Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Tiger

is an experienced nurse from Bengal, not Bangladesh. It was the first thing she told me, in response to my question about her name.  Her father is a devoted GP in the south east of England.  She has seen tigers in the wild.   Music

is the surgeon who told me her name means music – when the Hindu gods spoke, it was called music.  One of her grandfathers had hoped she might be a musician but both father and mother are surgeons and she is too.   Once she had chosen the eye (opthamology), she concentrated on the retina.   If the retina can’t work, there is no sight.

I have macular degeneration and the right eye has slid from dry to wet mac.   Several weeks ago I went to Moorfields the specialist eye hospital for the first time in 50 years where there was a slender hope of a variant.  This week that hope vanished. 

The treatment in the NHS for mac is a drug called aflibercept,  injected into the eye. 

What stops people taking part in research ?  I was asked to take part in a study asking if retinal images can predict response to the aflibercept therapy (etc) and enthusiastically agreed. That imaging takes ages,

a skill of its own, requiring you to sit very still in an allocated position. Somewhere in there the researcher said “You can relax now” and I growled “Shut up”, went on concentrating till we were done, and then apologised.  From there I was escorted to a quiet room with Music and the Tiger in the research part of the hospital where I said immediately that I was a complete coward, not good with needles, needles and eyes – not to be thought of.

But it is the treatment and often effective (if I had asked, Music would have given me the percentages).  As it was, I had hoped to evade this for a time when I would be ready (never) and it didn’t work like that.   

When I met the Tiger, I asked if she held hands.  She said “Yes” firmly.  And Music explained, what, why, where and three more dates.  Ayse who is running the project put the letter with the dates in my hand.

We’ll skip blow by blow, because all interventions are highly personal.   There are men and women who have suffered pain at levels I would find unthinkable. 

There must be an accommodation over time, the body must biochemically adapt, as does the mind (pain is perceptual). There are painkillers, the right position, coping strategies, etc but nevertheless, pain is.   This is a big deal to me, because I have been witness to so much – physical, emotional, sexual, social – so easy to cause pain.  And I know my physical levels of pain tolerance are low.  (A great friend is going through a procedure at the moment which is made more difficult because she is used to putting up with pain and she has to approach it another way if she is to heal.)

The Tiger did indeed hold my hand, Music told me what she was doing as she did it, through anaesthetic, antibacterial, retractor and injection. 

  There was indeed a moment of profound discomfort and I spent the rest of the evening wanting to shake my head like a donkey with a bothersome fly (one of my favourite poems is GK Chesterton’s The Donkey).   But there is no pain.  There wasn’t last night and there isn’t this morning.

I was given drops and told how to use them (in the worst designed ever bottle but then I am clumsy).  And they asked “Would you like us for the other appointments? ”   And I said yes please, it  would give me clinical coherence, explaining how in my professional life I spent time with people who never saw the same person twice and constantly had to go back to the beginning.  And how distressing that is, a diminishing loop.

I doubt that Music and the Tiger said anything they hadn’t said before and before, but I met them with one of my few gifts – communication – and it’s a two way street.  Two women, both mid 30s, committed with admirable skill sets and experience, kind hearts and clever hands.  My mother well wished me.  It was her birthday.

It’s all too big. 

£154 billion for the high speed rail link or borrowed to keep us afloat, a billion pound bail out for London Transport, here a billion, there a million –  £5 million for Graham Norton, £1 million plus for Zoe Ball.    Yesterday I heard the first sensible argument for the plan that reduces  “an Englishman’s home is his castle” to crumpled fag packet.  I remain unconvinced.   And however good at his job Graham Norton is, his price is too high.   To the whinny of “that’s the market price” I’d say – then let somebody else pay it.  Ditto Ball. Nobody is irreplaceable.

Small is Beautiful

is still on my reading list and  maybe, after Dick King-Smith – because after I wrote last week about my son reading his childhood books for reassurance in life’s pressure cooker, I have been reading one a day.  Let it rain.  I am dry, warm and comforted, not the least by the writing.  And they are still running dinnerladies on Sundays.

