Category Archives: Uncategorized

The ship was as big as a block of flats,

sailing through the Mediterranean while the passengers laughed and ate and drank and made merry.  At night the air was soft and the moon lit the sea, beating down on the wake she ploughed through the waves.  Never innocent that track, not with the waste of 1800 paying guests and the considerable crew to dispose of.  You can’t help but think of waste when we live in a consumer society which is always urging upon us something new, something we must have, something we just can’t live without.  And if you discard the old thing for the newer thing, the old thing has to go somewhere.

In the recent past, most people took a newspaper and when we threw things away, we wrapped it up tightly for rubbish collection

Friends of the Earth / uses for old newspapers

by what we called dustbin men. That’s a whole other discussion, right there.   Plastic was not everywhere as it is now.   

But interestingly when you look up wastage, it was a concept first applied to people.  And at the hands of some, it still is.  So there is a new television series on Peter Sutcliffe, a serial killer whose horror casts a long shadow because many of his early victims were what we now call sex workers but he subsequently killed other women too.

The new series claims to speak up for the children and families of those impacted

rather than the horrible man himself (thankfully dead) but also to examine what the police failed to pick up on, and why, largely because of their prejudice in favour of “decent” women.    So this is wastage, those who were shoved aside, forgotten in the media hue and cry over a man who evaded capture for a long time because he was himself so unremarkable.

Not for me.  It’s done, done well, done badly, done.    Let those people alone.

Also to look forward to is an acted series about Jimmy Savile which will undoubtedly involve what is thought as well as known, the failure to understand that it is rarely nice people who make a success of life in those terms (media attention, mass approbation, frequently foul mouthed and sexually unusual as perks of the trade, but acknowledged by the great and the good).  Savile made a lot of people uncomfortable

I wanted to wash my hands

and too many of them pushed away that feeling, suborned their misgivings to other people’s praise of him and the few that tried to bear a different kind of witness weren’t thanked. 

It was a gross management failure by the BBC who employed him, in the name of money.  And there are many people who blinded by the making of money – blinded, deafened and made stupid.

And the news on Saturday 16 September 2023 was dominated by the revelations to follow in Sunday’s press that Russell Brand, a sometime comedian whose voice I always thought raised by the tightness of his pants,

has been abusive to several women who now wish to make a case against him.   And the television company and the production company involved didn’t speak up, speak for or protect their younger staff.  Well, there’s a surprise.  Timed just as the Big Brother House comes back round for another bite of the profit apple.

Old journalistic hands would say there is always a story in sex, death, religion and the Royal Family.  To that, you can currently add wastage.  Let’s talk about the victims.  Who was left out, who was failed, which police acted narrow mindedly and short sightedly  – the police don’t have a moratorium on those qualities.  They are everywhere.   And so is personal taste.

Television’s commissioning editors have less money and less opportunity  than they have ever had so they commission on the basis of what they hope people will want to watch.    A crystal ball helps.  And bearing in mind terrestrial television is dying.   So maybe this is what sufficient numbers of the public like.  Never mind the critics, we are talking about viewing figures that hold up.   Maybe it takes their minds off their own troubles, the terrorism of the energy companies, not being able to make the money go round, not being able to allay the fears of their children whether from iffy school roofs to another pandemic, the strain of it all.   I hope so. Not for me.  

An unknown writer sent me a photograph of himself. 

I react badly to the whole machinery of sending a picture to a person.  I always did.  When we were encouraged to join a penfriends scheme as schoolchildren, I wondered what my photograph had to do with it ? I’ll never know.  After all, you can look at a picture and think “Oh, no …” Well, I can.  Because though I love writing and I love film – words and pictures, still or moving – writing for film is quite different from writing to read.  The speech around producing a photograph may impact it. ( Let’s leave drawings and painting out of this.)  Shot script is percolated through that magical, strange and various thing called a camera.  And some of us are very influenced by sound – the taken for granted adjunct of the camera. And words can make a picture. 

He quoted that old chestnut – a picture is worth a thousand words. 

  According to Google, widely attributed but not claimed.  One of those thoughts open to infinite interpretation, I’d say “a good picture is worth a thousand words” but then it’s my “good” versus yours. 

