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You know where it comes from ie the doctor hits just below your knee with a surgical tool and the reflex jerks the leg out below in a kind of kick. (Please don’t try this at home with a sledge hammer.)   It has come to mean when something plays into what I might call the top of the mind and we respond too fast and often, ill advisedly.   The actor Matt Damon

was quoted as saying he stays away from twitter because he is the sort of person who would respond one way and communicate that, then reflect and regret it – by which time (twitch time?) whatever it is has gone half way round the world.

One day this week I went up the road in the windy dark and as I rounded the corner, I felt I had stepped into a terrifying silent film. I could hardly see the soundless figure, black on black, there were distended eyes in a wrecked face. There was shock – the man didn’t expect me anymore than I expected him – and my feet kept on walking, good old feet. Later that day, residents were leafletted with information about a Proposed Public Space Protection Order in reference to street drinking which is becoming a problem to people living and working in the area. The order gives police the right to confiscate alcohol in the street within the designated area, under the heading of our old friend antisocial behaviour.

I went to respond to the email address to endorse the idea.   And then as I walked back to the kitchen, I thought “ – And then what ? What do the police do with the offenders when they have arrested them ?”   Alcohol services in London and everywhere else are staggering, public money is cut, police services are strained and recalcitrant drinkers will find a way.   But the email address on the printed form was one of two errors and my email was returned.    Arrested kneejerk.   Chastening.

And then I thought further, struck by Mary Dejevsky writing in the Inde about how she had heard Justin Forsyth, head of Save the Children arguing for the UK to admit a further 3,000 unaccompanied refugee children. The plea was cogent and generous, she said but far from persuading her, it made her unsure that anybody could resist. And that was what bothered her.

She went on to spell out how such good intentions could be abused, that parents might abandon their children to save them, and then reappear to claim them later – a legal nightmare and painful for everybody concerned. That the children we imagine would be young , vulnerable and as such, appealing – might not be so amenable. They might already have ideas very far from what we attribute to them. They will be displaced and there will be language problems, the root of more troubles that I can list. She pointed out that when the US made the admittance of unaccompanied minors mandatory, the numbers of those abused, exploited and killed on the way went up too.

And then there is the care these children will need – extra help, extra time, extra support, all of which will cost extra money – from a system staggering under current domestic demand. We don’t do well by many children in need in our own population. And, no matter whose children we are talking about – yours, mine, theirs, refugees – they need homes, care, sometimes special care, education and places to live, time and hope, all on a continuum. And policing in the best sense because the movement of a number of vulnerable children will bring the paedophiles and the abusers, sniffing about and employing all their considerable malign skills to accomplish what they want – a child without attachment, a child who can’t be heard.

It isn’t as simple as yes or no.   It’s a question how can we do it with the least negative impact – the very opposite of a kneejerk.

Ginny (not her real name) left her job and wrote to me “Am I worried about not being employed ? Yes. Am I worried about money ?   Yes.   Am I glad I am out of there ? Hell, yes…” in spite of being fully aware that the accepted wisdom is that you don’t leave a job except to go to another one.

But sometimes travel, mismanagement (usually but not exclusively) above you, the day to day erosion of your digestion, your sleep, your temper, even your skin shows you that this is more than just a warning amber light – it is a stop sign, it’s RED – and while those you live with may need your monetary input, sometimes the money comes too high.

Family budgets, whether for two or more, are rarely based on saving. They are based on earning. And I have real sympathy with this because I can remember having to face that I couldn’t earn any more.   Ever hear of the Beating Friars, men who wandered the country in the Dark Ages, chained to each other and beating themselves often to excess while bemoaning their sin ? Don’t enrol.

Yes, it would be wonderful if we were all practical about money. But money and family, money and feelings, money and self image and learned patterns of behaviour don’t always lead us anywhere we think very much about till we are there.

