Annalog

Every tree

is a leaf on a bigger one. It might be a tree with leaves itself, it might be a tree of fruit.  There was a lemon tree outside the second hotel room in Crete – I can still remember the smell.  I’d never seen lemons growing.  There were olive trees in Crete, older than time.  Trees are a root.  That’s why so many people got so upset over the destruction of that mighty tree in the north. Trees take time.  We might inveigh against time but we accept its power in our lives.  And, we say, time heals all wounds.

There was an avenue of trees

near home.  I can remember looking down it, the light breaking through or excluded, the shapes, the shadows. You can hear a tree, the noise it makes in the branches, the soughing, the movement of the leaves. A recurring theme among children’s books is the child’s relationship with or observation of a tree. Trees in storms are pulled out of shape, branches bent, leaves flattened, and watching, you hope the trunk can stand.

The better known of two best selling books about trees in the recent past is wrapped in the depths of translation as well as intellect.  I’ve tried to read it twice, I keep it to have another go.   I feel I “should” read it.  Trees are important. and I don’t know a lot about them.   In Henry Marsh’s current book (And Finally) he talks about planting a tree that prefers the ground into a big pot

where it seems happy, he writes, like an enormous bonsai.

I can’t get round the cutting to make bonsai.  It is a discipline that produces shapes and sometimes loveliness

but I am bothered by the cutting.  You prune a tree to help it grow, to keep it from overgrowth, to help it flourish.   I have always been wary of pruning, I don’t trust myself to do it.  Alex from next door has no such fear but then he is young.  And I did have a happy afternoon with the cherished winter broom (one of two shrubs I brought from north London south of the river 23 years ago) where I took off every dried dead bit and fed it and crooned (under my breath) so that it settled and grew again. It has yellow flowers on it. 

And I don’t know why I should be so mealymouthed about cutting trees.  Without cut trees, no fire, no charcoal, no paper

and without paper, no books.   You make separations among  things what trees are for, as you do among people.   “Don’t ask that of her” we say.   You accept to say hello and pass on with some but you linger with others.  Some become friends and some never will.  Some grow into friendship and flourish, some fail and die, some are knocked or cut down.  Just like trees.

Back as far as the eye could see in the Transvaal in South Africa, the road ran white, the sky was blue and the red flowers of the flame trees lined the road. 

One of those unforgettable lessons in colour.   And Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, was better liked for the popularisation of the fir tree at Christmas than a lot of the other much bigger and better things he did, that same fir tree still central to the visualisation of Christmas though generations have cursed the pine needles, unless they get a particular variant or an artificial tree – which always seemed like a contradiction in terms. 

Trees are real.

The week began badly.  One magpie perched on the house, one for sorrow.  Apposite.  But then I saw an old documentary on a man who has devoted his life to black bears, getting past the mythology of tearing claws and fearsome temper to find a huge, remarkably even tempered beast whom he can now feed by hand in the biggest wild and beautiful forest on the eastern seaboard of the US, in Minnesota. And, sitting in the kitchen, reading, I looked up to see a single enormous furry bumble bee, checking everywhere in the garden for late flowers and thus late food. And I thought of the image of the Tree of Life and what that has to teach us.    

Illness makes the world shrink. 

And I have only had a cold, a blocked up, unlovely, can’t get my breath without coughing or blowing my nose or both., can’t sleep because I can’t breathe –  cold.  A common cold. Though when you have one, it feels personal.  The hacking and wheezing , the lack of any kind of energy.  Oh Lord, for the last two weeks I have been an even weaker vessel .

It wasn’t Covid or anything else. Or flu. It was one of those very powerful four letter words again – it was a cold.

And I crawled out like a leper with pockets full of tissues, coughed expecting to be arrested, came home with the essentials and sat – choked lying down – and watched tripe telly (plenty to chose from) in a stupor.  A salt water decongestant (Sterimar) rescued my stuffed up nose, lots of lemon and honey my throat – though there is a limit to how much lemon my aged tum will take. Staying in a constant temperature is remarkably hard to achieve unless you stay in bed or indoors all day.  Which has led to the mythology of working through it.

