Annalog

Like beauty, humour is personal.  

Not laughing, but nice ears!

The world is full of people who laugh at this woman or that man while I can’t and don’t and there it is.  Some of them I can’t even bear to look at.   And sometimes somebody who you usually don’t like says or does something so riotously funny that you fall about and suspend the negative for as long as the laugh lasts. Or something just happens and you grin and giggle.   

Why am I writing about this ?  Because I am suffering from an overdose of BNS (Bad News Syndrome). 

Leaving war aside, the expensive ugly destructive universally concerning matters of the Ukraine and the Hamas/Israel conflict, through the last week media has offered me one worry after another. 

There is rising suicide among the young – a gifted young man who sent revealing pictures via the internet, was threated with blackmail and killed himself, it now being the norm that the young swap naked or sexually explicit pictures of themselves and they may fall into the wrong hands.   Just goes to prove how young the young are, that they think it will be all right.  “Everybody does it” – and trust their machines. 

   I can’t dispose of the cutting, it haunts me – the pain, the waste, the comments of  the obviously sensible experienced and much better informed than I am, authorities working in the field explaining that this is the norm.  Like cement paving and plastic rubbish bags with much more painful fallout.    

There is the young woman and her partner who have had four children taken into care and are being tried for the neglect leading to the death of the fifth.  Whatever her family is about, why  five children before we finally call a halt ? And no, I am not blaming the police.  This is an anomaly of law.   And social responsibility is taught by home first, school second.

Dogs starved,  animals tormented, the elderly knocked off for no other reason than that they are there – the Princess of Wales beaten about the ears by ambivalence of the acceptable style or not of the Royal Family – and just in case you are still standing

a double dose of child abuse, one to the want for nothing son of a want for nothing family  which was hardly a family at all, who suffered violent physical cruelty at a smart school and an in depth interview with survivors of sibling incest, underwritten by an editorial explaining why it’s important.   And it is.   But…

A person can only take so much.   I remember reading that an actor I admired in old movies came from eleven generations of clowns.   I thought he was a beautiful man, a very good actor and my imagination was caught by that background.

My early schooldays were difficult, I didn’t look or sound like “everybody else” but by the time I got to secondary school, I got a break.  I made the disapproving laugh. 

  Of course it meant playing a part, a part for which I had to make up the lines – but I remember the laughter and that the laughter led to an accommodation – thought that’s not a word I knew then.  Very few fools are foolish, most are wise and turn it.  It’s hard to put on the page because so much of it depends on intonation.   Which takes us to dumbshow, the face, the eyebrows -non verbal communication.

Two young people got on the bus yesterday, hallway through a run.  The young man balanced against the clear plastic which marks off the area round the door and did some exercises which concluded with his bottom pushed up against the glass and I caught the eye of the woman opposite.  She twigged, and looked away.   He continued – and I looked her full in the face and raised my eyebrows and made some universal facial gesture.  Her hand flew to her lips.   The young runners got off thank heaven, we travelled two more stops and when I wenrt to get off, I looked down at her and said quietly” And you’re a very naughty girl.  I knew exactly what you were thinking, it was in a balloon above your head … !”   And she seized my hand, beamed and I got off the bus.

Hooray for tying two ideas together

and getting “names” to tell us on Mother’s Day (10 March) what book (World Book Day 7 March) their mothers gave them.   Women (International Women’s Day 8 March) don’t get in there but it was probably decided that it risked being contentious.   And we had already had pictures of Helen Mirren (rapidly approaching opening of an envelope time) and Margot Robbie with suitably personalised Barbie dolls.  Spare me.   Shades of Britt Ekland saying “Every girl wants to look like Barbie” – no I never did.    