What is the image for?  who takes it ?  in what context ?  for what reason ?   Moving images are  different again from still ones.   Words you read are one thing, spoken they can be quite different.  I still read aloud,

especially poetry, because an image moves me to, because I need to understand how the words fall. Several times I have heard people say how they were disappointed with how a favourite book was rendered into audio – “I didn’t like his voice” or “it just sounded wrong.”

The temporary dispenser in the chemist (I only saw him twice) had a particular intonation to his excellent English.  Collecting a prescription, I asked “May I know where you’re from ?”  He answered “Afghanistan”, adding with patient sadness “The land of blood and tears.”  Six words that said a lot.  No picture needed.

Which takes me to how we feel  – whether you approach that as an individual thing or as a matter of consensus.  Supposedly “everybody” loves babies.  Based on the evidence of several recent stories of cruelty to children, that just isn’t true.  You do and I may  – but some other horror, man or woman, sees a child as the crucible of frustration, crying, needing 

– and lashes out, again and again, reinforcing the habit of every kind of abuse.  Judging by the RSPCA’s current appeals, not “everybody” loves animals – or is even disinterested enough to leave them alone.  They starve, beat, humiliate and harm them.  And when times constrict us, some of us lash out – physically or emotionally or both –  and cruelties to the next accessible in the pecking order increase. 

Reading about this or hearing account of it in news coverage is hard enough.  Pictures are mostly  unavailable or thought to be counterproductive.  You don’t sympathise and reach for your change: you recoil, repelled and frightened.

When annalog began, I was asked why I wasn’t on Facebook, “you have so many friends.”  The technology has changed not to say eroded how we meet people . 

A friend in her forties said yesterday “My sister won’t think about social media but that’s how we meet people nowadays.”    Not me.

Mine is the old way, face to face.   I’ve made one or two wonderful friends and had encounters of joy – you know I have, because I often write about them.   I can do what I can do, I have strengths and  weaknesses.    I prefer to see for myself, I don’t want images which have already incorporated a vocabulary of poses , thus rendering the image less representative of the person pictured and more to do with everybody else.  Mass injections may be very useful, mass perceptions less so.

Yesterday I stood behind in a bus queue a tall slender girl wearing the most becoming shorts I have seen, all in the proportions.  She was from Fiji.  I was thrilled and said that I remembered Fijian warriors dancing to honour of the young Queen Elizabeth II.   “I was not even born” she said, wide eyed.  Time doesn’t change everything.  

*the refrain of the Shoop Shoop song is “… it’s in his kiss.”            

This title is the nearest I shall ever get to the schoolgirl

adventures of Angela Brazil and Monica, the jolly hockey sticks schoolgirl and invention of Beryl Reid who planted the seeds of my interest in radio. Monica’s breathless faux-naïve gush and the Birmingham bravura of Marlene from the Midlands sill live, breathe and have being in unparalleled memory.  

That there was always an older woman is a great tribute to my mother.  I never saw them as threat, only as somebody from whom I could learn.  And by older, I only mean older than me – not necessarily of a great age. When you are 20, 40 seems antique. 

  There were men among them too, who were useful often just by being disposed to see me as a person not a pronoun.

When I was still a young secretary, I met a film producer’s assistant who made me believe that with work and intelligence, I could parlay what I had into something better.    When I met Ellie the office manager, I learned the power of being kind.  She did it as naturally as breathing.

I remember Helene Kantor who captained the office of the insurance company where I worked in NYC, where I heard that John Kennedy had been shot.  Small, great smelling (never knew the perfume), tough, fair, suits to die for. 

And much later this side of the pond the head of David Frost’s production company, same type, English version – her inspiration importantly more accessible ie you didn’t have to go anywhere else to be better. 

And Sauveur Guerrier from Haiti, who turned displacement into dignity and pushed me to be interested in French, especially the pronunciation – which led in turn to some sensibility about other languages.

Looking down the years, I see men and women who gave me something to aim for, a way to do it, good advice, a tone which inferred their time was not wasted on me.  I thought about all this as I came to the morning, not a thought in my head but how to begin copy people want to read.   I flicked through the now sizeable backlog of annalog and found a correspondent who had referred to me in a particular context as wise. And I thought how much wisdom,

juniper signifies wisdom

the power of overview and advice means to those of beginning life’s journey. 

