Annalog

This is quite different from annalog /Jean Hagen Lives ! and not a phrase Wal admits to. 

Not much Wal can’t bear including a recent argument with a concealed tree root which took him A&E where a woman in a white coat, presumably a doctor, kept asking him what drugs he had taken and the nice enough black nurse asked him if he believed in Jesus or God and invoked Sodom and Gomorrah.  Out, Jewish and exotic, Wal is proud of his secular antecedents.  Being what Dame Edna in that old interview with Michael Parkinson (sleep sweet, love) called a homeopath is his business.  He bore the woman in the white coat till she went off duty, the nurse by refusing to be drawn and when Howard came to rescue him, he was fascinated by a group of 7 doctors, all at computers, but not examining patients for hours. And he was then asked to wait to be seen by a consultant – and declined.

Sometimes, someone makes you think again about a phrase.   I have borne a number of things I thought I couldn’t, including pain and fear, largely because I couldn’t see round, I could only see through. Couldn’t always see through either –  I clung to  “This too shall pass.”   .      

But there are one or two things which madden me.

There is the local contingent of a wider tribe I can’t bear.  They are all female, mostly of medium height, wearing variants of leggings and all with the same hairdo – pulled back off the forehead into strands or falls or a sort of bush.   Without exception they carry a lot of extra weight, mostly where you can’t miss it, and they walk little snappy fluffy dogs.  If one of them should sit down in error on the fluffy, that animal would be impacted if not defunct.   And the sisterhood all carry poo bags which, filled, they leave in the street.

I am by nature a picker upper, a tidier, one who asks “Do we need this ?”    I have been teased about it, but so be it, I am.  And I can’t bear picking up and disposing of the excreta of other people’s animals.  It seems like the ultimate in the insulting raised finger, nastier than sandwich and sweet wrappers, discarded cigarette packs or vape bottles, tissues, paper bags and all the rest. 

Long ago somebody referred to his mother in law as “minlaw”.  Let me introduce you to binlore.  I live in the mostly private rental and owned end of a long road and I have referred before to my block (shades of NYC) where everybody has the money to rent or pay mortgage, but a significant number don’t have the brains God gave a turnip when it comes to bins.  

They don’t use bin liners which have been rebranded as big bags, presumably because you can sell more. They don’t use the free bags for recycling the council provide.   They don’t stand their bins up, they don’t drain them of rain water, they don’t rinse them out and they leave them uncovered with rubbish inside to rot and stink.  

I have written before about local waste disposal services and always favourably.   And I am so irritated by the lack of thought – not more than 30 seconds max at a time – that would make this if not Bin Beautiful, at least Bin Bearable.

Yes, I worry about the fires in Canada, about the decline in sea ice in Antartica.   I bet there have been fires in Siberia too – there were last year.   We’ve had punishing heat in continental Europe and fire there too.  Starvation in the Horn of Africa, decline at every level.  I know it’s too much to think about, I know it’s frightening, destabilising and comes back to tug at your imagination as does the image of a nurse killing children, mass graves in Ukraine and every other bit of bad news which is  horribly effective even when badly put together and repeated with little variation for hours at a time (what used to be called propaganda).

But I can’t bear these two things because they are something you CAN do something about.   No Governmental inquiry or international summit required.  The cost in time or money is minimal. And that all these people can’t think of dog shit disposal and lids on drained bins is the most unbearable thing of all.   

I went to my first wedding

when I was about five.   I remember my dress because it was a beautiful green and had pockets. I always loved pockets. A friend of my mother’s was getting married, it was not a formal affair but I remember hats and a bit of late forties/early fifties glamour – my father looking splendid in a suit, my mother with her hair up and a borrowed fur cape. 

The bride Mary and her sister Cicely had Pekinese dogs – Cicely’s was small and snappy but Mary had Billy, the biggest of the breed (Sun, Emperor and Sleeve) and he walked with feline dignity, seeming to float on endless waves of soft black, grey and honey coloured fur.  He was gentle and he was beautiful.

After the ceremony, lunch was in a country pub,

there were trees and flowers in the garden and I wasn’t a bridesmaid, I was just a little girl, so I could wander about and look at things safely, while the grownups laughed and talked.  It was a very happy occasion – and then – there was confetti.

