he had read me too, and seen me on bits of tv. He commented on something I’d done recently as courageous. I had not thought it brave, just truthful. And no, we are not going into that discussion about your truth and my truth. Perception is to do with
acuity, will, upbringing, personality, education, every one of those senses we take for granted and several we don’t know about.. You miss what you miss and you see what you see. And I generally want to see more. And speak as I find.
There are exceptions. Although (thank God) it never happened to me, I find reading about sexual abuse difficult and deeply uncomfortable. Same as rape in war. So do a lot of other people so they “blank” it. I read an excellent piece by a woman, herself abused, who went to every day of the Ghislaine Maxwell trial and was pursued after it in making a contact of the one person who came under the new sex trafficking statute. I thought of Jeffrey Epstein as silenced rather than suicided. Vested interests.
When there is something I admire,I long to write to the writer. Never a mistake to say something good.
Of course you can cast pearls before swine (no reply) but that’s the risk. There is a whole list of things I don’t write about because everybody else does and long ago, the lovely Linda (manager/agent/friend) and I decided that, as everybody else was chewing news till it was spent gum in the mouth, I would do issues. Issues have a much longer life and they involve people very directly.
My first love was magazines which fell out of fashion as too expensive, superseded by other media, while women’s magazines, where I began, constituted second class journalistic citizenship. I was an agony aunt (everybody else’s title,not mine), not a proper journalist. I was told this on several occasions. And then, I worked in independent radio which was – well – questionable. When I had my first professional money, the local newsagents (still called that then) held a raft of stuff for me, I took what I wanted, paid and said thank you for my source material, often American, a jumping off point for further investigation this side of the pond.
Perhaps, I thought as I looked back over annalog which I don’t often do, what I tried to do was to create the best of a magazine in microcosm,
something intelligent or funny with references you could trace and unexpected pictures and images.
I do try to write “up” when the world is down because the endless recycling of down gets us nowhere. I do occasionally haul off and write in a way which is a journey for me – but it is always a journey for me. You remember how the runaways in children’s stories had a few essentials in a red and white cotton kerchief,
to go on a stick over the shoulder ? I have such a bundle, always at the ready, but the pattern is black and white.
The Lasting Harm: witnessing the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell by Lucia Osborne-Crowley (Fourth Estate, £22)
This is not the serious piece to be written on addiction,
especially as overworked A&E is currently seeing healthy young women making themselves ill by injecting black market prescriptions for fat busting, weight reducing drugs. But I am addicted too – to good manners.
I want to shout for joy when somebody – regardless of age, sex, class, colour – behaves gently and sociably.
A young Asian man with one item in his hand waved me with a small basket full, forward at the supermarket. “Thank you” I said “but why ?” “Because I want to” he said. “My compliments to your mother” said I, grinning. And yup, I know – chanelling Queen Victoria and I don’t care.
I can’t say don’t care without seeing the line of my mother’s mouth pursed in disapproval. She forbade don’t care, I want and I told you so, the latter producing steam from both ears simultaneously. “Such a miserable thing to say” she’d hiss. It was just taboo.
I am addicted to coherence,
especially in scripts. Once you have asked yourself “What is this all about ?” you have admitted it lacks clarity. And if it is not clear or the style doesn’t grip me, I am not staying. Forget how many other people think it’s wonderful. As my father said “just because there’s just more of them, it doesn’t mean they’re right …” Thank heaven for books.
I am additionally addicted to voice. And that’s like music and beauty. It’s in my ears not yours and there it is.
I am addicted to taste but I have ceased buy jam – partly because I then have to buy bread to put it on -though mostly because it may say raspberry on the label but all I can taste is sugar. Raspberries grew in the back garden
– good fruit is just a joy. You can finick about with various kinds of sugar, lemon juice or weak Earl Grey, mint perhaps … but if the fruit tastes good, it needs nothing but washing.
