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The owner of the sixth gardening concern  (see annalog/decline and endeavour) arrived in response my telephone call for an appointment he made 45 minutes late,

talked a lot and seemed to think he was doing me a favour.  I forbore to tell him money is not paid for favours.

Old friends had the rerun of a crisis they could both do without but neither seems able to avoid.  I find bright people who can’t focus their intelligence on their own difficulties and how these impact on their nearest and dearest disturbing.  It’s as if the light only travels one way.

For the first time in many years, I am reading books less at a time.  Nothing can make me read slowly, I zap through things, but I know that if I am to understand what I am reading, I must read less and allow for percolation.  It’s been oddly pleasurable, like making a quarter of sweets last longer

when you were a kid.

One of the few things my son asked of me was that I lock the front door and it was locked at 9.20 last night when somebody banged on it (I have no bell).  “Who is it ?” I asked and the voice said “Me.”  Fortunately I recognised “me”, she lives round the corner and owns the first female Rhodesian Ridgeback

I ever met, a dog of truly magnificent indifference to all except her own affairs. 

I opened the door and my neighbour said” I had to come and tell you – my sister has dropped the action, I’ve got the house.”   And flung her arms round me.  I embraced her, remarking as I did, that it is the first time in two years I have seen colour in her face.  And we continued enthusing, jumping up and down on the step – she wouldn’t come in – and suddenly she said “What is your name ?”  And I told her and asked hers (again) because it really isn’t about that. 

a rose by any other name would smell as sweet

It’s about somebody being well disposed to you – just someone  you see at the bus stop, or out with dog, or wave to from the car. 

When her father died – I don’t know all the back story –  his will left her very nearly everything, principal among which was a house with a garden, a little further out.  Her sister took action to fight the will.  Death and money are often closely related.  

Encouraged by her sensible and supportive solicitor, she commenced to clean up the house.  Until she showed me the pictures on her phone last night, I had no idea what this involved.  Her father was a hoarder. 

There have been various ups and downs and she has continued working on the bathroom and the kitchen.  I have seen her looking really dragged down by it all, as you would be.  She has kept going, her home, her job, her husband and family, the daughter still at home and studying.

“You’re going to move in ?”   She nodded.  “Don’t go without giving me an address “ I said “even if I only send you a Christmas card.”

“I’m not going anywhere without telling you” she said. “That’s why I asked your name.  People come into your life for a reason, you’ve got the same name as my dad’s mum, you looked out for me.  That’s why I had to come and tell you, I knew you’d understand.”  And we embraced each other again.   “I’ve got to go home” she said “I’ve got dinner to make.  I’ll see you, I’m not going anywhere yet.”   Do you know, she even smelt different ?  She smelt of hope.

So Carly came to tell me about her dad’s house and Mrs. Robin returned to the nest in the jug hanging on the garden wall.  Yes, it’s very small stuff  but it lifts the heart and make you smile and there’s nothing better.    There’s an old song that says “little things mean a lot.”

Hard times are coming if not already here but not for gardening concerns.  I feel like a wallflower at a prom, having just been let down by the fifth gardening outfit, mostly because they have not been taught in work or life how to decline gracefully. 

They can’t say “No.” 

I am a big girl.  I can stand rejection.  All they have to do is assess the viburnum, honeysuckle and winter broom (all in need of pruning), and the removal of the laurel and say “Sorry, too small for us.”  And I’d smile and try again elsewhere.  Instead of which they don’t return the call.  They don’t acknowledge those neat little email forms, telephone calls you can forget – they do.   In two cases, they come, look, estimate and go away promising contact.  Only never to be heard of more.   And dammit, these are the things I can’t do and as I remarked crisply to a friend, recognising limitation and asking for help

is one of the few signs I have of increasing maturity.  

And you don’t want to be labelled as a bothersome old thing,  so you wait.  And in waiting, your turn in the queue is not so much lost as denied. 

