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If you don’t like Christmas, don’t subscribe.  You can choose.

Is that why so many people don’t?

Because you could sue (if you could find out who) about what Christmas has become, under the Trades Descriptions Act.

It is no longer to do with the birthday of the Christ or even (often) the applied values of Christianity like comfort, joy, peace, kindness, family and generosity, to name a few.

It is about merchandising.

The carols have yielded to endless reruns of elderly ballads and Saint Nicholas, patron saint of children, has morphed into Father Christmas or better still Santa Claus, father being rather a loaded term.   And if there is a god involved, it’s Mammon – dictionary definition “riches, avarice and worldly gain personified as a false god.”

Of course there are still those happy people who give friendly drinks and dinner parties, families delighted to rally, happy relaxed children of every age.

Acts of kindness are valuable and moving.  Loneliness is a problem to those it bothers but like stress, it has a positive side.

My favourite seasonal tweet so far says “Christmas food reinvented – organic, vegan – and lots of gin!” though often the drinking motif means we have gone from a bit to a bonanza, methodically slurping through several days – wine, cocktails, anything in a coloured bottle including morphine enriched cough linctus.

So let me speak up for the 25th.

Yule is a very old festival, long predating Christianity and in Northern Europe, it celebrates the darkest point before the slow rise towards a new spring which may be long in coming.  As a child, my Christmases were unburdened by religious belief but inclined to the spiritual because my parents were, and we all loved stories.

My parents married on Christmas Eve.

On Christmas Day when I was 12, my sister’s fiancé was killed in a plane crash.

I have never not had a lovely Christmas, I suppose because I commit to it.

I do whatever bit of titivating I am going to do to the house, I light candles (to see us through the darkness I mentioned), I forget the clock, I look at the garden and if I am lucky, I listen to a cherished silence so dense it has a sound of its own, depending on the weather and the fact that everybody else has gone away.

In December this year I spoke on the radio about the happy birth of any baby symbolising hope and that started me thinking about the components of the story, the supporting roles if you like – the shepherds and the Three Wise Men, the angels and in the old British tradition, the animals having the gift of speech for the night of Christmas Eve, the woman and her husband chosen as guardians.

My favourite Christmas poems are The Sheepdog by UA Fanthorpe, about the angels appearing to the shepherds from the point of view of a collie, and Prayer for a New Mother by Dorothy Parker in which Mary is allowed to enjoy the birth of her son.

I would cast as shepherds Kevin whose wife is terribly ill, who sells organic produce in one of the markets I frequent and David the window cleaner, his wife Lynn and their sons: they constitute simple warmth and grace in a busy tough world.

I have endless Magi, wise men (usually women) with gifts, Lala’s coat, Di’s hat, Daisy’s daisies, Slad’s pearls – and the unending gift of friendship.

My Mary is a Semitic Grace Kelly.

Joseph is in my memory, gone but not forgotten, my father, the lawyer Sir David Naply, Lee and Stacey who had an inspiring life partnership and shared everything they learned.

My ox is a Staffordshire bull terrier called Rico whom I met in the dark outside the convenience store, where (once his boss had introduced us)

I was allowed to caress his apple head while he pranced and smiled.

And my ass is every beautiful horse and mule including Joey in War Horse.

There is a tall gardener in the Pimlico Farmers ‘ Market called Rosalind from whom I bought a wreath, half a dried oak branch complete with acorns, some fir and holly, and that says it all:  some will go, some will stay.

Try again tomorrow.

The Times Magazine (8.12.2013) ran a piece entitled How to Have Sex on the Radio, featuring those artists who arrange sound effects for radio  – a rare small tribe who break sounds into separate syllables and reassemble an impression from unlikely things like wet tea  towels (as referenced above), melons (soft human tissue) and the tinkling of small light bulbs (ice cubes).  Not a clopping coconut shell in earshot.   

It’s not that I don’t like TV. It’s just that I love radio.  And in keeping with my favourite law of paradox, radio gives you less to work with and thus gives you more.  You can travel mightily between your temples. 