In the first couple of months of any new year, we long for something to reinvent us, to lift us up, up and away – from the bills, the aftermath of Christmas and New Year, the dark days, the pounds gained, the pounds spent …

The first couple of months of any new year are what the drivers of black ie licensed cabs call “kipper season” – there is not much work about hence modest suppers.   The first couple of months of any new year are the thinnest time for the fashion pages. Clutching the 21st century edition of a crystal ball, fashion writers try to predict trends.   Don’t sneer. From crops grown to material processed, to garments made to garments sold to garments deconstructed for recycling, fashion is one of the biggest industries in the world.   And I look with weary affection (rather them than me) at what experience tells me is nearly always a throwaway – handbags I wouldn’t play with as a six year old, ditsy blouses, colour blocks (come back Piet Mondrian and Yves St.Laurent and show us how to do it, not forgetting that neither of these men had to contend with mass production as it is now), tartan, the Wild West (mock skin, mock fur and fringes, mock turquoise, mock First Nation – nothing new there then) and the Deathless Duel of the Drainpipes ie are skinny jeans over ?

Last week, cynical old cat that I am, I visited more for exercise than purchase a venerable London emporium which has closed or rationalised the departments dealing with kitchen goods and carpets and hiked the price of everything else through the roof where I had the following experience in applied capitalism : a pair of gold earrings, made by a named jeweller for the store nearly 50 years ago – hence three lots of inflation – the store, the brand (ie two lots of brand) and vintage = £5,700.   If the earrings are still there at the end of the sale, I could get them for -gosh – £4,500.

“Money thrown away”

I didn’t make this up. It’s written down. Thank you George Vargas, for teaching me all those years ago that jewellery is only worth what it’s worth to you.

There is a photo feature in one of the colour supplements on the new jeans – all on suspiciously slender Oriental models with an average hip measurement of 32 inches – the most “wow “ of which retails for £430 – that’s right, denim in a different shape, probably harder to pattern in mass production.

Welcome to the new snobbery.   The new snobbery is not whether it suits you, is the latest thing, will give you credit among your peers, will reflect glowingly on the family fortune, is beautiful or even becoming: the new snobbery is this is what you can afford to waste.  Like £20 million allocated to teach Muslim women the language of the country in which they reside. I’d rather save the Margaret Pike Centre : it does quantifiable good and costs less.  

Unless you know somebody personally, their death is in some way symbolic.   You like what they did or the sound of them.  Even if you meet them, you have only an impression to go on.   You like the idea of the world better with them in it and the demise of somebody you admire makes you accept all over again that nobody lives forever.  You have of course an extended not to say second life now, with  all the electric gadgetry, after your death.  Stills of the talented and the beautiful are moved around for ads.  The rest of us just remember.  And whom do we remember and why ?    It’s been quite a year for shedding the specially marked out.

As we bumble around with the current edition of War and Peace, I remember seeing the US version directed by King Vidor, better cast in the minor roles though of course I didn’t understand it, but I think it was one of the best things the actress Anita Ekberg (died 11 January 2015) ever did.  It allowed her to be more than a magnificent bosom.

I bless Carl Djerassi (died 30 January 2015), a brilliant chemist who changed contraception forever, a women’s liberationist in a white coat, the self proclaimed mother of the birth control pill…

I think I probably cheered out loud when I read that Geraldine McEwan (died 30 January 2015) had described acting as “a way in which I could manage the world.”  I met her in a tiny studio in which you could feel her sensitivities, as fine as hairlike antennae, occupying the space between us.

Terry Pratchett (Sir or not) enhanced the world as a writer and stood up for Alzheimers – he passed (as the Americans say) on March 12 2015 and leaves us poorer.

Talking to a woman on a bus introduced me to the wife of Errol Brown, vocal embodiment of Hot Chocolate (died 6 May 2015).  It didn’t matter who we were, we just liked each other and she came to tea bearing champagne !  No wonder he loved her.

There’s a soft spot in my heart forever for Charles Kennedy (died 2 June 2015), former leader of the Liberal Democrats, because he asked and let me answer serious questions in a Radio 4 programme long ago.  And why was that special?  Oh, don’t you know?  Agony aunts don’t think and can’t make sentences so not only did he enhance me, he made an important point: most of us who aren’t asked, do think.

The background of Omar Sharif (died 10 July 2015) is so much more interesting than most of the films he made though he was outstanding in Behold A Pale Horse, where director Fred Zinnemann just let him get on with acting.

