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Searching for somewhere to put my savings after a “this year something, next year not much” agreement, I happened on a good deal at the Halifax. The banking adviser – in her 30s, married, a human – didn’t know enough to look through the papers I brought with me to get the details of where the money was to transfer it. Nor did I.

I had to come back when I had found the information at home among the documents I had already taken in.

Would I like to use them as a bank?  The bank which held my accounts for 30 years had refused to let me move my account from Hampstead to a closer branch, although I have lived 20 miles away for a decade.

I hesitated.  I explained: I live on state and a small private pension.  I have a small amount of what I call back up money.  Stupidly hopeful after the persuasive advertisements, I wanted to be reassured of a smooth transaction.   It was the week before Easter.   Allowing for the holiday weekend, the adviser claimed it would take a couple of weeks.

I wrote to the erstwhile bank to advise them of my plans.  As expected, there was no reply.  They don’t do customer relations.

Printed material arrived from the Halifax confirming the transfer and execution of standing orders plus the £100 you get for joining.

This was followed by a statement of my account and I transferred outstanding funds from one bank to another by cheque.

A month later I received a further statement of account.  No pensions.

There was a minor tussle about the form of my name.  It was duly noted but not executed.  I had a bank card in one variation, a cheque book in another and a credit card in a third.

In trying to sort this out, I had written to the female signatory of the credit card business saying yes, I was disappointed – because I had asked from the outset and had been assured it could be done – but no big deal, don’t intend to use the credit card, sorry you were bothered, please note the form of signature on everything will be thus.   The letter was passed to customer services.

I received an apologetic letter which seemed to have certain personal touches and offered me a £50 sweetener, changing my name to the preferred form on the second chequebook.

I wrote to the male signatory of the customer services letter on 31 May, quoting the Halifax reference on his letter to me, saying that the money I had transferred did not appear on my statement and my pension were now missing for 2 months.  I was frightened.

Eventually the third statement arrived with the balance transferred but no pensions so, preferring to see the whites of someone’s eyes, I went to see the banking advisor.

She greeted me with “All the direct debits have come through.”

I nodded.  “You’re good at taking money out.  Where are my pensions?”

She looked taken aback.  We sat down.  She said the transfer team had emailed the Department of Work and Pensions for my state pension to be referred and the Prudential similarly for the private pension. Neither had received any notification, they said.

This is now Mandy Rice-Davies’ territory – “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”

The banking advisor got first one and then the other on the line and I spoke to them both.  They told me payments had been going to the old bank and probably would do so until July.

The banking advisor handled me well and assured me I could always come to her.

Three months, not a couple of weeks.

I did not mention the letter to customer services which I only risked because there was a reference.

Sure, different people deal with current accounts and personal banking from those who deal with credit cards but what about a telephone?  What about personal initiative?

Keeping an elderly person uncertain about their income doesn’t seem to be very much in keeping with the theme tune of a choir singing “I’ll be there”.

I dread shooting the messenger.  All the counter staff have been civil, some are charming.  The problem, as I wrote in the letter I bet hasn’t arrived, is the disconnect between the promise and the reality.

Why don’t the transfer team check with the banking advisor?

Why doesn’t the banking advisor check with the transfer team?

Why doesn’t customer service liaison check with the banking advisor and/or the transfer team?

I have written a second letter to a designated director since then.   Not a word.

The post loses post, emails disappear into cyberspace.

X marks the spot.

Must go, emailed a friend, running to a funeral …

I can identify with that.   Sometimes, that’s just how it feels.

When I mentioned my will for the fourth time, my son asked if I were concealing some terrible illness from him and I had to confess that, no, I just loathe the disorder people leave behind them because they can’t face the inevitable.

One of America’s best sayings is”Three sure things in life: birth, death and taxes.”

Making the arrangements isn’t so bad.  It’s the updating.

Objects you bought for little turn out to have appreciated in value because nobody makes them any more.   It’s a rewrite.

You make a list of specific bequests – people move abroad, you fall out, they jump the queue – and you have to write the list again.

Or you thought you could ask x or y to be executor.  Then he or she is borne down by a parent’s decline, or a late and all-consuming love affair.

Blast it, your best intentions of dying neatly are frustrated by the business of living.

