Category Archives: Uncategorized

When my son was in a push chair we  took him to Crete

for holiday  where we had been before and Sonia Dioxinadis moved heaven, earth and chicken to turn up with a dozen  eggs overed with bits of grass and hay.  “From the farm” she said.  “Not the store !”  That’s a gift and don’t say  – but it’s only small.   Who’s measuring ?

I gave my mother her first cashmere one Christmas.  She muttered something  and took the dog out rather quickly.  I was a bit  dashed.  When she came back I was in the kitchen,  ministering to food, and she came and put her arms round me  from behind, whispering almost awed in my ear “I am wearing  cashmere – and my daughter gave it to me !”   Forget jewels.

There are people  who don’t know what to do, to respond to gifts.  They say thank you and the day  goes on.   There are people who don’t know how to give them or how to receive them.   Of course you can save up and buy a luxury, but it is often imagination – or even chance – that makes a gift. 

Last night was the end of an era. 

The Boys – three young men who came to lodge in James’s stepmother’s flat five years ago –  have moved on to the next stage – Harry to girlfriend, James to girlfriend and AJ staying with girlfriend.   I did not go and say a collective goodbye having said a quieter one to  both the men concerned.  And when I thank ked Harry for all their kindnesses and considerations, he said  “ But Anna, it’s mutual.   I never had a good neighbour before”   which meant so much to me, I  wrote it down.

(I have always written things down and sometimes even that doesn’t help me to negotiate self centredness and  Swiss Cheese Syndrome ie holes in  memory.) 

And today he topped it.  He arrived with a book and a card in which he has written all the nice things you might expect, having some social grace.  Though Harry is a velvet glove over a steel fist – I recognize it and I think it will serve him well.  We sat in the kitchen while he drank a glass of water and told me about his promotion.  All three of them lefthanded, he wrote his name and his new address in the book and I promised him a Christmas card.

So little is free nowadays that you can’t wonder at the success of a book about raising a leveret

by Albrecht Durer

and returning it to the wild (Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton), more goodwill than money, with more attention paid to the animal and its history, the weather and the vegetation than anything else.

Gathering  to moan about this or that may be a negative gift perhaps but a gift.  It’s free.   People say talk’s cheap  but if it makes you feel better, it’s beyond price and it’s not cheap in this house.

I prefer to call talk , exchange 

by Hedwig Oehring

because that’s the gift for me ie I tell you and you tell me  or the other way round.  Benign verbal tennis.   I don’t know why  the sound of the spoken voice became so important to me  – but I recognize where it falls short. There is a term in opera for a single singer half speaking, half singing over a narrow range of notes – recitative – and we have all been on the end of those.  Worse still, you can offer suggestions and advice which are shoved aside by the leviathan of lonely complaint.   Not everything can be fixed but quite a lot can be ameliorated.  Not interested.  Callers used to tell me their story over and over,  as if repetition would magically fix it. And it didn’t.  Thank heaven, not many of those.

There are gifts that come and go, and gifts that remain, tangible and intangible.  Gifts that smile or bring a smile to the face  unexpectedly.   Like the print of Victorian household  machines from a Mrs. Beeton book – she advised on all domestic arts as well as cookery – my son gave me when he was 12.  It has the air of beloved memory round it.  Given.

The only person I have known who smelt wonderful in Chanel Five

was my sister.  I smelt like  enthusiastic dog vis a vis lamppost.   I can’t remember – was  I more crushed or more embarrassed ?  Anyway, never again.   A wistful niff  in the bottle promised  like the lure of the sirens but I left it there.

When I spoke about something  two or three weeks hence, my mother would say “Don’t wish your life away” . I didn’t understand then, I do now. When I was so  wipeout ill at Christmas last – a benchmark of all sorts for me – I had to reevaluate me and time.  “Time masters you” said my father.  “You don’t master time.”   Where I was then, you enter time.

Like a mood or a building –  to learn anew. And if that’s the image in your mind, it lingers.

This Sunday morning, so enjoying the preceding evening with  Joan Hickson as the definitive Miss Marple (BBC4), I permitted myself to look at the tv programme for next Saturday to find yes, more  of my Marple but also an episode of Beck. 