It was white and gold and silver, bells and heart shapes, brides and grooms, horse shoes and silver slippers, boots and tiny white roses.  And you tossed it up in the air, where the sun caught the metallic bits. I kept two pieces in my treasure box for years. We did not think of biodegradable then, but it would have been hard to dispose of because of the gilding.  So it was swept aside and allowed to disperse over time, thank you wind, thank you rain.     

And this is where it came from. Food was not always easy to come by and methods for the preservation of food developed over time. So to throw grain or rice

or small dried fruits was a generous gesture which probably existed from a very long time ago, when weddings were much more of a business arrangement, and the community was more likely to be celebrating a good harvest, auspicious planets or evading local war.

Over time two ideas fused, to offer your best to the gods and to offer your best to the young that they might be fortunate – and the Italians (of course) came up with comfits – small almond cakes – and the words travelled as language does, went through some hoops – and confetti became what we understand it to be now.

Some of the meetings I have are as brief and windborn as confetti. And they shine.  Others might be less aware than I but I still hang on to the powers of observation which would make me the journalist I aspire to be.  And to notice was revenge for short sight and the specs I have worn since I was eight.

I’ve been pretty unwell with the aftercare package of medicines (see annalog/at a stroke) and so going out is treasured, even in the grot of the big city.

And I am so grateful that I am a successfully extroverted introvert, that occasional rebuffs are just that (nobody’s right all the time), that I get the best of people. I sat next to a veiled woman

on the bus, I’d judge by her hands and her body probably in her fifties.  And you know how somebody can move their clothes aside and it makes you feel you were quite wrong to sit there?  She did the opposite.  She moved her skirts and I said “Thank you” as I sat down.  She moved herself over and said something which sounded like “ You don’t have to sit on the edge, look – there’s room.” So I moved a fraction and putting my hand on her arm, said” You’re just like my mother.  You’re organising me  …” and she grinned – I saw the veil move – with real pleasure and said something I couldn’t catch.  You could feel the warmth.  When we got off the bus, she did everything except stroke me.

And then Charmian (not her real name) whom I have met twice in Waitrose and had made a point of thanking because of the constancy of the store through pandemic and strikes and all, walked up and hugged me.   Am I soppy?  Sure.  But those tiny things shine, like my remembered confetti, glittering bits.      

 This is notice of the annalog awayday because, the nicest thing that can happen is, if you can’t go away yourself, somebody else you know gets to go and sail round the Greek Islands ,

just as the Greek Government starts encouraging us back safely.

It’s only for a week, annalog will resume the week of August 14, as usual, and I hope you’ll be as glad to see me as I am to see you.

P.S. Don’t forget the sunblock

I don’t cover the news

because everybody else does.  And I have become very aware of that over the last few weeks of annalog.  I search for the positive, I won’t pretend about it but I like to offer it wherever I can.  What can I add to the debate on Trump and Joe Biden ?   Putin ?   Netanyahu ?  Do I have anything new to say about Ukraine, or Congo, or whatever has gone wrong inside the NHS, various police forces , the rail unions or any of the other daily mushrooming industrial disputes ?   (NB: anything missed off this list is because of its length, not lack of interest)

Now I start out to watch

and whenever I do, I see a similarly shaped programme which involves  hitting me round the head with the headline story  –  15 or 20 minutes,  the talking heads or so called experts, reporters on site, more studio commentary ….  And then bad news. Maltreatment of  women in maternity care, a child run down, a boy stabbed, a man knocked of his motorbike, this wrong in schools, that wrong in prisons.  

There is a great deal wrong in the country,

whether your country is particular or what we used to call the United Kingdom.   Some of this is newly discovered but most of it has taken years to get to the mess it’s in and there is no sense of things being addressed or resolved.    So I am not at all surprised that anxiety and depression balloon, that the figures for child abuse are up and so on and on – I’ll spare you the list.  It isn’t cheerful.

