Category Archives: Uncategorized

This is what a feminist looks like

Simone Veil

(if you have managed to escape the furore)
is the slogan on a T-shirt which several major politicians were persuaded to wear and be photographed in.
The Prime Minister declined.  So his PR people or his wife or some part of his brain not often in evidence deserves credit.
The T-shirt cost £45.  £45!  For a T-shirt.
So first of all there is a fuss about what’s a feminist anyway.
Second string hooha is the publicity.  I should think the magazine that caused this thing to come into being is licking its chops, publicity being the oxygen of present day existence.  And it was supplied through a chain of shops and retail can always do with a boost. And then there is the third bite of the press apple when it is discovered that the offending garment was made under “sweatshop conditions” (predictable) and the great and the good have to look shocked when actually, they should just look silly.

Where did they think the t-shirt came from, who did they think made it?
If it was that price, somebody  – indeed, several somebodies – were making on the deal.
Feminism be blowed, this is about publicity.
For a magazine which has a budget for the same.
For a chain of shops, ditto.
And anyway, do you know anything less flattering to man or beast – unless you are young, glowing and in terrific shape – than a short sleeved badly coloured T shirt, cut like a bag, with a slogan across it?

You will note – please note – that I have not named the magazine, the chain of shops or the politicians.  That’s deliberate.  They all want publicity and they can’t have mine.

Last year I shared a radio studio with four women who embodied feminism as it came to notice 30/40 years ago.  They founded and ran anyway they could raise the money a magazine called Spare Rib in which I was briefly involved.   I do not have any resentment about having worked for them for a few weeks.  I never did. They had very little money, I could earn more elsewhere.   I was a regular reader of the magazine, I applauded what they tried to do in theory if not in practice, I am thrilled to have it on my CV.
All the arguments about what the magazine looked like, what it contained, who it was aimed at, came later.  These women took Spare Rib from idea to reality and that’s never easy.

“This is what a feminist looks like” is a clever slogan because it is open to
interpretation.   I never knew what a feminist looked like.  One of the first and most heavyweight I ever met had my year’s income on her back in the form of a superbly tailored couture suit.   She probably had a manicure too.  And she saw no conflict between the points of view she espoused and the way she looked.
I’ve never known or been terribly interested in what a feminist looks like.
It was wonderful that it wasn’t about what you looked like.

The women I met the radio station are all better looking now than they were then (and I can assure you it isn’t to do with plastic surgery: like wine, some of us do improve with age).  They had great hair, solid attractive bodies in trousers and casual clothes, and all, with the exception of yours truly, wore unobtrusive gold wedding rings, which seems to suggest that whatever a feminist looks like, it isn’t a man-eater.

To me “I’m a woman, take me seriously” in seven inch heels, bottom stuck out in skimpy shorts, enough slap to repaint a liner doesn’t ring true.   First of all you’re not a woman, you’re female, yes.  But woman is a smashing word which suggests some kind of maturity, dignity, strength and grace.  I like grace.  Underestimated, grace is.  And that’s because I don’t like many of fashion’s current conventions.   I haven’t for years. I used to think it was because I couldn’t wear them but now I know I wouldn’t wear them, even to the bin.

“This is what a feminist looks like” is perfect dumbing down:  it seems to be one thing, but plays (finger in corner of mouth cute) as something else.  God forbid we should be serious about women!  Only half the sky, female genital mutilation, women stoned for adultery, domestic violence unchecked.  I don’t know if I am a feminist but I believe in the rights of women.   And I would never wear that ugly expensive T-shirt.

30 years ago (well, nearly – 1985) I put my name in the front of a book at the radio station where I then worked.  The idea was that, whether the book was used or not, when its day was done, it would be passed to the person whose name was in the front.
The book was the Women’s Institute Calendar of Feasts by Maggie Black.   It contains some uncredited pen and ink drawings and information about how life was regulated, seasonally and by the Church, till the two crossed over and you had all sorts of feast days, something to aim for in the endlessness of rural work which nobody who hasn’t done it understands.
I can’t sentimentalise about land. I’ve seen it worked and it is unremitting labour.   And  – whether it’s our country or another, that’s where food comes from  – I have respect for the land and the people who run it.