I have to thank my father, a major emotional mentor, for my special relationship with death.  He was fey and he taught me from the beginning that death was just the other side of the coin: you had life, therefore, life ended.   “Death is a curtain” he said.  “Some people get to draw it aside.”

This was absorbed before |I was old enough to notice that my parents were quite a lot older than the parents of my contemporaries.   My mother was 44 when I was born, my father 48.   The endless lists of the Great War’s missing and dead in black bordered newspapers haunted my mother all her life.   My father volunteered 3 weeks before his 18th birthday and spent the war’s duration in Mesopotamia and on the North West Frontier (now respectively Iraq and Afghanistan).  The catastrophic European losses meant that his war was forgotten.  Now 100 years later, we notice the territory and occasionally I ask my pa “Can you hear, darling ?  They’ve got it now …”

I know people who can’t do death.  They can’t do dying either which is much harder work.  Dying and living get all mixed up and require another kind of courage.   The form of death has altered as medicine changed in research and practice.  You’d think spiritual beliefs would influence the acceptance of death but I have lost count of the number of card-carrying believers who can’t hack the notion of an end.  It always surprises me.  If you believe in the Resurrection and the :Life, how do you suppose you are going to get there except through an end ?

Of course, form helps.  The Jews sit Shiva, seven (that’s what it means) days of mourning, providing comfort, prayer, food and remembrance.  Imaginative people may make up their own rituals but are dependent on communication for making it happen, as in “Shall we get everyone over for a meal and toast George ?”

“Oh yes, lots of candles and his favourite music …”

Recently I heard the popular writer Martina Cole remark about the value of a wake but you don’t have to be Celt or Roman Catholic to understand that if a ritual marks the passing, coming to terms with it often takes longer than you expect.   And death is not cast in tablets of stone, it is cast in stories, funny and sad, horrible and wonderful, often introducing another side of someone you thought you knew.

The illusion that we all want to live “for ever” is some kind of perverse inheritance from fairy stories and presumes that ageing goes into neutral at about 60.   I wish.

Only the undead live forever and few vampires are as attractive as Robert Parris.

I long for what is called “a good death” of which rock ‘n roll says “Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.”  Too late.

I am not young, I have lived temperately  and how you look when you’re dead is how you look.

So I hope to die swiftly, with little pain, when I am not so very old.

Am I afraid of death ?

I don’t think so but it is a mystery.   Or maybe death isn’t but life is, so the ending of life is mysterious too.

God (prayer not exclamation) let me have my memory.  It will carry me where I must go.

Once upon a time, we might have chicken for Christmas.

A generous bird with lovely browned skin, fragrant flesh, all the trimmings and my mother’s unrepeatable gravy, the benchmark of when memory is just that and not a cure for reinvention.

Now, I think if you suggested chicken for Christmas, people might think you were “poor” and prevailing social opinion suggests that, while heaven forbid you should be poor, if you are – don’t admit it.

Contributing to a Radio Four programme on attitudes to money (some time ago, I paraphrase) the presenter told me “You are very conscious about money” to which I replied that she asked the questions: I answered.

Poor is a four letter word, meaning different things to different people.

Back to the chicken.

I was perhaps 8 when we tried one of the new battery birds and it was the only time in my home that I ever saw food thrown away.  My parents came through both World Wars and, as recent historical evaluation makes clear, alongside tons of destructive weaponry, Europe’s greatest problem was lack of food.

So taking food off family plates, wrapping up and disposing of quite a lot of chicken, was a big deal.  So was the expression on my mother’s face.

“Disgusting” she said.  “Tasted of fish.”

Nowadays chicken is cheap.   Well, some chicken is cheap and as red meat represents a mortgage acquisition or dietary restriction, fish is mostly just as pricey and we are rightly being urged to eat more vegetables, chicken is cheap(er).

A friend told me the other day how she stood in one of the more expensive supermarkets behind a designer draped couple, he with the stonking great watch and she with the stonking great shoes (visible signs of disposable income) while he said to her “I just can’t see paying £10 for an effing chicken”.

Just as well I wasn’t there.

Because I am a chicken hunter.

Where I used to live, we had a good butcher and chickens perfectly acceptable in price and flavour.

An organic butcher with great chickens came and went.

In those days Nigella Lawson wrote for a magazine I still gave houseroom so on her recommendation, I trekked over to Holland Park and bought a peerless bird.   Occasionally.

