Category Archives: Uncategorized

Vladimir Putin

(excuse me while I spit) has made the old choice: either be loved or feared, and he has chosen feared.  Firing on mostly women and children on their way to or through what was believed to be a safe corridor is a new low in the Kremlin War, my name for it, because so many Russians are appalled by this international violence, in under and around a state media which has raised brainwashing to habitual consumption. 

But you must remember – dictators don’t fight wars by laws.  They order whatever seems expedient.

I have never been a fan of rolling news

which is described as “a 24 hour a day news service.”   I only  worked in news as a temporary presenter during the Gulf War when I learned that, for a lack of something new, you reshuffled the order of the stories you’d got and read them again.  It is still done. That was the time to push if that was the direction I wanted to go in, and it wasn’t.

If nothing is happening, rolling news is pad pad pad and if something is happening, the watcher is plagued by the feeling he or she might have missed something.   The way news is “made” is a story, and it is not mine to tell, though I am allowed as a consumer to comment on it.

A headline last week read “Ukraine couldn’t have come at a better time for Boris Johnson.”    Forget the parties, forget the wasted public funds and heartbreak.  By all means.  Done is done, forget them.  But DON’T forget lying at the despatch box in the Mother of Parliaments.  The House of Commons may not wish to call it lying but the rest of us can.   Never mind a knighthood for BBFs (Boris’s Best Friends) the former education secretary Gavin Williamson

or a higher honour for the man who owns the Evening Standard and the Independent (!) Evgeny Lebedev.

   Never mind gongs in a dishonoured and devalued system.   Let’s have real praise for those who stand and fight and those who bring us news of them, for reporters under fire who can weave reporting and commentary into an intelligent piece to camera, over and over again.

The senior fellow for land warfare, International Institute for Strategic Studies

has written an update of the battle positions.   A major female columnist

wrote that she was not surprised that many younger women were high in their praise of Ukrainian President Zelensky –  she called it the ”natural human response of a person starved of  examples of honour, decency and courage … when seeing those qualities can still exist in a leader.”   Could we please remember Mrs. Zelensky too, because it is hard to watch someone you love in daily danger?   You’re not invested in him being a hero, you just want him home in one piece for you and your children.

As BBC’s International Correspondent Lyse Doucet remarked recently, this is a very personal war – people found ways to relate to it, through history, through being the parent of a child in need, through the World Judo Federation, through gallows humour – often the best kind.   In the long settled West we live in various degrees of security, enhanced by the solidarity of the buildings where we live  – which lasts just until you see what damage a bomb can do to a pleasant apartment block in a Ukrainian city.   

Two very different friends (both men) have told me of unsettled sleep and bad dreams.  One of them sent me a set of statistics about Ukraine, its oil, its wheat, its manganese: of course the Russian despot wants it raped.   It’s valuable.  The other man bemoaned getting old, being unable to do anything.  I sympathise, being a witness to horror is horrible.

And I have a nightmare too.  In my dream Putin, even older and fuller of filler, comes to London on a state visit.  I cannot see in my dream who is the royal riding with him in the state landau.  (It is part of the royal job, HM has hosted some horrible people.) There are crowds in the streets and not a word, not a sound …

The people opposite

have spent the better part of a year changing the shape of the house they bought.  Each to his own. My idea of altering a house is at most a minor extension.  Otherwise, a revamped bathroom or some bookshelves.  They have rebuilt the house they bought and then began Round Two which involved a loft extension.   When the storms and the winds came, that scaffolding didn’t look any too safe to me. 

In the upheaval, the houses on both sides have sustained damage and you don’t want holes in the roof if the weather is cold and wet.   You don’t want structural damage, full stop.   