There used to be a big hooley at the end of October – first All Hallows (October 31), then All Saints (November 1) and finally All Souls (November 2), only one of which now survives.   Three days of mystery meant you’d have a bit of fun and extra food, lots of teasing and magic (how much you believed was up to you) and drinks, hot and alcoholic.
The celebration of any of these now, in certain parts of the world, would mark you out for trouble.

Today’s shops are piled high with pumpkins but when I was a child, I think the only pumpkin I ever saw was in Walt Disney’s cartoon of Alice In Wonderland.   We used turnips.  We hollowed them out, fixed a piece of candle inside and several of us together, draped in black, used to go round to neighbouring houses, ring or knock and when the door was opened, line up behind the lanterns and mumble threateningly.
For this reason we were called mumblers.

Invited in we were given soft drinks or hot drinks, depending on how cold it was and invited to play bob apple – apples floating in a tub of water, two partners with their hands tied behind them, to see who could pick up the apple in their teeth.  There is an older version with the apples suspended and swinging but then you need something to hang the apple from and even houses then called modern didn’t have handy beams.

Once you had your apple, you were given a knife and had to peel it all in one.  If you broke it, it was no use.  If you got it off in one piece, you threw it over your shoulder and it fell, it was said, with the initial of your true love amid much nudging, shrieks and giggles.

If it was cold you might be given soup or a jacket potato – I have eaten jacket potatoes on every possible festive occasion but the best were cooked in the ashes of the Guy Fawkes’ Night bonfire on the common when I was about 10 – and I can taste them yet.

My nicest grown up experience of Hallowe’en was the first year in South London when three boys knocked at the door, yes, dressed up but not plastic heaven, two medium to tall – I’d say maybe 12 years old – and a smaller figure who may have been the same age but sounded younger.   I raced for chocolate, satsumas and 50 pence pieces which were received with enthusiasm.  “Wow” said the smallest figure “food AND money!”
They were kids.  It was lovely.

The following year I got in the chocolate bars but nobody came.  So I took them to the Coptic Church nearby, thinking they must have a Sunday school, and thus heard a fragment of truly beautiful and unexpected music – their service was in progress when I arrived.

Hallowe’en has not come to call since then.   I have heard increasingly uncomfortable stories about glass in Hallowe’en food, children expecting money, the Transatlantic “trick or treat” gone mad, the elders dressed up in every kind of Gothic gear, the youngsters in imitation.

I didn’t have any idea about what All Saints or All Souls’ night might be beyond
Mussorgsky’s “Night on A Bare Mountain” in (again) Walt Disney’s Fantasia.   My Hallowe’en is like all questionable anniversaries (New Year’s Eve is another): I treat it with profound respect, light candles and stay quiet.  There is much unrest and discord in the world.   If I cannot fix it, I will do my best to stay away from it in the hope that it will burn itself out, not burning too many of us on the way.

According to the paper, women who have overplucked their eyebrows to follow an earlier fashion trend can now buy brush on fake eyebrows for a thicker Paloma Faith/Elizabeth McGovern look.   I suppose it can’t be worse than a woman I knew whose eyebrows were so badly dyed ( and somewhere rather exclusive) that she looked like Groucho Marx.
But there is plucked and plucked.

Had I not commenced to pluck my eyebrows at the age of thirteen,  there would have been little shape and I’d have tripped over them.   Secondly I was deeply influenced by a browline running through my father’s side of the family from the lady known as “the Spanish grandmother” (black Irish actually, allegedly descended from the Spanish sailors in the Armada whose ships were blown off course when they reached the Irish Sea from round the north of Scotland, winding up wrecked on the west coast of Ireland)   Surrounded from an early age by fashion and film, I knew how I wanted my eyebrows to look.

I overdid it when I was 13 (I read that plucking a few hairs from the centre made you looked younger and obviously I was maturing fast !) which led to a year of Vaseline and brushing with the baby’s toothbrush then recommended for the eyebrow version  of “100 strokes to make them beautiful”, just like the princess brushing her hair in the story.

But I can’t help wondering how you’d feel locked in a clinch with Mr. Wonderful with the risk of leaving fake eyebrow on his face ?    You see I am old enough to remember the Wandering Shoulder Pad of the Eighties , when your friend told you you looked so much better with the bigger pads in, of course they’d stay !  So off you went and had a lovely time till you caught sight of yourself – at the other end of the evening – shades of the Hunchback of Notre Dame or  more worrying still,  a third breast.  Shoulder pads went everywhere.