While sorting out the contents of Uncle Henry’s blanket box (one of my storage chests) I looked at the pile of tapes and cassettes and it leered back at me.  I couldn’t use them in that form and, technology being what it is, I didn’t think anybody else would either.

I rang Sean who is knowledgeable about these things.  “Where” I asked “can I get old master tapes converted into DVDs?”

“Not sure” he said.  “You need someone with radio equipment.  Let me think about it.”  And by the end of the conversation he had.  “NSA” he said.  Excuse me?

“The National Sound Archive.”  I blushed.  News to me.

“Write to them” he said.  “You’re a broadcaster in good standing.  They will want you to donate the originals but they will make the DVDs for you.”

I looked up the National Sound Archive, still shamefaced and thinking that, if I didn’t know about them, a lot of other people probably didn’t either.  I emailed to introduce myself and outlined what I sought.  A reply came back as fast as one of those zinging change machines that used to be rigged between the counters and the cashiers in old department stores.

Would I ring…?  I rang.

We made an arrangement to meet.

The National Sound Archive is on the lower floor of the British Library, one of the few modern buildings with heart, soul and shape. 

Paul Wilson came to meet me and for once in my life I took everything with me that might be relevant – interviews from campus radio here and in the States when I was working for Forum: various interview of me including about an early memoir and a first novel: interviews

I ran with all sorts of interesting people: a London Transport commercial: two of the long ago programmes with which I began at Capital

Radio and where I worked for 14 years: and so on. I didn’t take so much that I felt I was imposing, nor so little that I risked wasting the curator’s time.  We listed and discussed everything and then I offered a cassette i described as “the bribe” – an interview with the now dead US novelist James Baldwin who was black and gay, a delightful companion and a great writer.  It has never been played.  I recorded it to try and write an interview for a magazine whose editor thought I had a future.

It was beyond my abilities to render that extraordinarily distinctive voice into print.  “But he is enjoying a renaissance now”

I ended “so I thought you might like it.”  It is now on the NSA website.  

And I am the Anna Raeburn Collection.

In spite of the explosion of media of every kind, there are about 600 radio stations, BBC national and local, independent and community, and radio audience figures are still very impressive. 

Only the BBC has any formal requirement to archive so that the image of yesterday’s papers wrapping today’s fish and chips is carried over into the ephemera of sound. Heaven knows, the standard of some of it is so truly awful that you wouldn’t want to listen to it, let alone keep it for the ages, but a local radio station covering the building of an important bridge and how that effects communications and surrounding, or the impact of a change in industry on local employment, the surrounding community and its life – that’s oral history.

Not (to be) sneered at.

NSA.

Kismet was the gloriously over the top Hollywood musical my mother took me to see when I was about 12. Music and songs

had been added  to a successful Broadway script which borrowed freely from the Thousand and One Nights, stories Scheherazade told the Sultan stopping just before dawn each day with a cliff-hanger, so he had to keep her alive for one more day. This collection of very old stories from all over the Middle East was rendered into the English under the title of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment in the eighteenth century.

All I can remember about the film is noise and colour, uncritically accepted costumes and that familiar feeling that everybody else knew something about this I didn’t know, whether it was history, geography or sex. It was later that I learned that kismet meant fate.

I loved the idea of talking for your living and I just about did. Independent radio in which I spent many years had a maxim about avoiding any pause – it was called “dead air”. But the truth is I always talked.

One of my earliest memories of my mother is the sound of her voice from way above her apron strings saying, “Will do you something for me?”

“Yes Mummy?”

“Shut up.” I was already drawing breath to ask why.

“Please” she went on, “Just for a minute. I can’t hear myself think.”

But beyond that I was ill a good deal and she encouraged me to talk and observe and think, once saying (never to be forgotten) that she wanted me to be able to talk myself in and out of anything.