Do you ever imagine a sort of hangar with busy people, sleeves rolled up, endlessly checking the international and cultural references to come up with MD (originally Mothering Sunday, Christian,

when you return to the church where you were baptised to celebrate being a child of that church), WBD (started by the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in 1995, two dates – 1997 in the UK, different names cited, different aims given – terrific good intentions open to all sorts of interpretation – even glorious Google is not clear on this):

and IWD

(begun by feminists of different nationalities in France, 1911, dated in honour of the 40^th anniversary of the Paris Commune which controlled a briefly socialist France and immediately extended to support working women locked in to the Triangle Shirtwaist  Factory fire in New York a few days later), now transposed into marketing with a side order of social responsibility ?  I wonder, who chooses the dates ?  Are they often transposed to work better ?  And isn’t three in a week a bit much ?     

How can you celebrate a book day except by giving books, reading books, making books available whether by gift or book token, encouraging everybody to read and think (the two go often together) ?  Inevitably to interest children we offer dressing up and acting out but this isn’t reading – while in the background libraries strive to remain open. And until you can read well, books depend on being taught to read. 

Books were part of my life as far back as I can remember – borrowed from the library and school, given by other children, collected by one parent or the other “Don’t you want that?  My daughter would love it …”  Inherited – bashed up Beatrix Potter from my sister years before, a couple of my mother’s books from Edwardian childhood, the books my father was awarded as prizes …  Like food.  Essential.

Mothering Sunday meant something when I was younger – flowers, a card, visiting my splendid mother – but my son and I laugh gently about it.   When he rings me on Mothering Sunday, I tease him about guilt.  The child of a church ?  My church is the sky, the natural world

– good, bad and foreign to me as well as beautiful, comforting and inspirational.

This year for the first time in my life I was sent flowers for International Women’s Day – flowers I might have chosen, from my Italian friend, just returned there.  I was transfixed.   I wrote to thank her and to the company who sent them, praising them, and received acknowledgement.  That’s a business that should flourish.  But the day is only a nudge in a direction I already travel.  I do think about women in other countries – no not to the detriment of men – but because much of what women do is yet taken for granted. You can’t get round the reality of labour, no matter how many machines and technologies and when you respect labour, it works so much better.

I had to go for an annual glaucoma checkup at Moorfields and it was the smallest clinic I have been in in five years – not more than a dozen of us being processed through at any one time.  So time to speak, time for the various enormously skilled technicians to behave in a human way …  No this is not an attack on the NHS, not even slightly, just the reality that if you treat people like people, most of them turn out to be human. I heard four people thank the receptionist before they left, each quite different one from another.  It was terrific.  Shoulders were straightened, smiles exchanged, the air softened. And we all breathed.     

Buns trapped in his penance was more cheerful last night than I have heard him for a while – tired out, full of cold,

snow at the window (yes, really) but clearer – a audibly polished glass.  Sick of the demands of the old house which he bought with one eye closed and other covered, fed up with the rain and chill, deep in his warmest sweater, he said “ But it’s still light at 6.30 in the evening, so there’s movement…”

On the one warmer drier day of the last several weeks, robins arrived,

checked out my garden and started to explore a derelict plant pot for a nest.  They fled the next day, tiny things, damp and chilled to the bone.  And I like the long dark evenings – candle heaven.  But while waiting for the engineer to look at the beast in my boiler (it growls illogically, at ungodly hours), I looked at the files on the shelves and thought “And how long have I sat on those ?”  

I have every sympathy with people who find throwing away difficult.  Forget hoarding, just those of us who work on the principal of keeping things tidy and thus not thinking further, pushing things into the back of the closet, the top shelf, the filing drawers.   And I can only throw away personal stuff when the mood is on me.  Sometimes it is a matter of identity (was I this person ?) so I do not as Jud said all those years ago “sever and chuck”, I think before I throw away.  Never good at regret, me, working on the hard learned principle of “ if you are going to regret it, don’t .”   And on Tuesday, round the wonderful Tony boiler fixer, truncated shopping and all, I shredded

10 years of personal papers, writing, confidential stuff.  Bagged it, put it out, washed my hands and ate supper.  

I cleaned the kettle this morning – stove top, French fag packet blue enamel, clarted up with limescale.

Putting it off, you see.    I shall have to have another go when I have bought the distilled vinegar the helpful internet tells me I need.