Having bought a property with everything wrong with it, Buns nearly killed himself holding the roof on with one hand and keeping the cellar dry with the other.   And decorating and improving.  When it eventually sold, he couldn’t believe it.  Since then he has been to Dublin

(he is a closet Celt) and back, back to Dublin, looked at properties, stayed with friends on both sides of the Irish Sea, packed and unpacked his essential belongings, spent more money than I could bear to on storage, more energy than I could bear to arranging the transport of his vehicle, his equipment (radio man), worrying and not sleeping – both of which he does to Olympic standard.   It’s all money going out and he needs a place to call home.  He came back to the Blightly side and promptly left for a week in Spain.  I hope Spain makes him sleep, nothing else seems to.   He cannot decide until he can decide and I couldn’t live like that for two months, let alone two years.

In my life, I have lived in some horrible places, which I scrubbed and sprayed,  where I kept things in suitcases as cleaner and safer, and moved on as soon as I could.   But where I lived was mine.  I paid the rent and shut the door.   I couldn’t have survived without. 

Lack of privacy, no time to think by myself without any other input, would finish me. I could live much more modestly than I now do, which God knows isn’t glamorous, but I would still have to have such a place, where I could catch my breath, without witness.

If I think about home, I think of what I came from and what I took with me into the homes I made and I am deeply grateful.  Home to me means order, not obsessive cushion twitching , just space on desks, things in jars, garden tools where I can find them, all the clothes hung up in the days when I had a big enough cupboard, now swapped over once a year between the chest and the wardrobe, cleaning and turning out on the way.  Books.   A neighbour came in last week and exclaimed “Your books are in wine crates !”  I internalised that from a French book of interior decoration ideas 10 years before. 

Home.

Home means buses and tubes I know, where to buy certain foods or toiletries.  It means a chemist with common sense, and a sort of all round dry goods store, where I can buy compost.  It means the shape of the street and who lives where. You don’t have to like them all but it helps if you know their names or their faces.  They often come good in the most unexpected ways.

Home is where you hole up when you’re not well and wait till you’re better, like a beast in its den.  It means where you shut the door in the heat of summer, taking off all your sweaty clothes to put directly into the washing machine or to soak in the basin.   It means where you come in freezing in winter and walk straight through to put a light under the soup in the kitchen. 

It means where you can always find a plaster for a cut, yours or anybody else’s.  It means where the bits and pieces your friends have given you down the years have a place, on which light shines from the street.

It’s what people are fighting for in Ukraine. 

*The title comes from Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz: “there’s no place like home …”

Early afternoon the day of the storm, a man materialised on a link from the south of England to Jane Hill, BBC wonderful, and told how, with the schools closed because of the weather, he and his colleagues had “placed” several hundred school meals via social media and local contact groups. “We didn’t waste a fish finger” he said beaming.

It’s been a week of events – a friend brought me a wonderfully carved wooden spoon, my son visited with his little girl, the telephone and the screen went down for 36 hours, the repair followed by the worst artificial voice message I have ever heard, and I lost a gold pin.

For my 50^th birthday my then husband gave me two diamonds in a plastic box from Schipol Airport.  I took them to the only place I then knew to have them made into something, and while there fell in love with a plain gold pin – a bar with a curl and a clip.  I bought it.  It has been endlessly useful,  currently stitched carefully inside the pocket of the  lacquer red coat I use to get the paper – it fastens the flap across the chest and throat. 

Last night brought sleep for the first night in several, thanks to hot bath, hot milk, half a Nytol.     I got up and went off for the paper, corduroys, sweater, red coat and scarf round head. The wind may not be Eunice but it is still blowing. 

I bought four oranges for £1 (juice) and the Sunday Times.  I met Maggie who identifies me by once having discussed a post nasal drip with her.  I don’t see her often but the last two conversations over some months have begun “ You know that post nasal drip of yours … ?” in a big South London voice.  Last time was on a bus from behind a mask.  Barry Cryer lives, I thought.  Short exchange, she’s a happychondriac, can’t wait to discuss her health. My post nasal drip is merely the entry point.

  And I took the scarf off and let the wind blow.  Arrived home, came in and took the oranges out of the bag, went to take my coat off – no pin.

I checked my pockets, the floor, the table, outside the door – put my coat back on and went back to the shop where Sunday shift involves two men who can ring all sorts of bets and procedures on the till and other machines but don’t speak English.  “Pin” is beyond them.  I walked carefully home.  I saw a magpie and just as I was about to tell him/her to scat, there was a second.  I thought “two for joy” was a bit mean. 