I was introduced to Borough Market.   Good chicken.

I went to Jago in Elystan Street – good chicken…  To The Ginger Pig – good chicken.

Tried every stall in my local farmers’ market where chicken was OK but not distinguished (NB I changed ovens so some of this may be my fault).

Mr. Waitrose – usually acceptable.

The best of all meat including chicken came from Jon and Louise at Peradon Organic Farm.

My son once remarked that Mum would go 15 miles for a good chicken.

Obsessed, me?

Of course all this is to do with personal taste but living alone on a budget, a good chicken is an investment.

The first time I found a boiling fowl (£5) and came home to make chicken soup (o joy, o triumph, o thank you heaven – I lived on it for a week), those to whom I told the story couldn’t see the achievement.

“You’re Jewish; of course you know how to make chicken soup.”

I am at best half a Jew – I’d be the first to say, better than none – but it’s on my father’s side and I had never made chicken soup, though I love to cook.

A good enough chicken means hot meals, cold meals and stock.

A not good enough chicken means “Oh …”

And as the taxi driver said “What’s all this about cheap food?   Very little food worthy of the name is cheap.   I want the best I can get for as little as I can spend.”

Hence the chicken hunt.

A couple of years after the dreadful battery bird, with which this obsession began, we had an enormous delicious Argentine turkey.

One of nature’s pickers, I kept going out to the kitchen and taking a bit, and then another, and so on.  There was a great deal left and it kept well but my father told me how when early settlers went to the Americas, they found wild turkey so plentiful that they ate only the breast and discarded the rest.

Even then I found this story disturbing.

Don’t take a good bird for granted.  It’s harder to raise than you think.

PS  The Poultry Council did not pay for this writing.
Update:  www.fossemeadows.co.uk , discovered through Juliet at the Farmers Market – gold star!

Unusually today, I had lunch at a pavement cafe, alone, and enjoyed every mouthful.

The food was splendid, reasonably priced and I was so busy enjoying it that it wasn’t until near the end of the meal that I realised I had.

Over the years, I have learned to do all sorts of things alone.   I don’t have any difficulty entering a room alone, appearing in public alone, though I am ambivalent about being ill alone.  You may want to be left alone but you want to know somebody cares.

But with regard to the lunch – I have never been any good at eating alone in public.

When I came to London from Middlesbrough on my 17th birthday, opportunities for eating out had comprised fish and chips with my parents in the car at Stokesley and probably three Chinese meals, two with my mother.  I could just about handle coffee or a drink, but I was evasive about eating out with anybody.  The group of friends I made drank in the pub and in those far off days of luncheon vouchers, four or five of us saved them all week and then met for a blowout lunch at The Stockpot.  All women, I could manage that.

I was so terrified by the first meal in a French restaurant that I forgot all my French, ate soup and an omelette, and threw the whole experience away.  I couldn’t look at the waiter; I hoped devoutly he wasn’t looking at me.  It was so embarrassing that I felt as if I had blinkers on and could only see what was directly in front of me.  I remember everything about it and it was agony, to be avoided.  I used to meet for  what we called “late dates” i.e. eat first and drink later, or simply lie and say, I had already eaten thank you.   I don’t know where this came from.

Always perfectly happy to eat a home, in friends’ homes or on picnics, I have never had anything resembling an eating disorder as I understand it but sitting down in any kind of eating establishment produced a lock across the back of my throat reinforced by another lower down, across the stomach.

I was saved from much difficulty in my early relationships because none of us had any money to spend on eating out and then along came a job that required me to take clients to lunch.   I had to do it to keep the job I loved.   So I did.  I honestly believe this helped.  In the beginning I pushed my food round the plate to the manner born but in time, I ate a bit.  And then you have more or less beaten the fear into submission – you eat a bit more every time.  Until I had to eat with someone I was keen on, when the whole thing reprised and I went back to playing at “not very hungry”.   This continued until I was in my early thirties when I beat it by marrying a man I loved who liked to eat out.  So for twenty years, we ate in a variety of restaurants large and small, glamorous and otherwise, and I assumed that “that was then and this is now”.

When the marriage ended, I thought I was older and wiser and it would be fine.  And in many ways, I was.  But it wasn’t fine.