And I thought about a new kettle and spent a long time looking at alternatives, choosing between what was lovely, what I wanted, what I could afford and what I needed.   Same for coffee percolators.  Bought nothing, permitted myself to think.

This is a long way from buying something to cheer yourself up but on a budget, the possibility

of any purchase outside vegetables and laundry fluid is exciting.   (The last time I bought to cheer myself up I was careful and thoughtful – the colour is fine, the garment is lovely  – but I was then so ill that I changed shape and lost what I was dressing, so it hangs like a reproach in the wardrobe.}  I’ll get to it.   Especially if there is movement …

In between bouts of rain, I noticed a man up the road, meticulously cutting back the ivy hedge that threatened to take over the world.   So I went to tell him how grateful I was and how nice it looked.

And though you could never call the dust and vac I did yesterday more than a lick and a promise – I don’t do major spring cleaning

until warm enough air to have the windows and doors open – that’s not yet a while.   But there is movement in the air, in the sky and so I can move a bit too.

As an inveterate maker of lists, I have what I call the Big List and I try to address most of it, like dentist and optician, an estimate or two for painting the bathroom.  A new clothes line and a new yard broom are included and though there is no point yet, you’ll see – slight, don’t speak too loudly or you will frighten it away  – movement.  

While an old friend wrote me a card this morning in which he describes his hilarious  but fulfilling attempts at the local health club

where he has much enjoyed meeting a whole new group of people and the manager (he says) knows exactly how to handle him – “and that’s interesting too .”   Movement.

Faith (not her name, I’m working up to Hope and Charity)

has cut her hair off far too short but it’s clean and crisp. “Well” she said “I always wanted dreads – and now  – I have had them !”    Faith reminds me of Ellie, treasured senior secretary in my first office job at a paper merchants, plain and tall under a horrible lumpy hairdo – but once you had looked into Ellie’s eyes, you saw who she was and she was a good person – kind and helpful, thoughtful and plain spoken.   Never to be forgotten.   Faith has Ellie eyes.

Well, I’m here, this is modern life,

but some of it doesn’t fit with me.   Did I ever think I would see how long I could avoid the hairdresser (into the fifth month) and yes, I do have a hairdresser I like and trust.  But grown and ignored, my hair doesn’t look any worse that of the women who have it done, blasted to blazes and draped into ringlets..

I loved to look at clothes. Less to look at now.   A whole new lot of bad black, bad grey and dishwater beige, all synthetics, every shape you have seen before ?  Keep it.  I’ll find a pair of corduroys

and a secondhand sweater (I prefer second hand to used, of course it’s used, it’s a garment …)   

Once in a brief contract with the BBC, they insisted I had a mobile and I handed it back directly after close of play. 

I have never sent a text, WhatsApp or picture. Managing without a mobile is going to become increasingly difficult as the NHS to name but one ubiquitous public body employs apps that don’t jive with your computer (I have never owned a laptop either).  Booking a holiday or even a trip, ordering various things on line is becoming more difficult but bottom line, if you’re the supplier, do you want the money ?  You do ?  Then we shall find a way.

I have never got legless on white wine (or any other colour) with raucous friends, spent time in Torremolinos or any other “two weeks for the price of ten days” resort or been party to much less sung in karaoke. 

And I don’t feel I have missed a thing.   

No driver’s license either (though a secret yen for an Army jeep) and though I can see how much better for the environment bikes might be, I wish there were some way of making many of the riders more responsible. 

 My language towards them has deteriorated though in mitigation I bet I am one of few who ever thanks a bike rider for waiting at a green light.   You take your life in your hands crossing the road, too often the same kind of mindless violence that spikes drinks.

Whoever (bless) it was who said that if I hung on to clothes long enough, even the bashed up ones, they’d come back into fashion, spoke prophetic truth. I mourn the fashion migraine every time I see the Balenciaga name

invoked to some hideousness.   The Master would throw his scissors !    As the last great religion is money, the deal now is to sell along the line of least resistance rather than offering any kind of stylistic initiative to protect the profit margin. 