A friend rang to say that she didn’t want to talk to her grandchildren on Zoom – “It’s not the same” – and last weekend she had found a garden they could visit, she and her husband, the preserved and functioning herb garden of a 16^th century fever hospital.  The guardian took them round and showed them everything, about a dozen visitors carefully masked and distanced.  And then as they were going, presented my sympathetic friend with a bouquet

of some 20 herbs, tied in a red ribbon.  When she, thrilled, reached for words, the guardian ran through the herbs by name. I gasped when she was telling me this story on the telephone and she said she had gasped too.  “That’s what we need, a small a day…” I said, and you can make up the rest of the rhyme as you like.

When I left the house (newspaper run) I looked to my right – dumped toilet and cistern.

  Too heavy for me to fling through the window and you must get the right dwelling if you’re going to do things like that.  So I turned left, ducking under the branches of the trees in the street, heading for where my side road adjoins the main road – and there, smack on the corner were two navvies (19^th century from the word navigator – Oxford Dictionary) surrounded by red plastic hurdles and warning notices, taking out old paving stones. 

  And I said delightedly” You’ll interfere with the bikes” and started applauding. They looked at me.  “You go right ahead” I said.  “ This is a blind corner, I am an  old woman and they come down here “ I gestured” and go on to the pavement to bypass the traffic… “ and they grinned. “ Good for you, get in the way of the bikes.”  And I resumed my superficially respectable exterior and left them to it.  

I went out the other way, the road is blocked and they have a job to do.  But when I came back from shopping, there was an enormous wagon parked on the point of the corner and the two men still working, so I asked the nearest one “What shall I do ?”  He nodded and dug his spade in, walked out, held up his hand to the admittedly modest flow of traffic and waved me through.  As I went past I said ”Thank you very much” and he replied “You gave us a good laugh this morning.”   A small a day.  Please note: I am all in favour of bikes but not their weaponization.

Buns rang from a secret location –  the only way he can avoid constantly offering himself for painting, tidying up, bailing out and monitor duty is to go somewhere he doesn’t know anybody – and in a long and much appreciated telephone call, we discussed how wearying all this is.

  Not only the illness and all its preventions and conventions, but constantly having to prethink, which is in itself a problem.   I told him the two stories above, and the mantra I had devised.   

Don’t talk to me about Christmas, still less the flatulent neo-Victorian blowout which has dominated the past decade.  Don’t wish your life away.  A day at a time, a small a day …   

It’s all too big.  £154 billion for the high speed rail link or borrowed to keep us afloat, a billion pound bail out for London Transport, here a billion, there a million –  £5 million for Graham Norton, £1 million plus for Zoe Ball.    Yesterday I heard the first sensible argument for the plan that reduces  “an Englishman’s home is his castle” to crumpled fag packet.  I remain unconvinced.   And however good at his job Graham Norton is, his price is too high.   To the whinny of “that’s the market price” I’d say – then let somebody else pay it.  Ditto Ball. Nobody is irreplaceable.

Small is Beautiful is still on my reading list and  maybe, after Dick King-Smith – because after I wrote last week about my son reading his childhood books for reassurance in life’s pressure cooker, I have been reading one a day.  Let it rain.  I am dry, warm and comforted, not the least by the writing.  And they are still running dinnerladies on Sundays.

A friend rang to say that she didn’t want to talk to her grandchildren on Zoom – “It’s not the same” – and last weekend she had found a garden they could visit, she and her husband, the preserved and functioning herb garden of a 16^th century fever hospital.  The guardian took them round and showed them everything, about a dozen visitors carefully masked and distanced.  And then as they were going, presented my sympathetic friend with a bouquet

of some 20 herbs, tied in a red ribbon.  When she, thrilled, reached for words, the guardian ran through the herbs by name. I gasped when she was telling me this story on the telephone and she said she had gasped too.  “That’s what we need, a small a day…” I said, and you can make up the rest of the rhyme as you like.