What is going on affects us all or if it doesn’t affect us momentarily, we tend to thank heaven and talk about something else.  I know people and I am sure you do too who have given up on the news.  Phil  doesn’t buy newspapers, dislikes them for all sorts of reasons and says they just contribute to the recycling problems.   Pam the Painter uses a news app but often mentions something it doesn’t include or includes in such abbreviation that she can’t quite grasp what is going on.  Wal says he’s not interested but he is interested in what interests him, via tv or radio. He’ll pick up on this point or that and his response varies in one important way. He will say “I don’t know.”  He will even add “and it is of no interest to me” though if you push him, you often get a thoughtful comment.

There are papers I dislike, just as there are books and television productions which are not my taste.  It is about tone.  There are always people who have wonderful careers, whether in news or comedy  and I wonder why?   Careers seem to be built on what everybody else can admire or get on with.   We says “everybody’s different”   but the numbers of people who don’t differ make up enormous manipulable blocks, whether listening to the unfortunately named Daily Global or taking broad spectrum antibiotics.   This is the age of mass

by Brian Jungen

and there is nothing religious about it.

We seem to have stopped talking about numbers.   We have given up.  People go on having three to five children without apparent consideration of what is open to them in the future.   From warming to boiling in global terms, what future ?

Behind the endlessly repeated phrases (and that repetition makes for turn off in every sense) there is  real fear and the crossover from fear into rage is venerable and well documented..  The tunnel we’re in is long and dark with few lights to break the gloom.    

Party politics was always a fight and there were always those who believed one thing and those who believed another.  Now increasingly you hear disillusion –“ they’re all as bad as each other” – which is the beginning of disaffection which leads to not voting which means the country is run by a smaller number – those who did vote – and that opens the door to extremism and the end of our cherished if mocked balance.

We’re in a tunnel.  Our only hope is that eventually we emerge from it, into the air.

I met Christopher (not his real name) at a bus stop because he had new leaf green suede moccasins

on which I remarked.  And we never looked back.  He is more or less my age, a hairdresser with a painful back and lives alone.  We became phone friends.  He has a network of contacts and callers, is one of the few people I know to regularly refer to a cousin and we exchange news and views and laugh as we can.  

He suddenly asked me about a restaurant and when I said I didn’t know it, he said “I was thinking of taking you and Ivor (real name, his longtime friend and an antique dealer) there for lunch.”  Why ?  “Because I missed his birthday, I missed yours so let’s have it now.”   My acquaintance with Ivor was limited to about 15 minutes, but Christopher swept that aside.  “If you like the menu, it will be fine.”

The restaurant was everything I would have chosen,

lovely food, splendid staff courteous without being crawly, a plain place with charm.  And we sat and nattered and ate and told stories – they are both benign and insatiable gossips – and drank a modest amount of what C calls “pink wine”.   Time off from the world.   Even the coffee was good.

We came out into the sunshine, for once coherent for a few hours, said goodbye to Ivor and Christopher and I went for the bus to take us back.    So far, pretty darned good.   The bus was full, the weather slipped a gear into humidity and several stops later, I got up, kissed Christopher goodbye and got out in order to breathe.

Briefly at peace with myself and the world

(not a figure of speech) I came on a family – mother and father, father pushing an ordinary buggy, mother in the flowing clothes of Asia, a smartly dressed five or six year old boy and a tiny girl, probably no more than two, dressed in singing red soft cotton, like poppies crossed with roses. 

She stopped and looked at me.  Both children had that fine clean black hair that looks like the feathers of a baby bird.  Big Brother stepped forward to reassure his sister who turned and examined me with enormous dark eyes – and held up and out her hand.   So murmuring “Hello, beauty” I took it and we walked, all of us without a word though some connecting smiles down a London thoroughfare of which I have never been less aware.  It just faded into backdrop.

At the corner of a block, I thought she would have had enough so withdrew my hand but was stopped by a little noise, onomatopoeic of disapproval, like a young rhinoceros. 

  (I know about this from a friend and also from seeing Attenborough with one in a reserve, I love rhino.)  Her brother stepped back, she took my hand again.   We walked some more .  Then she was willing to release me. Her brother came to stand by her, I thanked her mother who beamed at me, I told her brother he was a splendid big brother and went to the father, put my hand on his arm and said” Thank you.   This was truly a blessing.”