“Did I say I’d be in touch with you ?”   emailed Smartypants when I wrote to respectfully remind him of my small existence.  “Sorry spring is here, summer just round the corner and we’re fully booked.”  “So glad you have work for the summer” I wrote in reply.” Just hope you treat the rest of your clients with rather more courtesy” and spat bullets.

The garden is roughly 7 x 30 feet.  And staring out of the kitchen window towards the wall, there was much fluttering, eventually revealed as a pair of great tits who departed and a robin who stayed. 

Hanging on that wall is a battered dark green enamel jug, about 7 inches high, a pretty shape which I haven’t the heart to throw away.  Robin cased the joint and began collecting nesting materials.   I watched fascinated.  He worked very hard.  I looked up the symbolism of the robin online and left him to it.  

When I came back in, he brought his intended who was clearly heard to mutter something about en-suite and preferring a semi before swishing off.  He followed.  And I thought that was it. 

As twilight edged to dark,

I went out to look.   He was standing braced in the mouth of the jug, a tiny thing in a posture which clearly said “This is mine.”  I begged his pardon, softly, and retreated.  

I watched much more coming and going until I went out yesterday to do what Buns calls the messages.  I made the trip to a large Boots (a long way in every way from the Boots of my childhood), looked about, found what I wanted, stretched the arthritic knee and came home.

I’d planted the tulips Laura brought from Italy in my favourite pot, put it up on the wall and it was in pieces on the ground, not doing the cherished yellow rose (A Friend Indeed) Ginny had given me in the bigger planter directly beneath it any good at all.  I do hope the bird is safe, he was of course nowhere in sight.  I swept up and cleared, saved the tulips, did the best I could with the rose – another gardener is allegedly coming on Tuesday, don’t hold your breath.  I shall be explaining how carefully any work must be done round the jug, just in case Robin gets over his fear of the cat on the wall (?) or whatever it was that caused the almighty crash the terracotta falling from a height must have made.

It remains a thrill and a privilege to have seen the bird with spring feathers as bright as paint, the effort, the endeavour, the construction.   If there is one thing nature teaches us throughout its many manifestations, it is how many times you have to try …  only for whatever it is, not to work out – and then to have to try again.       

Jane Seymour

rarely eats later than the afternoon, so is hungry for up to 16 hours at a time.   Trained as a dancer, she still weighs what she weighed at 17 (she is now 72 ).  She has also been married and divorced four times, survived financial catastrophe thanks to one of the husbands, come through health crises, written various shrewdly marketed “I survived it and you will too” type books, designed clothes and sold art.  She is currently having a hit with her second tv series Harry Wild, many years after the first.  Jane Seymour may not be a world star but she twinkles steadily in an industry into which she and her management have long strong and professional insight.    I read this over the coffee this morning and had a bad quarter of an hour.   File AR under “could have done better.”    And then I thought.

I thought of two marriages and two divorces.  Quite enough, thank you.    I thought (sorry) that my tolerance for self help books is very low and I never wanted to read or write one if I didn’t have to.   Designing clothes that will sell and painting the pictures ditto? Well that has to be a combination of considerable luck, a recognisable name, and a willingness to put your ability at the service of

what other people think will “go”.  

If you’re discussing something with me, however and wherever we meet, I will put experience, intelligence and information at your service.   But the sound of the exchange is hallmarked.  I’m what I was, the arena of work is different.  I am endlessly interested in and moved by people.  

Jane Seymour is Jane Seymour, I am not she. 

There is a French phrase “bien dans sa peau” suggesting what the Americans call being centred, happy with and knowing how to make the best of your lot, what you can’t do without, what you must let go.  And on the way to being happy in my skin, what did I learn about myself?   

Buns stayed with friends and lived out of a suitcase for years.  I couldn’t do it.  Give me the meanest room (and I have lived in some pits) but it has to have a lock on the door.  I’ll scrub it, paint it – but it has to be mine.   I need regular infusions of privacy.

