Category Archives: Uncategorized

I’d like to think that my vanity – all in its various bits – is less to do with conceit or what the OED calls “excessive pride” and more to do with a suitable degree of amour propre. 

Of course I would.  I do begin many thoughts and sentences with the word “I” but I comfort myself that I am at least putting myself on the line, using myself as an example, rather than making value judgments about everybody else . And I can’t stand simpering self deprecation – “Oh, this old thing” (the most expensive thing in the wardrobe), “just something I knocked up” (four hours over a hot stove, now you know how rich we are as well as how labour intensive the efforts).

My vanity is currently dented by  a frankly unsatisfactory  haircut. 

Please promise that if anyone picks up scissors in a hairdressers and starts talking about how talented he or she is given that they have OCD – you will leave the premises smartly.   I didn’t – and here we are.  It has been tidied up but significant improvement will take time.

Last week I had an appointment at Moorfields Eye Hospital on Valentine’s Day.  I was greeted by the receptionist for the clinic with an awed “But you used to be on the telly !”.

I said it was a long time ago.   (And me without a shred of eye makeup.) She and her colleague thought it was wonderful.  And then I had hardly sat down before the couple opposite commenced urgent consultation until the wife got up and came over.  “Are you “ she asked most politely” Anna Raeburn ?”   I stood up to answer her, she thought I hadn’t heard and repeated the question, while I was simultaneously summoned by a Nigerian nurse called Toby.  “Guilty as charged” I said smiling and excused myself.  When we’d done those tests, I went back via where they were sitting to say thank you.    

In the last clinic before the injection, young eye surgeons check that the preceding injection worked, was comfortable, there were no problems and I drew to the attention of the doctor I was with to the  eye they don’t inject having an itch at 4.00 am.  I promised I never touched it but that when I got up  a couple of hours later, it was caked.   She asked me how I cleaned it – I said warm water and clean cotton wool, carefully.  She had a look at it

and excused herself to consult with a colleague.  When she came back within the promised few minutes, she said they would not be doing the injection, antibiotic drops were prescribed, 4 times a day both eyes for 14 days and then another appointment.  Apparently eye infections travel easily from one eye to the other. 

The pharmacy  was downstairs – Moorfields has lots of volunteers to direct you -and there were maybe a dozen people waiting.  Having handed over my prescription and been given a ticket, I watched the man probably younger than me but in that age group, at the end of the row in front of me.  He was reading.  After several minutes, I put my lips close to his ear.   “The moral superiority of reading in an eye hospital is not lost on me” I said.  He replied at once without missing a beat ” I can’t read.  Just tell me the book’s right way up.” 

And we commenced quiet comfortable joshing for the next several minutes.  He said he was an undertaker and when summoned to collect his prescription, he remarked that there were people dying to meet him … a line I suggested he had used before. Grinning, he said in farewell ”Same time next week ?”   “Sure” I said.  “Bring a book.”   All very good natured, and very good for Valentine’s Day.

Books sent to radio stations used to be piled up and if you’d a fancy for something and its time was past, you put your name in the front so you could claim it.   Which is how I came by a Women’s Institute calendar of feasts

and learned that Valentine’s used to be more generally to do with “Knock and Run” secret gifts – “anyone might benefit, not just lovers.”    I did.  

My parents had been married 48 years

when my father died.   He asked to be buried with his mother, whom my mother loved too.  Years later some brave or foolish person asked my mother, didn’t she return to Kent sometimes to see the grave ?   “No” said my mother memorably.  “That’s not where he is.”   I didn’t have to ask because I understood what she meant.  It was my upbringing.  Memorials come in different forms, they mean different things  to different people and our perception of them, the meaning we attach to them changes over time.  

When I was young I was invested in things lasting.  I loved  books and antiques

and  history because it was all about  the endurance of things.   But when the Ukraine War accelerated, you only had to see one photograph of the front blown off a perfectly ordinary apartment building to know how tenuous what we think of as solid and lasting is.

For the last few days, the battered people of Syria and Turkey have been all over our media,  scrabbling barehanded through the night at piles of what were  homes and houses, weeping beyond tears.  “My  children are under this” indicated a man, “ and nobody comes, no equipment, no one to help us, no food, no water.” 