  I came home, checked at home again. 

It was a light thing, it would be blown, and the street was full of lots of dead leaves and the detritus people can’t be bothered to wrap or dispose of properly, loads of it blowing about, and the daily discard.  But I remembered where I met Maggie, and after her, a frilly woman with a frilly dog.  That’s where I took the scarf off … go back and check.

Second outing : this is silly, even with your glasses on. A little thing like that in the street, in a wind.  Retraced steps, searching,  and turned to come back.  It’s gone.  Damn.  There will be a reason, even I don’t understand it.  Looking carefully.  And there it was

under a sapling halfway down my street.  I  looked up and the magpies did a lap of honour.  I thanked them and God and picked it up and came home.

If it’s so important to you, I hear you say, why don’t you put it in a safe place, for best ?  My mother taught me best for everyday, better be, otherwise not much point.  I like to use things.   I remember shying away from confessing to Wal the breakage of some early gift.  Wal, who cherishes his possessions fiercely, said “These things happen, it’s a thing.  It is meant to be used.”    And I am usually careful. So, hooray for “we didn’t waste a fish finger ” and my haystack needle.   Little things may please little minds but small joys matter when big things start to slip.

It is nearly 40 years since I bought  a teapot,

1890s, American, cobalt blue, shape reminiscent of Aladdin’s lamp.   And it came apart in me hands, mum, three weeks ago.  I knew it was irreplaceable but not in such terms. Wal, on line wizard, offered to help me.  He sent me pictures of a dozen perfectly serviceable teapots which didn’t do anything to me, or him.  So we abandoned that.  I looked in the John Lewis flagship where they were ugly and expensive, at a name kitchenware store – ditto,  and another – same again.   

I went to Wilko -no, Robert Dyas – no and Zara Home – no (they all cross referenced each other).  I found what I wanted but I couldn’t order it and neither could the only young person I felt able to ask.

Coming back from an outing, on a different bus, I passed what we used to call a hardware store, leaped off.  Charming girl, mean teapots.  (This teapot has to meet the needs of Wal who is multi cup, runs on builders’ brew, and me – though the days when I drank a lot of tea are gone.   And I pass on the pretentious overpriced rubbish that people call coffee, preferring water).

Further down the road however I hit a home run – size, price and colour OK and a woman who wrapped it properly.  It is not distinguished but it will do.

Then I went on line to try and buy the replacement for a face cream I discovered last summer. 

”On sale in store” it said.  Well, not in the two stores I went into  – nor could it be ordered by those stores although that is how I first got hold of it.   Nailing it down on the on line part of the manufacturer without newsletters, offers, and the rest of the paraphernalia of modern marketing (pause for gnashing of teeth) took a while but we got there.  I have paid for it, so I assume it will arrive.    I could have called this annalog  “How Not To Shop”.  What a miserable business, useful only for the competitiveness of finger speed.

It’s like easy peelers, sounds like a stripper.  Perfectly acceptable, available everywhere, tastes of nothing very much.  I mean, you know it’s a fruit because you can see it is.   I wind up buying delicious expensive satsumas

which I eat one a day because they taste of something.

You will notice that this is not about the cost of things, of which like most of us, I am only too horribly aware.  It is about getting what you want, about the difference between what somebody wants to sell you and what you want to buy.   And why.  What hit me after some thought was, of course those neighbourhood stores don’t keep teapots – no demand.  It is the age of the tea bag and the polystyrene cup.

The online experience seems to be easy, provided your wishes chime with what the website wants you to do.  Misinformation on websites is rife though they would say, that in the aftermath of a pandemic, they are in a holding situation over manufacture, supply and demand.  I could understand that, if that was what whoever it is told me, as a customer.  But what is there is the breathless exclamation of how wonderful they are  – and we are for using them.  Oh tosh.    