Occasionally, as I contemplate a whole bus full of people not looking at each other but prodding plastic boxes, or realise it is no good making a good-natured remark in passing to some hardworking young man or woman who is plugged in with both ears and can hear nothing very much over and above that, I wonder if conversation isn’t a dying art, threatened by the pace of life and the insidious nature of handy technology.

Most people like exchange.

And “busmet” is a joke, a play on words.  It may be fate (kismet) but I meet people on big red buses.

This particular morning I meet a woman with a face shaped like a filbert, white skin, black hair and very pretty earrings. I notice earrings.

At a given point in time, she drew on her gloves, turned slightly and caught my admiring eye.

I remark on her earrings.

“Thank you” she said. “Mama had them made for my 50th.” Note: mama – not mamarr – two equal syllables.  Radio hones the ears.

I asked where she was from. She said Southern Russia and we went through those phrases again and three times, till I said

“Listen, there is a lot of Southern Russia, it’s big.  Tell me a town …”

She hesitated and said “Rostov”.

I said “Sure.  Rostov on the Don.”

She looked at me, taken aback, “You know Rostov?”

“No, no” I said,  “The book -”

Mayakovsky – a story is more powerful than the Tsar

“You read Sholokov?” I may have read it but she can pronounce his name.

I nod, yes. She beams.

“Why do you know Russia?”

I don’t want to close this conversational opening so I explain that I am interested, fascinated by certain aspects of Russia – for example, I tell her about the Redstone diary with illustrations from children’s books in 1930s Russia and the slogan I copied into my notebook – “a story is more powerful than the Tsar”.

I have chosen something safe – she can talk to me – you must think what might be unsafe for other people. She begins to speak about her parents in that way that you do, even to a stranger, when you are comfortable, when you feel somebody is listening.  Her father is from Ukraine but not Ukrainian (I have read this kind of distinction but never heard it said before) and her mother’s family are from Kazakhstan a long time ago, Kazakhstan with the ancient shapes of animals and the new museums, only possible when it seceded from the Soviet Eastern Empire.

“You know this?” she asked me. ”People do not understand, we are many countries, quite different one from another.”

So I remark that this was one of the difficulties the great dancer Nureyev had in the West: we would describe him as Russian and he would insist “Tartar.”

“Like mama” she nodded.  “They give her a food she does not like too heavy, too -” we find the word together “too greasy and she says – I cannot eat this.

I am Tartar.”  And we say (she meant the family I think) – Mamma, please – so long ago.  Don’t fuss.  Silly!   But she insists.”

The bus stop looms.  Without saying we know we shared a moment, a moment when somebody on a London bus recognised the name of her home town.

Who knows what else is forgotten?

We shake hands.  She pats my shoulder and disappears into the crowd.

Kismet/busmet.

Every so often London comes to a halt.

Sometimes, this is because of a demonstration or a march but more often, there is an accident or an incident that requires roads sealed off and numbers of police.  Traffic flow is impeded for miles.  Of course you can’t tell when this is going to happen so you just leave home as usual, with some time in hand, and hope for the best.

Where I live, local bus services are frequent but this morning, there was nothing for ages so

I got on the first bus that came, thinking it would take me at least the first stage of the journey.

I had an appointment with a cherished eye surgeon and I don’t like being late for anybody.

Traffic flow was treacly but eventually we got to Sloane Square where there are usually taxis and that was now the only way.

Four of us queued.  Taxis still honour the queue, it is long gone at the bus stand.

Two sped away, leaving me and another woman behind me with a small child.

After several minutes, two taxis began to move ponderously through the square towards the rank.  Two men appeared some distance away and signalled the first cab.

I called “Excuse me, there’s a queue.”   They continued towards the cab.

“There is a queue” I said again, to which the older man did the “go away dear” flap and said

“Oh chill.  Just keep your shirt on.  What are you getting so excited about?  Just relax …”

Like a version of “she didn’t say no” that makes it consensual?   Sort of “shut up and let me do as I wish”?  The driver pulled up beside me and, as I got in, the speaker went on

“The trouble with you, love, is you’re old – old and ugly …”

I said I’d rather be me than him, shut the door and we drove off.