The price of the endless abbreviation and diffusion of complex ideas like immigration, wokeism, social habits and responsibilities too many to list is that too often we accept that if it can be summed up in six words, they must be right.  Desperate to grab attention long enough to sell a copy or keep us watching, concepts are contracted for easy access – and Devil take the hindmost. 

In the Parliamentary kerfuffle of last week, a friend (her politics are not mine) used Keir Starmer’s name like an epithet – as in  “And as for KS and the Labour Party …”  and I said ominously that I had read widely on this and still didn’t understand it except that it was the kind of parliamentary obfuscation and in-fighting that makes people feel that their vote is a waste of time (a) and (b) your preferred party has had 15 years in power and we are on our knees. 

Let’s talk about the weather.

The end is nigh.  

William Nigh, early filmmaker

The newspapers haven’t yet been delivered.  It’s a distribution problem.  And like all sorts of things in this complex system in which we live, it is underpinned by largely unsung human labour and when it goes wrong, it goes wrong.  I just like the paper with my coffee, that’s all. 

And whether it’s a fault in the software, the grid,  war or Covid, or even strikes as featured in the French movie “Fulltime” (what a threatening portrait of commute to the city) everything is all right until it isn’t and then we feel – well, I do – terribly vulnerable.

Damn the doomsayers who dominate our media.  

Not only am I tired of bad news, I am tired of it being presented to me so badly.   It took Matthew Syed writing in the Sunday Times last week to offer a thoughtful explanation of why Putin is pursuing the Russian invasion into Ukraine, over and above his Botoxed ambition: the Ukraine has elements he wants to get his hands on.  Russia has all sorts of mineral wealth but it is hard to get at. 

Yes, I am sure I could have found out about this another way but I expect that basic news media will give me a more informed picture than it does. At the moment it is equal parts of Oh God, Nalvalny

and baby gorilla. I regret Mr.Navalny’s death in all sorts of ways, predictable though it sadly was, and I don’t like gorilla. Repeated several days running, as almost everything is, the juxtaposition makes for visual indigestion.         

Terrestrial tv is sub-hysterical, repetitive and seems to have got caught in its own knickertwist ie nobody is looking, colour it more vividly – and they still don’t because much of it fails at the first hurdle – it sounds wrong, it looks wrong, it does not interest.  Which is why I still buy a newspaper.  Yes, it is biased – what isn’t  ? – but it is often better conceived, more informative, more thoughtful  even if irritating than  “ our BBC”.  Not mine it’s not. ITV is patchy and Channel 4 has developed into highspeed hectoring.

But on the way to “nigh”, there are still moments of kindness and consideration and even occasionally, grace.   And you know I notice because I write about them.   The week before  made demands I love to try and meet – goodbye to this one (new job, home country), hello to that one (haven’t seen for ages), new fridge, old friend worried about her daughter and new friend worried about an old friend who is embarked for the second time into a physically and psychologically violent relationship.   Grace for me was to know finally that I shall never be 40 again. Did everything I could but

Joseph Beuys “We cannot do it without roses”

spent.

Anxiety is apparently on the rise among the young: I want to shout “ not just the young”.  It is the price of a uncertain world even if it does have all sorts of things going for it.  Me too, more anxious than at any time since I was in my 20s.

But yesterday in spite of a shopping list, I forgot the milk so queued again behind two women with weekly shops from which I was rescued by Joy (!) who said “Put it on the card”, whisked me through the machine and then went “ Taa – daa !” with outstretched arms.  “You be careful” I said.” If that halo slips, you’ll choke !”

And then two young women in Somali robes moved without a word from me so that I could sit down.  I called “Thank you ! How very nice of you …” echoes of my mother.  And I repeated my thanks when I got off the bus – all of us happy and waving.

And when I got the bus last week, a truly handsome  man (Umslopagaas – see  Rider Haggard) beamed at me from behind the wheel saying “Haven’t seen you for while …” and you think of how many thousands he had seen ?  And without a word the second time we met we just kissed our fingers to each other.