Eating out alone makes me feel conspicuous.  Even in the quietest corner and masked by a book, I feel I am disturbing the harmony of the place, that there is something discordant in me that means that I am not whatever it is that would make me acceptable.  I don’t eat out alone much but I do when I can because I feel that the ills of 50 years ago have no business in my life.  Part of the problem is that I am naturally gregarious so I long to share the experience but I am working my way past that whenever I can.

Last year, I swept into a place, tempted by feta and honey on hazelnut bread and my first ever glass of Temperanillo rose, which made me so happy I could have skated round the restaurant.  A spendthrift as soon as I am remotely intoxicated, I promptly bought a book I didn’t need.

So today was not an exam.   More like course work and presume it will stay part of course work until I can say “Eat out alone? Of course.”

I have never been a fan surrounded by the chosen image embellished on record sleeves and teacloth seeing film or performance over and again, shouting at the match, going weak at the knees in the street.

Quite early on I began to separate people whose physical impact I responded to from people whose achievement I admired, though I also came to understand that intelligence rendered much beautiful to me that wasn’t appealing to other people.

And I am an enthusiast.

Once asked what kept me young (apart from flattery!) I answered “rage”.
Did that mean I was always angry with people?

No.  It’s closer to the French sense of the word which means, among other things, passion.  Long ago. a very important man in my life with a temperament very similar to mine, remarked “People like us should be paid for living.”

At the time, I thought it was the height of conceit but I have come to see what he meant.

I like life.  The Jewish toast “L’chaim !”  (“To life !”) says it all.  I like some bits better than others, of course I do, but I never forget Auntie Mame (film, 1958) abjuring “Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving.”

Life is a series of doors opening on to vistas which shock and amuse, horrify and teach – and I want to be moved, churned up, made to think and choose and be rendered speechless.
Which is what happened when I saw a film called The Gatekeepers.

It is a documentary.  I am pretty guarded about documentary which has been eroded by the merchandising of the corporate brand, the rise of infomercial and reality tv.  

Throwing everything up in the air, avowing that “anything goes” results too often in less – less thought, less imagination, less impact.

But the Channel 4 series Unreported World shows that other people’s lives are quite different, often stranger than fiction, and that the difference is 
interesting..

Other people make choices we don’t even dream of defining.

The Gatekeepers is about the Israeli internal security operation Shin Bet.

The film is short, subtitled and it goes on a small list of documentaries that – apart from newsreels – affected my adult life.

These include a film about World War 2 pilot Richard Hillary, one of Sir Archibald McIndoe’s plastic surgery “guinea pigs”, one about the jaguar in Brazil, one about the black rhino in SA’s oldest game reserve (in both cases for what they taught me about the humans involved, as much as the animals) and The Fog of War, about former Defence Secretary Robert McNamara under whose aegis the US burned and was burned in the wars of SE Asia. (By no means a complete list, there are lots of other influences but a psychologist would make hay with the importance of threat in my cherished perceptions.) 

The Gatekeepers is an exercise in how exhausting decision making is.

Think what you like about Israel, here is a film, the length most films used to be and for my money more effective for its brevity, featuring as talking heads the men who have been charged with policing a small nation in a particularly vexed geo-political situation for 40 years.

You are invited to contemplate candour about pragmatism to such a degree as to render much of current British politics the consistency of cream crackers – familiar, useful, a bit bland, a bit brittle, forgettable.

Six men – intelligent, frightening, weary – not pretty, not actors or pinups – thoughtful, troubled, adult.

It was outstanding.

One definition of documentary is an assemblage of facts – what people do, what people say they do, which may deliberately or inadvertently tell
us the watchers something of what those people think.

How you put the facts together is immediately open to differing interpretation.

In a film, you can make things happen in an order or a way they did not, for greater impact.

You can argue that all the elements were true, you just arranged them.
Is that still documentary?

We used to say bitterly to one another, me and my film loving friends, that acted film was often more truthful than documentary but sometimes – in the exception that proves the rule – the structure and design, the setting of a documentary tells us something we did not expect learn.

It is not to do with my advancing age that I am aware of weariness.
I see what I see and you either grasp the emotional costs of a series of actions and responses, or you don’t.

I sat through three hours of Wyatt Earp (1994) to learn how tiring is the procurement of death in the pursuance of order, because however you choose to get there, the end is the same: too many die.

The Gatekeepers taught me much more in 95 minutes.