I made fewer concessions in the way that I wrote or broadcast than anybody I know.  Mind you, I haven’t spent a lot of time asking people.   It was the heart and soul of me, verbally expressed.   I was the girl who was asked for advice at school, in the typing pool.   I went on learning and I went on finding ways to express the things I was interested in, because they obviously interested a whole lot of other people who couldn’t find the words – but you couldn’t fake my interest, it was real, and you couldn’t write my lines. They were too.

I learnt that I cared much less about fashion than about style.  I have known women who keep on colouring their hair long past their sell by date but I went grey and then white, encouraged and endorsed by complete strangers as well as dear friends – always bearing in mind the man who sat opposite me on a train and said “ You’d look quite pretty if you coloured your hair !”   

I learned that I could live without flowers but I had to have books.   I learned – painfully – that you can do your absolute best for somebody but if they don’t want to help themselves,

you’re not going to get very far.  

I learned respect for my health, physical and mental, and when my son asked me the other day if I worried about wrinkles, I was able to say truthfully “Only on a bad day” though reaching for my slippers, I see the skin of my arms creased like tissue – and that’s age, nothing to do with care or cream. 

I like my skin, the one I’m writing about.  It suits me and it sounds as if Jane Seymour likes hers.  Very different, one from the other, that’s the lesson – not only what we share but where we differ.    

The garden

is doing its best but as the weather swings from one thing to another and in my view spring is still on a day/off a day, I thought I might look for a plant.  But the bus was crammed with bodies in every variant of group, every window was closed and when I got off  near the place I  go to for citrus and nothing else, I took one look at people  spilt all around as if from a packet, contagiously posing,  and thought  buy and go home and forget it, you’re no good with plants, you’ll get the wrong thing, it will die … etc.  I really don’t have very green fingers.   So I bought the only other thing I had to have and got the bus back.   And sat down beside a young woman in a black and white checked coat with the darkest skin I can recall seeing. And I began thinking about how I could describe it.

Black as night, we say.  But the night is rarely black and rarely dark, disturbed by all sorts of artificial light.  An African night perhaps,

 which appears suddenly on the end of sunset ? I haven’t seen that for a long time but I remember it well.  Black as pitch?  Possibly, don’t know a lot about pitch.   Ivory black in the water colour box ?  Not enough depth.  Ebony ?  No, all sorts of shadows and shades in the wood.  I looked up black on the internet, not that I rely on that machine, I’ll tell you.  And there are variants, some confusing –  for example, taupe.  I’d have said taupe was a completely different colour but a taupe is a mole and a black mole’s coat is a soft. shining and particular black.  I don’t think charcoal is black at all, unless you lean on it.  

I examined the young woman out of the corner of my eye.   Her eyes were closed and you could hardly see the beautifully drawn eye line, fashionably exaggerated. 

Nothing to do with bronze or copper or brown, she had equally dark hair, cropped to a wonderful head.  She wore enormous faceted gilt hoop earrings, a couple of vaguely Scandinavian sculptural rings.  She carried a Chanel bag, true or false, I wouldn’t know, held in hands manicured with medium length dark brown tinseled nails.  There was not the slightest inclination towards me, so I left her alone.  

My mind pulled up a picture from a time long predating the commercial manufacture of much makeup, when I had watched a hand strike a big old fashioned match, burn it for a minute or two over a saucer, blow it out and collect the soot, which was blended with a drop of some unguent to make an eyeline.  That was the black, deep, soft, unutterable.

She moved her hands into a gesture I know entirely too well, to shadow her eyes and press against her head.  She had a terrible headache. 

I stayed still, it was all I could do.

Halfway to my stop, I put my hand on her arm and she looked at me.  “Do you have far to go ?  Will you be all right ?”   She said yes.  “Do you have pills at home for the headache ?”   She nodded.  “I can do nothing else” I said ” on a bus.  I wish you better.” And when I got off the bus, she smiled – light delight and sweetness – quite wonderful in the grey London street – and waved.