And it has been cold.   So the chances of saving people have been less.

I know, everybody’s different and long live those differences but though I can understand not wanting your children under a  pile of rubble, I don’t understand wanting to  “see” them again.  They are gone.  Everything that they were has gone from this world into your recall.

For some people, memory is as fragile as the buildings thrown seismically into the air.  For the rest of us, it is the sustaining force of how to live in the world.  And sometimes it seems that what isn’t any more, is even stronger.  You can’t live in memory  but it makes daily life a great deal more bearable.

My father hasn’t been a constant presence as an image.  I have only see him, or bits of him  (the line of his head and shoulders) two or three times in the fifty plus years since he died.  But I hear his voice, I remember him telling stories.   My mother lives in my face, sometimes unsettlingly.   And she loved words, so certain words connect me to her immediately .  The intonations of both parents’ voices come to me at the darndest times, funny or serious, deeply in narration.

Both of them exemplarily explained ideas to me carefully and that’s a whole other set of connections.  This is not because I am necessarily always in agreement with them but that will to reach me, to offer me an interpretation, may be highly intangible but the wish behind it remains.  They are not gone.  I just can’t see them. 

What you believe and how it affects you is a subtle shifting stew of culture,  expectations, personality, family history,  imagination, need and will.    I thought I understood that what I believed in was underpinned by monuments, mostly manmade however long ago, but as I get older, I understand that what enables me to go forward is accounts of other people’s journeys in the world, literally and  imaginatively, the history of the land, what’s left and how it sits now, thousands of years later.    I accepted the law of paradox

ie if it looks like it’s built to last, it probably won’t and if it’s ephemeral, it probably will.   I once described old Mr.Moss  who lived at the top of the road opposite when I was a child, as looking like a dry leaf.   Human life is very small.  What is monstrous is the contempt in which other humans hold it.  

Keira Bell vv The Tavistock

Apparently the President of Turkey  took enormous paybacks from bad builders, who have now fled,  leaving the poor to do what the  poor do – starve and endure, starve and die, mourn and try again.   I hope Erdogan’s name is entered in the Heavenly Accounts on the debit side.

And Syria ?  Held by a blackguard, Syria was Putin’s rehearsal.  We can’t know what is coming.  We can only cleave to our good memories, and know that they are more use than any tombstone.   

Headlines in equal parts – dismay

about the dog walker who vanished, and Happy Valley.  Reality and fiction.  What we know of the reality is awkward, unhappy and confused.  And the fiction is terrifically well written, I watched the first two series with bated breath.  Couldn’t hack series three but millions did.  I watched Vera.   And let me say now – I don’t watch anything “obsessively”.   

I began watching Vera

because I had had the great pleasure of interviewing Belinda Blethyn about an agreeable memoir.  Halfway through the interview, in a station  break  (they play ads, you catch your breath) I said “You’re not Welsh at all, you keep talking about  Margate and Ramsgate.”   “Yes, well, “ she said.  “That’s where the family is from.”   So she changed her name?  She nodded, she had.  “What was it ?”   “Bottle.”  

No name for an actress, I could see that, and the Bottles are an old smuggling family. 

“Was there a Tom Bottle in your bit of the family ?”  I asked.  “My uncle Tom” she grinned.  “He was my father’s best friend” I told her.  And we danced up and down with excitement before returning to the business in hand.

My father boxed in the army of WWI, in a detachment now largely forgotten (because of the  obliterating losses in Europe) except for belated tribute to the Sikhs.  And at one stage he boxed with a then famous actor,

Victor McLagen, in a town anglicised into Jubblepore.  As my father came out of his corner, a voice from the crowd shouted “Come on, St. Peters !” (the village where he lived) and the voice was Tom Bottle’s. I grew up with this story.

Years later, when we walked back up the graveyard at St. Peters having buried my father, we came over a slight rise to two rows of elderly men very neat, very erect: what was left of my father’s unit.  My mother and sister passed with other family members and I beamed at the man on my right.  “Know that smile anywhere” he said.  “And you’re Tom Bottle” I said.  And he was.