We cannot see ourselves.  Even the mirror only shows a reflection, you could say a perception, and that quote from the Scottish poet Robert Burns

“O wad some Power the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us”

is thoughtful enough to get over the clunk of the way it’s written.

When I was younger I was punishingly self conscious and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, but I wonder what people would say or feel if they could see what they do unthinkingly, to which the rest of us are helpless witness.  At worst, it’s a kind of psychological dumping.

Small children suck their thumbs or pick their noses and this is usually amended by a handy adult.

Nail biting is harder to correct for the biter and the guardian but we can assume it’s not desirable.  I have never heard of it being encouraged.

In the past, a bad habit was controlled where it might be seen.  All of us have bad habits – no moral high ground here.  There was however tacit agreement that what you did in private was not what you did in public.

But – just as it is no longer unusual to see people go up the road in their nightwear – nightwear that has ceased to be advertised for sleeping but has become what you wear “at home” and may go to bed in – and as millions of us have been busy watching people exhibit themselves warts and all – or maybe just warts – for every kind of camera, there is a gruesome obviousness in flaunting what was once deplored.

A young woman sat grooming herself for the 20 minutes we shared a bus.  Simian, she ran her fingers through her hair over and over, shook it out, pushed it back, twisted it round, shook it out again and repeated the process.  Like a tic with a pattern incorporating a pause, the routine ran, over and over.

And you know that if by some clever scientific wheeze, you could tint the air so that she could see the dead skin and bacteria she was shedding all over, her mouth would pull into that familiar pout of distaste which people employ when they don’t like what they see but they can’t associate it with themselves.   A new take on denial?

I’d like the same idea applied to public transport when people sneeze and cough, not using tissues or handkerchiefs, and are so darned generous with their germs.

But this is passing irritation.

There are more serious forms of personal malpractice, laden with anger turned in or pushed out; perhaps depending upon gender though I suspect it has more to do with individual personalities.

In my casual observation, nail biters are 50/50 male and female but nose pickers are mostly male.

Like the young man who got into a crowded train on a cold day, medium height, attractive, well-cut dark overcoat and sat next to me whereupon for the ten minutes it took to travel two stops, he methodically picked his nose and wiped his fingers on his coat.

Recently in a well known West end store, I went to a saleswoman and asked if I could pay her for something not on her pitch, fished out my wallet and said quietly “I don’t want to buy anything from somebody who is so busy self-cannibalizing.”

Her male colleague’s eyebrows shot up and he went round the corner to look.  I explained quietly that the assistant to whom I should logically have gone was busy eating her nails up to the wrist.  The man came back shaken to remark “That’s not on, is it?”   But it is increasingly common.   And if the nose picking is distasteful, the violence of the nail biting is unsettling.  So what is this all about?

Are we in the process of losing any notion of personal privacy?

Is this behavior on the spectrum with lab rodents pumped with a stimulant that may attack each other and/or themselves?

Is it about longing to feel relevant and recognised but only feeling insecure, so that you attack yourself – like pinching yourself to make sure you are awake?

In the spirit of morbid curiosity, you may want to see television films about people with all sorts of psychological difficulties, distortions and disabilities.   But that’s the box.   You can switch it off.

This is life I am looking at and it is harder to get away from.

We didn’t have floods in London, but we did have a great deal of rain.

Day after day, mostly chilly, showers, heavy showers, the odd thunderstorm, a bit of hail and lots of steady downpour.

It is of course bad news for the retail trade dependent on seasonal selling; Pale thin linen isn’t high on the wardrobe list when the sky is battleship grey.   Picnic equipment isn’t needed.  There isn’t (yet) a waterproof barbecue.  And sales of gumboots have improbably overtaken sales of sandals, espadrilles and other footwear for warmer weather.

As the temperature swung between medium low and a bit higher, we all sneezed, complained and muttered to each other that we were tired of the rain.

And yet – the meteorological gurus say that we are short of water after two dry winters and recently severely depleted rainfall.

It would be best – you can hear them rolling this round their collective mouths – if this sort of weather continued for the rest of the year.

Weather is one of the few things you can’t lay at the door of politicians.

Weather systems have causes, or are at the least subject to influence, but most of us don’t care how we got here.

We are only know that we are in the umpteenth week of unseasonable downpour and mightily sick of umbrellas and raincoats, damp shoes and sniffles.