So – nigh – but not yet.        

Buns and I were discussing religion. 

He is an escaped cradle Roman Catholic.  I have all sorts of deeply held ideas and a passionate belief  that “when you look at the best mankind is doing, you can’t help but hope there is something better.”  God.  Probably closer to the Great Spirit of the Native Americans than anything else.  “And “ I said “if I waver, I have only to think of the wonders of nature – with or without explanation – to be reaffirmed.  The face of heaven.”  

I was invited to lunch by a woman I have met once, it was raining dank drizzle and I got lost.  No sense of direction till the feet know the way (see the idea of “the body remembers.”)   Coming back from the wrong way I saw a man with his hood up and the most beautiful Doberman I have ever seen.  Not hyperbole.  Enormous, tall, cropped ears, young, shining with intelligence and that strange quality which is beyond being beautiful, when it is known and accepted as part of the bearer’s responsibility. 

I stopped.  I do not approach without permission.  This is not Disney.

The owner signalled a query.  I pointed to the dog.  He turned and spoke to the dog.  I saw the balloon above the dog’s head which read an incredulous “You want me to what ?”   The man repeated himself and the dog sat down in the rain.  The man beckoned to me. 

I went forward, hands outstretched to be sniffed, which he did.   I said “Oh, you’re beautiful.” And he gambolled.  He stood up and kicked his wonderfully proportioned body in all sorts of directions, leapt and ran in a little circle before coming to me.   The man said warningly  “No..”  I said “Why ?” He said  “He’ll get mud on your coat ..”  I said as the dog closed on me “I could care less.  He’s the most beautiful thing” and the dog was tall enough to put his paws on my shoulders and his head forward, to lick my cheek.  I hugged him and said again “Oh you beauty !”  And then he sat.  Can a Doberman beam ?  

I am smiling

 And I looked at the face of the young man, smiling at me as I smiled at him.  I said “How can I ever thank you ?  You made my day” and he said  “Us too.”   And we parted in the rain.

Howletts is a Georgian house in its own grounds in which the legendary right wing gambler John Aspinall oversaw a zoo park for endangered species.  And there in one of the generous enclosures (better few and right than many and mean) Nick and I saw a clouded leopard

whose eyes were such pale green, they shaded into violet.   Neither of us spoke. The animal was there a minute or two and then gone. Nick said “Look down”.  On his shoe, paused safe for a moment because we were still, was a harvest mouse, with his long tail. 

And still we stayed till he left.

Among 723 channels offering brainrot, there are three wildlife programmes and sometimes my day is made by a cloud of deer drifting towards the waterhole.   I saw a man who had induced a certain ant to carry more sugar water to his orchards and thus the animals and the trees flourished.  The film of the labour was fascinating and I am bad at bugs.

I think of the strange implacable beauty of my mother’s face the night my father died, when she said “I have so much grief inside me, I feel I must give birth it.” And she began to rock in mourning, a behaviour I had only read about and never seen.

V arrived yesterday, after a gap of it doesn’t matter how many years, a friend of my son’s who always loved me, lost touch, got in touch and came to see me – no cumbersome explanations about “I should have…” or “Why didn’t you .. “   – bearing a home made loaf and raisin buns, the mushrooms I had asked her to pick up if she had time, strawberries (“every girl deserves strawberries in the winter !”)  and yellow roses, the face of heaven.

I have written a lot,

I don’t get tired of it, it’s my thing, particularly in this form.  In past contexts, I had to deal with editors and deputy editors and the oftentimes stand off between them (and not get caught in the melee), subeditors (a good one can make you, a bad one .. !), the brief – and so on.  

So I was shocked when AJ said “It doesn’t matter if nobody reads it…”.  Oh yes it does.   That’s like saying it doesn’t matter how much I talk – oh yes it does.   However attenuated, this is one side of dialogue.  

40 plus years ago, a woman interviewing me remarked that I seemed to remember every kind or nice thing I had ever experienced.  Obviously the comment made an impression.  You risk sounding precious (ugh), self aggrandising (guilty – ego like a house) but I would rather that than endless child picking at bloody graze, recital of bad news, which must then be interpreted from this angle and that.  