Coming home up the street  I found a little gathering of items outside a flat with a note “Please take me/us !” with a cyclamen in full bloom.   I came back to put chocolate through the door as a thank you, realised I didn’t know which flat was involved and anyway, the occupants of both were out.  There was also a small Christmas tree in a pot, now in corner of the garden.

A friend came for tea looking healthier than I have seen him and bringing the dog of the family he is staying with in between homes, so I heard the happy click of claws and had my arms briefly full of liver and white spaniel.  I’d have to say – a long weekend but a good one.        

Up the road

and round the corner lives an American architect with his French wife, two hardly seen sons and a hysterical Labrador cross.  I might have said hello to the wife out walking the dog but I encountered her husband in a fight with some local developers.   And then I suddenly became aware that I hadn’t seen him for ages.  As is often the case, as I thought of him, he appeared.  His brother died last year, he told me, after a long struggle with cancer and now he has it. 54.  Not fair.  Otherwise, unless you live in a fortunately interactive  neighbourhood, you just don’t know.   

Next door but one live the “boys”  – sometimes noisy but agreeable young men about whom I have written before because I lived for years with disagreeable neighbours and they aren’t.   Next door to them however, lives a story – a young woman with a small child who tried to tell me how living underneath them was impossible, they disturbed her child sleeping, and wouldn’t I help her with them ?   You can’t avoid the vibe.  She didn’t need my help for anything.  I wrote her a truthful note (record) which I put through the door saying I had lived there a long time, I had had unpleasant neighbours in every direction but that was not my finding with this group.  I suggested she should talk to them. What distinguished them from others was that you could always talk to them – and they listened.  She did a rerun a year later.  I wrote a second note.

Well she’s still there and I wouldn’t be if you disturbed my child.  But there is something that niggles at me.   I never see anybody else visit. 

I have given up greeting her on the rare occasions we meet in the street because there is no response.  I didn’t do what she wanted and so she has washed her hands of me ?  Possibly.  Of course I write a story in my head, but it is fiction. 

I don’t know.

The local police wrote at the end of last year in the person of a community officer, with a list of crimes, asking which was of most concern to me.  I looked at the list and wrote back saying that although I had lived here for over 20 years, nothing on the list had directly affected me and I wasn’t looking for problems.  I would however like to record that my slight interaction with the police had been helpful and polite – like his email – and I would like to thank them for all their effort.  He acknowledged appreciatively.

You know how you know there are certain things you could never do ?   My mother used to say that her vision of hell would be selling shoes

and having to deal with other people’s feet.   I read a considered article this week about the nearly 30 years ago layers of negotiation between the IRA and Sinn Fein, MI5, MI6, the government of the day and the back channel.  I learned that the violence continued at the hands of the IRA while negotiation was pursued through the political wing (Sinn Fein) and that too took place on several different levels.   I could never do that.  My brain wouldn’t hold it.

Over time, I coined phrases for myself “When in doubt, don’t” and “Be tempted – don’t fall”.   Discretion is never a mistake for anything important.   The wife of a much younger couple who briefly lived locally invited me to walk with her and the baby in the park, in the midst of which she said quietly “I so appreciate that you never ask about what Robert (not his name) does.”  It’s the only time I used the phrase “high security clearance.” 

We both drew breath and went on talking about what we were reading.  They moved a couple of months later.

I am as short tempered as anybody else and I think I am getting worse but I accept that my response to being unable to move as I want, or get on, is self interested and ignorant.  I don’t know what’s going on with other people.  Sometimes I guess and I am right, sometimes I am told – but without these two options,

I just don’t know.

I wish had a scientific mind

but I don’t.  I got as far as botany and biology at school, I remember clearly an exercise book with “General Science” written on the cover.  But physics, chemistry and their connecting thread mathematics ?  Not a hope.  Later in life I mourned that I had not studied medicine – until some kindly soul remarked that the way I worked would have been impacted by that discipline and I would have been quite a different person.  “Oh, good” I hear you sigh ?  Indeed.  But it was not to be.