Never a heroine, I found constant temperature helped.  But I have move about.  I can’t just sit, bad for the body, and all it took was to be exposed to the eerily mild weather and a bus with winter heating on full blast when it was unseasonably warm outside. A frightening reverse.. 

I watched the news, I

felt helpless, I switched off.   Out of everything I have read and listened to, I now know more but I am just as frightened.  I have heard people say “I was so frightened, it cleared my head.”   And I am sure this can be true but waiting and not knowing is an illness all by itself – anxiety.  One of the two very young women at the door (Jehovah’s Witnesses) asked me “Do you believe in peace ?  Is peace possible ?”   And I was caught between history, news, belief systems, wanting to reply and not being able to speak .  Maybe just as well.  I made half an answer – yes but there has to be collective will for peace and somebody always makes out of war. 

I wanted to say please, accept that certainties are personal – don’t try and tell me yours.  The evangelical aspect of Christianity has long bothered me – but then I think of a contributor to the magnificently re assembled Summer of Soul (1969)

saying “The Pentecostal churches were where black people were free, anything you wanted to bring and let it be” and I remember that dream as something really worthwhile, even watching from the outside.  And oh, that music.  Trumpets of Zion …

I know how lucky I am. I have a place to live, food, warmth, can nearly pay my bills (interestingly edf is back to estimated meter readings ) and the fortunate list follows of what works and I don’t take for granted – feet, back, guts, eyes, hands, and so on.  And I can read.

At school we were taught to aim for “reading with understanding” which briefly left. But that’s come back and old fashioned Covonia (late afternoon and then just before bed) has given me my second night of sleep for the first time since this all began.   The remedy in the Middle East

should be so simple. 

And if I don’t write more about that, it is not out of disinterest, it is out of respect.   The situation is intricate as far back as you care to go, worsened by successive bad decisions by everybody involved (Britain included) since the 1920s.  And two wrongs never make a right.  But you can forget “wiping Hamas off the face of the earth.”   Hamas is violent obsession with an idea – and you can’t kill an idea.   I find it hard to believe that Hamas did not recognise that the price of this insurgency was Gaza – so they threw it under the war bus.  And we watch in horror.

A man used to walk round the west end of London with two sandwich boards.  I never got to the second because the first stopped me short. It read “the wages of sin is death.”

There are times when I think the world has gone mad and times when I know it has.

A week ago, the BBC lunch time news itemised the Hamas attack and several other stories, ending with yet another promotional piece about its four part series on Jimmy Savile, plus extracted insert with a “real life” victim –  I hope you can tell fiction from fact.    A new low.  I recoiled.

Bad enough the story should be made (to what point ?) and promoted so relentlessly, and by the BBC at that – but on the news ?  On a day of the outbreak of another war ?   No competition between Ukraine and Israel, a war is a war.

War by Paula Rego 2003

  People use increasingly deadly weapons to kill, maim and displace other people.

And the evening news repeated the same running order.   Awful.   

God knows, I know the world goes on.  I live in the part of it which does, occasionally staggeringly but not yet invaded.   And I have nobody to complain to because handling complaint has become expensive, inconclusive (if people complain, they expect some response)

and unpleasant.   Enter social media.

A friend who has just laid out major money for a kitchen refit from a respected store, just round the corne0r from her in a smart area of London..  She won’t be the easiest customer for various reasons, not least because her son and daughter have to intervene at intervals (“they are so much better at this than me”) so you take on one and get three.  Nevertheless, the woman with whom she negotiated the job is no longer available to her.  Her replacement is neither skilled in language nor customer relations. And the young man who was designated to clear up the mess and misunderstandings and get the show back on the road – all this costs money,

her agreement for God knows what, their profit – is based in Manchester.  