We all know people with more money.  We all know people with worse luck.  Hitting the balance between knowing it could be better and knowing how much worse it could be is the beginning of the appreciation of chance. 

Being lucky.

Lucky doesn’t cost.  It comes.  Unless you are a complete mug, you note it – quietly as you paddle round frying onions and sipping the drink you now only have occasionally, openly to at least yourself in recognition about what could have gone wrong.

There is big lucky ie  the bomb hits, or the killers come.  But you’re not there.   Big lucky is when the chancy operation comes good.  Big lucky is when you miss the train that crashes.  And you come to see things as big lucky as in, if you hadn’t passed or failed or gone here or done that – this person, this opportunity, this life would not be as it is – you’d have missed a chance. 

You were just  – lucky.

And there is little lucky.   You choose the right gift for your notoriously difficult partner or her mother or his father.   The bank makes a mistake and it’s bit better than you thought.   You decide, Devil take the hindmost, that you will wear those old shoes (well brushed of course)

rather than the new ones to the party or the wedding or dinner with your daughter’s future in laws for the first time – and thank heaven, because you need all the help you can get, comfort being a good place to start. You need to be thinking about the matter in hand, not worrying that your feet hurt. Lucky.

I was asked by a therapist “Why did you go to America ?” (when I was 19 and stayed just under 2 years.)  I said “Running away, I expect.”  He said quietly “I think you were running to …”   And then explained – my role in the family, the difficulties, the distance and the freedom of it.   And it made sense.  Lucky.  And when I went back to the US in my first almost non secretarial role, I used all sorts of experiences I didn’t know I had absorbed and – if that wasn’t lucky enough – I used the second exposure where nobody who knew me could see me and any embarrassment was strictly my own, to better effect when I got my break in Britain.   And I gave up trying to be an actress  (I would surely have been an addict or a drunk) and fell into radio.  Where nobody cared what I looked like – only how I sounded.  Lucky.      

All this was described back to me as “a perfect life”.   No, I don’t do perfection.  I am very happy to leave that to the majesty of nature and the might of heaven. 

But lucky ?  Yes.  

Now, all of us who are older would tell you how lucky we were to go here, or meet that one, or work at so-and-so when it was new.   We can’t offer that world to anybody else, we haven’t got it.  This morning a noticeably unhysterical neighbour said in conversation “We are on the brink of World War III and nobody wants to talk about it.”  

Unless we’re lucky.

I ‘d like a hoarding

– you know, one of those big billboards – one I could have whitewashed every couple of weeks to add the same thought smaller and add to it, or change it all together.  

Alongside the upswing into technology is the knowledge that, for the first time in British history, over half the population

is over 65 –  a significant number of whom don’t have computers and the rest, and even if they did, don’t like them, don’t trust them, have had bad experiences with them and finally, would prefer a person. 

Please note – not all of these people fall into the category of  “vulnerable” ie not all of us are on benefits or out to lunch.   The systems are open to fault like people (!), only work when they work and if we get across them – or they across us – the way back is tricky. 

Re the NHS, yes, by all means use all the AI etc that is useful but remember that if you are old and frightened, most of us would prefer a human voice rather than a generated one.   Same if you’re younger.  Same if you are one of a very large number of humans.   Animals need voices.

The new energy company sent flowers with a card which says in part “ … hope the transition has been painless”.  It hasn’t..  Describing the hiccups to Bel (a management consultant) she said “sounds like a classic case of expanding too fast and not training people properly.”  Wal went further.  “The energy companies have to get their heads round providing for older people, for people who, by choice or some form of impairment, can’t deal with computers, bills on line, etc.   New companies have to build in a personal facility for dealing with this

rather than just hoping it will be all right. Either that or they can’t offer that facility.” And probably not with uproar in other involved quarters, ie BT and the Post Office, to name but two.