Art critic Brian Sewell (died 19 September 2015) presented a film about the pilgrimage of St. James of Compostella which ends traditionally with the pilgrims stripping and going into the sea.  So he did.  Very unhysterical, nicely done.  Several weeks later he was downstairs a flight from me so I called “Mr. Sewell ?”   And we spoke for a few moments in which I told him how I liked this.  Pulled into a BBC pilot a couple of years later with Phil Jupitus, Sewell and another man (token woman again),  I made a successful joke.  Sewell murmured into the microphone “I told you, she’s bright …”  I hope his beloved dogs met him at the Pearly Gates.

I remember Jackie Collins (died 19 September 2015) on the cover of Picturegoer and I was almost unreasonably pleased that she went on to be personally and professionally happy, successful and fulfilled, a happy woman and a happy writer.   Just goes to show that misery isn’t always the spur to creativity.

There was an “aaah !” factor surrounding madam Cynthia Payne (died 15 November 2015).  I never got it.  The only time I met her she talked about an abortion secured a public lavatory with scouring powder.  I must have looked as if I could take it.

But my eyes filled at the death of rugby international Jonah Lomu (died 18 November 2015) whom I met with his manager at BBC Breakfast for all of five minutes and he was splendid.  I am used to big men, father a whopper, both husbands reasonable size and a son to beat the band but there was a benign quality, a gentleness which was very moving.   I didn’t stroke him but I wanted to.   He was only 40, had had trouble with diabetes .  My world is poorer without that presence. 

It’s probably a sign of age to be interested in obituaries. But they are often very well written and you learn about people you have never heard of so death can make life richer, like cosmic compost.  

When I was at junior school, we had a double art lesson all of Wednesday afternoon with the dashing Mr. Elson.   I can still see vast sheets of paper, powder paints and jam jars and remember sitting with Lesley Gill, Sue Sanderson and Jean Dunn while we kept up a running soap opera which required the endless description of medieval clothes. I’ve liked Wednesday ever since.

Now I like Wednesday because the dustbin men come.   I’ve been very lucky with waste disposal. For years at the other side of London when my son was a child, we had a crew who always spoke to him, spoke to me, waved, took everything – I remember one of our two favourites leaving to go and work in his brother’s carpet shop and we were all in tears.   I had nicknamed him The Saxon though he was probably nearer a Viking

“Is that a bin lid in his hand?”

– tall and robust with a high reddish complexion and red gold hair – while the gaffer looked like Robert Duvall.

But as this morning began with a sulky percolator and the pouring rain, I realised I am in grave danger of defining the week by Wednesday mornings when the next nicest crew in London take away everything I’ve wrapped for them.   It is however only Monday and my mother would say I am wishing my life away.

Monday to me is like a weekly version of January.   January lasts psychologically twice as long as it does in time terms. The weather is usually unfriendly – no news there then – everybody is laden with bills and colds and anti-climax.   Not surprising that this is one of the two times in the year when counselling services of every variety spike – the other is when people come back from the summer holiday that hasn’t worked the hoped for miracle.

I quite like Tuesday, because it proves I have got through Monday. If I can do some task with a beginning, a middle and an end – catch up on letters, tidy the under the stairs cupboard, wash the kitchen floor – Monday feels better and the nicest thing I can say about Tuesday is that I often don’t register getting there until later in the day – rather like a dog discovering a bone it has buried – you know – “Oh Good Lord, it’s Tuesday !”   Of course I have felt guilty about not cherishing time, noticing time, not noticing time and so on but then as my father taught me, time is man’s measurement for something ineffable. He thought time was the face of God. Humans could measure it but they couldn’t control it.   I think of that when I see those extraordinary photos of Detroit’s great factories and workshops now decayed and overgrown with plants.   To see how temporary the bricking up of life is, you don’t need to go to the ancient remains in South America, just look at the speed with which weeds take hold in the street, poking determinedly through the paving stones and walls. I am torn between pulling them out and giving them a medal.