Whatever is going to happen in Ukraine, I’d like lessons in communication and public speaking based on the presentation of the head of National Security in the US, one Jake Sullivan –

whom I watched for some considerable time last night, speak fluently, clearly and with candour about a terrifying situation and resist the temptation to simplify it or talk up the side he represents.  He even managed to say  “I don’t know” and it played like honesty instead of confusion.

I remember the Bay of Pigs (April 1961) when my mother, a pragmatist if ever there was one, shook me rigid by saying  “This is truly terrible and I should never have had you – how could I bring a child into a world like this ? “

We used to value communication, whether it was about a packet of gravy browning or a gun.  Now we are so busy scoring lingual points off each other, we’ve forgotten what’s really involved.  Life and death, that’s what.

   Whatchewant.        

Over a two page spread on how to spend money you haven’t got,

I discover that fashionable nails are short and square.  Forget fashion, I just want my hands to look tidy.  I giggled over vegan nail polish (who eats it ?) while noting “hand peel rejuvenation” as a swiz at £59  when the best of it can be done with a lemon, some granulated sugar and glycerine at nearer 59p.  Is this what Wal calls “reassuringly expensive”?

Come spring, I admit I want to be rescued.  No I don’t mean a knight on a charger.   I mean touched by a magic wand that will make me over into bien dans la peau (one of the best French phrases ever).

  Some small thing that will work a miracle.  Spring (sorry Will) is ”the winter of my discontent”, pulls me down like a wolf to a lamb every year and I was almost comforted to discover my Italian friend, a 25 year old neophyte, working like a fiend in a city she isn’t quite at home in yet, feels the same about the first quarter – ie get through it and think about something else.

Will the budding Japanese aster make it through another day of cold wind ?  Will the house opposite  fly away, borne by the polythene sheets flapping over

the incomplete loft ?  You can have BBC3 if I can have BBC4.  The situation in Westminster depresses me into the ground, thank God for Anne Applebaum writing about Putin and Gavin Francis’s new book on convalescence.    What can I do about 38,000 tons of discarded clothing a year in the Atacama Desert, about children bombed, brutalised and starved into discard like broken birds ?  Are the dead and the dying an ugly version of birth control – the only way we might get mankind back to reasonable numbers on the face of the beleaguered earth ?  Doesn’t make me feel any better.

Ironically what lifted me through this year’s spring sag wasn’t new but old.  I had begun before I fell (that, as my father would say, didn’t do me any good) to look at the books I have kept and couldn’t remember – except that I must have been moved or impressed once, because I kept them.  And I don’t keep everything by a long chalk. 

I read the beginning of something and it went into the Oxfam box.  I began another, ditto.  Tastes change.  But on the third time around the shelves, I found some short stories by the Australian Tim Winton which never fail.  And then Love and War in the Apennines by Eric Newby (look him up). 

Kept at large in WWII’s beleaguered rural Italy by the sheer generosity of those he met, the land he describes has as much of a personality as the people.  And he meets Wanda, a personable Slovene, with whom he falls lastingly in love.  (I have interviewed her and I wanted to curtsey.)   The world of silence and stones and sharing not very much seemed oddly consoling after the last two years.  

And then on Saturday night I sighed and wondered whether I could watch The Untouchables again …     So I began scrolling through and I found Burn. 

I haven’t seen it for nearly fifty years.  I wondered how that would be ?  The director Gillo Pontecorvo is more famous for an earlier film The Battle for Algiers, the story of the making of which is almost another movie … 

When I saw Burn I was married to my first husband, a complex uncomfortable man (absolutely not  “bien” in his “peau”), bright, opinionated and a film maker.   The film starred Marlon Brando – he thought it some of his best work, before he was bloated with calories, confusion and self hatred.   

I watched it and it worked for me.  I saw different things, I made different criticisms but overall, it was a pleasure. And I remember the first time, coming out into a street in the light in Soho, smiling and shaken, in possession of one of the first political and philosophical lessons of my life : nobody gives you freedom, you have to take it.