Last week I ventured into a book my father loved, having been afraid to look at it for years in case I didn’t like it, didn’t understand it and so on.  It all seemed very congruent, the encounter and the book (Kim by Rudyard Kipling), which teaches among many other things that the journey through life is inevitable.  It goes on even when you are not thinking about it.   And set in an India of antiquity, numberless creeds and races, over a hundred years ago, when pace was different anyway, what the Buddhist lama Kim meets calls The Way,  is less for seeking than pursuing.  You don’t find it, it finds you.  

Current difficulties have all sorts of different names but the impact of where we are up in the world – nationally and globally – affects many of us from different angles at the same time which is wearing, tiring, destructive of peace and contemplation with which the tired old spirit is restored.  The gifts of how this time was spent were intangible and invaluable, probably short in time but lingering in memory.

This sentiment came to mind as I was obsessing about a pair of boots I don’t need.  I said it aloud, after I had finished laughing at myself and how the boots were going to fix my entire winter wardrobe (all half dozen pieces of it) and accentuate my mature glamour (ha). 

I looked up the line and discovered it was a song by the great Chet Baker

– I can’t tell you a note of the music – but I knew the line wasn’t mine.  So I borrowed it.

The mind is a wonderful thing.   It’s worth saying that very loudly as the one sided debate (one sided because we are hooked on progress as a positive) about Artificial Intelligence grows ever louder and  AI looks ever more  like mass identity theft. 

Yes, there will be positive applications though even the people who pioneered it want laws and containment. That old adage about stable doors and bolting horses comes to mind.   Saddest words in the English language are “too late.”

The idea of mind can’t be measured or defined or if so, in several parallel ways – remember, parallel means running alongside, never meeting.  You can have a political mind alongside an artistic mind ( see the obituary of Milos Kundera), a broken mind (good luck Huw Edwards and his straight backed and face it wife) alongside a mind that was “always good at the job.”.  You can have a mind for mischief (don’t confuse that with benignancy) like Elon Musk or a mind for business like Jeff Bezos.  You can have a visionary mind like Michael Bukht who started me in radio or a mind for manipulation (too long a list). 

Or you can just be soppy like me and decide that this, that or the other thing would make all the difference.

I do not fall in love too easily with people.  Not for me the glance across the crowded room – probably hampered by short sight.   I do not look to be transfigured by somebody else.  The door to me is open but that doesn’t mean I may not close it.  I thought about that the other day when I saw a woman I have avoided since her last full frontal hectoring at me made me roar and break out in hives.  I thought when I saw her recently that I was ready to say just that politely if she asked – don’t like being spoken to as if I were a difficult child, I am 79, I can chose and I chose not.  Too old and too ugly, smile and walk away. 

I could hear my mother cheering from the back rows of angels fifth class.

I fall in love with colour.  Several times in my life I have bought entirely the wrong thing because it was the right colour.  Now I walk away muttering “Leave it alone, it’s just that colour …”    

I am in love with books – a book drunk – but if you have ever read annalog, you’ll know that.   But I am not in love with all books by any means.  I have a friend who reads by just letting the words move in front of her eyes.  Not me.  My school taught reading with understanding.  Twice in the recent past I bought stuff which was too intellectually remote – one a book on Ukraine which I really wanted to read. But the pages passed before my eyes, nothing engaged me, I couldn’t get in. 

So I gave up.  

Falling in love suggest the cloak of permanence over the reality of change.   Like being crazy about a certain kind of food – and then deciding one day you have had enough of it.   Or a habit wears itself out or you decide that you will change it and – you know what? – the sky does not fall on your head.  The perfume you always swore by is suddenly old and declasse.

Falling in love as per the title for me is always about something I can buy to make myself more  whatever it is I think I am not,  ie antique earrings, boots – it was the colour (ash khaki) – a miracle cream … but I have learned that if I do not succumb, somebody else will, I will be rescued from my fixation and  life goes on. 