Last week’s steak was from a very unhappy cow. It tasted of nothing very much. And in anticipation of disapproval, let me explain that elderly women easily incur anaemia and iron supplements often cancel efficacy by passing through with alarming speed and prejudice- so I eat lambs liver, and the odd piece of red meat. I like it. While Pam the Painter ate a vegiburger the other day which she said tasted of door mat.
I am addicted to dark chocolate,
a chocolate tree
almonds and ginger. I was in love with almonds before they were wonder food, when I had to peel them for the Christmas cake. I was in love with the ginger in biscuits, chopping the root and variously using it. And I keep bars of plain chocolate with hazelnuts in a plastic box in the fridge.
I am not addicted to nuts as such but at this stage I would miss them. I eat them every morning with dried fruit, plain yogurt and fresh fruit. I am not “eat the whole lot at one sitting” addicted about anything. There is no pride in this, I am not specially disciplined, it’s just the way I am
I am addicted to colour. Failure or success in my wardrobe as far back as you care to go is to do with colour. I abandoned black for khaki
when my hair went white – though paler, the sallow tones in my skin (I wept over that word !) are constant. I look endlessly at complexion colour, at lipstick, at hair colour, at the modifications in between colours and I get jump for joy excited when I see somebody who has matched or not tried to match a difficult shade of cream or grey.
I am addicted to leopards. It is probably easier to tell you animals I don’t like (fewer) and I am not very good at insects beyond bees and the dung beetle, nature’s Sisyphus. I am addicted to stories – the human revenge on social media. I am addicted to joy and laughter, the symbolism of green shoots and the hope of better days to come – how else to get out of bed in the morning ?
Two magpies – one for sorrow, two for joy which means that the sorrow is part of the joy.
We say “always remember” of DDay and I do, but the best moment of the very little I saw of the events was Zelensky of Ukraine talking to an old man in a wheelchair. As the conversation ended, the veteran bent his head to kiss the younger man’s hand which he gently withdrew and embraced the sitting old soldier.
A heart lifting moment between two men.
And somebody tell the Prime Minister that leaving early was a regrettable diplomatic discourtesy to his host and the assembled mass of the British politico-military establishment, veterans, North American and European colleagues and allies, Germany for the first time. Remember, “don’t care was made to care” and it’s not a good look .
Having a gardener sounds grand but there are things I can’t do and things I am not good at so Josh came to take away the dead white rosemary replacing it with a bustling daphne. He tidied up, cleared away, to leave me swept and garnished with the sea thistle
I have been longing for in a big pot.
The weather changed up and down and up again, leaving us all bewildered and me tomato faced (always get the clothes wrong) but the three or four things I needed at the supermarket brought me to Nabila, a goodlooking woman (incredibly 60) with a white shirt I admired. She asked why. I told her. She said it was old Gap. We commiserated about how poor the quality of affordable clothes was and I said I was hopeful that the Chinese clothing monster Shein would not get its projected City float. “Shein ?” said Nabila, a Pathan from Kashmir. “I call them “shame” !”
(75 hour weeks, pennies per garment and why do we never seem to suspect what else we get when we open the door to invite such a monster in ?)
It is said that nobody but the Chinese understand the complexities of the notion of “face”(please look into it)
and I am not going to attempt analysis of something I know so little about. But it is to be hoped the owners incur loss and damage to theirs. We don’t need any more cheap clothes – we need better ones – and not to add to that 30 mile long dump of unbiodegradable discard, visible from space, in the Atacama Desert.
I read that a banker, the head of the World Gold Council,
was abused as a child but that – obviously bright – he parlayed his emotional damage into power in a career of note. In an interview with Andy Coulson of Crisis,What Crisis ? (podcast), he says that he wasn’t a brave person or a brave trader, he just didn’t care – and that gave him the edge. You have to live with this, he says, “and decide – I’m not going to let it beat me.” And there is a price to that too of course.
