gives me a headache. I don’t think I am alone. I found exactly what I wanted online, filled out the forms including safe (it had better be) credit card details but no copy of invoice, no notification and though I wrote immediately to the contact indicated, it’s been a week – and nada.
I went into my bank to ask to arrange an ISA and was told they couldn’t do it, would I please do it on line ? The teller I asked to transfer some money was so exhausted that when she had ploughed it for the third time, I asked if the money had gone through ? She said no so I took the details back from her to try again at another branch next week. A young man in Boots told me not to be embarrassed about asking for help with the machines, “they are always going wrong.”
I found a top I liked in the paper today but it is nowhere on the impenetrable website. Clothes for sale without saying what they are made of ? While Denning remains fascinated by calls referring to the Amazon account he has never had.
On a bus last week we sat, a woman roughly my age and me, and listened to two children (I didn’t turn round and clock their ages) create merry hell unchecked while the mothers spoke on the phone and to each other. I looked at my companion and said “What a cogent argument for birth control.”
She nodded feelingly, “Not that you can say that in a lot of places !”
But the former shadow chancellor John McConnell is pressing the new government to scrap the two-child benefit cap. Which will cost the earth and send the message that anybody can do anything, having a child is a right. But it isn’t – it is a privilege. Family planning was abandoned long ago to the NHS, sidelining commitment, expertise and the very helpful Balint groups (look them up). Not everybody thinks or is responsible. They go with the flow, without thought of the overcrowding of this relatively small country.
Don’t have children if you don’t want them and if you are in a partnership where one person’s mind changes, that is for negotiation, not pregnancy. I am biased. Much of my professional life was spent around people who were (or had) children they accepted as a norm but weren’t particularly keen on. It is not a good start.
Having a child is the most altruistic thing many of us will ever do and when everybody is through being sentimental about families, every child is an only child, a one off, an original.
Parenthood makes terrific demands and if you’re lucky, there may be terrific rewards. But it’s a chunk of time, you need money in backup for dentistry, extra tuition, a new football – and if you have the brains God gave a turnip, you as the adult will learn, learn and learn again, hopefully only minimally on the child.
This is the era of mixed messages: anybody can do anything – but they can’t. Sold on the idea that health care should be free, however you get it, it costs the earth (and listening to what a chronically ill friend of mine goes through to fill prescriptions is most unsettling.) Building programmes can’t begin until there is a comprehensive census of vacant properties. I did one of my first programme on this 50 years ago and we haven’t got very far. There is endless promotion soft and hard of AI, algorithms, computer, machines – but where are the people going whose jobs are superceded by the rise of the machine – bearing in mind that the insatiable demand for men and women for basic often badly paid soul destroying repetitive tasks doesn’t make for a happy healthy future and opens the door to a shaming form of neocolonialism ie come here and mop up after us .
Right, blessing counting- relative health and strength, beautiful scenery in a rather effective new Australian cop mystery (BBC1 ), some support for the beginning of a new parliament, a new government and so, on we go ….
The walls are fine, everything in White Tie except for the chimney breast which is Brinjal. I wonder how much they pay the people who come up with names for Farrow & Ball of whom I often heard it said great colours, poor paint. I moved things aside slowly and replaced them in a slightly different order, equally slowly, dusting and washing all the way. I do my spring cleaning when I can and anyway, I’m not even sure we had a spring.
You may have noticed – we had a election ? Tick.
You may have noticed – lots of football and tennis ? Tick.
You may have noticed a music festival at Glastonbury ? Tick.
I shall not be saying anything about the above beyond the thought that if you call on Boris Johnson for anything other than a cheeseburger,
you are desperate.
A tile came loose on the front step. Within 24 hours, there were three, woggling like wonky teeth. I called Pimlico Plumbers who have succeeded and multiplied, effective if expensive. However in my limited experience of them , they keep time, know what they are doing and do it. They diversified into carpentry and all sorts of other lucrative byways and now have a section for Small Jobs. And getting small jobs done is getting very difficult. Small jobs ignored become too easily bigger ones – so I booked
and along came a man who did the job in half an hour.
The upstairs tenant whom I had informed mentioned the letting agency (whitter whitter, inside the property different from out, finger in mouth) or the landlady ? Hell freezes over faster. By the time we might expect a decision, the step would be no more. Don’t always have the money but this time, put it where the mouth is.