When I left the house (newspaper run) I looked to my right – dumped toilet and cistern. 

 Too heavy for me to fling through the window and you must get the right dwelling if you’re going to do things like that.  So I turned left, ducking under the branches of the trees in the street, heading for where my side road adjoins the main road – and there, smack on the corner were two navvies (19^th century from the word navigator – Oxford Dictionary) surrounded by red plastic hurdles and warning notices, taking out old paving stones. 

  And I said delightedly” You’ll interfere with the bikes” and started applauding. They looked at me.  “You go right ahead” I said.  “ This is a blind corner, I am an  old woman and they come down here “ I gestured” and go on to the pavement to bypass the traffic… “ and they grinned. “ Good for you, get in the way of the bikes.”  And I resumed my superficially respectable exterior and left them to it.   

I went out the other way, the road is blocked and they have a job to do.  But when I came back from shopping, there was an enormous wagon parked on the point of the corner and the two men still working, so I asked the nearest one “What shall I do ?”  He nodded and dug his spade in, walked out, held up his hand to the admittedly modest flow of traffic and waved me through.  As I went past I said ”Thank you very much” and he replied “You gave us a good laugh this morning.”   A small a day.  Please note: I am all in favour of bikes but not their weaponization.

Buns rang from a secret location –  the only way he can avoid constantly offering himself for painting, tidying up, bailing out and monitor duty is to go somewhere he doesn’t know anybody – and in a long and much appreciated telephone call, we discussed how wearying all this is.

 Not only the illness and all its preventions and conventions, but constantly having to prethink, which is in itself a problem.   I told him the two stories above, and the mantra I had devised.   

Don’t talk to me about Christmas, still less the flatulent neo-Victorian blowout which has dominated the past decade.  Don’t wish your life away.  A day at a time, a small a day …   

The night before an exam, I went upstairs to say good night to my 12 year old son and found him sitting up in bed, reading a story he had loved when he was younger. As I looked at him, he said wrily “ It makes me feel better.”   I still have that book, Magnus Powermouse by Dick King Smith.

Sometimes I wonder if I namedropped, would it make me more interesting?

Like – Jilly Cooper introduced me to the Sunday Times.

Harold Evans took me to lunch.

I met Barbara Amiel at the BBC.

I chose these three names because they have all been recently publicised – Amiel to flog a book, the popular Cooper to memorialise the passing of the variously excellent former editor of the Sunday Times Evans.   But they were only part of the scenery as I was living my life.   Which is what we do if, along the way, we meet somebody well known.  We note what we think, how they strike us but we don’t know them.   Passing fair, passing handsome, passing through.   Unlike Magnus Powermouse.  He lingers.

Last night one of the very few women I know who is intelligent, good looking and likeable analysed the Covid situation and asked me where I stood ? – among those who were prepared to be sensible and do their best , however unhappy with the vagaries of the powers that be,  or with those who were jumping up and down about conspiracy and the infringement of rights.   As conspiracy theory is only ever interesting to me inasmuch as it reveals the fears and preoccupations of those who cite it – I am in the first group.  And as far as those parameters are concerned, I am fortunate.

I live alone, not wedded to seeing anybody.  I have personal resource – certainly as long as my eyes last.   I wear a mask, wash my hands, hair, self and clothes.  I am what we used to call sensible.  If it’s going to come, it’s going to come.
Today I saw the first item which suggested that many of the elderly would rather see family this Christmas and die in consequence than be cut off from them all.  Provided they take the further responsibility of Do Not Resuscitate and leave instructions not to hijack the appallingly overstretched NHS, I can understand that.

Not good at endless wimping, there is much of modern life I don’t miss but I know that much of the familiar is now out of reach.  It is a political act to go out, to go the cinema, to wander round the shops, to pick things up, to touch an arm in empathy or sympathy.  So you seek what is available to you  and occasionally you turn up a goodie, like ancient gold in the furrow.