   Chickens will not be counted before they are hatched.  It may be cancelled for something  like a pop concert or an  netball championship … You see, it’s always personal.

Not another whinge about  tv scheduling, the Karate Kid on a loop, segments of Midsummer Murders so old they have whiskers and can only have sedative value but I forbear. That’s not what I want and it’s always personal.

I shall not complain again about quiz shows

and how not to make documentaries because it is always personal but so is paying a licence fee for the unwatchable and the endlessly repeated.  A correspondent to my favourite  tv column remarked that the BBC was charging us for programmes  already made and shown (x 6 !) which was financially questionable.  

I forbear to  bitch and moan about  wildlife programmes which feature the presenters in preference to the beasts.   I shall not attitudinise about the style of  some  (not all ) documentaries, the  lack of curiosity which must drive their making  – up to and including questions asked and not answered to keep the flow of bitesized bits moving (Channel 5’s The Secret Life of Trees).  It’s always personal.

Pam the Painter and I discovered the difference in our tastes long ago and she described in detail a recent visit to Dungeness

(look it up)  as  fascinating and made it so for me in the telling.   She is unlikely to watch  BBC’s European editor  Katya Adler  (pause for  cheers ) interviewing  Germany’s former Chancellor Mrs. Merkel – but she listens to me explaining why  I was so interested, my interpretation presumably doing for her what hers does for me.   It’s always personal.

Levels of toleration and interpretation in the evocation of style and period varies.  I remember Wal ringing to inveigh about the china in Downton Abbey – “ how could they ?”   Well, he was a Thomas Goode’s expert and I remember walking into a French museum with a  room of full of china on the right  about which he knew a great deal.  Other people’s expertise seizes the imagination.

 I like my  detectives to be more involved in people than guns.   I accept the idea of guns, and the other day I saw  a bit of a Western I have never seen (The Big Trail , directed by Raoul Walsh in 1930 – not a typo – with a backstory at least as fascinating as the cinematography and the first named appearance of  a 23 year old John Wayne, long on  masculine beauty and short on mannerisms) – I was really delighted – something new in the antique department. 

The French language Maigret on TPTV is a joy in professional integrity  (casting, script, story, period and location) but I accept – it’s always personal.

And as I said to the  very helpful woman  at Barclaycard (lost and had to be stopped) five calls in with endless “just call our app” , “if you take my money the old fashioned way, you can help me when I get into old fashioned difficulty and no AI can do what you’ve just done, thank you so much “ – it’s always personal.      

With the world spinning out of control, I feel badly to be writing something lighthearted but hark back to something within my remit. Everybody else I knew  got their first bra’s from Marks & Spencers.  

My mother had an account at Lockeys in Middlesbrough and  she took me there, to a curtained alcove, where a kindly woman brought things and we chose a Silhouette.  When it washed satisfactorily, another was collected and then – oh the sophistication ! – I acquired bought a Kayser Bondor.   I looked the name up on Google – first place in the UK to manufacture nylon stockings.   So the pattern was set.   I was not big or small or special in the bosom department, so my bras were ordered alongside my mother’s  cherished boxes of Aristoc stockings.

When I came to London on my  17^th birthday I shared a flat  in Earls Court, moving eventually to one half  of a double room in South  Kensington.   On the curve just opposite South Kensington tube station was a shop called Elegante which sold just what I wanted.  I never had drawersful though I did once have a matching minislip and pants in black cotton printed with tiny flowers which I thought was the biz, even if nobody saw it but me.

The pattern was set.  I bought bras infrequently, washed them by hand, dripped them dry.  The pattern of  pants was set too – white cotton, medium size, hold the decoration.   I didn’t buy often, I bought carefully (the aforementioned  minislip and pants cost £25 ! which took a while to work off.  No card, no credit, not much money ).

Underwear in the US where I went at 19 was  revealing ie lots of stuff I didn’t want. 

So I wrote to my mother to ask her to get me what I knew worked and send it to me.  I have still a  letter from home – one from her, one from my father, same envelope in which he says  “ Your bra hasn’t come in yet – mummy will send it  next week – hope you can hold out till then.”   Eventually I found what I wanted Stateside so there was only this one instance

I love to look at lacy pretty frilly  but I do feel a fool wearing it. A new  shop in Kings Road, Chelsea offered a set in dark green lace

and I thought how my sister would have loved it.