Laughed aloud at the beginning of yesterday’s piece by the fashion director of The Times about Lady Starmer’s early wardrobe appearances – “Now the election is over let’s talk about what really matters: Lady Starmer’s wardrobe.”
One of the saddest things about modern life is that when you really want to write and say how much you enjoyed something, you can’t:
you can complain, take out a subscription, complain about a subscription, sign up to online whatever it is, follow whoever on social media but the number of people to whom you can write in appreciation is now minimal.
I understand. Of course I understand. The world is full of people and quite a lot of them are horrible (ask Holly Willoughby – and she’s not alone). If people are gutless, unpleasant and violent, modern media serves them well. They can make mischief and can’t be held accountable. Troll city.
But the casualty is the positive – wanting to write appreciatively, a couple of lines for example to a woman who wrote wonderfully about the culture of the whinge, dog with sore paw syndrome, prizing (as she wrote) suffering over resilience. I channelled some of the latter so that when I gave up in the face of the obfuscation of her employing journal, I looked online. Write to her care of her representation ? I tried. Well, I suppose if terrestrial television programming is as bad as it is, you might care to spend half an hour on this. Or having your teeth drawn… I wished her well and went to do the shopping.
Faith (see annalog/modern life) and her partner have had a terrible health scare through which they are working and I saw her yesterday for the first time since Mags (partner) collapsed. The news is good, hooray, swift catch up between bananas and salad “and “ she said sweetly, almost blushing” we’re getting married next year.” She was so happy, you could reach out and touch it.
I’ve found a new writer a black high school dropout from Richmond, Virginia – his description – who ties big themes to mayhem and violence with no cliches I have noticed.
And few write about the rural poor black in the US, especially one of their own. Plus the sheer stickability of 40 books and short pieces. The song in the title is composed by Harold Arlen, words by Johnny Mercer – read in brackets, get on with it.
“Another interesting piece “ wrote SR generously “I don’t know how you do it.” Neither do I. Years ago, I wrote about the balancing act between trying to charm
the Muse into kissing your brow and pursuing her with a hatchet. When I faltered, Snowdrop reminded me of this phrase. “Only someone committed to writing would think of that, the tension in the idea…” He was a senior academic, he must know … and I trust his taste in life, never mind writing. I continued to learn to write.
I learned there were ideas that came and you worked on them. I learned that you sat down at a blank screen as you once sat before a blank page and stuff came out of your fingers, in sentences. And how to hammer it
into a slightly different shape.
I learned heartfelt appreciation of and respect for the subconscious mind. I had it anyway but I would wonder “Where did that come from ?” But it came.
Last week I met the first person who ever wrote to encourage me with annalog. We have stayed in touch for all that time and never met. It’s like a radio friendship but he had read me too, and seen me on bits of tv. He commented on something I’d done recently as courageous. I had not thought it brave, just truthful. And no, we are not going into that discussion about your truth and my truth. Perception is to do with
acuity, will, upbringing, personality, education, every one of those senses we take for granted and several we don’t know about.. You miss what you miss and you see what you see. And I generally want to see more. And speak as I find.
There are exceptions. Although (thank God) it never happened to me, I find reading about sexual abuse difficult and deeply uncomfortable. Same as rape in war. So do a lot of other people so they “blank” it. I read an excellent piece by a woman, herself abused, who went to every day of the Ghislaine Maxwell trial and was pursued after it in making a contact of the one person who came under the new sex trafficking statute. I thought of Jeffrey Epstein as silenced rather than suicided. Vested interests.
When there is something I admire,I long to write to the writer. Never a mistake to say something good.
Of course you can cast pearls before swine (no reply) but that’s the risk. There is a whole list of things I don’t write about because everybody else does and long ago, the lovely Linda (manager/agent/friend) and I decided that, as everybody else was chewing news till it was spent gum in the mouth, I would do issues. Issues have a much longer life and they involve people very directly.
My first love was magazines which fell out of fashion as too expensive, superseded by other media, while women’s magazines, where I began, constituted second class journalistic citizenship. I was an agony aunt (everybody else’s title,not mine), not a proper journalist. I was told this on several occasions. And then, I worked in independent radio which was – well – questionable. When I had my first professional money, the local newsagents (still called that then) held a raft of stuff for me, I took what I wanted, paid and said thank you for my source material, often American, a jumping off point for further investigation this side of the pond.