I have only heard a fragmented version of this story – the full edition is a long running soap – but weeks into major domestic disorder which is so depressing, there is no end in sight and she took on the project with this company because she though they were reliable.    Who do you call ?

The weekend papers are full of standoff and misery, misunderstandings and accusations,  debacle and demonstration, history and the present  always half the tale, the versions vary is all – it’s what and who is in the wings, waiting, that makes my heart shrink. 

But the newspapers are also full of holidays waiting to happen, clothes to buy, books to read, all sorts of bits and bobs from major interview to new cosmetics, anything to titillate the tired mind – and food, food everywhere – lovingly photographed, ravishing pretty.  Harvest home indeed, season a bit out of whack, but lovely. 

It’s confusing.        

Do I want the broadcast news to be all one note ?  No I don’t.   But the way this is put together has run amuck.   Of course you do better on radio  – no image – because with a camera,  if there is a war, you must have pictures of it.  And the pictures must grab you.   Perhaps you haven’t noticed but only the weather changes in wars. Not much else.   And for the rest – how we are told about it – we depend on fashions of “making the news” (repellent phrase).  And somebody else’s taste.   Hence my retreat to the print where at least I can spend time and distance, making whatever sense I can.

Juxtaposition – what follows or is bracketed up against what, and how it is handled – was always a problem.   What used to be called “guidelines” have been taken over by marketing which has one simple rule: sell.   And that implies that everything is for sale.   What an epitaph for our times.

She was a pretty woman, grey long bob, slender in trousers and unremarkable clothes, standing on the corner of a street I was walking past and smiled.  “Do I know you ?” she asked.  “No” I said “ but I have seen you before – so I smiled.”   She invited me to have coffee. 

The café was there, with chairs outside, not busy.  I said “Thank you.” And though I offered to pay for all of it, or my cup, she insisted on paying for exorbitant coffee and talked.

I know that you do not hear the story of a life in one meeting.  You hear what the person wants to tell you

so I said little.  She seemed to need to talk and I reproduce here as much as I can, her terms, not mine.  She told me she had been married for 52 years, had four daughters and that from time to time, quite regularly, her husband (she referred to him only that way) preferred the company of a woman other than herself.  This had gone on for years and she found it painful.  

She also told me that she had a most unhappy childhood, brought up mostly by her aunt, because her mother “lost” her father and landed with a young child, needed to find another one quickly.   She said that she was envious of and unpleasant to her sister, and she came to London to a nursing school where other trainees mocked her for being from Norfolk but having no local accent. 

One night she went to a church where she heard preached that all her sins would be forgiven if she declared for the Christ

and she couldn’t wait till the end of the service.  She said that the church had changed but she was still part of it, they ran a coffee bar on Tuesdays for the young and the newly arrived. She had learned to be a barrista.

She said that she had asked her husband for a divorce but he didn’t want that.  I said before I could stop myself “Of course not.”  She asked why.  I said “Because he married his mother.” She said that was probably right, he lost his mother when he was 15.  After the first half of his life in the army, he went into the City where he met women and the pattern she described had culminated most recently in a 27 year old beautiful Ukrainian who had lived with them and when she moved out, he wanted to continue the relationship.   She said “I hate fireworks

but he has booked for the three of us to go and see the local display.  What would you do ?“ I said I would tell him  quietly that he was not kind and I would not go – but she will and I know why.  She is afraid not to.  She asked me if I would come to the Church on Tuesday and I said “No, thank you.”

This is what I call a lock.  She can only do it this way, he can only do it that way.  Such a waste of a life, to know that there is a pattern or a series of patterns but be unable or unwilling for whatever reasons to change them. 

I don’t know much about the Middle East but in reading about it, no matter the angle on this subject or any other, I am always aware of the writing.  Writing is like food.  You like it or you don’t.    I’ve tried before with two fine writers  but I can’t get in.  However I kept Black Wave which is about the unending standoff between two rival theocracies, Saudi Arabia and Iran, to dominate the area.  The writer is a Lebanese journalist. 