“You don’t get on by being original.  You don’t get on by being bright.  You don’t get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.”   So wrote Hilary Mantel in Wolf Hall.  Though it is only part of the story.  Heaven help me, I did it the other way round – I was original, I was bright, I was strong but I don’t think you could ever call me subtle.  Any subtlety I ever had was learnt from another godmother, who managed me for years and enhanced my life.

This morning too, I looked up the origins of the word mentor,

another correspondent triggered that.  In Greek stories, he is a friend of Odysseus, who brings up the latter’s son Telemachus while Odysseus is away for years (double message: you need to be present in some form to be useful for a child) and over time the word has become associated with experience, wisdom and advice.   I aspire to these words.  They get such short shrift in modern life, as if anything important could be amassed in short order.  And it can’t.  (There is the Eureka moment, of course there is, but you don’t get those by the half dozen in Sainsburys). And the model of learning over time takes into account that the way you see things changes over time.  You aren’t at 40 what you were at 20 and if you are, I’m sorry for you. It is essentially important to go on learning, especially about yourself.  Even if you don’t like some of what you learn.

And then there are those who just do you one small unquantifiable kindness after another.  Like Sarah who is clearing her terrace, prior to longed for work, so I have inherited two happy plants she is glad to be rid of.    Nothing nicer than a good egg.

We say “there is always somebody worse off”

and it’s a combination of wake up call and being grateful for small mercies.  It doesn’t really take away from the fact that when you are unhappy, you are unhappy.   A small injury can give you insight into what somebody with greater and more permanent impairment has to live with.   Or pain. 

Now there’s a four letter word.  Or fear, another.

Generally, things I worry about and dread have been easier to live through than to think about. Anticipation makes things worse.  And it may have been the same for Zena, a tall slender art teacher living next door who suddenly, in a bus journey, confided that she had to go to a teaching hospital the next day to have examined and treated a lump in her lovely neck.  She is a young thing, of course I felt for her and I am happy to tell you she has an all clear.  

Thank goodness.

The abreaction to the drug package prescribed when I had a recent small stroke was protracted, uncomfortable, and anti social.  My bottom nearly fell off.  I didn’t want anybody near me. I was embarrassed and afraid.   But, in a pause in between bouts (the only occasion I can think of when going through it did not alleviate the anxiety of what might happen) I went out to get the newspaper and found Liz (whom I have known slightly since childhood) sitting on the doorstep in a patch of sunshine, without her trademark rollup, weeping.

I opened my arms into which she fell, allowed herself that awkward  “Oh good heavens, look at me – I shouldn’t be doing this” hug and disengaged.  And I asked very gently what was the matter.   Her mother was having an eye removed that day in connection with cancer.  So you say the nice kind things, make the right noises. Don’t go in where angels fear to tread.    Poor woman, poor girl.  I have waited, but I will put a card through the door.

Neither of these experiences made me feel better but they did put my affliction into a more realistic proportion.  Better still, drugs amended and reduced from six to two.  If you had seen me hoovering up the first protein

to stay on board in three weeks (other than two widely spaced scrambled eggs), you would have laughed aloud – I did !   

How I missed my fruit and vegetables !  How I missed energy !  How surprised I was when various  friends encouraged me to eat as I liked, anything my body wanted, get the calories back in and drink water – which for the duration of the problem, passed through and never said good morning .. that truly alarmed me.   And at last I could sleep a bit, without waking every hour or so in response to insistent peristaltic action.   Nothing like having your body out of action for developing a whole new respect for when it begins to mend.

I thought of starving and how hellish that is, physically and psychologically.  I thought of war when the plumbing is bombed out and the doctor elsewhere.   I saw a sun bear

and a snow leopard, both with young, on tv.  I have never seen cubs of either before  – one at Chester Zoo and the other at the Bronx Zoo in New York.  

Stunningly lovely – uplifting.  Encouraging in spite of the erratic weather and the endlessly recycled bad news. 