The whole idea about losing an hour and gaining an hour is political and economic

rather than actual.   Man can measure time, think of those wonderful stellae in various former famous  civilisations, ancient calendars in South America, water clocks, sundials.   We measure it and build ideas round it but time is.    I just wonder where the lost hour goes.

Is it stuck like a ball at the back of a heavy sofa ?  Has it slipped down a crack between two tiles in the bathroom ?  (This also raises the idea of the material of a hour – is it squashable, easily folded or rigid ?)   Has it rolled outside, and become wedged at the back of that awful old bucket ?  Has the hand of a Keeper scooped it up  to hold away from  mind and vision  until whenever it is, and we get it back ?

Do I feel the loss of this hour ? 

I have done.  But not today.   Last night, peacefully assisted by one Flarin and one Paracetamol, plus half a chapter of Margaret Irwin on Elizabeth I, I knocked out the pain in my knee and drifted into sweet sleep, to awaken, look at the clock and alter the time pieces  to where we are now.

I went to get the paper but of course, of course – it was late being delivered.   And contained the usual slew of misery  – I shall not recycle the bits I noticed, I am sure you have your own.  Though I laughed out loud at shoes of such surpassing ugliness Widow Twankey must surely have been consulted.

In my family, there were two varieties to mislaying something important – there was “it’s probably in a safe place” –

which meant it was going to be hard to find.  Or “it’s under something” which implied  that whoever it was, didn’t realised it was important, so covered it up and now we’d have to look where we never expected to look,

on the off chance.    The hue and cry and loss of temper which attended either (plus working for various people who thought I should know, and I learned to) helped instil into me putting things – no matter what  – where they could be found again.  What I also learned was that, just as nobody is irreplaceable, so nobody is infallible.  The phone goes, the dog barks, the doorbell rings and your attention is distracted just long enough to mislay whatever it is.     

And you don’t just lose the tangible – your keys, your wallet, a coat.  You lose time, not because you waste it ( and pleasantly wasted time is a wonderful thing), but because it’s a one way ticket. 

Last week in the truly terrible television programming, I watched most of a documentary on Josef Stalin

which began with the best bit – that when felled by a big bad stroke, although various members of staff and family knocked at the door and called to him, he couldn’t reply and nobody dared go in.  He had given orders that he was not to be disturbed.   File under “be sure your sins will find you out.”      I was reminded of Boris Johnson about whom  some learned committee is still debating whether he did deceive the House, or if he did, whether he meant to deceive the House, when the finding of any observant person  must be that he neither knew nor cared whether he did – which is amorality – no sense of moral responsibility, and evidence of that abounds, in the House and every other place.   But remember “don’t care, was made to care …” etc.  Time out, quite lost.

“You look like a carthorse” said Julie as I left Waitrose loaded.  I said immediately “I knew a carthorse, her name was Blossom”. 

I was sent to the country to Mr. and Mrs. More, who had a smallholding with chickens and a pair of heavy horses .  I remember the birds flying behind us on the rut as we ploughed and I sat, small thing, on Blossom’s neck – the smell, the leather, the air, the earth.   Almost everything leads to a story and the stories vary with the teller as well as the listener, what is heard, what is omitted, what is inferred, what I would call if I were a musician, the tone..

As television programming declines, I read and thank God for Moorfields.  But I have other “books”, albums of ideas, impressions, memories.  I usually write on Sundays and I do not read read … that’s what I said to myself … read read.   My mother had a trick of repeating a word for emphasis.  I read  the paper, not a book, before I try to write.  Not read read.  She’d describe the weather as “not cold cold.”   It came to me this morning when I couldn’t sleep.  If I follow this sort of story in my mind it leads to kitchen furniture, the pantry, the back garden and my mind seeks memory

as if it had fingers.