And I am reading Jeremy Bowen’s The Making of the Modern Middle East, much and justly praised.

Israel and Palestine have been locked from the beginning. And in spite of all sorts of effort on both sides, the majority see only one way.  And other vested interests manipulate the standoff. 

The war in which my father first fought was called variously the First War, the Great War or The War to End all Wars.  

Devastation by Graham Sutherland, in the Tate.

I wish.

Last week I went in search of the dream. 

This happens occasionally to some women – men too ? I don’t know – but the dream is that somewhere there will be something that will make us feel better, younger, more attractive and more acceptable to ourselves as well as others   – a cream,  a hair colour, a new  garment .  And the enormous industries that attend upon all these – makeup and hair cosmetics, and the clothing industry for starters – have exploited this probably originally seasonal yen  for all they are worth, we know we can’t really afford it (which varies in degrees of reality) but our compromise is to go and look.    It’s part of shopping. 

So last week I went to look.  I’ll spare you a list of what I didn’t like, but I very much enjoyed the act of looking, whether at other people doing the same thing or clothes or books –  just looking. And latterly I went into a famous cut price store where I saw a face mask in a bottle which has stayed in my mind’s eye.

I admit I loved wrappings,

Wal and Howard are star wrappers because Wal can wrap anything so that you want to open it while Howard can just wrap anything, hospital corners on expensive papers.   I am not good with my hands.  I admire people who are.

Packaging has developed so that there is more and more of it, it’s a big part of the sell and it’s all thrown away,, complete waste so you can see why it clutters the earth.   The bottle took me back to childhood when briefly I collected bottle of shapes that pleased me. The face mask was allegedly rose based, faintly pink which may be nothing to do with roses but the bottle was heavy square glass,

sealed of course with a label.  No other wrapping.  

Nowadays we accept wrapping, starting with fruit and vegetables routinely from paper and plastic bags.  You can understand and be grateful for tinned food because it lasts but everything else comes wrapped within an inch of its life – and we throw most of it away.  

Multiply this by 100 per cent if you are talking about any kind of luxury.   And of course the makers want it to look luxurious because they appeal your envy, your sense of belonging, your insecurities and the wrappings have multiplied.  Cellophane, cardboard, plastic, synthetic but real looking ribbons, to catch your eye.   I am going back for that face mask, if I can ever find it again, not because I give a darn about the product but it is so refreshing to see something I could immediately relate to.  The rest of the shopping dream completed eluded me.  I bought a reduced silver cleaning cloth for the teaspoons, two reduced odour eating candles, and potatoes for supper.

My string bag is black from Longchamps – but you get my drift!

And I thought about packaging, surface, how easily we say “What you see is what you get” though life is rarely so straightforward.  You can mean it as a compliment  as in “He’s not always easy  but he’s honest” or you can use it dismissively as in “Looks like a choirboy, wonder how that plays ?”

Billy Graham

 We also say “Never judge a book by its cover” though President Zelensky

obviously believes that we do – so he wears the colours of his fighters because they’re in a war with which he is absolutely identified.   And generations of film stars and sports stars, celebrities from A to Z , politicians of every  kind, the girl who got on, the man who wanted the top job – they all dress the cover because they know that’s the first thing you see.  Occasionally there is an exception – but they usually cultivate the packaging by ignoring it so they look as if their minds on more important things – but it is still we, the onlookers, who pick up and interpret – or misread – the message.  

In the business of encounter – who you speak to , who you ignore, who you notice, what you feel about them from the first moment you see them, how you classify them, what you expect of them – you may no longer have a keen sense of smell or a keen sense of self – but what you notice and respond to is the packaging.

This is the title of a song from the musical Kiss Me Kate a rework of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, music by Cole Porter, lyrics by Bella and Sam Spewack which launched in 1948, to be revived at regular intervals. Though contextually, it is quite funny,  I wonder if you could sing this now without somebody getting windy.  