And then Diana emailed and said she was going away unexpectedly for the weekend – could she bring me some stuff from the allotment and her vegetable box, she didn’t want to waste it.   And I said yes please so I became the happy recipient of cold chicken, baby runner beans, mushrooms, a bit of this and a bit of that and fresh herbs from which I fashioned three meals.  And I wish you’d seen the basket, put together to appeal.   Diana is difficult to thank, she goes what my father used to call “all unnecessary”, but I have a card and a small gift.  God, was I grateful.   Food as medicine.   Kind friends and neighbours – next door, six doors down, ten doors down – the world on the doorstep.

This is quite different from annalog /Jean Hagen Lives ! and not a phrase Wal admits to. 

Not much Wal can’t bear including a recent argument with a concealed tree root which took him A&E where a woman in a white coat, presumably a doctor, kept asking him what drugs he had taken and the nice enough black nurse asked him if he believed in Jesus or God and invoked Sodom and Gomorrah.  Out, Jewish and exotic, Wal is proud of his secular antecedents.  Being what Dame Edna in that old interview with Michael Parkinson (sleep sweet, love) called a homeopath is his business.  He bore the woman in the white coat till she went off duty, the nurse by refusing to be drawn and when Howard came to rescue him, he was fascinated by a group of 7 doctors, all at computers, but not examining patients for hours. And he was then asked to wait to be seen by a consultant – and declined.

Sometimes, someone makes you think again about a phrase.   I have borne a number of things I thought I couldn’t, including pain and fear, largely because I couldn’t see round, I could only see through. Couldn’t always see through either –  I clung to  “This too shall pass.”   .      

But there are one or two things which madden me.

There is the local contingent of a wider tribe I can’t bear.  They are all female, mostly of medium height, wearing variants of leggings and all with the same hairdo – pulled back off the forehead into strands or falls or a sort of bush.   Without exception they carry a lot of extra weight, mostly where you can’t miss it, and they walk little snappy fluffy dogs.  If one of them should sit down in error on the fluffy, that animal would be impacted if not defunct.   And the sisterhood all carry poo bags which, filled, they leave in the street.

I am by nature a picker upper, a tidier, one who asks “Do we need this ?”    I have been teased about it, but so be it, I am.  And I can’t bear picking up and disposing of the excreta of other people’s animals.  It seems like the ultimate in the insulting raised finger, nastier than sandwich and sweet wrappers, discarded cigarette packs or vape bottles, tissues, paper bags and all the rest. 

Long ago somebody referred to his mother in law as “minlaw”.  Let me introduce you to binlore.  I live in the mostly private rental and owned end of a long road and I have referred before to my block (shades of NYC) where everybody has the money to rent or pay mortgage, but a significant number don’t have the brains God gave a turnip when it comes to bins.  

They don’t use bin liners which have been rebranded as big bags, presumably because you can sell more. They don’t use the free bags for recycling the council provide.   They don’t stand their bins up, they don’t drain them of rain water, they don’t rinse them out and they leave them uncovered with rubbish inside to rot and stink.  

I have written before about local waste disposal services and always favourably.   And I am so irritated by the lack of thought – not more than 30 seconds max at a time – that would make this if not Bin Beautiful, at least Bin Bearable.

Yes, I worry about the fires in Canada, about the decline in sea ice in Antartica.   I bet there have been fires in Siberia too – there were last year.   We’ve had punishing heat in continental Europe and fire there too.  Starvation in the Horn of Africa, decline at every level.  I know it’s too much to think about, I know it’s frightening, destabilising and comes back to tug at your imagination as does the image of a nurse killing children, mass graves in Ukraine and every other bit of bad news which is  horribly effective even when badly put together and repeated with little variation for hours at a time (what used to be called propaganda).

But I can’t bear these two things because they are something you CAN do something about.   No Governmental inquiry or international summit required.  The cost in time or money is minimal. And that all these people can’t think of dog shit disposal and lids on drained bins is the most unbearable thing of all.   

I went to my first wedding

when I was about five.   I remember my dress because it was a beautiful green and had pockets. I always loved pockets. A friend of my mother’s was getting married, it was not a formal affair but I remember hats and a bit of late forties/early fifties glamour – my father looking splendid in a suit, my mother with her hair up and a borrowed fur cape. 