“Please don’t go out” said a friend’s solicitor to her – they are in process of selling a house.  So she waited in,

for the call that never came.    “I’ll call you next week” said a woman I rather liked.    She didn’t.   After three times trying to reach the editor of a national paper, and receiving no acknowledgement  –  I gave up and declined to buy the paper again.   I wrote to the specialist who diagnosed and helped relieve difficulties with my back.   No reply.   I wrote a letter of appreciation to a named journalist (I didn’t gush)–  not a word.  And I hear over and over how this person emailed and that person left a message, how this one wrote snail mail in desperation and that one is facing some kind of telephone or other problem and is dreading having to deal with it because it takes hours and “they say they’ll call back” – but they don’t.

Delivered to your door seems to mean any time after 9.00, and while my upstairs neighbours sleep through the knock at the door, I don’t.  So it’s delivered to my door.  I can’t be horrid to somebody working their butt off to keep going – but “anybody can have anything” is an imperfect model (nearly as imperfect as “anybody can do anything.”)

“Delivered to your door”

means it gets delivered when it gets delivered, to whoever responds and the options are to leave it on the step (whence in my area, it is likely to rapid liberation) or to be a martyr to other people’s shopping habits – in this case, necessitated by hours worked.

Theoretically we are more available than ever before – the mobile, the screen, the iPad and so on.   We are beginning to talk about that and how it might affect us less than positively (cue “mental health issues”, increased forgetfulness and sheer over exposure – too many voices, too much input.) 

Too often the volume is up, the content down and any kind of consideration is out of the window.  

I have just read an admirably low key and informative article on artificial intelligence (Damian Whitworth writing about Professor Stuart Russell in the Saturday Times magazine 29.1.2022)

where it is made clear that humans need to think about this NOW rather than just buying into it, because while not having to do repetitious things may be seen as liberating, if you liberate (the writer’s word, not mine) lots of people from work, what are they going to do and what are they going to live on ?  AI sounds like milk: spill it and it stays spilt.

Spartacus (movie rights acquired by Kirk Douglas, for Stanley Kubrick’s still outstanding film) covers a lot of the material in the book (by Howard Fast) but not the fact that the Roman Empire was entirely slave based.

  And we are busily creating a slave culture – disposable people, who work for little.  In the past they survived and for a brief period (historically) their rewards were modest stability and children.   The stability is gone and they can hardly feed their children. And if AI takes over, it will be  to do their jobs and they can’t earn.

Artificial Intelligence is busy getting a positive build up.  When you read about it in the general press it is because it has discovered this or that in some area of medicine and thus may save lives or heart break .  Reading about AI has the same effect on me as reading about “re wilding”.  I want to save hedgerows, birds, small mammals, flowers and plants and the rest  (I can’t tell you how excited I got when I saw groundsel growing for the first time since my childhood) but you can’t give all the farming land over to wilding: we have to eat.

We can eat differently,

I hear you say.  Yes we can but I am still talking about numbers of people and the changeover will take time and cost money – while the further down the social economic scale you are, the less likely you are to be taken into consideration. Without the Prince of Wales’ avowed interests in farming,  the farming community would be even more remote from takeaway pizza and strawberries in December.     

I love a milk churn,

though when I looked them up, I discovered that they are antique.  Me too, I suppose.   I remember the milk churns waiting to be collected, at the end of the path from the house, and how sometimes, the driver of the lorry gave me and whoever escorted my child self a lift to the village if he came before the bus.  I thought it was so exciting  to be sitting in the front of a truck.   And I cherished the milk churns because they provided an excuse for the lift.

At about the same age, I learned the magic of the rural bus,

where passengers knew each other and the driver and he stopped at the top of lanes leading down into farms, seemingly without being asked.   Once, many years later coming back from south London to north, the driver of the bus at some ungodly hour in the morning, began talking to me  –  the only person on the bus – and he dropped me not at the nearest stop but at the top of my road.  “This right ?” he grinned.  Memory winded me, I could barely say thank you.