Years before, a woman I much admired but who dressed very plainly was chosen to play a rather more glamorous role in the local theatre and I went to see her.   She  looked wonderful, discreetly padded to fill out the strapless evening dress , well made up including false eyelashes and her hands emphasised by impeccably manicured false nails.   She was also very funny, sadly funniest when she flung out her hand in a magnificently cod theatrical gesture and all her nails fell off .

While my friend Wendy who had the most beautiful colouring – black hair, dark blue eyes and white skin and legs from heaven to breakfast – told about sharing a dressing room with a famously curvaceous  popular starlet about whom Wendy, a lesser mortal was a bit shy, until the lady arrived in the dressing room they shared and began to change, taking out of her well filled bra cotton and animal wool, several pairs of clean tights and a great deal of tissue.  Wendy couldn’t keep her face straight, the star was blessedly down to earth about it and they became friends.   But I wonder what she did on a heavy date ?

I don’t mind wearing a lot of makeup (this is as close to fake as I shall ever get) but it’s got to “fade “ nicely.   I can’t stand the black tramlines, false eye lashes like mucky park railings and other coloured constituents that blur and goo.   I think you’re really lucky if a man doesn’t mind but if I were him, I would.

The plain fact is we’ve got the fake mixed up with the real.  Most of the clothes and shoes (oh those horrible shoes) that have been in fashion for the last several years are standing still fashions and I don’t do much standing still.  Just as most of the make up is for clubs and cameras and pretty heavy handed at that.   Heaven knows, I don’t fall out of bed and wear nothing on my face any more but whatever I wear, I want to stay there and work for me, rather than end up on somebody else.

Why don’t you stop and make the best of what you’ve got instead of taking it down only to try and build it up again artificially ?
As mankind does to the environment, so woman does to her face.

“A real face, not a wreck”

Sitting in a French garden in the skin-strokingly warm dark of an early summer evening, something swooped over my head and I yelped.   It was a bat. No, I don’t believe in the legend that bats get in your hair.  It’s just that I have tried and I cannot like them.
I’d like to say it’s because I have read too many Gothic tales but it isn’t true.
I rarely read gothic tales because for me the partition between truth and fiction is hairsbreadth, it hardly exists.  The world is full of strange things and I lack the mechanism to say, much less believe, “It will never happen.”
Having witnessed a tall strong able woman in her late 20s regress into a frightened child before my eyes as she talked of parental abuse, the eyes are one thing, the ears are another.  And if there are five senses you know about and a sixth you suspect, odd can be real.

Bats.  Right.  The title is the origin of the word.  There is a derivation but not another dictionary synonym for bat.
We used to say “bats in the belfry” probably because of the “bs” but I can’t think of more than one or two belfries with which I have even nodding acquaintance.   And maybe that vocal device is part of keeping the whole idea of a very large order of mammals, the only one with wings and leather wings at that, at arms’ length.   My father’s maxim about “they’re more frightened of you than you are of them” wouldn’t console me remotely about bats.   I’d like them to be frightened.  Away.
I tried to watch a programme on bats recently, in a noteworthy cave (very deep and very old) in Mexico, the presenting naturalist reminiscent of David Attenborough enthusing over his pile of guano (bat poo to you).   But I knew I was going to get windy, jumping at every shadow for the rest of the evening so it wasn’t worth it.  I don’t like the look of them and I can afford not too.  I don’t live in the country where I would be more likely to come across them and I don’t live in the enormous chunk of the world across which they range.