Once back in London, I continued to buy my  36B at a variety of small shops or specialized counters – until even a “good” model left me looking decidedly lopeared.  And I was earning well so  I went (never shall I forget it) to the famous Rigby and Peller,  known for underwear and making  swimsuits  for the famous including Princess Margaret.

In R&P, I tried on several much more expensive models  the same size with no more success and said so to the estimable Marie who was tall and heavy and the only person in my whole life before or since to call me “modom.”  Just once.  Made my day.  She asked me to face the mirror and I did so, naked to the waist.  She disappeared and came back with three bras.  I tried on one and was transformed.  The other two did similar magic.  “What have you done ?” I demanded.  “34, double D fitting” she explained.  “Bigger cupsize.”  

I bought all three and remained a devoted customer till I wasn’t working.

A delightful Russian girl I only saw once fitted me with Wacoal (Japanese) in Fenwicks and as those have aged, I took a deep breath and talked to Denning who  does unpaid PR for M&S, where  I am intimidated by the numbers of everything.  But last week, I walked in to find exactly what I wanted but not my size.  Sizes vary so I took the next best thing and with the help of two delightful salespersons and Sue the fitter, tried it on, no I needed the size I thought I needed, come back when restocked.   Wacoal on the phone had a bad line and a bad attitude.  Peter Jones stock some of the range but said the assistant, “I can’t help you, I don’t know it.” And Ginny and I both knew Liz Truss was a wrong ‘un before people lost money.  No woman of wit  appears on national television with a bra as bad as that.  First rule of  live performance – hair and underpinning.  I’m off  to M&S.   

Yesterday (our meeting postponed by various occurrences on her side and mine) my son’s partner gave me a scented candle she had bought for my birthday three months ago.  I am not big on the idea but encounter them individually.  She and her older daughter conferred about what the smell reminded them of and mentioned a town in Sicily

where they had lived.  It is the  last name of an old  friend .

This morning I read an interview with James Ellroy whose troubles haven’t derailed his talent, and there was a paragraph about his most recent book (The Enchanters) which features “a real life Hollywood private eye “ whom I had  brief but meaningful acquaintance with at the beginning of my determination for any job other than secretarial.   I still shrug away from the word journalist because I remember years in which I was told over and over again that I wasn’t really a journalist.   I have never known what that meant, what I tried to do and failed at, by other people’s reckoning.    It shook me.  I don’t think I thought I was a journalist but I think I thought I was trying for what we might call the hoop – some sort of acknowledged working role.  

This morning I couldn’t write.   I pushed ideas around in my head, like unexplained items with the toe of your shoe.   I could plead the heat. I was stupefied.  I wasn’t going to meet anybody on the bus because nobody rode a bus in London who didn’t have to – they are airless   I didn’t have to work. There is no deadline, no boss.    I do it because I do it.  Unlike the wonderfully talented  caricaturist Quentin Crewe who draws almost like breathing,  I don’t write all the time, I talk preparatory to writing.

Every so often somebody asks why don’t I do a book about … and you have only to look at the  background to The Salt Path to know why I don’t.   It’s 20 years plus since I met with a publisher and while of course there are exceptions and generalisations are pretty meaningless, it’s only got worse.   There is no book I would go through for that.   We publish far too many books a year – think about the trees and the paper! – and I don’t want to publish tosh.

Today is the birthday of Simone Veil,

one of my few heroes.   Now, that’s a life.    I suppose it is inevitable that as you get older you wish occasionally that you had done more and better – though sadly to do better in media requires commitment by the people round you – and it may not be there, colleagues or employers.

Most of the time I am passionately grateful for the life I have had, professional and personal. For the most part, I can look my shortcomings in the face.  I ask other people to do it, it’s only fair that I should do it too – though that attitude to life inevitably leads sometimes to doubt and even despair.   Some people can’t live like that – I learned that late but I learned it.

I could tell you about what I am reading … but then not everybody is as in love with the printed word as me.  And you can only talk to people when you can talk to them.   I have to make that happen for you by a combination of sweat and the grace of heaven we call writing. 

The connections fascinate me, like the town of Lipari and the fixer Fred Otash, with which I began.  Then I have to make them interesting if not fascinating for you and today, I don’t think I can.