If I haven’t used an adjective to describe abuse, it’s because ALL abuse is appalling – incurring pain that goes on and on. But what an insight into a business career from a man of 60 plus who isn’t a footballer or a pop star or a celebrity – young and socially viable – and bless him for that . Life is long and pain lasts with it, like frostbite.
When Pam the Painter came to lunch, she asked all sorts of questions about the dress she was wearing (never seen her in such a thing before, terrific success ) – about line and cut and why and belts – and I was thrilled to be asked. “But you know” she said. “You can do this.” And I remembered seeing a film of the Bolshoi Ballet and noticing the toe shoes were different.
I remember dancers explaining that the leg was “made” differently through the classes, that the “line” was different. And I could see it.
Wal said the other day” Who else would I discuss cut with ?” and we laughed. But to see, to perceive, always to look again, to look further – that seems like riches to me. And I never tire of looking.
Diane Abbott. The voice alone, plus the thin skinned recall that she is the only person in all those years to have got my name wrong twice on air. Sad to see her looking weary and unwell, head wrapped in a turban, only to reappear for the faithful in wig and bad leather jacket and start to inveigh about being blocked from standing as a Labour candidate in the seat she has long held. Where did all this come from – the Labour party, its leader, the executive ? I doubt it. It came from Dianne Abbott. If she is as clever as we are always being told she is, this was to be anticipated. Left or right, power play is not kind to everybody. Times change.
She might learn from a not untactfully written story about Jennifer Lopez,
who parlayed some success in to brand bonanza – never underestimate the sheer graft of that, even if the financial rewards are magnificent. She and Ben Affleck eventually married so she set up a record, a show and a film about the Love of Her Life – only for the whole lot to falter massively – tour cancelled, film sold to television after failure in cinemas, record going nowhere.
I hesitate to say nothing lasts forever. The sea and the mountains
last forever but they change constantly. Graveyards were supposed to provide a monument to the dead forever – and we discover that stone degrades, weeds consume, land shifts. There are manmade monuments that endure – Egyptian pyramids are the obvious example – but there are many more unheard of settlements, road, water and garden systems conceived for immortality which, over time, falter into dust.
The lucky among us have our “go”. Mine lasted far longer that anybody thought it was going to,including me, though I never gave serious thought to what I would do next, except I would… I remember the lovely Linda ringing me to say “Anna, I can’t go on putting up ideas and having them turned down. There is a ceiling to this, it will damage how you are thought of.” God bless Linda. Let it be good and go.
I had to get on with it.
It was shocking. Intellectually, I had thought about it but emotionally – it was out there with melting icebergs and unicorns. Nothing to do with me. But it was.
There was a small matter of what I was going to live on but if you have to, you do. Heaven was kind and two or three things I had never aspired to made me think and kept me going. I was still struggling to find work because I couldn’t yet claim my pension. And I wrote about it for the magazine of a paper that no longer exists – thus making more money than Jobseekers Allowance paid me – which was taxed anyway. I wrote about that too.
And somewhere at the back of my mind, I reached for the memory of my father
going from educational executive to stockman in a wine and spirits company and back to his beloved teaching for the last few years of his working life. I remembered his comment when I missed out on something at school – “Not your turn”. And beyond that to being a child always talking to people. I had always done this but it became my “how to be”. Nobody gave a damn about who I was and neither did I.
When I was recognised, I was handsomely greeted. But most of the people to whom I spoke preferred a grin and a bit of exchange. I met and was disappointed – you can’t make friends like pastry – and I met and was fulfilled. I made acquaintance, people at the bus stop, on the bus, in the street. Putting my voice forward for all those years worked for me, smiling, laughing, teasing exchange.
When I was a child, I wanted to be a star – I had no idea what was involved. Now, I want to be a light because I see and hear the reflected shine. Embracing change is hard but setting your face against it in yourself is stupid. How long ? For as long as I can.