It was the first time I have directly experienced “old” as a supposed insult.

But we all get old.

The driver said he hated getting old.  Everything creaks and he has to have glasses.

He has had a great deal of trouble getting used to remembering that he needs them – “Not ideal if you drive” he said.  I sympathised with having to remember things but I have worn glasses since I was quite young and I’m used to them.

While he was talking, I reflected that there are days when I feel 100 but quite a lot when I don’t think about age at all, still others when I am very glad I am the age I am.

God help the young, my life seems to have been a great deal easier.

In my younger life, I couldn’t be older quick enough.  I was fired at 19 for deceiving a company into giving me a job advertised for somebody over 21.  I thought if I did well, they would forgive me.

But they felt that one untruth might well lead to another, and I was given my cards.

I never lied about my age for good or ill ever again.  It wasn’t worth it.

And the first time anybody threw my older age in my face I was 40.

I was fond of 40, 40 was my 21, the best I have ever looked or felt.  Not because I starved or struggled but because life was good and it suited me.

We lived in a flat in Hampstead and five young men rented the one above us, where they had a party of such wildness that the cistern broke and there was a flood which brought down part of a ceiling.

Neighbours called the police. What they did not realise was that my then husband did business with the bank that employed them. The bank required them to apologise.  Four out of five managed it in two lots of two but the fifth looked me square in the face and said “It’s just a difference of generation.”

I told him that I had worked and paid tax in his country when I was younger than him and that the notion of a generation gap in this context was simply an evasion.  He behaved like a jerk, I didn’t.  No age limit on jerks.

I wish I had thought faster when that man had a go at me in Sloane Square.  That’s the only thing I regret about age, that one is not always as fast as one used to be, in mind, mouth, hand or foot. That or I wish I had been a Marine top sergeant with a hand like ham and boxed my verbal assailant’s charmless ears.

Derek (his real name) was 10 and I a year younger when we climbed up on a car trailer which tipped with our weight and we panicked.  He pushed me aside and my knee snagged on a rusty iron bolt.   I limped home, blood black through the skirt of my favourite green pinafore dress and my mother took me to Middlesbrough General Hospital, to what was then called casualty. I don’t remember much of a wait.  I do remember Staff Nurse Helen Coates, a handsome dark blonde, who said the wound would require stitches, and I’d need tetanus and local anaesthetic.  The injection hurt and my foot jerked up to clip the ministering angel under the jaw.  We apologised, she took it in her stride.

The scar on my right knee remains.

Some weeks ago, coiling the hose back through the flat having watered the plants at the front, I backed into a spade hanging from a nail, it fell and shafted into my heel.  In spite of immediate running water and antibacterial cream, 36 hours later the whole foot was what used to be called “proud” – dark, angry, hotly swollen – so I went to ask to see the GP.

She was on holiday (it is a busy practice.)  Although I explained what had happened, nobody offered me any advance on an appointment four days later, so having waited and hoped to be wrong, in fear of blood poisoning, I took a book, caught a bus and went to Accident and Emergency.

Getting signed in took time, even turned up my son’s name. Why was it different from mine?  Divorce.

Was I who I really said I was?  Not fame, the receptionist got the date of birth wrong.  In time, I was sent upstairs.

I waited four hours though a friend in the know said if I had claimed a head injury, I would have gone to the front of the queue.

When I saw the first nurse, a Nigerian, I said “I want a gold star.”   She looked at me.

“I want a gold star” I said “because I have not ripped the TV out of the wall and thrown it through the window and because I have not knocked together the heads of the two young people in front of me who talk just too loud to ignore.”

Grinning, she asked “Are you always like this?”   “Is there another way?”  I asked, grinning back.

I sat down some more, summoned eventually by Laeticia the nurse practitioner, who frowned over the form in her hand and asked me to stand on my toes.  I did so, supporting myself with a hand on the wall opposite.