By next week, I shall have had the first of two important appointments (they were all important) at Moorfields Eye Hospital.   Perhaps we shall be able to breathe and I shall have lived through doubt long enough to try again.

Readers have always surprised me by what they do and don’t respond to.  A lot of people are away on holiday and I enjoy feedback which means I suppose that I am terribly old fashioned: I prefer the illusion of dialogue to the desperation of “putting it out there”.  If that’s for you, it’s for you.  I will try again next week.    

…oops! My ‘wonderful hands’ is going away and I shall not be filing until the beginning of the week commencing 28^th July.  Just think, I may recover!

First on a personal note:

No, MB

Not AR, not PM , not ever

Can’t reply  – computer ate your details.  Do get in touch.  (ends)

On a train  many years ago the practical sensible “put your money where your mouth is” activist Lesley Abdela asked  if I had thought about politics.  I was torn between being flattered that someone who clearly knew what she was about would mention such a thing, and recoil.   It’s a long time ago and I don’t remember what I hope was a graceful reply.   Me in politics came up a couple of other times. 

The best answer I ever gave was to a young man in an audience somewhere along  the line when I worked for Cosmopolitan.  “I’m in politics” I said.   “Anything to do with people is to do with politics.  From the Greek – polis – a people state.”   

Not party politics. 

I look at the last lot from Cameron to  Sunak, each with their strengths as well as weaknesses, and think  that it must be mandatory to  study the high wire.    And if the monied Truss had the grace and imagination of a cardboard box, she  would  donate or hand back the PM’s pension she doesn’t deserve or need.  Starmer is having a hard time – well that’s the difference between  knowing something should be done and hating how it is implemented.  He is in politics, not popularity.    Speak As You Find (see title).

Usually , if you say you’re going to call the council, whoever you’re with shakes a wise head patiently and says “Don’t expect too much.”  And I expected nothing. 

Desperate with lack of response from the neighbouring landlord,  I rang the local town hall.

Fully automated, not a human.  So I  searched and I found the section I was looking for  and  – eureka ! – an email address.  I wrote a brief letter of appeal.  It was acknowledged with a signature  to which I rereplied saying “Don’t leave this – this is a way of doing things” and the addressee turned up at the behest of his manager, took pictures, asked questions, checked.  I was so grateful.   SAYF.

When I grew up, there was the BBC and, barring Radio Luxemburg, that’s what there was,  And I was longtime loyal.  You have read me criticise what the news coverage has become – alongside that fact that only one member of current Cabinet I have seen presents well on camera – and Glastonbury  is not for me, nor Oasis or a dozen other things.

And if I wonder about who thought about  what acts were booked and why at Glastonbury, I presume all question was subsumed into “it’ll be all right”, “might cause a bit of stir”  and profit.

My friend Buns (a longer life than mine in various aspects of broadcasting) thinks the right to protest is sacrosanct and if you don’t like it, turn off.

Bearing in mind how it was set up, what happened was predictable.   But there was no broadcasting contingency plan (as in Broadcasting Buck and Cover).  

Five years ago before the seat of Director General was offered to Tim Davie, a wiser head than mine suggested forcefully that it was an impossible job,

which should by run by two people.   I disagree with two, which leads immediately to factions – but three, a triumvirate – yes.   Then there is always somebody to give a casting vote.  As it is, nothing we have heard (remember, it’s your BBC ! they say) from sordid Savile onwards demonstrates decision.  It demonstrates avoidance, moving here, saying there, leaving a little time, when in doubt have a meeting., publicise the findings – that makes us really feel better !

There is at least as much  problem in British business in management as in workforce.   And the BBC like the  NHS is overprovided with middle management ie far too many people with vested interests, reporting just so much to somebody  else and then waiting for suitable action.   What we might call The Unstoppable  Buck. 

And this in  weary parallel with scheduling that leaves you going for a walk or reaching for a book.    Yes, such choices are always personal.   But at the moment there isn’t much choice.

Hence SAYF.   

Suddenly 

a columnist whom you have basically distrusted or disagreed with down the years  says something with which you wholly agree.     I used to get communications which began “ I don’t always agree with you  but at least I know you’ll tell  me the truth” – and none of that  “your truth, my truth” thing  which is really about perception.  You see what you see and it means what it means.   Yes, of  course, personal taste, experience, upbringing  –  but they come later.   How restful to have a clear statement.