The BBC South Africa editor, a splendid woman with a clear voice, talked about how change would come to South Africa
in this upcoming election because the old dreams of the African National Congress were betrayed and dead. (If you want to know how dead, SA advocated the equivocation of Palestine’s Hamas and Israel’s Prime Minister – a diversionary tactic designed to take attention away from years of bent politics, increasing violence and no more for the poor under their own than at the hands of the white masters of apartheid – no jobs, no light, no loos.) In other words, don’t look at us, look at them. More money was embezzled through government in the two years of the pandemic than in President Zuma’s nine.
There was a thoughtful item on a young white mayor in a rural seat in the Western Cape, who is going for government via one of the minority parties and he is fluent in a couple of African languages.
Language was always a big part of the deal in SA (see Rian Malan, My Traitor’s Heart)
The young paramedic who has just moved in upstairs remarked that she had a love/hate relationship with SA having been there earlier in the year. “It is so beautiful” she said “ but there is so much wrong.” I went too early to see the current decline but I remember the beauty.
And no, I am not writing about South Africa and the Middle East because I won’t look at what is wrong in my own country. But in the hunt for some piece of good news,
I found the story of a man who discovered an abandoned park on his doorstep in Johannesburg. And who, one day, fed up with having to drive to space when space was on his doorstep, he borrowed the key, took his torch, and opened the gate. He didn’t go very far because everybody had told him how dangerous it was. But it wasn’t. It was deserted.
So he went in with clippers, his dog and a bucket for weeds. He asked friends to help, he crowdfunded over ten years having formally adopted the space from the city council who agreed to mow and remove the waste – but he would do everything else. The biggest difficulty was persuading people it was safe. So he made 67 metal owls, painted different colours. Children loved them. “Everyone told me they’d be stolen – but they weren’t, not one.”
He put in red kudu, orange monkeys, yellow pangolin and a pink and yellow giraffe five metres tall
– all in all, over 100 sculptures and welcomed 10,000 visitors a month. And everybody picks up after themselves. Asked by others for advice, he answers (in a variant of Field of Dreams) “if you start clearing, people will join you.” A Soweto born colleague agrees: “There is no messiah coming to save us … no point in just waiting for this perfect South Africa. We have to save ourselves.”
The nearest I came to such a story in Britain was of a retired domestic science teacher who learned by chance that nearby women with young families couldn’t cook because they hadn’t the money to spend on ingredients. She knocked on doors and offered to show them how to knock up a meal from what was in the cupboard, or with minimal extras. One woman’s triumph was making a birthday cake for her daughter . I waited for a follow up. It never came, sidelined by the developing passion for bad news.
In the desperate hunt for a vote raiser the government is talking about National Service
– an updated version, please, designed to recognise gifts that don’t fit, and allocate everybody who can’t be enlisted into community services like weeding and clearing, helping out and picking up. If you don’t see people do it out of conviction, you don’t believe it exists.
The political system in Britain will break before it changes but the way it is employed and spoken of, could change. If Keir Starmer isn’t offering miracles, it’s because there aren’t any. Wouldn’t you rather have a nice surprise than a broken promise ? The change is in style, not content.
Bring it on.
Many thanks to Christina Lamb of The Sunday Times for the story about James Delaney.
Perhaps it isn’t as brandished around as it used to be because the definitions have widened or blurred. The dictionary suggests technical, medical, chemical and geological contexts for starters. I have heard it applied socially to everything from oral sex to cleaning your teeth three times a day as in “But is it normal ?” Which means “Is it OK ?” Because of its medical context, I was careful. A number of things taken out of medical context or in changed medical context have become unsafe not to say inflammatory. Your normal is yours.
I wouldn’t have started this line of thought without the last question allegedly asked of a beauty editor recently “If I don’t have money for Botox, what is the next best thing ?” When did the use of Botox become normal ?
A very attractive woman, right hair, trousers, jacket, makeup, stood on a corner upon which I passed . I grinned in approval and greeting. She gave me that “oh something nasty on my shoe” look and I asked “Have you ever tried smiling ? It is so much cheaper than Botox.” When I told Pam the Painter who endorses my occasional asperity, she asked “ And what did she say ?” I don’t know. I let her get on with it. Silly thing.