If an energy company said it would come and look at the meters prior to fitting a smart meter – this was the way forward – I would go along with it.   I am still haunted by the fact that my readings are excessive and we just go trundling on.  Nobody knows or cares  – as long as you pay.

  Nice polite rip off.

John Lewis and Waitrose plan to reduce their workforce by 11,000.   What is to stop them running two ideas concurrently – how about Waitrose Auto  – smaller shops completely automated –  and Waitrose Hand (as in helping hand) where you shop and have staff ?  Lidl have great staff, it’s part of their appeal. It’s about management as well as money.   Many of us shop most days for company, exercise, exchange.  It is a fundamental part of social medicine.  

And you have to think about prevention to take some small part of the weight off the current treatment model – which has created dependence it now can’t service.

According to a promotional ad running on tv for therapy – oh you’re going to find hope and peace and understanding in therapy … With luck and the right therapist, you very well may do … but only with the sound of the human voice.  Face to face has got to be better. Exchange is not always verbal. 

The other day, coming home with my hands full of shopping a tall elderly man moved to my right, right out of my way so that I could continue unimpeded.   The movement was noticeable because other people were about, it wasn’t a quiet street.  So I paused to summon  all my mother’s charm and sent it winging out towards him.  “Thank you” I said and he beamed. 

Every time I read that the human brain works faster and more incisively than any computer,

I think “Yah ! Boo ! Sucks to you !”   and target another grin, another pleasantry, another unheard of compliment.   You don’t get a “hit” every time but you get enough hits to know that you’re right, it works, it’s the sound and the context of humanity – across age, class, ethnicity – do it.  Be nice.  Cheaper than Botox, makes you feel good too.  It’s the sound of the voice.    

For years, we went to shops and stores to look, to see what we’d chose if we could have our hearts’ desire, and dream

even if we couldn’t possibly afford it.   Shopping was at least as much wishes as wallet.

As London is being torn down and built anew simultaneously, I shelved my first shopping choice (Harrods has the brand I want, the only reason for me to go past the door) because you can’t get anywhere easily.  Instead I went to

Space NK’s sparkly deluxe flagship store, on the off chance.   Nowadays I am a cynical shopper. I exist to have a nice surprise. 

They stocked the brand I wanted but everything offered is laced with hyaluronic acid, booster, brightener, anti-ageing agent, SP100 – promoted to the power of ten with that oversell that is the hallmark of modern life.   Miracles to be wrought with cream

and the prices are eye watering.  I asked for what I wanted (a pure cream designed for children, half the price).  They don’t carry the children’s range (in one of the few postcodes in London where the parents could afford it) and no attempt was made to get it for me.  

In other words, I can only buy what you want to sell me.

I looked in Boots, a shadow of itself: I looked in M&S, nothing I wanted. I don’t buy cheap for the sake of it if there is something I know of for a bit more that I know will work. I looked in a second bigger Boots which had some of a popular range I like but again, they could only sell me what they had.

So I went to Harrods, climbing round the road works, where I met Cesca (the last two syllables of Francesca) who produced what I wanted, told me it was unlikely to continue long in manufacture (I am writing to the company),

French name, German owner, US office!

and walked me over to the only alternative she could think of.  Exemplary.

When I asked the assistant of the recommended range if she had anything I could read, she produced a one day sample (good manners forbade that I should tell her than almost anything works once, so not impressive) and when I looked at the leaflet she gave me, it is in Arabic.  Sadly beyond me.

The very agreeable young woman whose advice I sought on the Chanel counter told me they had endless problems with supply – and although she could show me samples of something I might like, they weren’t actually in stock. And she was politely rueful about the world famous brand.

I had heard the story in another big store.

I came home to an article promoting a new Steven Spielberg series (also a world famous brand) called Masters of the Air, described by a prestigious war writer as “as near to real life combat as you can get.”  Watching Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) was described as like experiencing the Second World War.   You don’t have to sell me a war.