But the Olympics were estimated to be pulling in an extra one million people, further straining the bulging seams of the capital, people who need to wash, eat, drink and void themselves, all of which takes a lot of water – more in this country than in many because our systems use a lot.  We have always had water.   A shortage of it is a new idea to us.

Years ago I wash washing my hands under a flow when my hostess reached over and turned off the tap.

“We don’t do that in Africa” she said.   “Water is scarce.  We save it.”

Where they were then, we are now.

And like every other major concern, response to saving water is personal.

Our last dray summer got me to use the shower more than the bath because received wisdom said showers used less water.

I have long conserved rainwater for the garden.

Though I wish someone would explain why running the tap, whether for teeth cleaning or washing up, seems to engender a sort of pleasure.   I do try to turn the tap off but I am aware that I prefer it running.

What I don’t know is why.

But when we start to consider a major influx of humans into an already crowded city, you know that water will be needed for all sorts of thing, in quantity, and that getting athletes, the entourages and the crowds to queue at standpipes isn’t viable.

And where are they are going to relieve themselves?

A friend came back from Istanbul saying there were lavatories (both hole in the ground and pedestal variety) all over the place, and directions to find them.

We are mean in the provision of water closets: public lavatories were closed down, centers for the homeless, the erotic, the drug taker and the most appalling excretal behavior.  So now we have the old/new experience of increasing numbers relieving themselves in the street – I’ve just seen my first woman and my third man, this year.   All in areas far from run down.

The big stores provide facilities (only Harrods charges) but in far too many restaurants and bars, the facilities are poor or none.  And sadly the exclusivity of a place doesn’t mean that its toilet facilities match – oh, I could tell you stories.

In Florence (personal experience again though I know there is no relation between the size of the city and the size of London), the smallest cheapest bar has some kind of lavatory (sorry I hate the word toilet), somewhere to wash your hands, loo paper (not always soft) and a towel or hand drier.  The astounding figures for reduction of infection in hospital highlight that washing your hands afterwards isn’t a nicety, it’s essential.  No wash?  No pee.

I wonder if that statue is still on the books which provide that a person may go to the door of any dwelling in the land and ask to use the privy.  I’ve always thought that was useful, with or without the Olympics

I try not to rant.   It’s very aging.  We all have things we take for granted of which we say “It’s just common sense.”   But the dereliction of common sense promotes a rant – for example in the matter of getting rid of household rubbish.

Apparently we lag behind many other countries in this.  Our landfill is overflowing and heaven knows what we do for an encore.

In the meantime, large numbers of people just dump rubbish without a thought about wrapping, recycling, discarded food, aesthetics, vermin or health hazard.

I live on a street of mixed properties; council and privately owned. Some houses, some flats, owner occupier and tenants.

Some of the flats have gardens, some tiny terraces.  The upper ones keep their rubbish out the back, those lower down put it out the front.  The local authority collects for recycling and landfill, regularly sends round little wagons with circular brushes and large men with flat brooms.  In the matter of waste disposal, the householders are well served by the local authority.

But the more it does for us, the less many of my neighbours do for themselves.

In the matter of the bin lid: if rainwater gets into a bin full of rubbish, it causes the contents to rot and stink.

The road is full of uncovered bins.

And when was the black bag converted by marketing from “bin liner” to “rubbish bag”?  A bin liner has to go inside a bin.  Apparently a rubbish bag is an alternative to a bin.

When I suggested to one of my neighbours that she might invest in a bin (even in these straightened times, not an item of major expenditure) she asked “Why?”

So she and her flat mates continued merrily to put their rubbish out the night before collection in the cheapest black bags which spilled and split and the foxes had a field day.

The next morning there would be much pouting and tutting, fingers arched away from any contact with the mess, but not a lot of clearing up.  No, that was for the waste operatives – what we used to call the dustbin men.

Reasonably, they have neither time nor inclination to pick up after us, so the eggshells and the bits of half eaten food, the bacon rinds and the wadded tissues and teabags would be left all over the pavement.

Until I went out and picked up.

Another neighbour observing me commented in his best disapproving voice “Bin men don’t do a very good job.”

I straightened up, Queen of the Marigolds; to say crisply “The garbage men do a fine job.  Most people don’t know how to wrap rubbish.”

It wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

Why don’t you think that dumping a rolled up carpet in front of your flat may have solved a problem in the short term when the weather was dry but once it has been raining for some weeks, the carpet is beginning to rot.  And it smells.

Why don’t you understand that a paper carrier breaks down in the rain and disperses the contents everywhere?

How can you not know that foxes and rats are attracted to every kind of meat scrap and that if you don’t wrap remains and put them in a place safe from claws and teeth and a sense of smell far more acute than a human one, they are going to be slavered over., defecated on and are thus a source of horrible odour and putative infection?

If you can’t afford a bin (£25 between two or more of you), what about stronger bags and not putting them out till the morning of the collection – rather than the night before when the critters roam?

I continue to write to the waste disposal department to point out when bags aren’t collected, when fly tipping (the logical extension of the above) occurs, to thank them when they clear stuff away, to wrap and rewrap, frequently swearing under my breath, always with a sense of incredulity.

Because if it is all a matter of common sense, then clearly common sense is as rare as hen’s teeth.

A fashion article recently claimed that ballerina pumps (i.e. dead flat shoes) had stopped being anything to do with fashion now that they had become a wardrobe staple selling x hundred thousand pairs every day.

By a similar token, you know there is a communication problem when newspapers start writing about it.

Why don’t we speak?

“Oh” I hear people say “it’s the pressure of modern life.”

Well then don’t be a victim of it.  Change it.

It is rarely quiet or pleasant on the bus nowadays.  The ride is usually dominated by one person speaking loudly into a mobile telephone, or worse still, two people speaking loudly in different languages on their mobiles.  Curiously, people think that they can’t be understood or gainsaid, so they speak ever louder.

A woman turned to a man mouthing off in Spanish and asked him to lower his voice.  She was polite.  He stared at her cold-eyed and spoke again into his mobile.

“I know what you are saying” she said blushing.  “I speak Spanish and that’s very rude.  I was quite courteous to you.  Couldn’t you speak more quietly?”

I immediately wanted to give her three different kinds of awards – for wearing her ordinary face, for refusing to be intimidated by him as lord of creation and for keeping her cool even as the blood vessels in her face dilated.

For I discovered xenophobia when I spent 20 minutes behind a Russian very nearly shouting into a mobile.

A more sociological experience involved a man with a plum in his throat who was challenged by two enterprising women in their thirties on a packed bus coming home through the rain.  He was conducting a conversation of mind-numbing triviality at the top of lungs clearly trained for field sports.  Challenged, he made the mistake of playing “poor me, it’s all about women nowadays” so that feeling against him from both sexes ballooned on all sides, till it was almost tangible and rain or not, he felt he should take his leave.

“That’ll teach him” remarked the woman beside me as he got off.  I said I doubted it, that personality is always right.

When the work I do slid away from me under the door marked “change”, I reverted to an earlier me.  I always spoke to people but it is easier with a degree of elective anonymity.  I have the security of knowing who I was which allows me to be who I am.

Aztec Rock Medicine

I try to be tactful, not everyone wants to speak.  I am willing to leave it.  I expect nothing.  I am unlikely to meet my new best friend, that horrid phrase which has inbuilt several kinds of expectation.

But most of the time casual exchange does what it always did.

It passes time agreeably.  It often begins with a chance remark about the weather.

But sometimes, it doesn’t.

I sat behind a boy of five or six making speech-like noises.  His mother talked to him, fed him slices of pear.  He interacted non-verbally with her.

When the passenger beside me got off, he knelt up in the seat to face me and indicated very clearly by these noises something on the river.

I said gently but clearly that it was a boat.  He beamed at me.  We commenced exchange – I talked and he responded.  He seemed to understand me but there were no recognisable words.

I took a deep breath, leaned forward ready for anything, and said into his mother’s ear “Please excuse me – this child needs his hearing tested.”

She turned to me.  “I was going to start with a speech therapist.”

“OK” I said, overcome with relief. “But his hearing needs assessing.  If he can’t hear, he can’t speak.  Speech is imitative.  My son was the same (conversational précis).”

The boy was beaming on us.

“Do you think it’s anything else?” she asked.   This is when you pray.

I said I doubted it, I am not trained but his eye contact is good, he interacts and he is clearly bright.

There was more, but she left me in no doubt that I had done the right thing.

It won’t always be as uplifting as that but we won’t know if we don’t speak.