I loved Singin’ In the Rain, I still love Singin’ in the Rain.  “Why does it have an apostrophe ?” I asked my mother gravely. Answer:”It’s American, darling.”   God love my mother.  And after Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor dance meisters, I love Jean Hagen,

Lina Lamonte to you, with the tortured voice dubbed by Debbie Reynolds, the main theme of the story being about the coming of sound to Hollywood.  And right up there is the visit to a lah-di-dah voice coach who tries to render the sound of Miss Lamonte a little more raffinee – as in “And I can’t (long a) staaaahnd it”.  Which she offers back as “And I caiehrrnt stennd it.”    There things I can’t stand either.

I don’t like the construction “bored of”.  

Bored by, bored with – not bored of.  First heard some time ago, it is now inevitably used (because this is how speech travels and changes) as a construct in print.  Hilary Rose no less used it in the Times the other day, some sort of a seal of approval.  Not mine. (JH)

I try to be patient with “Not a problem” instead of  “thank you” or “you’re welcome” but am heard to mutter “Of course it’s not a problem – it’s your job.” (JH)

When I took over half a bottle of prosecco to the girls next door ( my lunch guest was driving so  we had drunk a glass each), I took it with a temporary metal cap and asked if they would bung it through the door when they had finished.  I even reiterated the request in an email exchange with the teacher among them.  Not so far.  Can’t be bothered. (JH)

It’s terrifying that I can’t get a straight answer out of the fifth GP about one of the things the doctors want me to take after Destruction tapped me on the shoulder (see annalog/at a stroke).   No, I don’t want another prescription.  I want a straight answer.   I am not quite up to Jean Hagen with this

but I am getting there.

A remarkable teacher, my father would insist “Answer the question.  Not what you think I asked or what you want be asked – but the question you were asked.” 

  Yessir.   Over time I have watched a lot of people on tv wriggle, blag and lie – misbehaviour and anything to do with politics, public life and Westminster makes this worse.  I call it Westminsterspeak.  It is designed to evade rather than communicate so you can call Keir Starmer boring  (I wish he’d axe the Sir) and I don’t care. Sometimes, he answers the question and how refreshing is that.

I am repelled (JH) by the uniformity which seems to govern makeup and fashion which is presumably something to do with social media, mostly as anti social as it can be.   Better faked and drawn in heavy eyebrows (Groucho lives !) than the ones God gave you , false eyelashes  the consistency of shinguards. Flattened hair and flabby mouths. And to match this, the generalisations – all women, all men, all of us –  everything sold to us as wonderful and iconic( I should think icons have headaches, they are so often invoked) super super super from the weather to yet another not quite good enough series, script chosen because it lends itself to social media.   How many supers before it backfires ? 

There is a book in preparation about the death wish of television, product and programming.

Years ago in a tv studio Britt Eklund said “Every girl wants to look like Barbie !”    and I had to swallow not to contradict.  Barbie was blonde with a little nose, and her bosom under her chin.  I was dark and aquiline, and you could haul bra straps till tomorrow morning and mine wouldn’t sit there.  If you are at war with yourself, you have lost your first reliable ally.  Making the best of yourself may sound terribly old fashioned but it’s a lot more rewarding than trying to reinvent yourself like the kitchen extension made flesh.

We are closing down jobs with people in favour of unreliable technology and overwheening AI.   So how are the hundred and thousands without income to eat ?   Jean Hagen Lives !           

unbearable

This is the heading over a review of Pulp,

a band reunited after x years, designed to provoke, ensnare and hopefully to get you to read what’s written.  The editor of the broadcasting reviews and correspondence in my tv guide encourages his staff to be similarly snippy and crisp.  Beats the hell out of talking about everything as if it’s wonderful because it isn’t. 

But it made me think.   Response to shock, bad news, horror and just plain old disappointment  adapts down over time.  If it doesn’t, there may be more to it than you wish to examine or you’re just plain old fixated.  Life is peristaltic action, only goes one way.  You may not like that way

but there isn’t another.   Whatever horror and pain you carry in your memory, tomorrow is another day – even if they seem unendingly similar.

Walking home the other day, I looked with appreciation at the quiet street where I live – and realised I have lived there longer alone than I was in my long, immensely important to me, second marriage.   It was the first time I had thought about that.