Perhaps, I thought as I looked back over annalog which I don’t often do, what I tried to do was to create the best of a magazine in microcosm,
something intelligent or funny with references you could trace and unexpected pictures and images.
I do try to write “up” when the world is down because the endless recycling of down gets us nowhere. I do occasionally haul off and write in a way which is a journey for me – but it is always a journey for me. You remember how the runaways in children’s stories had a few essentials in a red and white cotton kerchief,
to go on a stick over the shoulder ? I have such a bundle, always at the ready, but the pattern is black and white.
The Lasting Harm: witnessing the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell by Lucia Osborne-Crowley (Fourth Estate, £22)
This is not the serious piece to be written on addiction,
especially as overworked A&E is currently seeing healthy young women making themselves ill by injecting black market prescriptions for fat busting, weight reducing drugs. But I am addicted too – to good manners.
I want to shout for joy when somebody – regardless of age, sex, class, colour – behaves gently and sociably.
A young Asian man with one item in his hand waved me with a small basket full, forward at the supermarket. “Thank you” I said “but why ?” “Because I want to” he said. “My compliments to your mother” said I, grinning. And yup, I know – chanelling Queen Victoria and I don’t care.
I can’t say don’t care without seeing the line of my mother’s mouth pursed in disapproval. She forbade don’t care, I want and I told you so, the latter producing steam from both ears simultaneously. “Such a miserable thing to say” she’d hiss. It was just taboo.
I am addicted to coherence,
especially in scripts. Once you have asked yourself “What is this all about ?” you have admitted it lacks clarity. And if it is not clear or the style doesn’t grip me, I am not staying. Forget how many other people think it’s wonderful. As my father said “just because there’s just more of them, it doesn’t mean they’re right …” Thank heaven for books.
I am additionally addicted to voice. And that’s like music and beauty. It’s in my ears not yours and there it is.
I am addicted to taste but I have ceased buy jam – partly because I then have to buy bread to put it on -though mostly because it may say raspberry on the label but all I can taste is sugar. Raspberries grew in the back garden
– good fruit is just a joy. You can finick about with various kinds of sugar, lemon juice or weak Earl Grey, mint perhaps … but if the fruit tastes good, it needs nothing but washing.
Last week’s steak was from a very unhappy cow. It tasted of nothing very much. And in anticipation of disapproval, let me explain that elderly women easily incur anaemia and iron supplements often cancel efficacy by passing through with alarming speed and prejudice- so I eat lambs liver, and the odd piece of red meat. I like it. While Pam the Painter ate a vegiburger the other day which she said tasted of door mat.
I am addicted to dark chocolate,
a chocolate tree
almonds and ginger. I was in love with almonds before they were wonder food, when I had to peel them for the Christmas cake. I was in love with the ginger in biscuits, chopping the root and variously using it. And I keep bars of plain chocolate with hazelnuts in a plastic box in the fridge.
I am not addicted to nuts as such but at this stage I would miss them. I eat them every morning with dried fruit, plain yogurt and fresh fruit. I am not “eat the whole lot at one sitting” addicted about anything. There is no pride in this, I am not specially disciplined, it’s just the way I am
I am addicted to colour. Failure or success in my wardrobe as far back as you care to go is to do with colour. I abandoned black for khaki
when my hair went white – though paler, the sallow tones in my skin (I wept over that word !) are constant. I look endlessly at complexion colour, at lipstick, at hair colour, at the modifications in between colours and I get jump for joy excited when I see somebody who has matched or not tried to match a difficult shade of cream or grey.
I am addicted to leopards. It is probably easier to tell you animals I don’t like (fewer) and I am not very good at insects beyond bees and the dung beetle, nature’s Sisyphus. I am addicted to stories – the human revenge on social media. I am addicted to joy and laughter, the symbolism of green shoots and the hope of better days to come – how else to get out of bed in the morning ?
Two magpies – one for sorrow, two for joy which means that the sorrow is part of the joy.