There is another reason I like Wednesday – it’s the middle of the week. If you are depressed and time hangs like cannonballs on your hands, getting to midweek makes the management of the time remaining seem possible. So Thursday is a to do day – the day you go the exhibition, take the shoes back, something outside the house, outside general domestic order, probably a kind of internalised version of the old rhyme “Thursday’s child has far to go.”

Friday has become a different shape for me lately because I have to shop in two halves. I don’t want everything delivered to the door. I want to go out, select, carry and talk – and the only time I get marginally fed up with it is hiking home my preferred kitchen towel. And then Saturday brings me the market, a long walk, postcards, shop gazing, wandering, only ever curtailed by rain.   Cold not a problem, wrap up and get on with it.

I have to be careful with Sunday. It can be like wading through treacle though I can usually beat it with books. There is of course television, the older person’s friend, if badly programmed. Thank heaven there are occasional pearls in the dross, though sadly more by accident than intention. People think that since I worked in radio, I must like to listen to it and I confess I don’t, much.

And then in the immortal words of Flanders and Swann, it’s “back to bloody January again” – or Monday in this case and you know how I feel about Monday.

When I first had a job with a salary I couldn’t spend no matter how many books, Tshirts, trips to the cinema and gifts I bought, I worked for a women’s magazine.   There were always people who thought that you shouldn’t admit to that, it was a lower form of journalistic life – and being an agony aunt was lower still. (What’s that lovely quote about “I may not agree with you but I defend to the death your right to an opinion” ?). Off the back of a salary I couldn’t spend (it was only ever enormous for three months, when I worked three jobs, the most remunerative for a woman and a newspaper I disliked – so I quit, to find that my adored husband had boasted to his clients about how much I earned: regrettable) I instituted the purchase of good gloves, good shoes, good soap and every publication that interested me. As I handed over chunks of money and held out my arms for the pile of stuff, the newsagent used to twinkle at me “Singlehandedly keeping the print alive?”

I would be honoured. One of the best things I heard just before Christmas was that book sales were up.   Specialist magazines are thriving too – I have a quarterly on Illustration which I gave myself as a present last year (see below).

Apparently men of over 50 dressed better (Antonio Pappano certainly does.)

“Better in movement, like most interesting people!”

It’s been a long time since Matt Frei who was the last tv frontsman to find a style which didn’t look poor, poseur or odd. I’ve never got over Dan Snow flapping about in cheesecloth or the beautiful R Everett in black pseudo sports gear, looking as if he were taking a day off from a cure.

Watching Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara and Todd Haynes talking about the film they made together (“Carol”) beat the film into the ground, as did Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and Mark Rylance discussing each other in “Bridge of Spies” – about which Camilla Long’s review (“is this a film about Tom Hanks having a cold ?”) made me laugh out loud.

Downton was down before it was out. “Call the Midwife” escaped twee by the narrowest of margins – oh the pitfalls of the Christmas special.   But Daniel Craig is the best actor ever to play Bond, and even if I hate his (unchecked) tailor’s suits, at least I now understand their purpose. While Judi Dench’s M made a strangely prescient speech in which she said in part “We don’t know who our enemies are any more: they have no nationalities, no boundaries… we talk about transparency but we function in opaqueness.” Yes.   So unexpected honours to Bond, a franchise that meant nothing to me until I had nothing else to watch and was so disappointed in a new book on the Joan of Arc myth, that I couldn’t read any more. It was how not to write a book – pedantic, predictable, over-extended – you only have to look at the pages of acknowledgements to know that this was conceived and managed as a beach best seller, too many cooks, utterly predictable and a waste of a provocative idea.

I waved to a bus driver on New Year’s Day and he waved, hooted and kissed his hand.   Honours. And I met an elderly Irishwoman, older than me, wearing a holly berry red coat which we discussed (“They said I should put on a warmer coat, I’m so glad I did” she told me in that soft sibilant accent, before we hugged each other and went our ways home on the first day of the New Year.)    And the young Australian makeup artist at the BBC on Boxing Day greeted me saying over her shoulder to her colleague – “I told you she’d be made up, she’s a pro !”   And she didn’t know who I was from a hole in the ground.