I began watching Vera  out of curiosity, the tension in the character between her often difficult, even unpleasant manner and her ability which was considerable and generous.  Blethyn is a good actress.  The series was often imaginatively cast.  And the scenery is the scenery of my youth.  

Strange, oddly coloured, often bleak but sometimes unexpectedly beautiful, old, waiting… The north east of England is another country.

I have always thought setting cops and robbers in the countryside changes the story before you start – distances have to be travelled, small communities are often indrawn against strangers (this was before the word police had become almost swearing), the weather has different impact.   The stones and heaths may see but they don’t tell.

My parents did everything they could to make me look around me, to show me that though the town I was born in wasn’t an oil painting, some of the surrounding country was at worst interesting and at best dazzling.  It’s too late to tell them how deeply those lessons have stayed with me, not just that countryside either.   I should add that I am always interested in cinematography

and Vera is often terrifically well shot.

I am not going to tell you I have loved every minute of it – I haven’t. I’ve caught up with an episode I missed and thought “I could have left that.”  But casting absorbed early on the lesson of people just being people instead of black people or disabled people and never lost it.  Occasionally an outstanding script deals with things you and I know happen but we don’t often hear about – two men who loved each other from boyhood but never got further than dumb adoration, a distressed family with a father blamed when it was the wife who was doing the hitting and God knows what the teenage son saw or intuited.   And I think a two hour script in a long running series is much more difficult than an hour and forty/forty five minutes to which such stories more usually incline.

Something on television?  Really.

The lovely long curly wavy hair I had as a child may have looked nice but it was hell to keep knot free.   Getting the brush or the comb through other than superficially day to day involved my mother gritting her teeth and me growling and howling and many tears.   The sweetener was chocolate. 

  “It’s a food” opined my mother, breaking off two squares.   “And if it’s good enough for Captain Scott, it’ll do you.”  

I have hardly any sweet tooth but I habitually kept the plain chocolate in a plastic box in the fridge, for occasional use.  Pam the Painter who has a sweet tooth is gratifyingly impressed.   But then one day, when the Italian sweet rusks I bought to eat one of for breakfast became too expensive, I tried a much cheaper product, a similar thing, lighter, made of oats and edged with plain chocolate. And began to eat one with my coffee for breakfast.    The point of this is not to bore you rigid with the chocolate component of my admirably sensible diet but to point out that I stopped buying bars of chocolate.  I bought the chocolate edged biscuits and had one for breakfast, at that end of the day  when I can burn anything, rather than a couple of squares in the evening when I can’t.  

In Saturday’s Times magazine I read the following : “Our ageing population is one of the greatest threats we have ever faced – but what if we worked out how to keep people healthier for longer?

Raghib Ali has the answer.  The former A&E doctor needs just one in ten of us to sign up to one of the biggest medical trials in history.  Prepare to be recruited on your next weekly shop.”

It’s a fascinating piece because, instead of writing yet another lament about strikes and the burden on the NHS, this talks about how research is setting out to accrue data which can be used to employ clever medical insights the other way around, not to keep the elderly from dying, but to prevent them, younger, from getting ill. 

It used to be common to talk about how difficult it was to get men to go the doctor – always supposing you can currently get an appointment.  A chronically ill friend waited 8 weeks to see a GP and left in tears of frustration. So let’s put aside getting to see a doctor and presume you can.  The people who won’t go, won’t go, because they are afraid of what they’d learn, because they might be faced with bad news and worse still, their own responsibility in trying to get better.

Not wanting to hear bad news, being scared, not wanting to have to change but hoping for a magic wand – that’s a personality – whichever sex. 

And I will never forget how taken aback was the young clinical research fellow who tried to brief me when I first went to Moorfield for eye injections.  Between the  complex terminology, her strong accent and a mask, we weren’t getting very far till I heard a word and stopped her.  “Are you asking me to take part in research ?” She agreed, she was.  “Then yes, yes.”  She was astounded and when she explained, so was I. 