We say “always remember” of DDay and I do, but the best moment of the very little I saw of the events was Zelensky of Ukraine talking to an old man in a wheelchair. As the conversation ended, the veteran bent his head to kiss the younger man’s hand which he gently withdrew and embraced the sitting old soldier.
A heart lifting moment between two men.
And somebody tell the Prime Minister that leaving early was a regrettable diplomatic discourtesy to his host and the assembled mass of the British politico-military establishment, veterans, North American and European colleagues and allies, Germany for the first time. Remember, “don’t care was made to care” and it’s not a good look .
Having a gardener sounds grand but there are things I can’t do and things I am not good at so Josh came to take away the dead white rosemary replacing it with a bustling daphne. He tidied up, cleared away, to leave me swept and garnished with the sea thistle
I have been longing for in a big pot.
The weather changed up and down and up again, leaving us all bewildered and me tomato faced (always get the clothes wrong) but the three or four things I needed at the supermarket brought me to Nabila, a goodlooking woman (incredibly 60) with a white shirt I admired. She asked why. I told her. She said it was old Gap. We commiserated about how poor the quality of affordable clothes was and I said I was hopeful that the Chinese clothing monster Shein would not get its projected City float. “Shein ?” said Nabila, a Pathan from Kashmir. “I call them “shame” !”
(75 hour weeks, pennies per garment and why do we never seem to suspect what else we get when we open the door to invite such a monster in ?)
It is said that nobody but the Chinese understand the complexities of the notion of “face”(please look into it)
and I am not going to attempt analysis of something I know so little about. But it is to be hoped the owners incur loss and damage to theirs. We don’t need any more cheap clothes – we need better ones – and not to add to that 30 mile long dump of unbiodegradable discard, visible from space, in the Atacama Desert.
I read that a banker, the head of the World Gold Council,
was abused as a child but that – obviously bright – he parlayed his emotional damage into power in a career of note. In an interview with Andy Coulson of Crisis,What Crisis ? (podcast), he says that he wasn’t a brave person or a brave trader, he just didn’t care – and that gave him the edge. You have to live with this, he says, “and decide – I’m not going to let it beat me.” And there is a price to that too of course.
If I haven’t used an adjective to describe abuse, it’s because ALL abuse is appalling – incurring pain that goes on and on. But what an insight into a business career from a man of 60 plus who isn’t a footballer or a pop star or a celebrity – young and socially viable – and bless him for that . Life is long and pain lasts with it, like frostbite.
When Pam the Painter came to lunch, she asked all sorts of questions about the dress she was wearing (never seen her in such a thing before, terrific success ) – about line and cut and why and belts – and I was thrilled to be asked. “But you know” she said. “You can do this.” And I remembered seeing a film of the Bolshoi Ballet and noticing the toe shoes were different.
I remember dancers explaining that the leg was “made” differently through the classes, that the “line” was different. And I could see it.
Wal said the other day” Who else would I discuss cut with ?” and we laughed. But to see, to perceive, always to look again, to look further – that seems like riches to me. And I never tire of looking.
Diane Abbott. The voice alone, plus the thin skinned recall that she is the only person in all those years to have got my name wrong twice on air. Sad to see her looking weary and unwell, head wrapped in a turban, only to reappear for the faithful in wig and bad leather jacket and start to inveigh about being blocked from standing as a Labour candidate in the seat she has long held. Where did all this come from – the Labour party, its leader, the executive ? I doubt it. It came from Dianne Abbott. If she is as clever as we are always being told she is, this was to be anticipated. Left or right, power play is not kind to everybody. Times change.
She might learn from a not untactfully written story about Jennifer Lopez,
who parlayed some success in to brand bonanza – never underestimate the sheer graft of that, even if the financial rewards are magnificent. She and Ben Affleck eventually married so she set up a record, a show and a film about the Love of Her Life – only for the whole lot to falter massively – tour cancelled, film sold to television after failure in cinemas, record going nowhere.
I hesitate to say nothing lasts forever. The sea and the mountains
last forever but they change constantly. Graveyards were supposed to provide a monument to the dead forever – and we discover that stone degrades, weeds consume, land shifts. There are manmade monuments that endure – Egyptian pyramids are the obvious example – but there are many more unheard of settlements, road, water and garden systems conceived for immortality which, over time, falter into dust.