Mary Stewart wrote a series of books about the Arthurian legend from the point of view of Merlin the Enchanter

photography by John Fox

where I found this when I wasn’t looking.   Merlin to Uther Pendragon about the king to come: “Mithras, Apollo, Arthur, Christ – call him what you will.  What does it matter what men call the light?  It is the same light and men must live by it or die.  I only know that God is the source of the light that has lit the world, and that his purpose runs through the world and past each one of us like a great river, and we cannot check or turn it, but can only drink from it while living, and commit our bodies to it when we die .”   It sounded like my father, wholly familiar.

In the last week, I have reached for old cherished reading, had my drains attended by a comforting and informative plumber and received emails from two men quite dissimilar but warm in their wish to communicate appreciation across the divide.  I know the books but I find new things them every time I look.  I did not know the plumber, his company costs the earth but always delivers while the two correspondents spoke quite differently – one in general appreciation, the other quite specifically.  For him my broadcast voice was part of the light and part of the light was its familiarity.

That glass.  You know the one, the one that we describe as half empty or half full.  Life’s glass, the image a friend offered to me at the end of an anxious, tired conversation about the ills of our world (which I am not going to list, who needs a negative incantation ?)   “And well, you know” she said “ for me, the glass is always half full.” “The glass is half empty” I said.  “I drank the first half” and we laughed.  It is very difficult to have a positive conversation without sinking into toe-curling bromides.

But I am serious.  I had a wonderful time.  Yes, I have had sorrow, defeat and loss but I have had joy, victory and gain. You will note the absence of “also” in that sentence.   The balance is kept in another place, I don’t do ledgers about life.   I mean what I say and it is still true.

One of those small decisions we live by was that I would have a desk diary.  In one sense this is ridiculous.  I no longer work beyond annalog, social life was nearly in neutral before the bug and will continue to be so.    I am not as self sufficient as some of my friends.  There are still days when I need a voice first thing in the morning as much as I need my two glasses of cold water (here’s to you, Vera Atkins, SOE).  I was absurdly and unreasonably hurt by the people who didn’t come through on the telephone during lockdown.  But then others I had not expected at all did.  It’s that glass again …

The desk diary however gives me great pleasure and with one exception, it’s been the same diary for years – Redstone Press.  One of those places you email and they reply ?   Unlike finding a gardener which took me four goes including a cold as a stone chit who told me “We don’t give advice.”  “Oh really ?” I said.  “Then why don’t we just forget the whole thing …” and then I hit a home run.  I am not being grand, I am being (gawdelpus) sensible.  If I went up a ladder to fix the honeysuckle and made a mess of it, or me, it would be one more thing for my son to cope with.

In the desk diary I put birthdays and dates of importance.   This has already paid dividends.   We are human, we like to be remembered, we like things about us to be remembered ie the anniversary of the day the big job came through, your father’s death, in my case, both parents’ birthdays, days of good omen.  I noted the death of Ho Chi Minh, Kristallnacht and Oradour, the day I saw the neurologist, sayings that appeal , the plagues of Egypt, how correctly to address Her Majesty .  All sorts of bits and pieces that need to be noted in a safe place you won’t lose, and should you need them, you will know where to look.  The Redstone diaries have wonderful written things in them and pictures, and like my cherished New Yorker date-a-day, it’s something new, inexpensive, personal and positive.

And I have discovered I may be a secret optimist because I have just bought my diary for 2021. That made me laugh at myself.  Who knows if we will even be here ?

Don’t talk to me about the new normal, another irritating slogan.  The recent normal was about as far from normal as you could get, I mean for about the last 50 years.  Greedier and greedier, less and less thoughtful, more and more synthetic.  Bound to rupture and it did.  And then “thousands of children fail to show up for school” (Times 16.09.20).   My grand daughter was at school for two days before she was sent home to isolate as a suspected Covid contact.  Normal.

It’s not my favourite word.  It has quite specific connotations.  Thrown about, it is just another buzzword.  Like “woke”.   What is normal really is to have the glass both half full and half empty at the same time.   It’s the same glass and unless you are a member of the Magic Circle, it will be the same bit that’s full – the bit you have still to get to.   Here’s to you.