The bride Mary and her sister Cicely had Pekinese dogs – Cicely’s was small and snappy but Mary had Billy, the biggest of the breed (Sun, Emperor and Sleeve) and he walked with feline dignity, seeming to float on endless waves of soft black, grey and honey coloured fur.  He was gentle and he was beautiful.

After the ceremony, lunch was in a country pub,

there were trees and flowers in the garden and I wasn’t a bridesmaid, I was just a little girl, so I could wander about and look at things safely, while the grownups laughed and talked.  It was a very happy occasion – and then – there was confetti.

It was white and gold and silver, bells and heart shapes, brides and grooms, horse shoes and silver slippers, boots and tiny white roses.  And you tossed it up in the air, where the sun caught the metallic bits. I kept two pieces in my treasure box for years. We did not think of biodegradable then, but it would have been hard to dispose of because of the gilding.  So it was swept aside and allowed to disperse over time, thank you wind, thank you rain.     

And this is where it came from. Food was not always easy to come by and methods for the preservation of food developed over time. So to throw grain or rice

or small dried fruits was a generous gesture which probably existed from a very long time ago, when weddings were much more of a business arrangement, and the community was more likely to be celebrating a good harvest, auspicious planets or evading local war.

Over time two ideas fused, to offer your best to the gods and to offer your best to the young that they might be fortunate – and the Italians (of course) came up with comfits – small almond cakes – and the words travelled as language does, went through some hoops – and confetti became what we understand it to be now.

Some of the meetings I have are as brief and windborn as confetti. And they shine.  Others might be less aware than I but I still hang on to the powers of observation which would make me the journalist I aspire to be.  And to notice was revenge for short sight and the specs I have worn since I was eight.

I’ve been pretty unwell with the aftercare package of medicines (see annalog/at a stroke) and so going out is treasured, even in the grot of the big city.

And I am so grateful that I am a successfully extroverted introvert, that occasional rebuffs are just that (nobody’s right all the time), that I get the best of people. I sat next to a veiled woman

on the bus, I’d judge by her hands and her body probably in her fifties.  And you know how somebody can move their clothes aside and it makes you feel you were quite wrong to sit there?  She did the opposite.  She moved her skirts and I said “Thank you” as I sat down.  She moved herself over and said something which sounded like “ You don’t have to sit on the edge, look – there’s room.” So I moved a fraction and putting my hand on her arm, said” You’re just like my mother.  You’re organising me  …” and she grinned – I saw the veil move – with real pleasure and said something I couldn’t catch.  You could feel the warmth.  When we got off the bus, she did everything except stroke me.

And then Charmian (not her real name) whom I have met twice in Waitrose and had made a point of thanking because of the constancy of the store through pandemic and strikes and all, walked up and hugged me.   Am I soppy?  Sure.  But those tiny things shine, like my remembered confetti, glittering bits.      

 This is notice of the annalog awayday because, the nicest thing that can happen is, if you can’t go away yourself, somebody else you know gets to go and sail round the Greek Islands ,

just as the Greek Government starts encouraging us back safely.

It’s only for a week, annalog will resume the week of August 14, as usual, and I hope you’ll be as glad to see me as I am to see you.

P.S. Don’t forget the sunblock

I don’t cover the news

because everybody else does.  And I have become very aware of that over the last few weeks of annalog.  I search for the positive, I won’t pretend about it but I like to offer it wherever I can.  What can I add to the debate on Trump and Joe Biden ?   Putin ?   Netanyahu ?  Do I have anything new to say about Ukraine, or Congo, or whatever has gone wrong inside the NHS, various police forces , the rail unions or any of the other daily mushrooming industrial disputes ?   (NB: anything missed off this list is because of its length, not lack of interest)

Now I start out to watch

and whenever I do, I see a similarly shaped programme which involves  hitting me round the head with the headline story  –  15 or 20 minutes,  the talking heads or so called experts, reporters on site, more studio commentary ….  And then bad news. Maltreatment of  women in maternity care, a child run down, a boy stabbed, a man knocked of his motorbike, this wrong in schools, that wrong in prisons.  

There is a great deal wrong in the country,

whether your country is particular or what we used to call the United Kingdom.   Some of this is newly discovered but most of it has taken years to get to the mess it’s in and there is no sense of things being addressed or resolved.    So I am not at all surprised that anxiety and depression balloon, that the figures for child abuse are up and so on and on – I’ll spare you the list.  It isn’t cheerful.