The lucky among us have our “go”. Mine lasted far longer that anybody thought it was going to,including me, though I never gave serious thought to what I would do next, except I would… I remember the lovely Linda ringing me to say “Anna, I can’t go on putting up ideas and having them turned down. There is a ceiling to this, it will damage how you are thought of.” God bless Linda. Let it be good and go.
I had to get on with it.
It was shocking. Intellectually, I had thought about it but emotionally – it was out there with melting icebergs and unicorns. Nothing to do with me. But it was.
There was a small matter of what I was going to live on but if you have to, you do. Heaven was kind and two or three things I had never aspired to made me think and kept me going. I was still struggling to find work because I couldn’t yet claim my pension. And I wrote about it for the magazine of a paper that no longer exists – thus making more money than Jobseekers Allowance paid me – which was taxed anyway. I wrote about that too.
And somewhere at the back of my mind, I reached for the memory of my father
going from educational executive to stockman in a wine and spirits company and back to his beloved teaching for the last few years of his working life. I remembered his comment when I missed out on something at school – “Not your turn”. And beyond that to being a child always talking to people. I had always done this but it became my “how to be”. Nobody gave a damn about who I was and neither did I.
When I was recognised, I was handsomely greeted. But most of the people to whom I spoke preferred a grin and a bit of exchange. I met and was disappointed – you can’t make friends like pastry – and I met and was fulfilled. I made acquaintance, people at the bus stop, on the bus, in the street. Putting my voice forward for all those years worked for me, smiling, laughing, teasing exchange.
When I was a child, I wanted to be a star – I had no idea what was involved. Now, I want to be a light because I see and hear the reflected shine. Embracing change is hard but setting your face against it in yourself is stupid. How long ? For as long as I can.
The BBC South Africa editor, a splendid woman with a clear voice, talked about how change would come to South Africa
in this upcoming election because the old dreams of the African National Congress were betrayed and dead. (If you want to know how dead, SA advocated the equivocation of Palestine’s Hamas and Israel’s Prime Minister – a diversionary tactic designed to take attention away from years of bent politics, increasing violence and no more for the poor under their own than at the hands of the white masters of apartheid – no jobs, no light, no loos.) In other words, don’t look at us, look at them. More money was embezzled through government in the two years of the pandemic than in President Zuma’s nine.
There was a thoughtful item on a young white mayor in a rural seat in the Western Cape, who is going for government via one of the minority parties and he is fluent in a couple of African languages.
Language was always a big part of the deal in SA (see Rian Malan, My Traitor’s Heart)
The young paramedic who has just moved in upstairs remarked that she had a love/hate relationship with SA having been there earlier in the year. “It is so beautiful” she said “ but there is so much wrong.” I went too early to see the current decline but I remember the beauty.
And no, I am not writing about South Africa and the Middle East because I won’t look at what is wrong in my own country. But in the hunt for some piece of good news,
I found the story of a man who discovered an abandoned park on his doorstep in Johannesburg. And who, one day, fed up with having to drive to space when space was on his doorstep, he borrowed the key, took his torch, and opened the gate. He didn’t go very far because everybody had told him how dangerous it was. But it wasn’t. It was deserted.
So he went in with clippers, his dog and a bucket for weeds. He asked friends to help, he crowdfunded over ten years having formally adopted the space from the city council who agreed to mow and remove the waste – but he would do everything else. The biggest difficulty was persuading people it was safe. So he made 67 metal owls, painted different colours. Children loved them. “Everyone told me they’d be stolen – but they weren’t, not one.”
He put in red kudu, orange monkeys, yellow pangolin and a pink and yellow giraffe five metres tall
– all in all, over 100 sculptures and welcomed 10,000 visitors a month. And everybody picks up after themselves. Asked by others for advice, he answers (in a variant of Field of Dreams) “if you start clearing, people will join you.” A Soweto born colleague agrees: “There is no messiah coming to save us … no point in just waiting for this perfect South Africa. We have to save ourselves.”
The nearest I came to such a story in Britain was of a retired domestic science teacher who learned by chance that nearby women with young families couldn’t cook because they hadn’t the money to spend on ingredients. She knocked on doors and offered to show them how to knock up a meal from what was in the cupboard, or with minimal extras. One woman’s triumph was making a birthday cake for her daughter . I waited for a follow up. It never came, sidelined by the developing passion for bad news.