Before the pandemic, say three or four years ago, I watched the female driver of a big red double decker bus handle the heavy vehicle to safety while some twit speeding and probably half cut briefly endangered himself and everybody else.  It was my bus, I got on and said thank you. When I got off I asked the driver, whom I saw to be Middle Eastern with a headdress but not veiled, if she was all right ?  She stared at me.  I repeated.  “Did you see … ?” she asked .  “Yes” I said “ I did and you did beautifully but that’s not what I am asking.  I am asking, are you all right ?”   And she did that lovely gesture I had only seen in a film, putting her hand to her heart, and bringing it, lightly clenched, to her lips to kiss.

We saw each other occasionally, we waved and beamed.  Once she passed me walking and gave two cheeky little toots.  Last week she drove up to the bus stand where I was waiting and stopped the bus – admittedly, it was empty – got out of her cabin, got out of the bus and stood before me, demanding “Are you all right ?”

   I began to laugh, and said I was, and I hoped she was too and her family , we stared at each other for a second and then embraced and wished each other a better year.   She got back in the cab and I thought of milk churns.   Unforgotten.

As are the witnesses, though they grow old and frail. 

And I am only ever what I call a plastic Jew, a name I coined, not offered in insult or diminution but because they claimed me, people I didn’t know, met in shops,  at work, in the street ,in the US and the UK,  and it meant so much to me.  Because I looked like the real thing.  “We are so proud of you” said a woman I didn’t know from a hole in the ground, embracing me.  “You’re one of ours.” More accurately I am what the Nazis called a mischling, of mixed Jewish and other races – the predominant other being Rom (thus also a didikoi –  of mixed gypsy and other races).    Only two people in my whole life claimed me as a Jewish daughter and it remains a jewel in my memory.

I remember the painful insight of a film called Almonds and Raisins about the Yiddish theatre which bloomed briefly before being superseded by the bigger audiences of cinema. In a flash I understood how foreign these people were, how other …  how what I found interesting, others found threatening.  They weren’t the only foreigners or the only others but you know how you understand something uncomfortably, because a harsh light shines smack on it, if only for a few seconds ?    I was shaken to be unable to deny the understanding of hate.  So I remember the Slavs and the trade unionists, the Baptists and the gays, everybody who got in the way of the steamrollers of the Third Reich.  My father’s mother’s name was Julie Rosenbaum and no monument works better than memory – even a milk churn.

When I was a child, you were called a monkey

if you were mischievous, a little bit cheeky in a nice way. You were not allowed to make a habit of it.  Being a monkey was an occasional thing. Nowadays, monkeys would probably bring an action for defamation.  I never thought about the monkeys (not my favourite creatures) though in the Chinese zodiac, I am a monkey. 

You have probably heard of The Three Wise Monkeys – Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil and See No Evil. 

According to my search engine, this is a Japanese image and Ghandi refers to a fourth monkey.   I can’t be the only person who is silently screaming for mercy from saturation media coverage of  Prime Minister Boris Johnson (I’d say he was Speak No Evil), tennis champion Novak Djokovic (Hear No Evil) and the Royal Family’s Prince Andrew (See No Evil).  What those three have in common is a large dose of victim mentality – always somebody else’s fault.

The British Prime Minister doesn’t speak well. 

*

That turkey hubble-bubble, incomplete sentences, wah-wah is a good example of how not to communicate with anybody you don’t want to communicate with, ie most of us, obviously lesser mortals. It sounds as though you’re saying something but you’re not really.  All sorts of poor devils speak for him in matters great and small and they have one thing in common – when he perceives that what they have said and done hasn’t left him reflected in the sought after light of glory, if he can’t pass the buck, they are expendable.   Pippa Pig, eat your heart out.  It’s all somebody else’s fault, not a word of accusation, just –

out.

The best comment I have heard about Novak Djokovic is that, like a lot of high powered, busy people – he relied on somebody else to get the papers in order and say the right things, secure in his belief that he is so important and talented that, should there be a wrinkle, it would be ignored.  The person expounding this point of view to me said “And he forgot: it’s his name on the form.  He can’t blame anybody else – it is his name.”  His mother’s comment in a press conference where she referred to her son “being tortured, like Jesus Christ” was frankly ill judged.   The President of Serbia feels that, if the champion were from a bigger and more important country, his visa would never have been cancelled.