I recall explaining to my better than pretty mother 35 years ago that the reason I invested in wider ranging skincare was that pollution in the city was high. My favourite photograph of my mother shows her very attractive lines and the quality of her beautiful skin. One did not cancel the other.
And yes, I know some of this is the luck of the draw not to say genes, emphasised by a piece a week ago about how terrible to be 80 by a woman with a face like a boot. You may be sure that by the time you hit 80 what you are will show on your face.
What is normal apparently is fear of age.
But age comes. And you can’t blame it on a political party. Why treat the body as a piece of real estate, planning the extension to buttocks or the uplift/enlargement of bosom as once we used to save for the kitchen extension or conversion of the shed ? And we are a lot more critical of a bad builder than a bad aestheticist. So the subtext of this is eerily to do with remaking yourself.
I am all for making the best of what you’ve got
with diet and dietary supplements, exercise, rest (in everything from meditation to shuteye), relevant cosmetics, changing colours, getting a better haircut, realising you should never wear jeans again or those achingly badly cut shorts (all sexes). I am not for obsessing about any of this. And although every so often there is an update on the increasing numbers of men involved in plastic surgery, they remain small compared with the number of women
Normal has shifted from “as far as we know” – what we know having exploded, often unreliably, in our lifetime to “everybody does it” which generationally reminds me of the Nazis, my first tentative grasp of a totalitarian state.
Inevitably the obsession with youth backs into the obsession with the end of youth ie age.
I find it the last great freedom. I can list as well as anybody else the shortfall. I know now why people might call me a cow – because the toenails are like hooves (cloven, I am sure). I can’t lift this or shift that. I have to ask for help but I have been generously, charmingly, unexpectedly, uplifted by kindness and consideration. I was shaken to the roots of my being by illness last year – but you have to die of something.
I hope it comes fast and conclusively. I am less afraid of death than dying. It is in the hands of the Master of the Universe and to him I give thanks for every good day, every grin and silly joke, every generosity, the birds and the beasts and a good life. And it shows round the wrinkles and the bags into an ability to live, even in a troubled world. What we used to call normal.
I have never got over the feeling that, if I go out and leave the house untidy, a seraph
will appear, clipboard under wing, to point out my error. Whereupon, chastened, I will go to straighten up and make the bed (which I leave open for a purpose – airing, mite killing), fold the towel, put the washing where it should be, leaving the house in apple pie order. I don’t know where this comes from,
I have never been punished for an untidy room.
Indeed I only remember being struck once which taught me the crossover between rage and fear – something we could do with recalling now. No blows at school (hooray for Simon Mills who usefully highlights the sheer humiliation of having incurred punishment) and God bless state education. An earlier model, certainly, but nevertheless …
My mother – and it really was my mother, division of labour, less a victim than anybody I can think of – kept us clean and decent (her phrase). She cooked well, often conjuring something out of nothing, shopped (till she taught me), washed everything by hand except the bed linen that went to the laundry, ironed – but my mother hated housework.
One of my earliest memories is of her saying crossly to the vacuum “Oh for goodness’ sake, you’re a machine !
Do as you’re told.” Nowadays this would probably result in a rights case and anyway, the machine would have a computer which would register disapproval.
I remember the Slovene engineer who oversaw the end of my beloved family sized washing machine (it didn’t owe anybody a farthing) with the prescient comment “None of them are the same or as good, and the next one will have a computer.” I thought he was joking.
Wal told me that the engineer who oversaw the demise of his name brand had said all washing machines are the same – so when mine gave up, he arranged for me to take delivery of the same model he has which I walked round warily until Buns told me that the eco programme
might be slow but it was thorough and used less electricity than anything else.