I don’t think a list of the big things that I find shameful or dishonourable is useful- you have your own and some of them will be in common to many of us. Worse still, some of them will be the same or worse than last year.   (I think of a frowning angel with a big ledger, looking down at us and writing “Must try harder !” And we must.) Never mind about New Year’s Resolutions, just make a list of ten or fewer things and try to work through them.   And remind yourself that if the BBC had learned the lessons of Warner Brothers in their heyday, they’d have shot “Dickensian” and “War and Peace” back to back: it would have been cheaper.

“See Tom Sizemore’s programme on Rachmaninov for comment”

Illustration: contact cellomail@cellopress.co.uk

Christmas was lovely.

“as pretty as my grand daughter”

I had it on Christmas Eve when my son , his wife and their daughter came to see me. We spoiled each other and shouted with laughter and had a wonderful time with surprises, real surprises. I bought my granddaughter her first book , a picture book by a Japanese artist in which five flowers fold down into five animals, laminated, deliciously coloured. Just the job.   And the couple I call the kids were more excited to have bought me a wine I have only drunk twice and never owned a bottle of, than anything else.

Christmas Day I spent coughing and sweating in bed, Boxing Day more of the same and what became of the ancient and respected art of television programming?

So now we arrive at crossover time, the few days in between the allegedly Christian festival and the pagan one of New Year.   These are the days you fill with buying things you never thought you’d rush out to buy (like laundry fluid) or sale shopping.   How revealing that the independent Office for Budget Responsibility published a report warning that the recovery is the thickness of tissue paper and unsecured personal debt will be the undoing of many of us.   That was on Tuesday 22 December while on Saturday 26 December, money was being spent as if it was going out of style and very few people did what one young man did and saved for the splurge. Most of them flashed the card in a bad attack of Scarlett O’Hara-itis, ie “I’ll think about that tomorrow.”

So while we’re on the subject of what you want and what you don’t want in the immediate future ie the next twelve months, here’s what I really don’t want:

I don’t want this Government to slip through legislation which directs local councils in what they may or may not invest in – more to the point it will tell them what they must invest in, thus denting the idea of democracy (always a relative term) still further.   A bunch of committees in London cannot run affairs for 70 million vastly different people across the UK.   Worse still, this unprecedented curb may be pushed through Parliament without proper consultation. That isn’t Tories for Britain, that’s Tories for Tories, ruthless self-interest. (see Page 4, the Independent on Sunday and the writer is Donald MacIntyre.)

I don’t want – thought mostly I shall be too late – to have George Osborne thinking he’s going to get some kind of award for being the Chancellor with the Highest Level of Privatisation. Mr.Osborne’s sympathisers feel he’s doing a grand job of making banking pay for itself, and that may be true but selling off concerns like the Post Office (at what is generally agreed as a loss) and the Land Registry raises question about his plans other than amassing some money and never mind whence it comes.

I don’t want to hear about men – or women – in space when we need money spent on anticipating the possible effects of changes to our weather systems in this world, so that if we don’t need to activate emergency plans, that’s fine, they can wait – but if we need them, the resources are there.   We can’t carry on hoping everything will be all right. This sweaty winter has shown we won’t.

And I don’t want to see White Christmas with Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney, Danny Kaye and Vera-Ellen ever again. It wasn’t a good movie when it was made and the years have not been kind to it. It’s been on a loop, played about six times in the last two weeks and I want it mothballed.

Permanently. Please.

And here’s what I really do want. I want less non ticket paying children taking up seats on buses while others stand.   What happened to sitting on your mother’s knee?   Or being a big person and offering your seat?

I want people to understand that appreciation is vital.

  Going back into a shop 24 hours later to express satisfaction took three minutes and it was win win win. I was pleased, the assistant was pleased, the manager was pleased and other customers were pleased to hear our pleasure.   Saying please and thank you is going out of style. It seems a lot of people think that makes you look weak. I was taught “if you don’t put in, you can’t take out” and it’s got me this far.