People don’t like to take part in research, they fear intrusion, indiscretion, being treated less well than they might otherwise be.  I waved it all away and had the great pleasure of meeting her again two years later, the first four injections in her research project, the rest in Moorfields outpatient clinics. Bless them.

Social transition is almost always slower than we like to think.  People look at a longterm project which might benefit them and delay – till after the holiday, when I’ve done the kitchen.  But the wheels are coming off the cart of  a particular model.

When Snowdrop tells me about his mother  going to yet another appointment, for yet another prescription, but nobody ever sits her down  and tries to make a picture of what’s gone before and build on it, it is a dramatic illustration of our over dependence – unhealthy dependence  – on a particular model eg., go to the doctor and get a prescription. 

I don’t know what is involved in this project,  I am probably too old to be useful but I am – as my father used to say – putting my hand up in church.  If I can be useful, I’m going to be and I am sending the article to the Princess of Wales

who is avowedly interested in benefitting the younger.

To sign up, go to ourfuturehealth.org.uk and investigate biobank.  

Given her own she was born the daughter of a

princely Prussian house.   She married a British double barrelled bully and after a long time with many ups and downs, he has gone to glory (where he will bore the saints) and she is facing being alone.   Alone is always a challenge unless you are one of nature’s loners.   Yesterday she remarked “ I just feel so unsettled.”   And I asked why wouldn’t you ?  She said “You feel it too ?”   I said I did.  Yesterday I watched the news on Al-Jazeera and if you wanted clarified the idea of the world in uproar, there it was.  I lasted a few minutes.   She agreed and we worked our way round to how we survive.

Years ago Johnson and Johnson

manufactured pantyliners and as she would talk about most things, I was asked to address the local sales force.  Informed about female hygiene, I knew how such an accessory  might be useful.   I also knew from what I had heard that they were planning to sell it to everybody all day everyday upon which I remarked unfavourably.   Shutting of ventilation from the area has never been advisable.  “And you’re promoting anxiety.  We don’t need any help.”  And we surely don’t now.

Excessive unease is part of the dictionary definition of anxiety.   Judi Dench once famously remarked that there was such a thing as good stress and I am sure that you can be nervously wishing to do your best, whatever the context,

and the anxiety will resolve into the realisation of something good ie he’s lovely, you cleared the high jump or you got the job.

The anxieties of the present age get under your nails and into your soul.

For years, the consolation was to go out and buy something, even something small.  But small and modest is in shorter supply than it has ever been, even supposing it’s effective.   And you hesitate – the ordinarily moneyed hesitate – to spend money on anything you don’t have to have. 

Food prices continue to rocket.  Two of the most famously inexpensive supermarket chains are now putting their prices up. 

Every kind of work structure costs more – more to clean, more to light, more to heat, more for tea and coffee, more for unguents, more for waste.  If you can keep work.  Over the shoulder for many leers the malign ghost of unemployment. 

It’s easier to hide your troubles when times are easier.  You can evade them, go out, go to the movies, a concert, an exhibit, have one two three drinks and stagger home in a taxi.  None of that, not now. You watch and make the money go round.  There’s one more wash in the bottom of the box of soapflakes.  Another month to get out of those shoes.

And much as I long to be able to support – even if only by looking – I have never seen such ugly lines as is offered to women in what are called fashion stores.  I had an hour or two looking around last week and it sent me home to count my blessings and change my scarves.  They are what I call “standing still clothes” – shoes too – OK if you’re slight, young and modelling but absolutely incongruous if you are wearing them and moving in them. 

    The psychological interpretation of standing stock still and hoping not to be noticed comes to mind.

Years ago just after the Japanese tsunami, I met a Japanese woman in the local branch of a dress shop I liked.  Of course I asked after her family and she ended our short conversation with a bow such as I have never seen, though read about.  A couple of weeks ago and 12 years later, we met again.  She remembered me, I remembered her.    And we spoke about the world, bad news and my determination to find the good and think of the beautiful as a means of spiritual survival.  In conclusion, she reached out and took one hand of mine in both of hers.  “You live your life” she said. She said it twice with an emphasis on “your”.  We looked at each other, she bowed like a leaf.  I said I would. 