“Take your hand down, stand on your toes” she said again.  It hurt but I did it.  “Good.  Well, if you can do that, you missed the Achilles tendon.”  I hadn’t even thought of that.  She told me what she was going to do and I heard a familiar inflection the voice so, as she went to the door, I asked where she was from.  She looked at me forbiddingly.

“Zimbabwe.”   And where in Zimbabwe?  “Bulawayo.  Why?”   I told her my first husband came from there.

Big smile.

And she gave a painless injection.

By now it was 10.00 and I was sent to a small window tih a bell where a young man took my prescription, told me he was dealing with an acute case and he would call me as soon as he could.  20 minutes later, he handed me the pills, ran through the notes and smiled.  I thanked him.  I thanked the woman who showed me the way out.

Everybody I met knew more about the procedure and the location than I did.  And there is no question that most of the people I saw could have been seen by their doctor.

But getting to see your GP is becoming increasingly difficult.

You have to book to be ill.  If I had waited four days to see a doctor, I would have been in trouble.  As it was, my foot and ankle were marked and I was told “if it swells beyond these marks, or it hurts or there is discolouration, come back here.”

I made an appointment, as per Laeticia’s instructions, to see the nurse practitioner, turned up and was told “No it’s tomorrow.”

And if you are in the surgery at 8.45 in the morning, why do you have to ring back at 4.00 to make an appointment?

You may wait in A&E but you are seen, the process of getting you better begins and you appreciate the NHS all over again.

The burden on the staff in Accident and Emergency is visible.

Are emergency medicine and general practice talking to each other?

I hope so.

I spoke to the builder working across the street about the small job of repainting needed on the front wall of my building after the gutter was cleared.

All he had to do was decline.

He said, “Yes.”   He said yes five times, which included seeing me in the street and knocking on the door twice to reassure me.

And then he vanished.

The painter decorator next door who is a one man band has offered to help three times and not followed through three times.

A next door neighbour with whom I have been liaising about something else entirely followed our conversation by telling me he’d like my number and would ring.

That was two weeks ago.

We are less than two minutes apart.  I put a note through his door saying I am sure he is busy but I need to know – does he have time for this or not?

Nothing.

A friend in PR tells me she now sends four emails – increasingly jokey – “Gosh, I feel like a stalker” – before she rings almost to be greeted with “What a wonderful idea …”  and resounding silence.

What is all this?  What happened to politely declining – whether it’s a job, a junket or a third cupcake (I hate cupcakes)?

Refusal is not what you want to hear but it’s clear.

Whatever it is, find somebody else – says the refuser – I don’t want to/haven’t got time.

So whoever is on the refused end has to start again.

Fair enough.

But suspension, evasion, saying one thing when you mean another – starts to make you (the one who is doing the asking) feel that you are in the wrong.

You shouldn’t have asked, you have over-expected, your deodorant has failed.

It leads to lack of trust – trust of yourself and trust of anybody else.

Recently former Conservative Prime Minister John Major suggested that the government take some responsibility for the increased prices of electricity and gas demanded by the energy companies.  He said reasonably, that should we have a cold winter, these bills would become a crippling item for an ever larger number of people

And the Tory party immediately fielded a minor functionary bleating about “looking for alternative sources of supply from cheaper tariffs.”

What alternative sources?  What cheaper tariffs?    Where?   Who?

The position of the energy companies is summed up by a circular I just received from one of them which promises

to freeze energy prices until 2017 “our longest ever available energy deal”,  “no prices rises guaranteed until March 2017”.

And then right at the bottom of the page “Correct at the time of going to print.  Tariff can be withdrawn at any time.”

Would you trust them?

I don’t.

We have all known for years that no matter who is in power giving with one hand and taking with the other is what politicians of any stamp do

For example the press tell us at regular intervals about the joy of wood burning stoves.

Getting your gas and electricity from the same place turned out to be as good a wheeze as decimalisation for a price hike.

Locally we are forbidden to burn wood domestically without specialised equipment, though the council admits this involves a very small number of people.