Among the really not very many photographs I keep are two or three of me and Rosemary who was a first friend.  She was dark blonde with a wonderfully shaped face and when the presenter of the local television show asked me years later what I remembered about her, I could hardly say her smell but she smelt like a plant or a herb, as precise as a perfume but harder to describe.

I woke up this morning thinking of Jean Treverton – and that led to how many names I could remember from school. Jean had thick wavy dark red hair, a singing colour, and she bustled.  I even own a piece of amber the same colour, it’s in a ring and although I cracked it years ago in a large gesture that ended up banged on a metal filing cabinet, I cannot part from it.  A alcoholic Buddhist (very Western) I only met once, somebody else’s fella, said “ You keep that – for the son you are going to have “. I think of him sometimes, well wishing me down the years.

In my last radio job, a man emailed that his wife had told him she went to school with me and I joyfully wrote back “Ginger hair, white skin with freckles, her father died early, her mother had a big house on Acklam Road: one of the kindest, nicest people you could ever meet !”    And there was Maureen who wasn’t a Maureen whom we christened  Mingi – for much or very – mingi maradardi means very pretty in Swahili – because she was.

Whenever I could,  I sat with Sue Sanderson, Jean Dunn and Lesley Gill while we talked our way through a tale with no ending about four friends at a medieval court (we must have liked the head dresses) so we describe every detail of what we wore – that’s what I remember, the endless preoccupation with colour and clothes  – and little adventures, all made up for our own entertainment.  I grew up with stories, stories read and stories told, and I obviously wasn’t alone.  This was just at the time that I had begun to see films  (the first was The Barkleys of Broadway with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, the second a full length animation of Alice in Wonderland) other people had been to the Saturday morning matinees,  had older brothers and sisters in film clubs about sports and hobbies.  We were nine or ten.

I wasn’t thinking about best friends or regret at time passing.  I was just thinking who I could remember –   fair-haired Ann Simpson and Susan Milner who was tall and good at maths and Rosalie Annette Eve Kirkbright with dark curly hair, the only person in the class who, if asked her name, gave them all.  I remember the Caroles, with or without an e, Woodall and Irwin.   I remember Brenda Horsman, Helene Simon (who studied Russian – we were among the few state schools to take on a teacher of Russian), Ruth Saville and Gwendolyn Lamb.

I remember Dorothy Crosby as the only person who could put a drape into a school blazer, there was Doreen Turner and another Carole I met at the bus stop  – the first person I knew who wore stiffened petticoats every day and she introduced me to the music of Buddy Holly.  And Jennifer who hated me.

Years ago the Times Educational Supplement asked me if I would write about a favourite teacher and I couldn’t because I liked most of them and I couldn’t choose one.  So I had the great pleasure of writing about all of them.

And I think of women in the world of paid work –  Rose Phillip s the school secretary, Ellie at my first job, Avril who took me home to her family when my father died: Brenda who kept me employed longer than I might have been at the film company in Soho: Helene Kantor in New York, who made everything understandable.

I recall hands, faces, hair and voices.   I wonder if this means that they are gone to glory ?  Or just gone from my life.  Not from my memory, my sisters of the early morning smile.

“every one her own woman!”

Three boys, none of them over 18, walking single file up the other side of the street, 7.15 am, I’ve just been to get the papers.  The leader calls “Good morning, miss !” to which I reply “Good morning.”   Two more steps.  They are all black, there is a Black Lives Matter meeting scheduled.  “Are you going to the demo ?” I ask.  (Wrong word, should have said “protest”, took a moment for them to progress what I meant. Language changes.)  “Yes” replies the leader and the other two nod.  There are two girls walking behind them, in warmer coats, it’s chilly.   “God bless you” I offer.   Three big grins, “Thank you, miss, you too” and the girls smile and wave.  They walk on and I go home.  Why did I say that ?