In Texas, Oklahoma and Virginia, bats are on the state flag, invaluable farmers.  Fruit eating bats spread seeds, which is how vegetation survives and flourishes, and humans need it to.   In Tonga the bat is sacred, probably because of this idea of its helping to grow food, and ancient peoples in Central America saw it as a magical animal, like the jaguar, a bridge between dark and light.   Alongside the fruit eaters are the insect eaters, logically related.   And then there are those that hunt for smaller animals or fish.  You can still get your head round that, like an owl or other bird of prey.
And the vampire bats live on blood.
Although natural history records small incisions (and the Masai, distinguished nomadic people of Kenya and Tanzania drink blood the same way), we all know those apocryphal stories of Dracula, altered through creepy to dishy, from Louis Jourdan to Robert Pattinson, a hundred years of being consumed into alternate sexuality and the ultimate orgasm of death.   
Martin Cruz Smith may be best known for his breakout novel Gorky Park but for me his finest book is about bats – “Nightwing” – and it draws attention to the number of bats, the way they collect, their ability to change and grow and how intelligent they are.  It is very unsettling and it makes you think – and we have some thinking to do right now.
Because Ebola got its name in 1976 from the river in the Democratic Republic of Congo where the bug was first diagnosed, it was thought to come from fruit bats – which it did not harm – but the bug leapt to other animals including gorillas, chimpanzees, antelope and porcupine.  In Africa bat meat is bush meat, for human consumption.  And the bug spread through bodily fluids – blood, vomit, faeces, semen, breast milk, urine, tears, saliva and sweat.  About which many in the West are becoming increasingly careless.   (A friend told me about sharing the men’s room at a recent shoot with three other moneyed men and he was the only one who washed his hands.)
There is an old saying “An ounce of protection is worth a pound of cure “.
Protection is not “it will never happen here”.  That cannot be guaranteed.
Protection is “it is less likely to happen here and you can make it less likely still by basic and unremitting hygiene.”  Wash, think, be careful
Protection has always been hardest to teach the public.
Perhaps the bats will do it.

People work very long hours.  Work has been extended through demand, insecurity and various bits of technology.   And I was brought up very short in an interview the other day when the interlocutor commented admiringly on my workload in the days of paid work.  But there is more to work than hours. There are different demands, different kinds of input and output, differing responses.   I learned that I would never see that kind of energy again the first time I worked with Pam the Painter.  Once the brush is in her hand, she is demonic, a driven Virgo and I couldn’t even interrupt her for a tea break because she doesn’t drink it.   This is not a criticism, she’s wonderful.  It’s just a different way of working, when you realise that what you have been doing may be perfectly enjoyable but it’s also tiring.

On Friday afternoon I shifted a lot of heavy and beautiful books from the inbuilt shelves in the corner because Pam was coming to repaint the wall stained by damp.  She had previously filled two offending exterior holes with cement and we had waited for the walls to dry, which took ages and was eventually passed as acceptable by the local old school jobbing builder. I covered the patches with stain blocker and watched the wonderful Neil Brand’s programme on The Music That Made The Movies (BBC4), definitely nothing like watching paint dry!
On Saturday morning I went off to the street market I love and walked back via to the supermarket I love less and less, ready to make a late lunch for Pam who will occasionally admit to hunger.   I am the commissariat – a word reminds me of my pa who would have been 120 this week – I cater.   Pam’s method of working involves hesitation, nit picking, worrying and finally a beginning, after which there is no stopping her till paint needs to dry.   That done, we ate and drank prosecco which is guaranteed to make both of us feel a lot more positive about numbers of things.
She had been back to where she used to work and discovered that there really was no going back – it was all changed, she had the best of it and surviving colleagues told her so.  After an insistent second coat (by which I mean she went at it till it was beaten into submission), we talked about equity release and the future and then she departed.

I cleared space to move, had a bath and, tired, waited for sleep to come.
It didn’t.   Neither an old favourite book nor half a proprietary sleeping pill worked.   So by Sunday I felt and looked like hell, lumps on skin, hair like bat wings, leaden.   But hanging about doesn’t help – I find waiting more tiring than ditchdigging.

So I went walkabout to an imaginative hardware store where I thought I might find spider spray.   And I did.   Before me loomed the door of Christies the auctioneers and because I was drawn to something in the window, I wandered in.  There was a woman in black with a clipboard and I enquired if I was permitted to just walk in. “Indeed” she smiled “encouraged” and told me a bit about the sale.  There was a lot of stuff that leaves me cold (I hear my mother’s disapproving voice in my ear saying “And who’s going to dust it?”) but there were some lovely old copper pans, a table, a chair and a jewellery department, Cartier eat your heart out.   The security man offered me a pass, “I don’t have light fingers “ I said with a smile and in I went to things of beauty  – how lovely to be able to admire instead of wrinkling your nose.   So I wandered around and came home to join battle replacing the books, which occupied me very happily till fish pie not of my making and Downton , both equally benign and digestible.