Rights are very “in”.  I don’t hate men.  I married two, had to do with many and bore an incipient third.  I preferred to some to others, but while I can say I found this one tricky or that one unsettled me for some absolutely instinctual reason, I see them as people and I like people – not always trustworthy, often disappointing (me too) but people are always interesting.

On the bus a man sat down,

hat, glasses, stick and a carrier from the Saatchi Gallery so I asked what he had been to see and he told me, showed the book he had bought on the artist’s work.  He was a retired paediatrician. 

He told me that when he was a newly appointed consultant at Great Ormond Street, he skived coffees and took the paper home from the consultants’ room because everything was going on the mortgage.  Things improved and then declined over a long time. He told me that a year after becoming a consultant, he resigned from the BMA and has been an “outsider” ever since. “But this ? I’d worry about my patients” he said.  Pause.   “And what do you do ?” 

I think

I said that after many years as a journalist,  for the last 10 I had written a blog called annalog.  He looked a question.  I said “Because I’m Anna and I am very analogue” and spelt it the way I write it  (which originated with a man.)  We got off the bus, we said goodbye, he said he was going home to look at the site.  I just wish I had written down the name of the artist whose work he introduced me to because the Saatchi Gallery website is coy to the point of uselessness. 

Mishugas by Jacques Lipchitz, the Israel Museum

(Another man – sorry, Charles.)

A neighbour haunts the street, can in hand, speaking in a strangely hectoring kind of way with a sexual undercurrent I find repellent.  The big square postman has had a round with pre cancer and his wife too.  This is the man who on his own time delivered stuff last Christmas, “of course” he said, when I thanked him. He remarked unbidden  “ I can’t stand that fella.  Sticks to me all the way round the block, as if he were interesting –  and I don’t like the way he talks to women, not at all.”

I remember the first professor I ever met, a book of whose I had read.  We met in a television studio – I was so scared, you’d have thought the gallows beckoned –  and I remember his grin, that he was courteous to me and made room for me for the few minutes we had before and after transmission.  I smiled at his name on bookshelves for years. 

Of course you remember politeness, it has no sex,  and you particularly remember people who were kind when you were beginning, when whether they knew it or not, it wouldn’t have taken much to undermine you and knock you aside.   I met plenty of those and my revenge is that they do not linger in the memory – the experience maybe but the person is gone.

I remember the plain solicitor with a beautiful voice who rescued me from a contract very much not  in my interest.   Good doctors, wonderful plumbers, the best hairdresser I ever had who left for LA over a weekend (I hope he was in love !)  without saying goodbye: the divorce lawyer saying “Wipe your mouth and walk away.”.    I remember my son’s secondary school teacher who was so practical and helpful.  And sitting next to David Kossoff whom I had seen in A Kid for Two Farthings, who talked to me while sketching the man opposite on a card he gave me when he left. He signed it “for my Anna.”  Half the sky.

From the trenches in Ukraine

The ship was as big as a block of flats,

sailing through the Mediterranean while the passengers laughed and ate and drank and made merry.  At night the air was soft and the moon lit the sea, beating down on the wake she ploughed through the waves.  Never innocent that track, not with the waste of 1800 paying guests and the considerable crew to dispose of.  You can’t help but think of waste when we live in a consumer society which is always urging upon us something new, something we must have, something we just can’t live without.  And if you discard the old thing for the newer thing, the old thing has to go somewhere.

In the recent past, most people took a newspaper and when we threw things away, we wrapped it up tightly for rubbish collection

Friends of the Earth / uses for old newspapers

by what we called dustbin men. That’s a whole other discussion, right there.   Plastic was not everywhere as it is now.   

But interestingly when you look up wastage, it was a concept first applied to people.  And at the hands of some, it still is.  So there is a new television series on Peter Sutcliffe, a serial killer whose horror casts a long shadow because many of his early victims were what we now call sex workers but he subsequently killed other women too.