But the wood burning pizza people are exempt in the name of earning a living and there is a cement factory complete with emissions and 24 hour day lorries at the bottom of the street.

Clearly your pollution is your pollution, and mine is mine.

Of course there is skill in learning to decline with courtesy.

It may take a while to learn and you won’t learn it from a computer.

Your will learn it from a person, a parent, a teacher, a mentor, somebody who isn’t necessarily wiser in other aspects of their approach but who can teach you something you need to know.

The increasing distrust who spreads yeast like through every branch of our increasingly complex society makes us wary of any kind of relationship.

Who can you trust?  We ask each other beseechingly.

Trust has got confused with assent.

But you can’t trust someone who says “yes” when they mean “no”.

Note: * Addo Annie is a character in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! and she sings a song  that begins

“I’m just a girl who can’t say “No”!

“My mother inspired me to feminism” said I on Radio 4’s Reunion to Sue McGregor.  “She went back to work when I was nine (and she 53) and made something out of nothing.”

She was asked “Can you type, Mrs. Taylor?”

“No” she replied “but I can use a typewriter.”  She got the job and “can do” was embroidered on her name tapes.

A year later, she was given a pay rise, a title (Deputy Superintendent, Women’s Educational Centres) and over and above considerable administrative duties, began to teach English and Arithmetic to student nurses.

“Why do you want to work?” I asked as if she didn’t already.

She replied, hands always busy with something – washing, folding, cleaning, peeling, feeding the dog – ”Your father would give me anything that we could afford but I want to buy my own.

I don’t want to feel guilty every time I buy a lipstick.”

Three years later I watched fascinated as my father removed a wad of money from his jacket, put it in front of her place at the table and asked for his cigarette money.   The joke was arranged.  She grinned, he grinned and I grinned too, asking “What is all that money?”

“It’s called a Chicago roll” he said, “what gangsters carry.”   It was his month’s salary.

Even with both of them earning, there wasn’t very much and he disliked money.  But, liberated man, he boasted about how much better she was with it than he.

She was generous with him, with us, with me.  Her indulgences were Tweed eau de cologne by Lentheric, Aristoc stockings (in boxes of three) and having the sheets laundered.

She bought her own clothes, most of mine and spent wildly on my shoes.  Her feet were terrible, shoved into a size too small after her father left and money was tight at home.

She had her hair done once a week, slathered her nails in almond oil, kept house, walked the dog. Read a daily newspaper and two monthly magazines with a far higher quality of editorial than we have now plus the National Geographic and some part of a book every day.  She and my father were enthusiastic moviegoers and both liked to learn.

This is the woman who when I asked her what class we were (I was 14 and it had come up at school) replied crisply

“Educated darling, and there aren’t enough of us.”

She hated her name and once I asked her if it was ever shortened to Et or Ettie as I had read somewhere.

“Briefly” she said, face like a thundercloud.  “Ethel is a horrible name.  And Maud.  We had a golden retriever called Maud.”

Years later, I told her in conversation about some friends whose beautiful Chow had run away. ”What was it called?” she asked.

Unthinkingly I answered “Ethel”.

“Well of course it ran away” she expostulated.  “Poor dog!”

She was frustrated by the lack of much social life – my father was an intensely private man -but after his death, she had 15 years of neighbours’ suppers, lunch with friends, the Pensioners’ Club, outings to the theatre, grand gardens and places of historical interest.  If her formidable and very real charm failed her, she lined up what we called her steely blues with a temper made ferocious by its clarity.  I recall weeping as a small child at the sharpness and suddenness of it till she said quietly” Now, stop it.  I know I make a noise.  But it’s over and done in a minute, and I don’t hold grudges.”   And she didn’t.

We had an awful parting, for reasons too long to go into here, but I remember her as wildly funny and quite extraordinarily patient with a difficult late child who was often odd and ill.

“You’re a changeling” she told me.   “God knows where you came from.”