I can’t make the  national political situation or international unrest (admitted and/or implied) uplifting.   We are in a long dark corridor and I hope to God there is a door to the light at the end of it.

How many times am I going to be told about  or read about new homes, “affordable housing”, (affordable to whom ?), building on green belt –  when I cannot remember an insight into  how much stuff is standing vacant|?   Surely we should be able to rule against anything standing empty longer than a year – mandatory to sell after that ?   What about what can be fixed ?  Yes, I know  mending and making do is only on the periphery of fashion as a current concept  but until  it is public knowledge that we haven’t got enough housing,

I question it.

The dependence created by the NHS cripples it.   Going to the doctor or to the hospital ?   What about going to bed ?   Numbers is not just a book of the Bible.   It is the problem – numbers in school, numbers in hospital, numbers besieging every  facility to the detriment of function.  

What happened to personal responsibility and  common sense ?  Yes, you can pat my head and say  wonderingly “Poor old dear !” but until we begin to think less about who will do what for us and what can do for ourselves, scupperdom  comes  ever closer.

A BBC producer wrote to invite me to take part in a programme to discuss failure.  We arranged to speak and I began to think.  I looked up a thesaurus of quotations.  No women on failure – only men.  And then I sat down and thought.   Failure has not been something to which I have given a lot of attention.   I was focused on survival, figure the terms out afterwards.   And I thought about how this attitude was formed.  Home and the 11 Plus exam.  Me worrying about it (I had missed a lot of school through illness) and  the  “pass or fail” thing.   I was taught” Pass or fail is for exams, not for life.” And I asked myself –  flat question, forget the qualifications and circumstance – at what had I failed ? 

by Rochelle Dulay Razon

And answered:   marriage and contraception.

So that’s what I said to the producer when he rang.  He asked what I meant.  I explained – two marriages , both ended in divorce – and abortion.  No good being evasive and saying contraceptive failure. And we went on from there.  

The system under which we live is as deeply  imperfect

as any other though it has its pluses as well as defaults.  And it has long been our way nationally  to let somebody else make the decision and then complain about it.   We have  above all else too many people who evade work – it seems they can always get money from  somewhere – and people who do work and aren’t paid enough on which to survive.             

This isn’t a generational Dunkirk (look it up).

We are avoiding the scale of what is implied and threatening us.  The will is there but the machinery is  too cumbersome.   Sometimes inclusive is too expensive.   I don’t want another  person of dual nationality who commits a ghastly crime interned int British prisons.  Strip of them of our nationality and send them home.  There aren’t many and they cost us a fortune in prison.    Make it a condition of living here that you speak discernible English (loads of us waiting to help you learn)  and have  a qualification.   And close the gates for  say a year while we figure out how to stop the islands sinking,  literally or metaphorically. 

I don’t know anything about Bruce Springsteen

except odd bits of music, the profile and the wonderful “stand up and be counted” riff in the face of Trump and what he represents.   And I don’t know anything about Johnny Depp except that he has a face which has been used by an industry

which  does that: chooses a  face, builds what is now called a brand round it  – and devil take the hindmost.  It works for you – great.  It doesn’t ?    Good luck with that, bottomless supply of faces.   I never underestimated the price of fame from my twenties when I was told that something I had written could make a hit  and asked “Do you know what that involves ?”    And it was spelt out.  

I had no great insight, I just didn’t go further.   When recognition came, I was doing something I could do.  I did it well,  apparently it worked for a lot of other people and  I had a shape to my life which enabled me to keep going, learn, limit and appreciate.  

I was propped up by all sorts of lucky breaks, starting with my parents (two  lone gun loners if ever there were) who imbued  me with a profound sense of self.   I didn’t access this insight easily or quickly, it was ongoing and still is – but I bless them. 

The  Institute of Group Analysis advised me that I either dominated the group or the group dominated me.  One on one would be more helpful.   Thank you.  I am as fascinated by  groups as wary of them.  Sometimes, one is all it takes – to change minds, to give you an insight, to change the course of history, to  overcome and make change.   Change is another big little word.