The new series claims to speak up for the children and families of those impacted

rather than the horrible man himself (thankfully dead) but also to examine what the police failed to pick up on, and why, largely because of their prejudice in favour of “decent” women.    So this is wastage, those who were shoved aside, forgotten in the media hue and cry over a man who evaded capture for a long time because he was himself so unremarkable.

Not for me.  It’s done, done well, done badly, done.    Let those people alone.

Also to look forward to is an acted series about Jimmy Savile which will undoubtedly involve what is thought as well as known, the failure to understand that it is rarely nice people who make a success of life in those terms (media attention, mass approbation, frequently foul mouthed and sexually unusual as perks of the trade, but acknowledged by the great and the good).  Savile made a lot of people uncomfortable

I wanted to wash my hands

and too many of them pushed away that feeling, suborned their misgivings to other people’s praise of him and the few that tried to bear a different kind of witness weren’t thanked. 

It was a gross management failure by the BBC who employed him, in the name of money.  And there are many people who blinded by the making of money – blinded, deafened and made stupid.

And the news on Saturday 16 September 2023 was dominated by the revelations to follow in Sunday’s press that Russell Brand, a sometime comedian whose voice I always thought raised by the tightness of his pants,

has been abusive to several women who now wish to make a case against him.   And the television company and the production company involved didn’t speak up, speak for or protect their younger staff.  Well, there’s a surprise.  Timed just as the Big Brother House comes back round for another bite of the profit apple.

Old journalistic hands would say there is always a story in sex, death, religion and the Royal Family.  To that, you can currently add wastage.  Let’s talk about the victims.  Who was left out, who was failed, which police acted narrow mindedly and short sightedly  – the police don’t have a moratorium on those qualities.  They are everywhere.   And so is personal taste.

Television’s commissioning editors have less money and less opportunity  than they have ever had so they commission on the basis of what they hope people will want to watch.    A crystal ball helps.  And bearing in mind terrestrial television is dying.   So maybe this is what sufficient numbers of the public like.  Never mind the critics, we are talking about viewing figures that hold up.   Maybe it takes their minds off their own troubles, the terrorism of the energy companies, not being able to make the money go round, not being able to allay the fears of their children whether from iffy school roofs to another pandemic, the strain of it all.   I hope so. Not for me.  

An unknown writer sent me a photograph of himself. 

I react badly to the whole machinery of sending a picture to a person.  I always did.  When we were encouraged to join a penfriends scheme as schoolchildren, I wondered what my photograph had to do with it ? I’ll never know.  After all, you can look at a picture and think “Oh, no …” Well, I can.  Because though I love writing and I love film – words and pictures, still or moving – writing for film is quite different from writing to read.  The speech around producing a photograph may impact it. ( Let’s leave drawings and painting out of this.)  Shot script is percolated through that magical, strange and various thing called a camera.  And some of us are very influenced by sound – the taken for granted adjunct of the camera. And words can make a picture. 

He quoted that old chestnut – a picture is worth a thousand words. 

  According to Google, widely attributed but not claimed.  One of those thoughts open to infinite interpretation, I’d say “a good picture is worth a thousand words” but then it’s my “good” versus yours. 

What is the image for?  who takes it ?  in what context ?  for what reason ?   Moving images are  different again from still ones.   Words you read are one thing, spoken they can be quite different.  I still read aloud,

especially poetry, because an image moves me to, because I need to understand how the words fall. Several times I have heard people say how they were disappointed with how a favourite book was rendered into audio – “I didn’t like his voice” or “it just sounded wrong.”

The temporary dispenser in the chemist (I only saw him twice) had a particular intonation to his excellent English.  Collecting a prescription, I asked “May I know where you’re from ?”  He answered “Afghanistan”, adding with patient sadness “The land of blood and tears.”  Six words that said a lot.  No picture needed.