But she supported me through illness and endorsed my efforts, arguing and appreciating.   She even understood why I changed my name – because she changed hers.

She felt that the heroine of August in Avilion by Ella Monckton was so like her that she took her name and there we are, photographed in Tatler when I had spoken at the Women of the Year lunch –

“Mrs. Jane Taylor and her daughter Miss Anna Raeburn.”

A day of meetings sounds very professional and business-like.  My meetings were purely pleasurable, beginning when I went out to buy newspapers.  I used to by three a day, five on Saturday, and two on Sunday.  Now I am down to two a day and one on Sunday.

But they make me think, I like them, I like the convenience store where I buy them and the walk there and back.

As I returned, a young man, bearded and bespectacled, came towards me preceded by a small smooth coated dog, bouncing along full of joy.  A dog lover, I like to see a happy animal and I bent to acknowledge what I could see was a she whereupon she went all shy on me.

I asked her name.  “Sophia” answered her owner with the short Italian ‘o’.

“Like Loren?”  I said.

He beamed.

Later I let a woman on to the bus before me and as we sat together, said “I was going to say – beauty before age-”

“Not much in the age, I think” she said kindly if untruthfully.  Rebecca introduced herself as a jewellery teacher, currently exhibiting the Goldsmiths Fair, mother of a fourteen year old daughter.

When she got off, she waved. Nothing to do with new best friends – it’s called passing the time of day.

On the next leg of the journey, a tall heavyset woman in a beat up black suit got into the now empty bus and clawed for her bus pass at the bottom of a capacious handbag.  As there was nobody else about, I ribbed her about the size of the bag, she answered in kind and

I could hear something in the fluent English, beyond a demeanour that wasn’t home-grown.  I asked where she was from.

“Germany a long time ago – Berlin” she said.  I said I was just rereading The Gift Horse by Hildegarde Knef, Germany’s first international star after WWII, having learned over time that Berlin is a s much of a one off to Germany as London is to England.

“My sister adored her!” she exclaimed “Such a life!”   “But what a writer” I countered.

“I hesitate over the translations” she said.  “You know, I tried to read Falada – Alone in Berlin?”

“Michael Hoffman translated Alone in Berlin” I said.  “I thought that was OK.  But other than that, I agree with you – and I don’t speak German.

You just know the translation is sticky …  Do try The Gift Horse.”

The bus stopped, we shook hands, her name was Renate.

And then I went to buy the converter to make it possible to charge the electric toothbrush the chemist had been so quick to sell me but had never mentioned how I could make it work.  The men in the electronics shop are unfailingly helpful and laugh when I say

“May I ask a dumb question?”  I went to the supermarket, the bank, the second-hand bookshop that was open, stamped my foot over the second one that was closed and met a small wall of musculature in the form of a Stafforshire bullterrier on the lead to an raffishly elegant 35 year old who adored him.

“His name is Slasher” she said helpfully “Slash for short.”   He hid modestly behind his mistress’s leg, she and I enthused over bull breeds, bemoaning owners, until I relinquished him with one last stroke of liquorice coloured brindle.

This is a very large city but there is an area of it that is wholly familiar to me.

I have known it at all stages of my adult life, I know where things are.

I went and droooled over eye makeup and skin care,.  I look at these things the way richer women look at diamonds but

I doubt if they enjoy them more than I do.

And then I went to get the bus home having bought none of them.

On the bus in front of me was a tiny woman with very short hair atop a face of almost medieval symmetry, who was plainly worried about something.  She strained to see where the bus was going.  At one point, she got up to see and then sat down again.  I leaned forward and asked where she wanted to go.  As it happened, she wasn’t out of her way.  She was just rushed and fussed.

But then as we approached the junction of Brompton Road and Knightsbridge, she began to talk about a bunch of hideous monumentally wealthy apartments and the traffic has never recovered.  She knew so much, I asked if she were an architect.

She shook her head and her bus stop came, stood and gave me her hand and her name, so I did the same.

“Ah” she said, smiling into my face.   “I thought I knew you.”