  Poor little Serbia.  It all went on so long, I began to wonder if this was Djokovic’s PR machine because he got coverage he could never afford.  And the Australians didn’t handle it well –  but they have made a legal decision. 

 And then there is See No Evil (Prince Andrew) who didn’t see anything because he didn’t see why he should have to look, much less ask question or make decisions contrary to his initial wishes. 

Although playtime with a convicted paedophile is a bit much, you get the same sort of avoidance much lower down the scale – the child with cuts and bruises that nobody wants to have to notice, a woman’s black eye or broken wrist, or a man withdrawn and tense to breaking point – but nobody asks, because nobody wants to know.   His point of view, it seems, is that a Royal Prince should be able to have a good time, at somebody else’s unlimited expense, without having to think about it, as in “I know nothing”.   A retired Royal servant says he was ever thus.  And even if he had better advisors, he won’t take advice.   The word “entitled” comes to mind and you can just see that porky hand waving unwanted advice away

…   Particularly unwanted if it isn’t what he wants to hear.    

These are not happy men, any of them but I will forbear to bore you with pop psychology.   What is interesting is that dozens of other men have been through the same kind of emotional confusion, uncertainty and dissatisfaction and handled it quite differently.    Human beings are fascinating. 

Boris Johnson wanted power and then got clobbered by a pandemic which made his interpretation of the highest office in the land a good deal less fun and successful than he had depended on it being.

Novak Djokovic learned he is better on the court.

And Prince Andrew will learn the high price of paying for your pleasure.

*nice poem, shame about the spelling (as in conjunctions)

In the pause between bouts of unseasonable weather Tim wrote that he had seen dead leaves falling

and swirling “like brown snow,” dead leaves blown like souls on their journey, the rest of the life cycle irrelevant.  The Americans call autumn “fall” though I was rather more preoccupied with a tumble down tricky stairs.  This morning I met a woman walking with a stick, we have grinned before, and I asked what happened. She fell at work and damaged her spinal cord, is several months into rehabilitation and will have to have to surgery. Merciful heaven.

No concussion but this has slowed me and I have seen the physio.  Nothing like a small injury for bring you face to face with how much we take our bodies for granted.  And other things too…   When something has been there a while, we tend to think it will go on being there and are taken aback when it isn’t any more.

London’s West End is currently in upheaval,

boards up, builders busy and whole streets silenced.   It won’t all be bad news, I know.  Business people take a view, sell up, hang on to the money and wait to see.  But for someone wandering through, the changes are enormous and it’s oddly post blast.

I read further coverage of the administration of a famous tailoring establishment, a couple of hundred years old, which in partnership with two other equally well known concerns, had recognised changing times and changing styles as not being in their favour, and tried to adapt. But they were advised to use Chinese money

to bridge the gap and have been left 2 years later, high and dry.  The investors will be covered by their national law and skilled workmen from this business will be out on their ear.  In response to yet more writing on the “street” edition of plastic surgery – and where it falls short – I can’t help but wonder if some of those wonderful tailors couldn’t retrain with sterilised thread:

I am sure they’d do better work.   And a forty year skilled worker in one of the surviving businesses in Burlington Arcade says their rent is now £250,000 – well that won’t last long, with falling footfall.

And I am surprised that with all the introspection nobody has yet written to theorise about the connections between the mixed messages of this time – on the one hand against plastic in the sea (and every other waterway – phosphorous in the River Wye)

but endless  rubbish in the street: trumpets for  everything natural and pure  from  juice to jumpers but cutprice procedures with  God knows what in your face, your buttocks and anywhere else that will make a few bob. And what that means and why ?  Shortage of food is imminent, if not from growing, from harvesting and transport and I am all for saving flowers and plants, insects and wildlife but farmers deserve our support.  Again, the endless playing over WWII has not taught us its key domestic messages – one of which was

grow more food, harnessed to nature rather than pulling against it.