There are lots of things you can do alone

though you may prefer to do them with somebody, what you want and what you get being two different matters.  The magic of the programme about the relationship between songs in Scotland, Ulster and the States was that it featured songs travelling, being rewritten and reinvented, addressed and sung by people who had played instruments for so long that the instrument had become another arm, another tongue – an extra bit of the person.  But you can still perform music alone.  The ballad singers who began to move the music sang in the street.   I’ve done that.

Last week I wrote on a wet Saturday, trying to make sense of the time but this Saturday is quite different.  It took well over a year to persuade me that I could write what I call a column and other people call a blog.  Column has the remnants of a professionalism I cherish, anybody can write a blog and I mutter to myself “I am not anybody.”  That is not quite as conceited as it risks sounding.  I am deeply convinced of individualism.    Even when it is a wagtail

trying to cross the road (yes really, this morning – and of course I saw it through the traffic, making encouraging noises in the rain.)

But I didn’t know how long I could keep up the idea of a weekly blog to my standards.  All sorts of people write columns, not all of them very good.  To chose the subject(s), complete the form, select the pictures and turn up something I could put my name to every week was demanding.   And yes I have before now written and put the copy aside only to look at it in the cold light of day and shake my head regretfully.  Not good enough.   And I have to be able to stand my ground to my own taste when I don’t get feedback. What I write is a closer to “op.ed” (opinion/editorial) than a popularity contest.   

Although in these stages I am alone, and I enjoy them – I’d never have kept it up for ten years without you.  No social media, old fashioned PR or any other kind of promotion – and I am shamelessly proud of that – It’s our tenth birthday,

yours and mine.  The first annalog was 14 January 2013 and here we are.  I wish you a dazzling self replenishing birthday cake, with candles and sparklers that never wear out.   And thanks from the bottom of my heart for making a dream I did not realise I had come true.

We often hear about the power of the circle in the negative, but what goes around, comes around can be positive – and I have lived to be told what the radio programmes I fronted did for the people who derived something from them.  They had one advantage – the magic component of voice. 

We diminish this to our cost. 

This week a woman wrote to me, about how something I had said had affected her life. She married and had children very young but pulled herself out of years of work as a carer, to go back into education where she became the first member of her family to go to university, continue to work and study and is now a research scientist. She wrote movingly about how she had stayed happily married, how her life’s journey had changed things for the better for her and her family.  She thanked me for my wise words (her phrase) and how they had made all the difference to her family (her words).  I was staring transfixed at the screen. 

This was clearly an annalog birthday present.

If my voice is not present in annalog, then clearly the inference of it is.  Whoever is reading is very real to me and it seems clear that I am equally real to you, hence the circle.   And because you read me and I had ten years to do it in, I was able to learn a shape and pursue it into similarity and variance.  Ginny once called me a wordsmith and I love the idea of me with small silver hammers making verbal shapes and learning all the time.  Happy  birthday.    

I am writing this on Saturday morning, when I expect to be out and about .  But it’s raining

and I can’t see that getting wet in a country awash with infections, and all the attendant difficulties in treating them, is a wise thing, the susceptibility of age, and so on.  There is a terrible nervousness for which I have no logical explanation which says I must go and buy food – as if I would starve if I didn’t.  No I am not a secret hoarder and I have only gone hungry through mismanagement and inexperience, and that a very long time ago.  But the anxiety is real enough, and has to be arm-wrestled into quiet through what we used to call common sense,

now as rare as hen’s teeth.

As the television news media collectively has become less impressive, more repetitive and flies increasingly under the banner of  “nothing sells better than bad news” – I have taken to a newspaper.  Well, I started with three, came down to two and ditched one over a year ago when, after three approaches and a personal introduction, the editor didn’t acknowledge, let alone reply.  So I am down to one.  Not Holy Writ but reasonably informed and not extreme, I do well with it for the most part but I seem to spend a lot of time avoiding certain images.      

There are faces I don’t want to look at, my initial distaste reinforced through repetition.  