What is going on affects us all or if it doesn’t affect us momentarily, we tend to thank heaven and talk about something else.  I know people and I am sure you do too who have given up on the news.  Phil  doesn’t buy newspapers, dislikes them for all sorts of reasons and says they just contribute to the recycling problems.   Pam the Painter uses a news app but often mentions something it doesn’t include or includes in such abbreviation that she can’t quite grasp what is going on.  Wal says he’s not interested but he is interested in what interests him, via tv or radio. He’ll pick up on this point or that and his response varies in one important way. He will say “I don’t know.”  He will even add “and it is of no interest to me” though if you push him, you often get a thoughtful comment.

There are papers I dislike, just as there are books and television productions which are not my taste.  It is about tone.  There are always people who have wonderful careers, whether in news or comedy  and I wonder why?   Careers seem to be built on what everybody else can admire or get on with.   We says “everybody’s different”   but the numbers of people who don’t differ make up enormous manipulable blocks, whether listening to the unfortunately named Daily Global or taking broad spectrum antibiotics.   This is the age of mass

by Brian Jungen

and there is nothing religious about it.

We seem to have stopped talking about numbers.   We have given up.  People go on having three to five children without apparent consideration of what is open to them in the future.   From warming to boiling in global terms, what future ?

Behind the endlessly repeated phrases (and that repetition makes for turn off in every sense) there is  real fear and the crossover from fear into rage is venerable and well documented..  The tunnel we’re in is long and dark with few lights to break the gloom.    

Party politics was always a fight and there were always those who believed one thing and those who believed another.  Now increasingly you hear disillusion –“ they’re all as bad as each other” – which is the beginning of disaffection which leads to not voting which means the country is run by a smaller number – those who did vote – and that opens the door to extremism and the end of our cherished if mocked balance.

We’re in a tunnel.  Our only hope is that eventually we emerge from it, into the air.

I met Christopher (not his real name) at a bus stop because he had new leaf green suede moccasins

on which I remarked.  And we never looked back.  He is more or less my age, a hairdresser with a painful back and lives alone.  We became phone friends.  He has a network of contacts and callers, is one of the few people I know to regularly refer to a cousin and we exchange news and views and laugh as we can.  

He suddenly asked me about a restaurant and when I said I didn’t know it, he said “I was thinking of taking you and Ivor (real name, his longtime friend and an antique dealer) there for lunch.”  Why ?  “Because I missed his birthday, I missed yours so let’s have it now.”   My acquaintance with Ivor was limited to about 15 minutes, but Christopher swept that aside.  “If you like the menu, it will be fine.”

The restaurant was everything I would have chosen,

lovely food, splendid staff courteous without being crawly, a plain place with charm.  And we sat and nattered and ate and told stories – they are both benign and insatiable gossips – and drank a modest amount of what C calls “pink wine”.   Time off from the world.   Even the coffee was good.

We came out into the sunshine, for once coherent for a few hours, said goodbye to Ivor and Christopher and I went for the bus to take us back.    So far, pretty darned good.   The bus was full, the weather slipped a gear into humidity and several stops later, I got up, kissed Christopher goodbye and got out in order to breathe.

Briefly at peace with myself and the world

(not a figure of speech) I came on a family – mother and father, father pushing an ordinary buggy, mother in the flowing clothes of Asia, a smartly dressed five or six year old boy and a tiny girl, probably no more than two, dressed in singing red soft cotton, like poppies crossed with roses. 

She stopped and looked at me.  Both children had that fine clean black hair that looks like the feathers of a baby bird.  Big Brother stepped forward to reassure his sister who turned and examined me with enormous dark eyes – and held up and out her hand.   So murmuring “Hello, beauty” I took it and we walked, all of us without a word though some connecting smiles down a London thoroughfare of which I have never been less aware.  It just faded into backdrop.

At the corner of a block, I thought she would have had enough so withdrew my hand but was stopped by a little noise, onomatopoeic of disapproval, like a young rhinoceros. 