In the desperate hunt for a vote raiser the government is talking about National Service
– an updated version, please, designed to recognise gifts that don’t fit, and allocate everybody who can’t be enlisted into community services like weeding and clearing, helping out and picking up. If you don’t see people do it out of conviction, you don’t believe it exists.
The political system in Britain will break before it changes but the way it is employed and spoken of, could change. If Keir Starmer isn’t offering miracles, it’s because there aren’t any. Wouldn’t you rather have a nice surprise than a broken promise ? The change is in style, not content.
Bring it on.
Many thanks to Christina Lamb of The Sunday Times for the story about James Delaney.
Perhaps it isn’t as brandished around as it used to be because the definitions have widened or blurred. The dictionary suggests technical, medical, chemical and geological contexts for starters. I have heard it applied socially to everything from oral sex to cleaning your teeth three times a day as in “But is it normal ?” Which means “Is it OK ?” Because of its medical context, I was careful. A number of things taken out of medical context or in changed medical context have become unsafe not to say inflammatory. Your normal is yours.
I wouldn’t have started this line of thought without the last question allegedly asked of a beauty editor recently “If I don’t have money for Botox, what is the next best thing ?” When did the use of Botox become normal ?
A very attractive woman, right hair, trousers, jacket, makeup, stood on a corner upon which I passed . I grinned in approval and greeting. She gave me that “oh something nasty on my shoe” look and I asked “Have you ever tried smiling ? It is so much cheaper than Botox.” When I told Pam the Painter who endorses my occasional asperity, she asked “ And what did she say ?” I don’t know. I let her get on with it. Silly thing.
I recall explaining to my better than pretty mother 35 years ago that the reason I invested in wider ranging skincare was that pollution in the city was high. My favourite photograph of my mother shows her very attractive lines and the quality of her beautiful skin. One did not cancel the other.
And yes, I know some of this is the luck of the draw not to say genes, emphasised by a piece a week ago about how terrible to be 80 by a woman with a face like a boot. You may be sure that by the time you hit 80 what you are will show on your face.
What is normal apparently is fear of age.
But age comes. And you can’t blame it on a political party. Why treat the body as a piece of real estate, planning the extension to buttocks or the uplift/enlargement of bosom as once we used to save for the kitchen extension or conversion of the shed ? And we are a lot more critical of a bad builder than a bad aestheticist. So the subtext of this is eerily to do with remaking yourself.
I am all for making the best of what you’ve got
with diet and dietary supplements, exercise, rest (in everything from meditation to shuteye), relevant cosmetics, changing colours, getting a better haircut, realising you should never wear jeans again or those achingly badly cut shorts (all sexes). I am not for obsessing about any of this. And although every so often there is an update on the increasing numbers of men involved in plastic surgery, they remain small compared with the number of women
Normal has shifted from “as far as we know” – what we know having exploded, often unreliably, in our lifetime to “everybody does it” which generationally reminds me of the Nazis, my first tentative grasp of a totalitarian state.
Inevitably the obsession with youth backs into the obsession with the end of youth ie age.
I find it the last great freedom. I can list as well as anybody else the shortfall. I know now why people might call me a cow – because the toenails are like hooves (cloven, I am sure). I can’t lift this or shift that. I have to ask for help but I have been generously, charmingly, unexpectedly, uplifted by kindness and consideration. I was shaken to the roots of my being by illness last year – but you have to die of something.
I hope it comes fast and conclusively. I am less afraid of death than dying. It is in the hands of the Master of the Universe and to him I give thanks for every good day, every grin and silly joke, every generosity, the birds and the beasts and a good life. And it shows round the wrinkles and the bags into an ability to live, even in a troubled world. What we used to call normal.
Anna's 40 year long award-winning journalistic career as an adviser (nowadays we say "agony aunt - she loves the job, hates the title) has spanned magazines, radio, television and newspapers; including a 14 year run at Capital Radio with her groundbreaking show 'Anna and the Doc', and 7 years at Talk Radio hosting 'Live and Direct' and her work was rewarded with a Gold Sony award and induction into the Radio Hall of Fame....Read More
Annalog 