I want us to understand that in a materialistic society, all those things aren’t worth a damn if you don’t have some kind of interior life, some interest in art or science, people or ideas.   I want us to understand that our world is cruel as it ever was, sometimes in the same ways, sometimes in awful new ones and start looking at how we can contribute to its betterment, you in your small corner, I in mine.

I want us to understand that the smile and the truth are as much weapons as frowns and evasions and use them.

And every good wish for 2016.

There were two kinds of Christmas presents when I was growing up, one was the big thing you had to have like a coat or new spectacle frames and then there were what my mother called “sillies”, small presents which initially filled the stocking I was sad to say goodbye to, at the age of nine.

I was also aware from an early age that Christmas wasn’t always unalloyed pleasure and joy. Bad things often happened to people around Christmas time, a sort of way of reminding us that you can’t have it all and even when you think you might have, you haven’t.

The other day in a shop where I only ever seem to look, never having seen the clothes I seek in it, a woman who works there made it clear that not only did she know who I was (as you get older, this is rare and if you any sense of self preservation, like me, you cease to expect it) but told me the most delightful story of her parents, both in the throws of divorce from their respective first marriages when they met, and both listeners to a radio show on people’s lives that I fronted for 14 years. “Are they still happy ?” I asked hopefully.   “Oh yes” she said. “Never looked back – and they’ll be thrilled to think I met you.” I sent them my very best wishes.

That is a Christmas present.   It would be hard to define, it wouldn’t fit in a stocking, it may be silly to anybody else but it’s wonderful to me.

And on a bus I sat next to a startlingly youthful woman in her fifties, now alone with grown up sons (“I’m taking care of my grandchildren this week”), highly qualified in nursing, who put herself forward for special training in dealing with MRSA – one of those bugs that frighten the life out of us all when we or those we love have to go into hospital.   “I’ve made mistakes in my life” she said “ especially in relationships but that’s all gone now. I’ve just let it all go. I live in one room and I study – it‘s wonderful.”   And again I was reminded that Christmas is more than a day or a dream, it’s the marker of another stage of your life and going forward is always preferable – even if it’s tough – to looking back.

A friend I will call Ginny (it’s not her name) has spent years being the fall guy for her family. She picked up for them all emotionally and financially, one after another over the years. In time, the habit of making do spread out into her emotional relationships with other people and finally into her work. She took a job which sounded fine except that the travelling alone was exhausting and precluded the improvement of any one of the other things she might want to address or looking for another job – she was tired out and even if she wasn’t – there weren’t hours in the day.

She decided against the extension to her contract.   Yes, her partner was all for it but she did it. And for the first time is ready to look for what she wants, to use that pile driving energy for herself rather than anybody else or any other situation.   It’s my best Christmas present so far.   I’ve known her for 20 years and it’s grow up time.

And then I received this via annalog:

“ Hi Anna, I was listening to the radio while travelling in the car and caught an appearance of yours on Off the Page on R4 Extra …a repeat from some years ago on the subject of money. I just wanted to tell you I thought you spoke very entertainingly, intelligently and movingly” … “and I sincerely hope life is a little easier for you now.”   So I wrote in appreciation.

You couldn’t wrap it, it doesn’t need tissue or gilded ribbon.

Who wouldn’t want to be described with those words ?   What Pam the Painter calls “bucket time” as in “put that in your bucket” – a Christmas bucket – thank you Mike.

“sung every Anzac Day”

We’d been talking about the world in general and our small bit of it in particular, when my friend said thoughtfully “Change and decay in all around I see…”   “Where did that come from?” I asked.                                                                    Notoriously uneven in her recall (all the words of all the Frank Sinatra songs, but not the name of “that actress who played the Queen – you know, the blonde …”) Slad said “Oh, the Bible I think ..” so I came home and looked it up.

It’s from the hymn “Abide with me” and I had never read it all before – lyrics by Henry Francis Lyte, to the music of William Henry Monk.                                              And I wonder what does abide – stay – with us, when so much is changing?              I have been “off” the David Attenborough voiced over nature films for some time because they are saturated with music.   The filming is often wonderful but I object to having my responses half-cued, half directed as though by an invisible traffic cop.   And I know animals kill each other so I wasn’t open to programmes devoted to The Hunt – until the last in the series which was about conservation when I watched three teams – two in Africa working respectively with African wild dogs and cheetah and one in somewhere darned cold working with polar bear – and was moved by the real tenderness expressed to these animals in this unremitting work.