It may be hard, if you spent most of your life working Monday to Friday and occasionally extra, not to think of the weekend as special time, time off – but the living room wall has had a facelift, the books are back in a more thoughtful arrangement, the autumn has arrived (infinitely preferable to the sweaty hectic last throw of summer) and everyone should have a friend like Pam.   And last night “golden slumbers kissed my eyes”.  Lucky me.

No more milk in glass bottles, says Dairy Crest.  260 jobs will go, plastic is preferred and cheaper.
Is that because plastic is cheaper – really – or because you can’t persuade a significant number of people to deal with milk at the door when it might be delivered or collected with the rest of the groceries?
If plastic is cheaper how is it that the imported French crème fraiche (forget half fat, fat free or any other tweak) is the cheapest, sold in a glass jar?

Put “is burning wood environmentally friendly?” into the search machine and again, it seems that the answer depends on who you ask – the purveyors of stoves?  The environmental agencies?   The local authorities?
Check out an article called Power Struggle by Danny Fortson, pictures by Jez Coulson in The Sunday Times Magazine, 28 September.  It’s about bringing in wood pellets from Mississippi for the power station at Drax in North Yorkshire. And it gives a whole new slant to the idea of food miles, food in this case for the furnace.
Everybody has an opinion, everybody has answers for the questions but what is to be believed?

When I recently injured a knee, my GP – a sensible Ulsterwoman with people skills – said that she’s like to have an MRI of the afflicted joint with a view to (query) arthroscopy.    Immediately a friend sent me details of a Canadian survey which showed that some 8oo plus people who had had arthroscopy had suffered discomfort severe enough to call pain and no improvement. When I raised it with the attentive registrar at the local teaching hospital, he said in their opinion, it was a good intervention but required some sensitivity in timing – administered too soon or too late, it was a wasted procedure.   I can see those of you who have had some experience of timing and the NHS smiling wryly.
Cheap or free is supposed to be the ultimate recommendation.   But it backfires:
look at the number of people who don’t bother to ring to say “No thank you, not coming” so the appointment can be cancelled: they don’t have to bother.  It’s free, free to be treated with contempt.

And we are caught up in generalities like the stylistic director of J. Crew listing
Fabulous Fixes for the Over Forties – only they may not work for you.  Most of them didn’t for me.   “You must” she says authoritatively “wear a tinted moisturiser.”
Well I would but there has never been one invented that didn’t upset my skin.
Same with pressed powder.  There is something in those products, probably a fixative or something to prolong shelf life that makes me break out in a rash.  So although J.Crew have the most agreeable store staff in London, I am much more likely to be influenced by India Knight (also in the ST) who writes about what works for her and in the case of Raw Virgin Coconut Oil (a pure plant product) it’s cheap enough to play with and incidentally has been miraculous on my poor old scaly hands..

About every decade, a man or a woman stops washing their hair ie stops using shampoo and there is a little story about it, we all wrinkle our noses except those of us who are persuaded and the story goes away until next time.  But we don’t know what shampoo does.  Its claims like those of so many cosmetics are more to do with anxiety than health.  Like toothpaste.  You can clean your teeth with wood ash or soot or salt and you won’t smell clean and minty but your teeth will be OK especially if you keep up the dental appointments and use floss every day.  There are whole nations of people who don’t use toothpaste or shampoo.

But finding out how to deal with a damp patch on the living room wall or how to
approach your landlord about purchase of the freehold requires specialist knowledge and there will always be half a dozen answers from which you will have to select one.
In spite of more information, there are still specialists in every degree from those who know to those who sound as if they know, and you are at their mercy still.
You don’t know who to believe.

A young man, his dreads flying above a singing orange sweater rode his bike down the road, reduced speed and cried to the four winds “What a fool !”
I doubt if he meant anybody but himself and I really sympathise.
Is worry the other side of perfectionism ?   Of always wanting to do your best and if possible get it right – being convinced that, if you don’t get it right, you are without doubt a twit ?
Worrying about what you can’t do keeps you awake (don’t I know it) or wakes you with a knot in your stomach.   And then you have to unpick the knot along the lines of “  I am not harming anybody, not costing anybody anything: we have agreed that I should do this or that (the “we” isn’t royal, they’re the people whose opinion I value), if you don’t try you’ll never know ….”    Round and round and round, like a cartoon cow with a particularly sticky cud.