I have got better. The extremely expensive to fit boiler has gone squiffy so that in the first few days of warm weather for ages, the heating is on – very low – but on. I was slow to recognise this, you don’t spend much time near radiators when the sun is shining, but after the debacle with EDF, I am very aware of the price of energy. I rang the boiler company – the appliance is still under warranty, an engineer will come on Saturday. But that’s another several days – so – at 5.43 the next morning I switched the boiler off.
You would have done it ages ago. Quite right. But you do not have the profound sense of maladroit that I have in my hands. I am a domestic craven, and part of the problem is that I am sure I have only to touch these things for them to go awry.
For this reason, once I have put the washing in, I go out. The worst that can happen is that the whole thing implodes, there will be water all over the floor and I will have to start again. So be it. I just can’t cope with the pause.
In that pause I lose whatever bottle I had. I knew where I was with the old machine and it never failed. The new machine does what it is permitted to do and I have to get on with that. That machine knows something I don’t know and I want to hide.
What is interesting is that this only applies in this part of my life. I don’t drive, it’s true, though I did learn (thank you Dan) to manage the computer well enough to make annalog possible though after all this time, when something goes wrong at the other end of putting the blog up, I want to crow “See ! Not my fault this time.” And wash my hands in fairy dew.
Update: the boiler is OK, but the Peabody light (see annalog/cries unheard) is still on.
Amy wrote to appreciate something I had written and I replied. In her acknowledgement of that, she mentioned a test for breast cancer,
which was confirmed as cancer in both breasts within 48 hours. She wrote again – short, un selfpitying emails, often referencing books of contemplation.. She wrote me a couple of lines in the morning and I wrote back. Seems like little enough to do for someone facing the beast.
In the journey to her operation I learned a bit about her – one of several children, all adopted, a schizophrenic sister, a disapproving brother, a son she adored and he killed himself which is repudiation, rage and more questions asked than answered.
She had been a nurse, had retrained to become an academic, had a therapist, was an active communicating Baptist. She treasured her friends, was grateful for the kindness
of the medical personnel she had to deal with, took this class, walked when the weather permitted and went to that evening for breast cancer survivors.
Somewhere in there she saw by chance the grandsons her son’s partner has kept from her and she and the boys cleared the air. There was no miracle reconciliation, just something painful eased.
I had to be honest with her early on, that the tone of some of the stuff she sent me was not for me. We worked round and through, so that she could be she and I, I and we could still brush against each other in a mixture of acknowledgement, reassurance and communication as animals do.
And she came up against people unmanned by what she was facing, whether the cancer, or its form, or the operation – some of whom gave up and backed off, those who got stuck in a kind of mourning that was much more about them than her, and those who came through.
She wrote some time later that she couldn’t depend on these people, she didn’t want to – she was enquiring for a convalescent bed. The young woman who ran that part of the service had been a pupil, Amy had forgotten that, and she came for tea. Wrote Amy “She told me what a tough time she had had recently, I responded, we wept and we had tea. She will do everything she can for me.” And I wrote “Well done for facing the beast and tying a ribbon round its neck.”
She emailed after the operation, I was so touched. And she has her bed allocated. And I thought about the beast.
The thread of loneliness is what links a lot of my experiences with people, because I have long known loneliness in myself. Just as I have long known that shyness won’t stop you functioning, even functioning well, it’s just always to be negotiated. And the beast is not just the cancer, it’s about the fact that the people you’ve felt closest to can’t get past the convention of what they say, to reach out or in or past the monster, so that you know the washing will be done or the groceries dropped off, or that they are outgunned by the enormity but still care and if you would just give them a steer … As a cruelly ill friend long ago remarked “I seem to spend a lot of time making other people feel better about my illness.” The beast is the difference between the courage to try to communicate (and implicitly you may fail) and the inability to find that courage.
I remember a Japanese film about a man with what he called The Crab, the beast of his cancer. We all have beasts, the beast of perfection so that you don’t want the saucer with a chip or the friend with a gimp foot. Yes, we could have a whole discussion about the nature of friendship –
but people have different beasts.