The range of the dogs is so extensive that the teams travel with them all the time, occasionally sedating one to check for health, growth, blood and parasites and then watching as the dog staggers to its feet and rejoins its group. “Best thing in the day” said the beaming group leader “ when you see the dog get up and recover.”

The group working with cheetah actually move the animals around to new ranges, for their own wellbeing.   I was struck by the contrast between the interference to the animals to save them and the way they were handled, visibly gently – as if the humans knew the animals would sense something of the positive from the way they were handled.

Polar bear are 20 per cent smaller than they were some years ago, which means in turn smaller cubs which would stand up less well to the rigours of the climate – and if they failed to survive, it would mean the end of the polar bear – while we saw skilled hands measure, weigh and log data on a sedated polar bear (which even out for the count looks menacing large) and then, as the harness was stripped away and the team made to withdraw, a man rubbed the ear of the beast affectionately.

Appalled by cruelty, misuse and abuse, we forget to celebrate the positives which are often difficult to quantify, subtle and open to interpretation.   Sometimes there isn’t even touch.

In a French film about a small country school and its school master (acted but based on a true and best selling story) there is a scene in which the teacher talks to a boy who has been away from school because his mother died of cancer. What struck me was that the words had to cross the space, there was no touch.   Touch however kindly meant might have confused things, when it was imperative they were clear or touch might have made the exchange unbearable.   The boy had to be left to be alone, he had to learn to bear it, the teacher witnessed what the boy had been through, the words were acknowledgment of suffering and endurance.What stays with us is the effort, the offering somebody else made at a time when we were alone, in great pain, unhappy or ill.   What struck me last night was the same kind of offering in a highly scientific – you could say artificial – context.   All the people involved were specialists – this was training, life’s work which has to be evidenced to be funded – and yet still there was joy and sweetness.

Never mind the toys and the food and the shining things for a minute.                       I want the best of humankind – those small often wordless kindnesses – I want them to “abide with me.”

There was a Christmas Fair at the Town Hall. Sponsored by a magazine called Selvedge, it filled the old rooms with colour and light, pleasant people selling better than pretty things. And there was a tall and wonderful looking man, never going to see 27 again, with a head of grey curls and a big grin who sells Indian handicrafts and antiques. Across the top of the stall was a long length of fine black cotton embroidered with ribs of red and marmalade, orange and crimson, a woven sunset. “What is it?” I said in awe…   “Either a turban or a sash, 1880s, North West Frontier” he told me.  I looked at him. “Nowadays called Afghanistan, as Mesopotamia is called Iraq – suggesting nothing changed in British foreign policy in the region for a century or more.”  He nodded.  “But then “ he said “ we knew we were fighting for an empire. Right or wrong, we knew what we were fighting for. Now we don’t.   We have run down the services. Do you know how many planes we have ?   We could just about defend Hull.”

Twenty four hours later a man walked down the aisle of a bus, the shape of a man that makes you catch your breath across a room at a party – thick springy hair touched with grey, becoming clothes , long legs, lovely hands and one side of his face looked as if it had been smeared against glass.  He sat down beside me and we exchanged a couple of remarks about the traffic till I said very gently “What happened to your face ?”                                                                                                       “Cancer” he said.                                                                                                                                “I’m so sorry.”                                                                                                                              “Nothing to do “ he said. “It was big, they had to operate. They cut all sorts of stuff and – “ he gestured.   He told me the doctors missed some cells so he had a secondary in his back.   That time he was in hospital and couldn’t walk for two years. I asked him what he did before all this. He was an antiquarian, Egyptian, Roman and Greek art.  I told him about Mr.Chu who taught me the way to buy things was to fall in love, saying “Don’t fall in love ? Don’t buy.”                                   “I ‘m glad I had to sell things to live” he said” otherwise I would never have sold anything.”  “But you haven’t given up.”                                                                         “Never” he said.