Achievement does not alleviate worry.   You may do and do, and do with a reasonable degree of accomplishment.   Those accomplishments (however modest) may shore up the rational side of your mind, make it easier, so to speak, to hear the voice of your own reassurance echoing in your ear  (as in “we got to this stage last time and you got past it, it will be fine …”)    But it doesn’t stop you worrying in the first instance.

You worry about what might happen.   You worry about what might go wrong.
You may be able to recite – for yourself, dammit for the Albert Hall filled to capacity – the reasons why it won’t go wrong, why even if it does go wrong, it can be remedied – but none of that stops you worrying the first place.  I speak as one who could worry for Britain.  Interestingly however, worry is always selective.
At this level of functioning neurosis, worry is not a broadcast net, you don’t throw it over everything.

You worry because you have offered  out of the kindness of your heart without thinking and now (a) you wish you hadn’t, (b) you can’t work out how to retrieve yourself from the position you have taken and (c) it’s going to weigh on you, perhaps with money, perhaps with emotion.

You worry because you want to do your best, be your best, whisper it quietly be thought of at your best – but best is not constant.   You have to keep striving towards it.  And there is always a voice urging you “more, harder, better” which has to be offset with consideration, life experience and having your feet so firmly planted on the ground, you risk being up to  your knees in it.
I have a tall friend, a carer, who is one of the kindest and nicest people I know and  one of the reasons is because he has painfully learned who he is and what he can and cannot do.   But he could make me cross and he does make me laugh because he will listen to me fretting and tell me “Chill !”   This is a personality type I’m stuck with.  Chill is for refrigeration and death.   As far as I know, there isn’t a little light at the back of my throat and I’m not dead yet.

I didn’t choose worry.  It chose me.   I was first aware of it as a managing device in anticipating what goes wrong.  I am not shy, I am nervous but that doesn’t always show so I am judged  (like so many of us) by my exterior, neat/lower middle/good voice.  It’s only when I am seen to be exhausted by effort (doubled because of the worry) or shaking because I wanted it to be good so badly, that strangers remark
wonderingly “You do worry, don’t you ?”

I have learned down the years that worry is anticipation.  That if I stop trying to second guess the situation and begin the process of “doing” whatever it is, I will feel better, it will feel better.  And for that reason I bless the slogan that really helped me – – “Just Do It.”   Begin, begin to deal with the real stuff instead of all those shadowy dragons and pitfalls.  They’ll come back, they always do but at least when you have begun to do what you need to do, you can see tell the difference between a real fight and shadowboxing.
And feel less of a fool.

The raven was making a hell of a noise and you don’t want to wake to a bird of ill omen.   But maybe he was a crow, spooked by a cat, lone trumpet of doom in an Indian summer.  The garden still thinks it’s summer.  And people cling to sandals and shorts, savouring the last little bit of the sunshine which is reasonable because we all know we need our vitamin D.
But is it perhaps another kind of Indian summer, a sort of dying gasp before so many things go wrong simultaneously that we will be in a global mess the like of which we haven’t seen for some considerable time?   Because, as long as things go wrong here or there, you can distance yourself from whatever it is but when things go wrong all over the place at the same time, you run out of safety, disaster looms closer.   You feel threatened and withdraw, the mists of confusion and bewilderment swirling round your knees …  hide under the duvet days.

I don’t know anything about Scotland.  I am ashamed to say it but I think if a few more of us admitted we don’t know what Union has meant, or means, the atmosphere wouldn’t be so doomladen.   I do know what it means to change everything because of an idea.  It’s expensive financially and emotionally. The London County Council ceased to exist, to be reinvented with attendant expense with a similar function under a different name.  A principle was at stake and there is always a price tag to a principle.   Sometimes the principle is absolutely worth the money.  And sometimes not.(See Melanie Reid’s piece in the Times 16.09.2014 – pay for it if you have to, it’s terrific)

John Kelly’s book The Great Mortality, about the Black Death, prepared me in a way for the outbreak of Ebola.