Inspiration came from the obituary of a woman who had worked on early radar during WWIIand the loss coming out of a raid during which her boss moved her aside and called to various aircraft, without response, one after the other.  “God be with you” he signalled.  Still makes my back thrill.    What else can I wish you that’s big enough, gentle enough, disinterested enough to make you understand that at least some of the way, your walk is my walk.  We are human and some humans find any difference, visual, audial or behavioural, unsettling.  Not me.

Then there’s Hull.  Tall, 50-ish, coherent round terrible dentition, he says that’s where he comes from and I have given him modest alms for a long time now.  I prefer to give money to a person rather than a cause unless the person can embody the cause like the Salvation Army or collectors for lifeboats.  It is Saturday morning, the store is busy and there is my friend  Bertha the Battleship, tall and broad, and in the  swift greetings – she is working, I am leaving – she notices that I am fishing in my purse.  “You’re not going to give him “ she indicates with her head – “money, are you ?  Anna, please don’t he’s a dealer “ and she launched into the story which is unreasonably hurried because of where we are and muffled by her incongruous pink mask.

Bottom line, I have known Bertha for years, she has never lied to me and yes, there have been other things where I’d know, I can check.  I know where she lives and her telephone number – I can ask again.  I’ve been suckered.  How would I know he’s a dealer ?  He’s not going to wear a badge.  I have always found him surprisingly clean and well nourished for street life which is often characterised by muck and lack but I have been snowed by his address and an unwillingness to think any further.    London 2020: the dealer outside the supermarket.   I feel a fool.

While some of us (I decline to fall into the modern thing of claiming “all”)  waited with excitement for the BBC to give us another dose of JKRowling’s Strike (shrike would be better), it arrived as curate’s egg.  The tv reviewers I read are women and they both lay into a script with another “emotionally inept” male character though the actor is attractive and talented.  What about the female lead ?  A supposedly intelligent woman marries unfeasibly (not enough screen time/character development – and you’d only mess with my telephone once) in the teeth of attraction to her boss and her job, under pressure from her mother, to wind up seeing  one of a series of therapists, without insight into why the situation has caused insomnia and panic attacks.   Not as bright as you think you are, then. I like the actress but Sarah Bernhardt couldn’t convince me this character knows her elbow from the other thing.  Another ditzy leading lady, all surface, lacking substance.

There was pizza delivered down the road – if you don’t answer the door, it is left on the step, so three large, two small were all over the pavement.  I went home for my gloves, and put everything into a bag, safe from pram wheels and dogs and discovered foxes don’t eat olives. They had happily torn at the edges and the middle but olives are not vulpine pick of the week.  It quite cheered me.

I know that having half your face covered doesn’t make it any easier but I am not going to give up being as positive, polite and agreeable as I can.  And so far, so good.  Last week it took me three goes to convince the West Indian driver of a bus that he just done a splendid piece of driving , negotiating  his heavy clumsy vehicle with about 4 inches clear on each side, past a double decker vehicle carrier on one side and the usual collection of hurried drivers spilling into an imaginary third lane on the other.   Appreciation is the opposite of spilt milk – never wasted.  When I finally got through to said driver that I wasn’t complaining, I was complimenting him – he beamed.

With or without a mask I am aware that I have always communicated or tried to communicate in any way I could.  I got through 9 days in the Italian backcountry with vivid face, hands, eyes and five words of Italian, ten years’ holidays in Crete with pantomime and no more Greek, same thing. I am not resistant to learning languages, there are always reasons. 

Voiceover remains one of the most exciting things I was ever asked to do professionally because the producer’s voice in your ear asks you for colour, warmth, speed etc as precisely as a conductor, only moving on when he or she gets what’s wanted.   It’s a long way from that dreadful hokey long skirt and wooden beads whisper employed by some female presenters.   You colour the voice.   And that colour goes out from your voice across the gap into the ears you’re trying to reach, one set or many.