What Amy couldn’t know is that I was feeling old and tired, scared of being boring and disappointed that several people I thought of relevant, didn’t find me so any more. I couldn’t fight Amy’s beast for her and she didn’t know about mine. Looking at her beast let me go shopping for a ribbon for mine.
with several Peabody buildings abutting the back garden.. George Peabody was an American philanthropist who invested in modest homes for what we used to call the working class. Over the 25 years I have lived here, the second floor hall light has been left on for weeks at a time. I have counted my blessings ie it isn’t noise but from time to time, as it shines right up the length of my small garden, I gnash my teeth. I have asked the people who live there. Blank. And I have heard other stories about Peabody deaf ears. So I wrote to the CEO on 26 March, offended by the light, the lack of consideration and the conspicuous waste of energy.
On 15 April I received a letter from the so named Executive Enquiries Lead/Customer Experience Team, saying that a repair order was raised 11 April and hoping that by the time I received the letter, the problem would be resolved. Welcome to Planet Peabody. Don’t hold your breath.
Rosie (not her name) has a long, intricate and serious medical history and she was injured 18 months ago in a car crash.
She was briefly and effectively hospitalised, and it was agreed that the injuries she sustained made her existing problems worse. She should claim damages. Since then she has seen the medical specialists designated by the insurance company to assess various aspects of her claim up to and including clinical psychologists. The suggested techniques for treatment included exercises based round rapid eye movement (from which she was ruled out because of advancing neurological illness and existing double vision) and cognitive behavioural therapy
– which is everywhere much praised.
For whatever reasons she is disposed against CBT. She is not against psychotherapy having previously made some effort to find treatment for herself (privately). But she is now being told that she must have 16 sessions of CBT with the designated practitioner or she disqualifies herself from her claim.
So is she to lie and welcome a treatment she is not sure about ? Is she to try it in good faith. saying she is unsure about it and see what happens ? Where is personal choice in all this, not to mention delayed treatment of psychological impairment attributed to the crash ? The appointed solicitors have already changed her representative once without reference or explanation and do not reply to letters, email or phone messages. To whom does she turn ?
While Wal and Howard (not their names) who live in a semi detached property which houses the accrued investments of a lifetime (including jewellery, antiques and furs) for which they pay heavily to have made secure, suddenly couldn’t activate the alarm Wal sets faithfully every night (apart from the timed lights and the locked doors).
Wal rang the well-known US company. Six hours later, the last of several unimpressive operatives opined that he could do nothing, he was working from home. He thought it might be the batteries ? The company is paid £700 a month and is supposed to check/change the batteries every six months. Wal and Howard between them changed the batteries and Wal was so distressed, he was still shaking when he rang. “Nobody cares” he said. “Nobody. We are paying for a service that doesn’t exist. In the past, your last engineer would enter the date that the batteries next had to be checked. Not now. And nobody cares.” I told him about Rosie. “Blackmail” he snorted.
All I know is that, when you get in a jam,
you are very lucky if you can find somebody who will do anything. And nobody talks about why. Part of the problem has to be sheer numbers – the population is staggering and goes on growing, you wonder if the island will sink ? Companies are vast and belief in technology is crippling. (my final account from edf is variously six pence (really), £13.50 or so, and £39 plus: they may trust their machinery, I don’t.) In the past money bought you a kind of immunity. Not any more. The helping agencies are swamped, I have chosen three stories – there are others, and you really don’t know who to turn to hence the title: cries unheard.
Anna's 40 year long award-winning journalistic career as an adviser (nowadays we say "agony aunt - she loves the job, hates the title) has spanned magazines, radio, television and newspapers; including a 14 year run at Capital Radio with her groundbreaking show 'Anna and the Doc', and 7 years at Talk Radio hosting 'Live and Direct' and her work was rewarded with a Gold Sony award and induction into the Radio Hall of Fame....Read More
Annalog 