“Ebola Virus”

Primitive magic seems to suggest that if you name a problem, you risk giving it power.   But scientists researching Ebola and vaccines to counteract it, know that Africa today, Europe tomorrow.   Disease travels.  World Health Organisation funding has been cut.  I’d like some of the money we plough into the United Nations and given to the WHO – more pragmatic, more use.
Ebola sounds like a victim of one of the health fashions.   It didn’t kill so many so we
thought we could afford to ignore it.  But now the bug is training for a marathon.
Back to the lab, let’s find some money.  This is nature against man.

In the background there are migrants ripped off by their own to die imprisoned in unsafe vessels in foreign seas, illegal logging, hostages under death threat, projected flights to kill the right insurgents (how?), Russia bombing Ukrainian coal mines and switching off the gas (because it was expected doesn’t make it bearable), people with mental illness waiting over a year for NHS treatment and killing themselves – I could go on.  That singsong tone adopted by many newsreaders is a way of distancing us and them from the horrid recital of bad news.

I retreat into my visual coping drugs – favourite books, familiar TV. |Until last night the only new things I could contemplate was the reprinted Inspector Maigret series (thank you Penguin), short finely wrought beginning middle and end unlike the ongoing chaos of the world around me.   I have things to do and I haven’t done all of them though on a duvet day, crossing anything off the list of the domestic do’s feels an achievement.
But here is the good news.  On Sunday, my bus terminated inconveniently and not to be late for a friend, I signalled a taxi.  The driver was a very pretty woman with fine hair, terrific eye makeup, all enhanced by exactly the right shade of yellow with green in it.  I do not always know what is meeting and what is recognition.
I said please could you take me to …
She told me she is the oldest person to qualify to drive a Black Taxi, an unbelievable 66.   She has lived with the same man for 30 something years, she thinks he’s wonderful, and she loves the job.
Drive safely, Linda Jackson.

When I woke up I had been dreaming about a wood.
It’s the wood I ran away into when I was five or so, from which my father rescued me in a thunder storm.  And of course there is a whole backdrop to this – what wood?  Why did I run away?  Why do I remember the wood as benign though I was briefly in danger (a tree struck by lightening came down across the path I was happily running along, toward the beloved security of my father’s big figure)?   
That made me think about the act of recreation that we call memory.
Memory censors, blocks, re-evaluates, recreates, and is highly selective about what and how it recalls..

I hate those endless press pictures of Ashya King on yet another trolley, in yet another country, surrounded by microphones and various kinds of camera.  While his parents pursue something to save him, I wonder what the movement and disruption, the tension in the air, the different dislocations and reunions, the pressure and demand of all those strange bodies, is doing to him.  That’s why none of the images are reproduced in this piece.   I am not big on the reiteration of harm.
This is not about being “a sensitive little boy”.   We are all sensitive in that way, sensitive or dead.
Never a Jackie Kennedy fan, I came to see her request that the plane to do a couple of extra circuits while she prinked, only to throw herself at the waiting press, bought time for her children to get off the same plane and go home quietly.
I liked her for that as for little else.

People depend on the resilience of their children.   “He’ll forget” they say.
I hope so.  But I have listened to too many who remember.  They don’t want to
recall and the mind dresses the often unpleasant memory in strange symbols and
settings.  But remember they do.   And very often until you can unpick that, there isn’t much chance of moving forward.

“Walls of Memory” by Tayler Rollins

An old psychiatrist and his wife wrote a book about dreams and I invited him/them to talk about it on air.  He came and our first caller was an Irishwoman who recounted how, though she had long lived in London, every visit home produced great disquiet over several days, even if the visit itself had been uneventful, and the same dream.  “ I have this suitcase with me, d’you see” she said. “It’s big and heavy but I know I cannot put it to down. I must take it with me.”
“Have you ever opened it?”   asked my guest gently.
“Yes” she replied “and that’s the strangest thing.  It’s full of rubbish, dirty old bits of paper, broken things, and yet I know I must take it with me. “
“If you could bring yourself to start picking that rubbish up and examining it” he said  “ you will find memories of the past, the pain and difficulty, stuff you carry with you from home every time you visit, because you are the one that got away.”
She gasped.

But the pain of parenthood is that what you mean, what you intend, is not received by the child you mean it for – so well, oh heavens, with every good wish in the world – as the same.   And the gap between what you mean or meant and what your child feels or felt is very often plugged by dismissal, denial, euphemism and fear.