Voices are like faces, there are some you cannot like.  Man, woman or variant, there’ s the occasional person to whom I abreact – blame my mother, she was just the same.  “I want to hear Frank Sinatra” she said contentiously “I don’t want to see him.”   Or Cliff Richard. Or Clark Gable or Marlene Dietrich.  I don’t want to see or hear Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman or Warren Beatty to name but three.   I don’t know what the recoil is about.  I could hypothesise but who cares ?  There are just some people …

The man in charge of the door at my local supermarket is either deeply involved in his telephone in which case you could come in stark naked with your mask as a pubic banner and he wouldn’t notice – or he’s so on the case, he can’t wait to forbid you to step over the threshold before the mask has gone hand to face.    The job is boring and I know it is.  I have drawn breath, narrowed my eyes and my nostrils over him for some time – long  before I had to negotiate him as the Keeper of the Gate – but masked, my sneer is concealed, you cannot hear my clear voice muttering.  And I do love a mutter, saying some unfavourable aside out of the corner of your mouth. It is the most positive thing I can say about the mask.

How much you can see of the face is of course limited, a limitation added to by spectacles, hair or veiling.   But there is intention involved here too. Wearing a mask pushes the face into shadow, covers the mouth so the expression of it cannot be seen and makes the whole face less accessible.    So people will wear their masks and withdraw still further from any social interaction.  I freely admit I fear this.

When I was younger, you offered greetings (“hello”, a time of day “good morning”)  and added all sorts of  I suppose formulaic but pleasant nothings “nice day “, “keeping well ?” “haven’t seen you for ages, how are you ?”  It bridged the gap between people.   I remember this beginning to fall away and I made a conscious decision: not me.   I would continue to use that skill the best way I could.  Of course there are shortfalls – a girl glared at me the other day so savagely I should be pushing up daisies.  But I am not.  Exchange for the joy of speaking is not yet taxed, and you need not be muffled by a mask.    

Like many of us, I can only take so much “news” at the moment.   In an interview with Professor Karol Sikora, a noted cancer specialist (The Times 22.08.2020) he says that, as every resource was thrown at Covid, we must expect a terrible falling away ,because people simply haven’t been able to get to their doctors to be examined or diagnosed, to be helped in the maintenance of where their cancer is up to.   And while the subject of cancer is always emotive, it isn’t the only thing that couldn’t happen.

Given that the subject of health is always personal, I couldn’t get eye tests for five months. More frighteningly, a radio friend with several parallel complex conditions went through months of negotiation to be invited to a specialist clinic online, where different aspects of her illnesses would be considered at the same time.  Her medications were changed, a big deal. She abreacted.  Last Friday marked a week since a doctor said he would come back to her and hadn’t.  He can’t feel a thing.

When we began to use email instead of letters and texts (even faster), it might reasonably be assumed that a line of acknowledgement that you were still waiting to hear might not be too much to hope for.  Huh.

With the adoption of those aspects of technological advance came new power games, new manners, new avoidances.  The last time I was approached to contribute to a documentary earlier this year, I knew that I wasn’t what the producer wanted so at the end of the conversation I said “Look: I have no investment in this.  You want me ? You want me.  You don’t ?  You don’t.  Just drop me a line and let me know.”  Not a word.   Nobody wants to say no thank you in case it sounds like rejection. Oh, tosh.  Let me introduce you to the real world: you get rejected.  We all have levels of it we can stand, and those that are too much to bear.  Some of us have choice in the matter.   But the lack of communication has grown exponentially in parallel with the means of communication.  I am sure the doctor my friend was waiting to hear from is busy.  How busy, that you can’t find five minutes ?

I don’t have much hope of the present government.  They have a majority but that’s all they have.  It is held that “nobody” could have anticipated Covid-19.  I think this is inaccurate but give them the benefit of the doubt.   I want to take them all and teach them how better to speak in public.   Most of their pronouncements blend the sloganizing of Mr. Cummings with the evasion of  Westminsterism. It is not attractive and it sells large numbers of us desperately short.  They don’t know what they are saying because they try – and often succeed – in saying nothing.  And we suspect they are saying nothing because we don’t understand what they are saying  – and then they change it anyway.