And a day after that, in a different part of town a short thickset man with a heavy pack was almost thrown into me as the bus braked and he apologised in an accent I couldn’t recognise, explaining when I asked he came from a small town in Northern Ireland.   Had I been there ?   I said I would never forget going to do some programme for the BBC and the receptionist in Belfast coming round the desk to embrace me. So I hugged her back and then said “What was that for ?”

“For coming to visit us,” she said. “So many people won’t come, we think you have forgotten us.”  He nodded.   “There are things going on in Ireland now that nobody wants to know about.”  I said he must know that there are fashions in everything, medicine as well as hemlines, food as well as media, and right now we’re not thinking about Northern Ireland. He nodded. He was, he told me a Roman Catholic who had been 22 years in the British Army , come out and worked in media, now as a freelance.   “There are still questions to be asked” he said “ and the problem is how to ask them.”

It takes about 60 years before there is a perspective on political and social decisions, how they pan out, the good and bad of them and how they affect us.   Nothing comes out of the ground fully formed. It starts from something much smaller, even if it grows to something very big and very ugly.  So – as these three men taught me – you call it as you see it, you hang on to yourself and you go on asking the questions – and reforming them and asking them again – till you begin to understand.

The backwash of Black Friday (apparently a week’s plasticfest, not a day) – plus roads up everywhere while the Mayor throws his weight into building cycle super highways that cyclists don’t even have to use – means getting anywhere in London after 5.00 am takes hours.   I set out to redeem a lamp from a specialist shop, going against the traffic but it didn’t seem to make any difference, the journey just went on and on. Never mind road rage, I should think bus drivers need tranquillisers.

Coming back, there were two voices behind me in the bus, one younger, one older, both women. And the younger one suddenly said “I can dress a tree perfectly well, thank you !” (It’s a funny phrase, isn’t it – “dress a tree” ? You imagine coaxing branches into sleeves )   Then the older woman said something to which the younger replied “I see, but do you usually take tree decorations with you to somebody else’ s house ? “ Murmur,murmur.   “The decorations in the kitchen will already be up.” Pause. “ No, not the ones you brought last year.”   Murmur.  “Mother, you’re impossible.”

Oh, Happy Christmas.

Leaving aside the endless dream machine of the Christmas advertisements (no thank you M&S, no thank you John Lewis), all sweetness and light, hideous clothes and bottomless piles of unnecessary food, I shall be sending a fan letter to House of Fraser which seems to have had the nice idea of sending itself up with the result that, even though the ad runs repeatedly, you can giggle. It is also shrewdly stylised into unrealism, built round an old rock tune instead of “inspirational music”.

But the gap between the have’s and the have nots – what David Shepherd as Bishop of Liverpool long ago called “two nations” – is very unsettling..   Those who have, have to have more and more and more, while those who have not must just get on with it.   The bridges between the two have been dented by endless marketing and the shame of being poor.    All reason is lost.   Never mind whether you are bright or beautiful – have you got money ?                                                 Because if you have, there are endless ways to spend it.

Money or no money , I have escaped much of this.   I amass various kinds of candles and fir cones but I don’t buy a tree.                                                                               I acquire gifts as I find them through the year, there aren’t many and finding them is a joy: I’ve got several, there is time.  I don’t like Christmas pudding, Christmas cake, stollen (tastes of scented cement) or mince pies but I am a sucker for pannetone.  I am already stockpiling boxes of apricots, dates and figs dipped in plain chocolate – one for me, one for my son and one for everybody else.        By the standards of the day, my greed is quite restrained and I aim to keep it that way.  This year I have been introduced to an easy rose, a quaffable white and a magnum of Prosecco but I have drunk less than for years:   I love it but it doesn’t love me and I tire of not sleeping.

In an expensive Scandinavian shop I found delightful tree decorations made of thick felt in primary colours (for my grand daughter), a silver owl with a small rattle in it (I can’t part with it) and other joys – all under £5. I’ve collected Christmas cards and was given my calendar with a staff discount – how handsome is that !

Now, all I need is stamps and to know that the Post Office will deliver for another year ….