All stories are prismatic, they have lots of sides, and how you interpret the side you’re told varies too.   We have different ideas and perceptions, we are different people, we respond differently to all sorts of input to the human and no machine is ever going to rival that.

Unusually, one day last week I switched on the tv early.  I loathe the so-called breakfast programming, whoever does it.  So I went to the BBC News Channel where I saw a man in a legal wig

sitting behind a bench, the word “Preston” in the top left corner of the screen.  He was a judge and he was summing up.

I had never seen such a thing.  If you say “summing up” to me, I think of a well known actor in an film or a play, a couple of minutes and the story moves on.  I didn’t set out to watch this, I didn’t know what I was watching – but it is a very good insight of how  the same story plays different ways to different people.

There were nine counts, evidence was assessed, put to one side, its perception explained.   It was the story of a young woman now 22 who had made through what the judge called sophisticated use of telephones, keyboards and other all too accessible accessories false allegations against men,  Caucasian and Asian,  involving alleged repeated rape, sex trafficking,  brutality – and none of it checked out.   The police involvement over three small towns went on up to and including riots in the street – those who sided with her, those who didn’t believe her, the destruction of businesses, homes and health. 

The judge continued, adjusting the length of the sentence to include different tariffs and time that must be allowed for this or that.  There were 2 psychiatric reports, one of which he set aside explaining why he did so.    He sentenced her to 16 years which he cut by half because of her extreme youth.   He spoke of how she would be managed after that, what she would be allowed to do and not do.

On the evening’s Channel 4 news, I saw an item with a good reporter which included a brief interview with the mother of the accused.  The word that came to mind was “unreal”.  

I’ve seen two pieces in the paper, heard a couple of news items and they are all reduced for a whole slew of reasons including historical relevance, interest and (I imagine) a great wish to move on.  It is a complicated case which doesn’t lend itself to easy journalistic compression and was out of the main stream.

It was one side of a story, I had never heard that story or that side before.   It did not close the gate in my mind.  It made me think.   Now I know why  “know-it-all” was such a criticism in my family.   We don’t. 

When I first began to write annalog,

stomp box – perfect!

I asked what would happen to past pieces  and was told they would stay on the internet.  I thought that was odd, untidy almost –  though probably better value than a tombstone.   So there’s a decade of annalog including odd excuses for technical problems and holiday breaks.  And Jiz.  Except the words aren’t there.  Any banging on the door of wordpress will be much appreciated. 

Jiz was a wonderfully generous friend who pulled me gently back into standing position after the knockout of divorce. She was wracked with cerebral lupus (a variable syndrome, hers was punitive) and eventually she departed this life, leaving me to remember her and the above – a quote from a French Canadian surrealist called Mimi Parent.

I thought of it about 4.00 this morning, an hour with which I have become all too well acquainted lately.

The man who asked the questions for the survey at the Office of National Statistics (far too much expensive printed paper for a take up of one in three) asked what my father did.   “Director of Physical Education for the boys in the North Riding.”   I explained Yorkshire is the biggest county,

used to be four ridings -north, south, etc.  and he oversaw maintenance of playing fields, equipment, made suggestions, haggling to provide plimsolls that could be borrowed so that boys, whose parents couldn’t afford them, could take part in  gym and sports.     “Did your mother work ?”  Her title was Deputy Superintendent, Further Education for Women, in Middlesborough, organising classes on a wide range of subjects, making the schedules, finding the spaces and keeping the peace, eventually in her last years teaching English and Arithmetic to student nurses. Then he gave me a date.  “What were you doing then ?”    “Working for IPC Magazines.”   So was he, as a production manager. In all the millions, we met on the telephone.   