Being a parent, a caring good enough parent (there are no perfect humans – children or parents) is the bravest thing you will ever do and that’s only something you reflect on when perhaps your more proactive parenting days are done  – and then it is important that you do not opt out but remain, patient, polite, honest, caring  – the role of the parent of adult children is unsung – and I do not mean only taking care of grandchildren.

And you will not remember everything and even if you remember a lot, they will be your memories, nobody else’s.   The parents of sick children remember what they went though to try and find treatment, the child remembers differently.  Neither memory is right nor wrong but memory is personal.   

Both my parents loved words and so do I.
This doesn’t mean that I spend my life trying to use three syllables where two would do but it does mean that I love language, the variations, subtlety and precision, the often very funny coarseness, the shape and colour of the whole thing, where words come from..
“Talk’s cheap” I hear somebody sniff.
That doesn’t mean it is without value.  And a lot of the time it’s all we’ve got.

When you look at the current news (preferably holding a strong drink) you realise that a lot of the mess is because people literally don’t understand each other.   How many people in industry, commerce, media or politics speak Arabic or Russian  – let alone Ukrainian?   
I remember a young man with both parents language teachers (French and Spanish), who were taken aback when he wanted to go into the police because he had inherited their flair and they foresaw security for him in academe.  I suggested he split the difference. Theoretically he’d have real value to the police if he had language aptitudes and qualifications.  Go to university and get the degree, then it’s your turn to choose.

I am fascinated with how language modifies and changes, and down the years have collected odd articles into my modest archive, often very funny for example, like American restaurant jargon, or more sinisterly the language of war, designed to blind people to what really happens.  I once met a man who in telling a story referred to a “wet operation” and I swallowed hard when I realised what he meant.  Blood spilt.
Over the last 48 hours, first one and then the other of the newspapers I read daily has offered me stuff on language, one direct and the other applied, one funnier, the other cleverer – but both fascinating.

Robert Hutton is a journalist and his book is cryptic and savage, about what he calls the art of uncommunication (I used to call it Westminsterspeak).
Robert Cialdini is a psychologist who has been writing about human behaviour in an apparently accessible and practical way since his first book Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion in 1984.   (Of course they are both called Robert – it’s from the Old German meaning “fame bright”)   Details of their current offerings are at the end.

What won me to Robert Hutton was “We must have lunch” which he says means,
“We won’t have lunch.  Even if we find ourselves in the same restaurant, I’ll be at my own table.”   Whatever happened to just shaking hands and saying goodbye?
Modern methods of communication that supposed to make things happen quicker but they risk becoming just one more layer of stuff to be negotiated before you get the reaction you suspected you were going to get anyway.

Robert Cialdini tells you how to “tweak” your emails to get a response – boy am I happy to hear this since there are several of us writing, writing, writing into a cyber silence which is the exercise of petty power.
He says include some small personal detail and people find it easier to respond.
I want Robert Hutton and Robert Cialdini to teach me how to handle the accursed energy companies, one of whom in spite of an expensively colour printed brochure alleging a agreement with me and linkage to Age UK, has just kicked me into touch again because it acts without communication.   It has my bank account details for
direct debit so it can put in or withdraw at whim.   That’s enough to keep you awake at night.  And however alluring the agreement (waste of paper and print) there is this little sentence about “being subject to alteration” which effectively means they do what they want and we firefight in the rear.  No email address, all to be done over the telephone with the desperate for a job and brainwashed.
Suggestions, gentlemen?

Books
Would They Lie To You?  How to spin friends and influence people by
Robert  Hutton published by Elliott & Thompson £9.99
The Small B!g: Small changes that spark big influence by
Steve Martin, Noah Goldstein and Robert Cialdini
Published by Profile Books £11.99

And another thing:

Recently a friend put her daughter into university in New York where the sensible younger woman asked her mother if she thought there was anything else she could do to keep herself safe.  (Security measures in place are impressive.)
The daughter is a freshman so they went to meet the head of campus security who told her “Take your earplugs out of your ears when you go out,
Don’t check your phone six times down every block.
Be aware of what’s around you.
You’re safer that way.”
Makes you want to cheer and send him roses.           `
I wonder how many listen?