  (I know about this from a friend and also from seeing Attenborough with one in a reserve, I love rhino.)  Her brother stepped back, she took my hand again.   We walked some more .  Then she was willing to release me. Her brother came to stand by her, I thanked her mother who beamed at me, I told her brother he was a splendid big brother and went to the father, put my hand on his arm and said” Thank you.   This was truly a blessing.”

Last week I ventured into a book my father loved, having been afraid to look at it for years in case I didn’t like it, didn’t understand it and so on.  It all seemed very congruent, the encounter and the book (Kim by Rudyard Kipling), which teaches among many other things that the journey through life is inevitable.  It goes on even when you are not thinking about it.   And set in an India of antiquity, numberless creeds and races, over a hundred years ago, when pace was different anyway, what the Buddhist lama Kim meets calls The Way,  is less for seeking than pursuing.  You don’t find it, it finds you.  

Current difficulties have all sorts of different names but the impact of where we are up in the world – nationally and globally – affects many of us from different angles at the same time which is wearing, tiring, destructive of peace and contemplation with which the tired old spirit is restored.  The gifts of how this time was spent were intangible and invaluable, probably short in time but lingering in memory.

This sentiment came to mind as I was obsessing about a pair of boots I don’t need.  I said it aloud, after I had finished laughing at myself and how the boots were going to fix my entire winter wardrobe (all half dozen pieces of it) and accentuate my mature glamour (ha). 

I looked up the line and discovered it was a song by the great Chet Baker

– I can’t tell you a note of the music – but I knew the line wasn’t mine.  So I borrowed it.

The mind is a wonderful thing.   It’s worth saying that very loudly as the one sided debate (one sided because we are hooked on progress as a positive) about Artificial Intelligence grows ever louder and  AI looks ever more  like mass identity theft. 

Yes, there will be positive applications though even the people who pioneered it want laws and containment. That old adage about stable doors and bolting horses comes to mind.   Saddest words in the English language are “too late.”

The idea of mind can’t be measured or defined or if so, in several parallel ways – remember, parallel means running alongside, never meeting.  You can have a political mind alongside an artistic mind ( see the obituary of Milos Kundera), a broken mind (good luck Huw Edwards and his straight backed and face it wife) alongside a mind that was “always good at the job.”.  You can have a mind for mischief (don’t confuse that with benignancy) like Elon Musk or a mind for business like Jeff Bezos.  You can have a visionary mind like Michael Bukht who started me in radio or a mind for manipulation (too long a list). 

Or you can just be soppy like me and decide that this, that or the other thing would make all the difference.

I do not fall in love too easily with people.  Not for me the glance across the crowded room – probably hampered by short sight.   I do not look to be transfigured by somebody else.  The door to me is open but that doesn’t mean I may not close it.  I thought about that the other day when I saw a woman I have avoided since her last full frontal hectoring at me made me roar and break out in hives.  I thought when I saw her recently that I was ready to say just that politely if she asked – don’t like being spoken to as if I were a difficult child, I am 79, I can chose and I chose not.  Too old and too ugly, smile and walk away. 

I could hear my mother cheering from the back rows of angels fifth class.

I fall in love with colour.  Several times in my life I have bought entirely the wrong thing because it was the right colour.  Now I walk away muttering “Leave it alone, it’s just that colour …”    

I am in love with books – a book drunk – but if you have ever read annalog, you’ll know that.   But I am not in love with all books by any means.  I have a friend who reads by just letting the words move in front of her eyes.  Not me.  My school taught reading with understanding.  Twice in the recent past I bought stuff which was too intellectually remote – one a book on Ukraine which I really wanted to read. But the pages passed before my eyes, nothing engaged me, I couldn’t get in. 

So I gave up.  

Falling in love suggest the cloak of permanence over the reality of change.   Like being crazy about a certain kind of food – and then deciding one day you have had enough of it.   Or a habit wears itself out or you decide that you will change it and – you know what? – the sky does not fall on your head.  The perfume you always swore by is suddenly old and declasse.

Falling in love as per the title for me is always about something I can buy to make myself more  whatever it is I think I am not,  ie antique earrings, boots – it was the colour (ash khaki) – a miracle cream … but I have learned that if I do not succumb, somebody else will, I will be rescued from my fixation and  life goes on.