Most of us fear change, whether it’s BT or banking.   Wisest thing I was ever taught about change is that it will come. 

Better to face it than try to build a wall against it.  Walls tumble and bricks fall on your toe.

You can’t blame the decline of a nation on one thing, there are  contributory factors but one of th things that gives me the creeps about  where we are now is the avoidance of benign individuality  – your face, your nose, your wrinkles, your heroes, your health, you as an entity.   So  the rise of fat injections at the same time as the decline in helpful vaccines is fascinating if depressing.  I don’t want any child to be ill with measles.  Unchecked it is a harmful killer – see in the US right now.   And  today I read for the first time of the negatives of weight loss by injection ie face falls.   Well, I could have told you that.   Which will mean more injections of course.  Lucrative. 

This week’s experience of  my “one” was a Tuesday night wracked with  anxiety

about the landlord of the flat next door, long story, won’t bore you but Buns issued the rallying call-  the Party Wall Act.  And on Wednesday morning I spoke severely to myself “- Come on, you’re a big girl, you can do this”, and did what I feared to do.  I read on line.  I found a group who would refer me to Party Wall surveyors in my area, I could ask advice so I filled out the form and I waited, secure in the knowledge that I can deal with the phone.

A man rang and asked if he could help  me, stating his name, all his details and his relevant experience (he said 15 years, thousands of clients ). I asked permission to give him background and when I referred to afore mentioned landlord, I called him a toad. (Sorry, toads.)   “Why ?”  he asked.  I replied “A man who thinks women are a lower form of life.”  “I bite them” he said and when I laughed, he added “and if I don’t Henry (NHN) would.”   I asked  who was Henry ?  “Miniature dach” he said.  “Don’t go anywhere without him. “  After a few more sentence he said “Look, money aside. Let me draft this letter for you, you’ll OK it, we’ll send it on my bells and whistles stationery and let’s see.   And if you need muscle, I’d be delighted.”   And that’s what he did.   One.          

Our hero

stands in one of those odd suits – wide legs, long jacket, mile wide reveres – looking out at the lights of the city below and as the door opens, he turns to meet his fate and says “Hello, beautiful.”    Or he leaves her to a far far better man and touches his (inevitable for the period) hat  saying “’Bye, beautiful.”   Beautiful is not a word you hear much now and if Andrew Tate is inspiring young men, you can understand why. 

There are all sorts of  beauties – of youth or age or light, colour or concept or gesture – as well as what the dictionary calls “a combination of qualities that delights the aesthetic senses.”    But it is not often offered as a pleasantry.  Perhaps  beauty is too formal, too demanding, too (get ready for this) gender specific, though I think beauty just is.. 

Which takes us smartly back to what  you or I think of as beauty  – even the implication of it being in the eye of the beholder.   

The two best things  Lily (NHN) ever did for me  was to send me  a goldstone heart  and a Turkish proverb :”A heart in love with beauty never grows old.”  It’s not so much that I look for it as recognize it in my own terms when I see it – and hold myself free to comment.

A man came down the aisle of the bus, great jacket, crisp jeans, etc and oddly becoming spectacle frames.   As he sat down beside me, I said “I’m so glad you sat down there, now I can tell you how attractive those glasses are.”   He looked at me and thanked me.  “I always notice glasses” I explained.  “Worn them since I was eight.”  

He talked  quietly – you know how you think some people are shy ? It doesn’t stop them doing anything but it costs. And he made several references to changing his life and doing things before he was too old.    So I asked.  He looked at me and said very quietly “62”.   I thought he was in his late forties and said so.    (aside:  I have learned long ago – better an unexpected truth than an anticipated  evasion).  We talked (I think chat is a four letter word.)  I’d say his appearance was harmonious, what I call almost beautiful – no mean compliment.  My mother was almost beautiful.

Having  taken leave of him, I walked up to where  a number of people had gathered in a sort of pool for the next bus I wanted and waited.  At the back was  a man – middle height, middle age, ordinary clothes, glasses and I grinningly extended my left arm to the bus, saying to him as we drew level “Beauty before age”. I know, it’s a reversal of  “age before beauty” but he grinned and waved me forward.  