Which takes me to how we feel  – whether you approach that as an individual thing or as a matter of consensus.  Supposedly “everybody” loves babies.  Based on the evidence of several recent stories of cruelty to children, that just isn’t true.  You do and I may  – but some other horror, man or woman, sees a child as the crucible of frustration, crying, needing 

– and lashes out, again and again, reinforcing the habit of every kind of abuse.  Judging by the RSPCA’s current appeals, not “everybody” loves animals – or is even disinterested enough to leave them alone.  They starve, beat, humiliate and harm them.  And when times constrict us, some of us lash out – physically or emotionally or both –  and cruelties to the next accessible in the pecking order increase. 

Reading about this or hearing account of it in news coverage is hard enough.  Pictures are mostly  unavailable or thought to be counterproductive.  You don’t sympathise and reach for your change: you recoil, repelled and frightened.

When annalog began, I was asked why I wasn’t on Facebook, “you have so many friends.”  The technology has changed not to say eroded how we meet people . 

A friend in her forties said yesterday “My sister won’t think about social media but that’s how we meet people nowadays.”    Not me.

Mine is the old way, face to face.   I’ve made one or two wonderful friends and had encounters of joy – you know I have, because I often write about them.   I can do what I can do, I have strengths and  weaknesses.    I prefer to see for myself, I don’t want images which have already incorporated a vocabulary of poses , thus rendering the image less representative of the person pictured and more to do with everybody else.  Mass injections may be very useful, mass perceptions less so.

Yesterday I stood behind in a bus queue a tall slender girl wearing the most becoming shorts I have seen, all in the proportions.  She was from Fiji.  I was thrilled and said that I remembered Fijian warriors dancing to honour of the young Queen Elizabeth II.   “I was not even born” she said, wide eyed.  Time doesn’t change everything.  

*the refrain of the Shoop Shoop song is “… it’s in his kiss.”            

This title is the nearest I shall ever get to the schoolgirl

adventures of Angela Brazil and Monica, the jolly hockey sticks schoolgirl and invention of Beryl Reid who planted the seeds of my interest in radio. Monica’s breathless faux-naïve gush and the Birmingham bravura of Marlene from the Midlands sill live, breathe and have being in unparalleled memory.  

That there was always an older woman is a great tribute to my mother.  I never saw them as threat, only as somebody from whom I could learn.  And by older, I only mean older than me – not necessarily of a great age. When you are 20, 40 seems antique. 

  There were men among them too, who were useful often just by being disposed to see me as a person not a pronoun.

When I was still a young secretary, I met a film producer’s assistant who made me believe that with work and intelligence, I could parlay what I had into something better.    When I met Ellie the office manager, I learned the power of being kind.  She did it as naturally as breathing.

I remember Helene Kantor who captained the office of the insurance company where I worked in NYC, where I heard that John Kennedy had been shot.  Small, great smelling (never knew the perfume), tough, fair, suits to die for. 

And much later this side of the pond the head of David Frost’s production company, same type, English version – her inspiration importantly more accessible ie you didn’t have to go anywhere else to be better. 

And Sauveur Guerrier from Haiti, who turned displacement into dignity and pushed me to be interested in French, especially the pronunciation – which led in turn to some sensibility about other languages.

Looking down the years, I see men and women who gave me something to aim for, a way to do it, good advice, a tone which inferred their time was not wasted on me.  I thought about all this as I came to the morning, not a thought in my head but how to begin copy people want to read.   I flicked through the now sizeable backlog of annalog and found a correspondent who had referred to me in a particular context as wise. And I thought how much wisdom,

juniper signifies wisdom

the power of overview and advice means to those of beginning life’s journey. 

“You don’t get on by being original.  You don’t get on by being bright.  You don’t get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.”   So wrote Hilary Mantel in Wolf Hall.  Though it is only part of the story.  Heaven help me, I did it the other way round – I was original, I was bright, I was strong but I don’t think you could ever call me subtle.  Any subtlety I ever had was learnt from another godmother, who managed me for years and enhanced my life.