I know it is much easier to complain than to praise and it is much much easier for journalists.  You can have a lot of fun with a knocking piece.   But it is interesting who has begun to complain of the government.   A military historian slightly to the right of Genghis Khan calls this a “lapdog cabinet” because you can only be in it if you agree.  Whatever happened to healthy exchange ?   A respected columnist writes that government confusion has aggravated the despair over Covid.  And then a man further right than either of them has written a “who’s minding the store ?” piece coming to the conclusion that Boris only wanted to be PM in title, “the point of winning the election was to win. When it came to actually governing, he packed his tent.”  He isn’t even there when he’s there.   Oh great.  Governed by virtual reality, a ghost in the machine.

P.S.  I knew it, I knew it.  I knew that as soon as I remarked on 160 “likes”, one would drop off so whoever pushed the figure back up- thank you.

When I read about somebody with millions of followers on Twitter or something, I think it’s just a modern take on public relations – whether it’s Jim the Twister physio or the real Donald Trump if there is such a thing, the Big Orange Nightmare.  So when annalog likes climbed to 100, I was excited.  But the figure now stands at 160 and I have just done a jig in the garden.  Thank you, all of you, all those who have written and all those who have read annalog.

It was agreed from the beginning that annalog would be as it is – no PR, no social media, stand or fall.  The other day, when I was talking to Bunslove (sweet toothed friend) he remarked “there was nowhere for people to talk.” A couple of days later, another quite different person echoed him.  And AZO (All Zoomed Out) appears to a coming indisposition, if not quite a mental problem.  (Am I the only person who finds this terminology oddly dated – like the Victorians covering piano legs with frills in case “nice” women were embarrassed ?)

The need to talk is not met by annalog, well only somewhat, tone rather than talk, aided and abetted by those who want to read something that sounds as if it comes from a person not a committee.   We’d do better on radio but then beggars can’t be choosers.  And no, not podcasts, because that still wouldn’t offer the one thing that is invaluable and that is exchange.

Podcast is like mobile phones, everybody’s doing it, but that doesn’t make it right or good – it just means that’s what is available.  And this morning I read my first “chip” at The Times podcasts (which I have never listened to) but I bet it’s right – the inability to pause and punctuate.

The numbers and the desperate need to mark this up as better or bigger or higher or more fabulous than that get in the way.  What we need is contact and contact at this Covid moment is in short supply.

I don’t think it would fix everything.  I think Covid has frightened the bejasus out of a lot of us in quite a subliminal way which many of us would prefer to deny or dismiss, but significant numbers have just begun to face as evidence of the outcome, as surely as antibodies and not quite tested enough vaccines.  We’ve always said man was a social animal.  It is now increasingly difficult to put together notions of sociability and safety.

Safety is like beauty – it is in the eye of the beholder.  There is currently a big soft dark dry stain in the corner of my bedroom which is under the terrace of the upstairs flat.  It is possible that some moisture has got through the skin between the floor of the terrace and my roof.  It is possible that I have been the recipient of unexpected muck via the airbrick in that corner,  though I do clean, honest I do.   What is sure – rather than possible – is how unsafe this makes me feel.

I imagine the roof falling in, a row with the owner to obtain repair, the expense of redecoration – and then I think of 300,000 people homeless on the streets of Beirut, many more on the streets of the United States – with a desperate lack of basic sanitation which will lead to infection in short order.  I think of migrants trying to cross the Channel from France in the belief that the UK will be better. And how badly that is being dealt with. I think of children separated from parents, I think of the falling away of all that was known in the desperate desire to escape from all that is dangerous. That safety isn’t my safety.  I am shamed.

One of the reasons I so loved Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me is because the writer  sees her job as a teacher to find language again for kids who have been silenced by terrible events.   Language doesn’t feed you or put a roof over your head (even one with a questionable stain) but it does give you some aspects of yourself.  And without a sense of self you can’t fight loneliness,ill health, unemployment, homelessness, loss and the massive change all around us.

picture by Kostya Pazyuk