So knock hard doesn’t only suggest noise to me, it suggests sticking to things, endurance, memory. Names may change, ideas vary, things fall out of use (those long mellifluous titles my parents had, for one) but you are still trying to get a handle on life, so you can deal with the bad bits and enjoy the rest.   Knock hard means there are people who won’t understand why

– why Van Gogh painted as he did, why Stravinsky composed his music, why it takes humans until they have nearly wiped something out and ruined it before they realise and begin to look after it better – see Paul Whitehouse’s programme on British waterways.   

Knock hard suggests not being afraid to be heard and having to account for the noise.  Knock hard  suggests life is tough, nothing sweet or soft or furry except in passing.   The knockout World Nature Photography Awards 2022 includes a wonderful picture of a leopard climbing.  Oh that rump – velvet eat your heart out.  But sweet ?   Not a leopard.  

Many animal lovers contribute to a language problem with this.  There are those who think that we must be soppy to animals so that animals will be soppy back, forgetting that when God made animals, he didn’t make them soppy. He made them worthy of respect which is a rather different ballgame. 

I think life is often deaf because the knocking is cacophonous, we bang and hassle and it’s not coherent – the opposite of the clarity of persistent knocking, which is.  There is so much noise in the world that we can’t hear the question.    So it’s a kind of circle.  We should knock  – because life is deaf – in order to hear more clearly but often all we do is add to the noise and obscure any chance of understanding.   The BBC’s current ructions are a perfect example.  I’m sure you have an opinion though all we now know is a perfect example of half the story. And I am waiting for respected colleagues to make it clearer to us – without the paranoia that woke me at 4.00 am.   Because I am stuck with remembering of  “systematic delusions of a persecutory nature” (paranoia): just because you think they are after you, doesn’t mean they’re not.     

A Paranoid World by Richard Bentall 

Buns – so named because he can be bribed for a cup of tea and something munchy sweet to eat –

has moved to a house in its own ground in Mayo, Eire.  The consideration of this took years (literally) and  as it is not near anybody else, he can sing as well as clean and paint.   And I rang last night.  He does. 

So we spoke of the weather, his book and my book, and his meeting a Frenchman who came and spoke to him in the library because he overheard him use a Gaelic term.  And then he told me that he had caught up with an old broadcasting acquaintance, 14 years in the BBC, who now has to reapply for her job –  fill out a form,  make a tape, in other words act as if the intervening years never  took place. 

  What a waste of time and how utterly cynical because whoever is in charge knows full well how many jobs must be cut.   Wouldn’t it be more honest to lengthen the time of notice, call in those whose names are on the “out” list, apologise, be straight and let them get on with rearranging their lives ?  You can’t make it “nice” so why try to ?

Several years ago, I watched the review of the year at New Year on the BBC News Channel (now also threatened with amalgamation and tosserdom) and was so impressed that I waited and took the name of the producer to whom I sent an email saying how much I had enjoyed it, cherry topped by the Aretha Franklin song at the end ? 

Not only did she reply  but she sent me the  uncut item, writing “I think you might enjoy this !”   So we are in touch once a year.  

Christmas 2022, after 18 years with the corporation, she told me she is going through the same nonsense and she won’t play.  She’s on her way, heaven knows to whom or what.

While the endless evocation of the BBC iPlayer leads me to assume that soon, that’s how BBC tv will run.    Last week, I saw a short item which gave a date after which you wouldn’t see local news unless you had updated your television.

And there is nobody to speak to about this.  Ours not to reason why …  Whoever the head honcho will make an appeal about economies and the television license, changing patterns and expectations of viewers, et cetera.  And I will thank heaven I read. There are things on the BBC that drive me mad, things that are wonderful and the latter gets harder and harder to find. “Well, if you want the news” said a woman on the bus “you watch Al Jazeera.”

Meanwhile afternoon independent television, in between endlessly touting insurance or funerals, has reached a new low with an ad showing (purportedly) menstrual blood on a marvellously absorbent sanitary towel and a mock Regency dressed group round a table bemoaning cramps, flow  and so on – who are offered as dessert a brand new pack of wonderful tampons as the answer to everything. Except possibly taste.   And an ad for a durably popular laxative now shows a simplified form of the interior organs with appropriately coloured material moving through. 