This morning too, I looked up the origins of the word mentor,

another correspondent triggered that.  In Greek stories, he is a friend of Odysseus, who brings up the latter’s son Telemachus while Odysseus is away for years (double message: you need to be present in some form to be useful for a child) and over time the word has become associated with experience, wisdom and advice.   I aspire to these words.  They get such short shrift in modern life, as if anything important could be amassed in short order.  And it can’t.  (There is the Eureka moment, of course there is, but you don’t get those by the half dozen in Sainsburys). And the model of learning over time takes into account that the way you see things changes over time.  You aren’t at 40 what you were at 20 and if you are, I’m sorry for you. It is essentially important to go on learning, especially about yourself.  Even if you don’t like some of what you learn.

And then there are those who just do you one small unquantifiable kindness after another.  Like Sarah who is clearing her terrace, prior to longed for work, so I have inherited two happy plants she is glad to be rid of.    Nothing nicer than a good egg.

We say “there is always somebody worse off”

and it’s a combination of wake up call and being grateful for small mercies.  It doesn’t really take away from the fact that when you are unhappy, you are unhappy.   A small injury can give you insight into what somebody with greater and more permanent impairment has to live with.   Or pain. 

Now there’s a four letter word.  Or fear, another.

Generally, things I worry about and dread have been easier to live through than to think about. Anticipation makes things worse.  And it may have been the same for Zena, a tall slender art teacher living next door who suddenly, in a bus journey, confided that she had to go to a teaching hospital the next day to have examined and treated a lump in her lovely neck.  She is a young thing, of course I felt for her and I am happy to tell you she has an all clear.  

Thank goodness.

The abreaction to the drug package prescribed when I had a recent small stroke was protracted, uncomfortable, and anti social.  My bottom nearly fell off.  I didn’t want anybody near me. I was embarrassed and afraid.   But, in a pause in between bouts (the only occasion I can think of when going through it did not alleviate the anxiety of what might happen) I went out to get the newspaper and found Liz (whom I have known slightly since childhood) sitting on the doorstep in a patch of sunshine, without her trademark rollup, weeping.

I opened my arms into which she fell, allowed herself that awkward  “Oh good heavens, look at me – I shouldn’t be doing this” hug and disengaged.  And I asked very gently what was the matter.   Her mother was having an eye removed that day in connection with cancer.  So you say the nice kind things, make the right noises. Don’t go in where angels fear to tread.    Poor woman, poor girl.  I have waited, but I will put a card through the door.

Neither of these experiences made me feel better but they did put my affliction into a more realistic proportion.  Better still, drugs amended and reduced from six to two.  If you had seen me hoovering up the first protein

to stay on board in three weeks (other than two widely spaced scrambled eggs), you would have laughed aloud – I did !   

How I missed my fruit and vegetables !  How I missed energy !  How surprised I was when various  friends encouraged me to eat as I liked, anything my body wanted, get the calories back in and drink water – which for the duration of the problem, passed through and never said good morning .. that truly alarmed me.   And at last I could sleep a bit, without waking every hour or so in response to insistent peristaltic action.   Nothing like having your body out of action for developing a whole new respect for when it begins to mend.

I thought of starving and how hellish that is, physically and psychologically.  I thought of war when the plumbing is bombed out and the doctor elsewhere.   I saw a sun bear

and a snow leopard, both with young, on tv.  I have never seen cubs of either before  – one at Chester Zoo and the other at the Bronx Zoo in New York.  

Stunningly lovely – uplifting.  Encouraging in spite of the erratic weather and the endlessly recycled bad news. 

And then Diana emailed and said she was going away unexpectedly for the weekend – could she bring me some stuff from the allotment and her vegetable box, she didn’t want to waste it.   And I said yes please so I became the happy recipient of cold chicken, baby runner beans, mushrooms, a bit of this and a bit of that and fresh herbs from which I fashioned three meals.  And I wish you’d seen the basket, put together to appeal.   Diana is difficult to thank, she goes what my father used to call “all unnecessary”, but I have a card and a small gift.  God, was I grateful.   Food as medicine.   Kind friends and neighbours – next door, six doors down, ten doors down – the world on the doorstep.