The journey was lit by sun, I saw a Swedish neighbour and two other women I know by sight, all of us uplifted by the clearing of the cloud and momentary ease. My back was to the glass partition, round which  the man from the  queue put his head before he got off.    “’Bye, beautiful” he said.   As I turned with delight, he waved from the pavement, he kissed his hand, I kissed mine.   Less a truth than an invocation – oh the power of words. 

I am horrified  by tweaks and fillers and Botox, just as wary as  at the constant bombardment of images and being like somebody else.  And young men

are currently more likely to footle around with all this stuff  than young women.  So the procedure isn’t about what it does but how it make you feel about yourself.   And at an estimated £200 a pop, it’s our old friend “Because I’m worth it” – an insecurity  exploited by the burgeoning men’s beauty  business.  So I read delightedly  of a Dutch university  where research indicated that if you want to be more attractive – smile.   And again, you can’t fake it.  Most of us recognize that upward swing of the lips while the eyes stay unmoved as not a smile at all.             

Such  courage and joy did those two men  give me, I hope it was mutual.  And thus,  I walked  much further, quietly, in and out of places I didn’t know, my heart  eased that in this sad old bad old world, there is still room for the beholder, and beauty.

Sadly, no copy this week courtesy of BT (copper line fault). Till we meet again…

Do you think of Granny with her tomatoes?  Or – not telling – often something deeply important – big, bad, ugly?   And when you do – because you blurt it out or plan to tell this person or that person?   And not open to everybody but unbottling on media  with the illusion you are telling ”everybody” ? With no guarantee of how people – the person opposite, the chosen person or people in general will react?   End of control.  Silence broken.

A woman spoke about being raped.  She was 16 or so at the time, and told nobody.   She knew nothing about me, there was no reason why she should tell me.  I am certainly not the first person she told. Now in her early fifties, there are good things and bad in her life (as in everybody’s life). Is this is some kind of test?  that she tells you about the formative power of this experience and her response to it, deciding then if she wants to get to know you. I was mostly unknown to her – anybody can check on line…  And although occasionally I was part of the conversation we came back to her. Over several hours, the shadow over her life.

Chef Jamie Oliver is now very emotional about what a bad time he had at school with  undiagnosed dyslexia. 

In spite of all his successes, personal and professional, this is the thing he  took  unto himself,  kept quiet about and worked against, and now wants to talk about .  You wonder what the process was, that got him tested, let alone ready to speak.   Except most of us  hanging on to something  come to realise – better out than in, even if you have several goes at  getting it out to somebody who understands  

And memory plays an unsettling role. A 74 year old surgeon abused hundreds of children in Western and Central France between 1989 and 2014.   |One of them, now in his 30s, then a 13 year old boy, was suddenly   sent a summons to the police station and discovered there were notebooks, names, records on line …  The trauma he had buried so deeply he didn’t remember it  got in the way of his development.  And not surprisingly when it came to light, he had a major crisis.  Few have chosen to be named or speak on the record.   Another young man abused at the same time, discovered it or suspected it earlier, using drink and drugs to bottle it up until he died.  So you don’t know what you are locking away. 

You only know there is something, some shadow impeding you, something wrong.  Pain. And the fear about acknowledging the shadow, the block, the problem – because you may get it wrong, point a finger at the wrong person.  

So bottling risks becoming a trade off between your flawed life and another person’s flawed if not destructive behaviour. 

Acknowledging a problem is like throwing a pebble in a pool, worse if it is serious and of longstanding..  The ripples spread outward and may involve all sorts of other people.   For example, your child has a skill but pushes and pushes and pushes (Jamie Oliver).  Of course you accept it, it’s just him.  But maybe – and then it is later discovered – there is an impetus.  A neurotic driver.   I am sure I did not have the career I might have had because of what my careers mistress called “different life goals”  ie  I wanted a life.  

I wanted something like my parents’ life I learned painfully that I was not either one of my parents.  My opportunities and choices were different.  But my period of working all the hours God sent was quite short.           

And I had parents from the very beginning who told me always to tell them.   How do you feel if your child now an adult says “I couldn’t tell you”?   And time passing prejudices what has happened.  Never easy, it becomes more complicated. 

I am not keen on the present glamour of the confessional, but it will be useful to somebody.  We used to call trying against all odds “the grit in the oyster” adding “no grit? no pearl.” High price to pay.