We’ve got Ukraine slogging it out, currently discovering how distasteful international politics can be when you go out of fashion and the Israel/Gaza confrontation currently playing at six of Hamas, half a dozen of Benyamin Netanyahu.  Ghastly.  While the Yemeni war has had a tenth bloody birthday.  And all the others we never talk about because they don’t involve us, or very many of us.

Three years ago, I was solicited for a contribution to wikipedia which I often find a good starting place.  The request was short, polite and realistic.   I paid up and was thanked.  If you put this year’s appeal in fiction, it would be over the top.  When I declined I referred to it as “hyperbolic sub-sales cant.”  Not brief, not dignified, the written version of that unending harangue with which so much of media is characterised

Don’t the editorial staff (written, radio and tv), the sellers of much reduced amounts of advertising and the sales and advertising staff of every product from household bleach to my few treasured cosmetics understand that this kind of promotion is counterproductive ?  The younger among us have grown up with it and can tune it out.  I just want to switch it off for something simpler.

In conversation about the RAF retaliation against the Houthis and the build up of aggression relating to trade via the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, a friend said  “… and of course because so many people  believe in nothing,

there is no comfort” – I am paraphrasing.   And I remember looking at a couple of things on my mantel, at the themes of objects and images that occur and recur in my home and thinking “household gods.”  I learned that phrase in the Latin division at grammar school when I was 12 or 13.   Touchstones, things that suggest a standard (originally used for gold), remind me of good things – love, continuum, courage, another world – interestingly a touchstone

was sometimes made of jasper, itself a stone of strength and well being.

And although it is getting a whipping internationally,  I am very glad I grew up  with a broadbased liberal interpretation of the world with a strong sense of rules that were not to be broken alongside every other kind of knowledge I was open to acquire and knowing that to change one’s mind was sometimes a strength and not a weakness – and to seek understanding of the difference.

The Wellcome Foundation (Britain’s leading scientific charity, valued at £38 billion) has mounted an exhibit called The Cult of Beauty and the art critic Waldemar Januszczak in reviewing it refers to us as obsessed with beauty. 

And that made me think. 

I looked up obsession.   I looked up fixation.   Both denote unbalance, ill health even.  And I asked myself about what was I obsessed ?   Certainly not major money or beauty.  Other people’s business..  Power  ? not me.  Success ?  Always relative.  Being accepted ?  Past my teenage years, no. I thought about my parents and the word obsession was missing from my upbringing.  You made the best of yourself, you did the best you could, you tried at your exams, that’s what they taught me

– and armed me with two strategies which can only grow better with using, which have served me admirably well – communication and good manners.   

I’m not obsessed with communication but I mourn the decline in its perception and want shout with joy when I meet a young woman like Raisa (Bulgarian, I asked) yesterday, who was a lesson in retail – informed, communicative, willing.  

Like the young man (20, I asked), Asian, who sniffed and blotted his nose twice as discreetly as he could next to me on the bus so that I touched him arm and said into his ear “Take two” offering him the tissues.  “I am sorry” he said.  “It’s the cold…” I agreed, and added “May I ask how old you are ?  He told me and I said, still into his ear” Well done you, for being able to take a tissue from an old white woman with grace” and we beamed at each other.  I suppose really, you can’t separate  communication and good manners in these stories.

Politeness is seen as a weakness.  I see it as strength.  It makes it possible for me to account for myself.   And people are not taught to communicate.   A little girl (8) of my acquaintance is dealing with a year of upheaval and change –  divorced mother has moved  manfriend in (he likes both the ex husband and the child, that’s a good start), moved premises, change of school, father has a serious new relationship  – and she has withdrawn into the commonplaces and silence. 

In a similar circumstance, my family would have gently explained over and over that I could always come to them, that I could always ask questions, nothing was too difficult – they loved me, they were there.  Was I ever lucky ?  And on my inner ear, I can hear that young mother telling me her side of the story, how busy she is, how tired – and wanting to shake her and say “Yes, but you’re the adult – get on with it.  What about the child ?”  You don’t buy communication and good manners in the supermarket, under home products.  You have to teach them and there is no point in obsessing about them or anything else, if you won’t face up to what’s there, chose and do the work.