There are images that may be politically popular but I don’t like them.  I am prepared to be told that I am culturally indoctrinated – who isn’t ?  The form of mine is more benign, generous even, than a lot of other people’s.  And when I was showing my son my commonplace book, into which nothing makes it unless it is very important and lasts,  I found “Beauty refers to a high level of coherence existing everlastingly in the world.”  Of course your view of beauty isn’t mine, though we might share certain kinds of image or idea … and as I wrote this, a card arrived, a Japanese woodblock of morning glory from John, who wrote “I was in the Ashmolean last month and this gave me as much pleasure as all the amazing artefacts.”   I can see why.  It cheered me up no end,

I love a woodblock – linocuts too. 

It was particularly welcome because of the conditions described above but also because we are in the seasonal dearth of good cards.   We’ve just had Christmas and New Year,  a certain level of birthday is probably fairly constant, there is that group of enthusiasts like me who like their cards blank so they can be used for apology, enthusiasm, acknowledgement and so on but they were thin on the ground yesterday  when I had an all purpose and a birthday to  find, and not much to choose from.

Cards mean different things to different people but while I am prepared to send you the gift you’d like rather than the gift I would like to give you, I can’t send you a card I wouldn’t put my name to.  Unreconstructed snobbery, personal taste and aspiration to the importance of the aesthetic  described in the quote above by Barry Lopez.

image of coherence

I keep articles, images, books and I go back to them, absolutely sure that this happens when the time is right.  And it only has to be right for me.  Which is how I came to be re-reading The Incredible Journey last night, the story of how three animal companions cross the wild land of Canada to go back home and meet their returning  human family.   It was written in 1961, I’ve read it before – but not with such understanding.  I believe in re-reading.  You see something else …  and the written pictures are wonderful.   I wonder how much of that wild world remains.

Like most city slickers – and I have lived by choice in a city most of my life – I like my country quite wild.  And while the news labours this death, this shock, this regrettable, I want to save more land and plant more trees.  That would make me happy.  Even on an overcast and miserable Saturday.

Denning had a rotten

Christmas.  He has a disabling back problem (one of thousands), takes heavy painkillers which bind.  They did, he took senna and blew his bottom off, making him proper poorly – from which he was rescued by a dear friend who, after two days of temporising, took him by car to the overworked and wonderful A&E.  And for the first time, on New Year’s Eve afternoon, he watched Zulu (1964).  Ignoring the fashion to pour scorn on anything redolent of empire, Zulu tells the story of a battle, of course pointless and bloody,  gave Michael Caine his atypical breakthrough and features large numbers of Zulu playing themselves.

I’d watch the whole movie for a terrified soldier who asks “Why us, sarge ?  Why us ?”  of Nigel Green’s colour sergeant,

who replies “’Cos we’re ‘ere, lad, ‘cos we’re ‘ere.”   Motto for 2023: ‘cos we’re  ‘ere.

The price of Christmas trees was like lots of other things prohibitive but I was given flowers – pink roses and lilies from one source, dark red and syringa from another while Lydia sent me mimosa and alstroemeria, still going strong. 

The cards came through and I was ashamed I had faltered in sending more once I’d asked my postman to look out for a big envelope due by Royal Mail, would he put it under the bin ?  “Of course “ he said “ but there’s no delay in this street, Anna …”   I gawped at him. 

“I can’t have all that hanging around, it’s Christmas.  So I went back and loaded the cart again, and did another turn.”  His daughter is at university, I hope she is as proud of him as he of her. (The envelope was under the bin with the chit through the door saying “BIN”, bless him.)

My granddaughter gave me her first ever Christmas card and my son coined the best name for that odd sag of days between Christmas and New Year – Twixtmas – when he came to see me for a belated present swap and protein boost,  he having poor devil

a foul cold. 

He gave me a book I had asked for by Neil Oliver who presents history intelligently and likeably on tv called The Story of the World in 100 Moments

which is, as he says in the introduction, ridiculous – because yours are yours and mine are mine .  But I like the writing and I am always provoked by choice and this is no sillier than 100 favourite tunes or 100 favourite poems – they always miss out something you would choose.

And I gave my son a year’s worth of political cartoons which will I hope provoke the odd giggle, that or he will be sick with tears.