Walking of necessity slowly, I saw a tall slender woman I should think in her early fifties, with the sun behind her and the most gorgeous hair – thick, lustrous, grey/gold, God and man hand in hand. I exclaimed “Your hair is lovely.”   She stopped “Say again.”  I repeated.  “Oh how wonderful” she said.  “I really needed to hear that, I have cancer, I am going to lose it all .”

I begged her pardon, I said how tactless of me ..” You couldn’t know” she said.  “And it is great to hear.”  I asked “Where was the cancer?”   “Everywhere” she said “Stage Four.”  I said I was sorry.  “Don’t be” she said smiling.  “They have done everything they could… that’s life ..”  I said,” I light candles in my house every night, tonight they are for you.”   And we parted smiling. 

Three lots of self realisation (and Liz Truss) in one newspaper

– Manifesting by Roxie Nafousi, James Smith Not a Life Coach/Not a Diet  Book – neatly crossed through as No Myths/No Fads/No Nonsense, Giles Coren writing that should he divorce, he would take nothing, too much stuff anyway, especially after Christmas …  so this is the reinvention of New Year’s resolutions with social media packaging to help the medicine go down.  Glory.  Am I glad I’m past all this.  Am I a victim of Santafest ?  Not me.  Did I take every opportunity offered to me ?  No – but I took most of them.  Did I believe in myself ?  Sure, but it took time.  Oh how I distrust “one size fits all”. 

It’s like Jean’s one piece undergarment with crotch poppers in dinnerladies.   I remember trying one on and laughing so hard in the old Dickins and Jones, I caused a disturbance.  I was still laughing when I left.

  Sounds great – but only if it fits and, call me Quasimodo, it didn’t fit me.  More like a spatchcocked frog.  One size does not fit all.

Somewhere in the dim and distant past, I learned two thirds of a Chinese proverb ie “many paths to the top of the mountain”, the concluding third says “but the view is always the same.”   Never got that far, always a work in progress, “many paths” has guided my life. 

People do things differently – different things at different times, for different reasons and in different ways.  Sometimes the result is as expected, other times it is very unexpected but I don’t want to model myself on somebody else.  I doubt if you do.  I want to be me.   Finding out who I was took years and long after you get your feet on the right road, you still falter occasionally or have an odd moment of bewilderment when you just don’t know.

Part of the reason for the title is because I was once called a potentiator, encouraging people to realise themselves.  There were common principles and ideas but everybody was different.

  It will be a truly sad day when they are not.   Sometimes you can’t grow a person.  There’s some sort of block, like a tree across the road.  You don’t spend enough time together, you don’t know them well enough.  There is aIways a story and, for whatever reason, you don’t get to hear it – so I settle for doing the best I can with what I’ve got – the bit I know.

The husband of a pretty fair-haired woman up the road has just died.  Not only does she feel understandably awful, she can’t verbalise it.  We met twice and she told me how bad she felt but she couldn’t be more specific and I didn’t see that Q&A on a street corner was necessarily kind or useful.  But last week we met and she said glumly “They want me to go to counselling.” 

This is not the time for me to launch into what, where, who, how, counselling versus psychotherapy so I said “Well, at least that’s about you.”  She looked at me.  “The door shuts” I went on “ and it’s between you and the counsellor.  So you can talk about anger and pain and confusion and that bloody woman across the road …  It’s your time.”   She said as if it had never occurred to her” I suppose it is.”  “Very useful” I said .  “When my father died I fell apart and private work with somebody skilled was the beginning of sense in the world.”

O f course I am over simplifying.  I hope to heaven she gets somebody who knows what they are doing.  But we have to start somewhere.  She has to know that far from being the victim in this, she is the subject.  Her turn.  She can emerge from this dissatisfied and give it another go with somebody different and get further with herself.  The decision is hers.   She isn’t a malfunctioning neurotic.  She is a woman in pain.   And pain comes from a lot of places.  And the resolution of pain so that you begin to see yourself comes from a lot of different places too.

If you are going to read these latest versions in the lucrative self help market and take from them what works for you, fine.  You aren’t Roxie, James, Giles or Liz and you may live to be grateful for it.