  Off.

Out of the several reviews I have read for a new series of Unforgotten – a police procedural about  cold cases – which may not be your thing and I respect that – all namecheck the new female lead alongside the old one but not one mentions the different style of writing or making or a remarkably ungooey and realistic friendship.  And friendship is unbeatable.

 There are days  I never thought would come, when I do not turn the box on.   I understand the repeats but not on a loop.   I am far from alone in being borne down by endless bad news.  I can only handle it when I can handle it.  I am fascinated by the bad voices and heavy accents which do not lend themselves to communication, even if I can see the faces. It’s a box all right, but not the one they thought.     

Who is paying for the legal representation of Shamima Begum,

she who quit the country for Isis and became a casualty of its fall?  a lot of money is involved.   I am not masochistic enough to want to listen to 14 podcasts in that monotonous voice but I am fascinated that, in amongst allegations of trafficking, sexual abuse, Canadian double agents, nobody has mentioned shock.  I am big on shock.  Not  “oh my goodness, how could you ?” but the quantifiable medical kind.

The mental and physical interact in shock.

And if you have left your country, embraced a malevolent and violent fairy story, and if you are as bright as you are supposed to be, you can see that it is, surrendered to a member of the prevailing clan, had and lost three children under bombardment, I suggest shock should be part of the story.  Because – never mind how bright you are – it will make what you say unreliable.

Why is Helen Mirren (don’t bother me with the dame, I couldn’t care less) willing to pose with thin grey hair in a string down her back, unbecoming to put it mildly?  I suppose I should remember that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Of what interest is the emotional rehabilitation of Nicky Campbell through meeting the child of his abuser?   Why is the declaration of abuse both prevalent and misunderstood? 

  I know medical services of every kind are overstretched but media is not the same as medicine.   Allowing for the fact that there are as many dubious therapists as there are bad restaurants and hairdressers,  speaking to  somebody privately about difficult things – as difficult in their verbalisation as their perception –  is not the same as giving a newspaper interview.  I’ve done both.   We are in grave danger of electing the press to be judge, jury, mediator, therapist and priest, if we haven’t already done it because we are scared of losing ground to social media.  

And while every so often we hear a good story about social media, most of them aren’t. 

Social media is the logical extension of that person you spotted briefly in the body of the hall, from the platform on which you were speaking, and thought “Oops, be careful.”  Only now they hide.  We do not see them and they are not less violent and nasty for being unseen.

Apart from human compassion, why should I care about a man with a brain, a job and a bike

– who rides without a helmet so that rescuing him took hours of police time, ambulance driver, paramedics, skilled hospital staff?   He may have eyes but he has no vision.  And in his article he writes of “vulnerable road users”.  Pause for gnashing of Raeburn teeth.  Bike riders who observe any kind of road safety, road courtesy or the Highway Code are in a minority.  They may think they are a higher form of life but they’re dangerous.

And then you wonder about the explosion of couples having babies.  I know the positives – oh heaven, do I !  But the world is compromised in terms of global warming.  Extreme weather abounds – and is increasingly impacting on food.  

People can’t eat and they can’t earn.  In the UK we are sitting on top of the breakdown of much of our accepted (because it has operated successfully for so long) social structure. 

The housing shortage has existed unattended for 50 years.  There aren’t enough places in schools.   We are busy mechanising thousands of jobs so what price work?  The country is about to take on board another refugee intake – and they all have to have something to eat, somewhere to live, put children in school, be cared for when they are unwell. 

I am not a negative person – I have just had a wonderful half hour in Harrods and I never thought that would happen again – but I am a realist and I am not sure who else is.  I am delighted Grant Shapps has helped a Ukrainian family (photo op) but I want to know when he is going to do something about the rapine of the energy companies upon the citizenry.  Isn’t that part of what he is paid for?  

10 months to resolve my dispute