I met three young women collecting for a local scheme for adolescent mental health, my eye caught because the smallest started to smile at me before they spoke and then did that charming thing of putting her fingers over her mouth, the movement of course drew my attention.   And we laughed about them only wanting money and I said spontaneously to them and their slightly older mentor “I’m sorry , we screwed it up for you, the country is in a mess.  I hope it will come again and you’ll have a better chance” whereupon they beamed and shook hands with me.

When I went out to get the paper on New Year’s Day, there was the usual sprinkling of bikes, beside one of which was something I couldn’t make out – so I crossed the road, to a neat little pile of pizza boxes.  I returned home, got the bags the council gives us and people despise if they are distributed, but nick if you pile up outside your door (I do).  Happy New Year wrapping somebody else’s rubbish.

But when I waved to the bus driver, he waved back, beamed and we swapped thumbs’ ups. I went to collect my paper, and I forbear to compile a list of things I never want to hear about again, because it will be different from your list.  Oh heavens I wish you well, I really do .

every year is special and I don’t want to

frighten the good omen by talking about it

so  – thank heaven for every good and beautiful thing in 2022

no matter how tiny –

and may there be more in 2023

annalog will be back on 3 January.

Because I can’t send cards to everybody,

I wanted to list all the people who have been in touch with annalog – just to acknowledge them and let them know what their contact meant to me.  Then I thought, it was a bit of a cheat and not really writing.  I thought about the Christmas list, who I give what, and what I’d like – all much abbreviated this year.   Wal makes Christmas for his long term partner who loves everything about it – tree, decorations, rich food – while Wal, born a Jew and really not interested, can’t wait to get through it.  And I must say this year, I could very easily write a negative Christmas list of things I never wish to hear about again, before going on to wishing for  world peace in your Christmas stocking

– just people and events and behaviours that bore me to screaming pitch.   It’s much harder to pin down what really matters about Christmas in a secular state.

There’s time off.  But what we have learned with force this year is that what is one person’s time off is another person’s work.  If I don’t list all the strikes, it is not out of disrespect but because I would like to hear more about what is being done to resolve them.  I opted long ago for reading a daily paper but the assistants at the convenience store make its purchase possible.  Of course I could go elsewhere  – but it would be less convenient.

There’s warmth and comfort.  Not everybody has them,  or access to them.   The podiatrist, the nicest lay preacher,  said her husband had said to her “Let’s be warm this winter – hang a few days in the sun next year.  If we can’t do it, we can’t do it.  Let’s not come home from work to a cold house.”  It’s called “paying for your pleasures”

– they were affordable if not free for so long.

There’s special food  – but food becomes very special if you’re short of it.  And we had so much so available for so long.

There are favourite television programmes, streamed or otherwise.  Good luck with that.   One person’s pleasure is another’s anathema and  there is endless repetition.  I usually find something but the pickings are slim.

There’s company –  but they’ve got to get to you and it’s harder this year than it has been for some time.  And they have to get back.  People will make the effort and it will be lovely and good luck to them – but I am used to plans being changed,

other demands having to be met.  As long as you’re well, you don’t have to be with me. 

If Christmas is to survive as more than just a public holiday, we shall have to look at it anew.  None of us can escape from memory, good or bad, but the maniacal focus on the bigger, the richer, the noisier, the more resplendent can’t go on growing and as the couturiere Chanel famously remarked “less is always more.”  

So the Christmas list is  – half a dozen presents for half a dozen people:  a meal with Pam the Painter – she chose a chicken dish I have already tried on her, which she absolutely loves.  Wal makes a meal for me and Howard.   My son (cross fingers) comes to bring me a book and a card – the card is much more important.  And I give him a gift and card.  And I get to feed him. 

There were candles in my house most evenings long before energy became the Chanel Five of the twenty first century.   And I will be warm and pay for it.  There will be candles in every room, one of my favourite symbols

and like many of us, I need all the help I can get.  

There will be flowers or plants, yet to be chosen  and in the quiet  I will remember my family, my dogs, people I have loved, still love, the good times ringed with light like candles in the mind – to get us through the darkest days, to the light that follows.