 When I shared with readers the tenth anniversary of annalog, I had not thought about till I thought about it – if you see what I mean.  It was the first time I marked ten years.   A decade.  Gosh.

Until I went to South Africa, I thought I knew about the animals.   I mean, I knew their names, roughly their size, some idea of their colouration.   I learned more about colour and shade in South Africa (yes, this was before Amandla) than any film or book could tell me.   Forty years later, I remember grinning like an idiot, it was so wonderful.   Riding round the Kruger Game Park sitting (highly incorrectly) in the window frame of the Peugeot, one hand gripping the luggage rack, the other in the book on birds I had just bought.  Nothing prepared me for bird life in SA. 

  First time.

Discretion forbids any detail on the first serious boyfriend (long married, I hope happily and with daughters with whom I hope he is rather more thoughtful than he was with me) but there was only one, the first time that a man I really care for, said very quietly “I should have married you.”  We were at lunch with a lot of other people, I had just got married to somebody else.   He was famous for the beauty, intelligence, standing and wealth of his connections which I remarked, saying I would never have done.  But years later I saw him enter the foyer of a big public building, mark me and head towards me.  I rose to meet him and we stood in a long wordless embrace.  Outside time, inside space, the first and only time.

That kind of embrace is shared by Virginia McKenna and Peter Finch at the end of the original A Town Like Alice, the splendid conclusion to a gut-tearing film, when you love somebody above and beyond, so much that the kiss and the rest of that very enjoyable stuff comes second.

I remember the first time I passed an exam, it was Friday 13^th and my parents were so delighted that I asked them why ?   “Because you can,” said my mother.

The first time in a broadcasting studio, it felt like home – and residually, it always did, even in less than able or pleasant company.    And the first time I had my hair “done” and was so disappointed, I was rude to my father for teasing me about it .

The first time I understood wonder was the night of my son’s birth, the closest most of us get to the miracle of creation, every girl her own stable.  And the first time I understood hate (though I had been on the end of enough of it) was when a response to a programme about backstreet abortion – before the law was changed – found me likened to Myra Hindley. And I was immediately defended.

Years ago, I read or heard it remarked that every child was an only child, a one off.  So, I suppose, every important event is a one off.  It may happen again, it won’t be the same and we remember, even in shadow, the first time.     

People use words differently.  It is a mark of friendship

good friends are like stars, you don’t always see them but you know they are always there

when the verbal exchange between you is mutually understood without any effort.  Among my close friends we say “I know you’ll know what I mean when I say” or “since this is a private conversation, what I really mean is…” Or you use a word and add “You know what I mean ?”   If friendship is shelter against the indifference of the wider world,  communication is the mortar that binds the words as bricks – and when there is a misunderstanding, it is a mark of the depth of that friendship that it can be worked through and assimilated.

But friendship is not cut out of the cookie dough of existence

in the same shape.  One friend will be very good at practicalities including real estate, law and divorce.  Another won’t speak about money but is endless supportive in the day to day.  Friendships come and go and grow – but then that’s a personal definition.  I always want to be able to talk about what I am reading and thus what I am thinking, what was in the papers beyond the headlines.  I try to accept that people change, that I change and again it’s the exchange that makes it possible to negotiate such change.

Friendship is a matter of degree

– some go deeper, some don’t.  They are limited but true.

Broadcast news was, I thought, about what we knew with comments from those who knew more than us.  But I fear that a great deal of modern news is about making a story by talking it up through endless commentary and opinion.  And endless is not an exaggeration – hours and hours of different people saying much the same thing – avalanches of words, showers and showers and showers of them – but not advancing information by very much at all.

My sister (13 years older) knew the sounds of war in this country. 

One of the remembered insights of my childish life was my sister’s reaction to a clip of a recording of an aircraft battle on the radio.  But since the end of WWII there has always been a war somewhere.  If it was a long way away, we didn’t give it much attention.  I have a friend of German birth, whose father, a diplomat, got the family out to the US, family members suffered for dissent with the Nazis and war in Ukraine nags at her like arthritis.  Other friends simply ignore the news, they have it reduced to bitesized on an app or they read a newspaper – and newspapers are in the same trap.  To sell copies, they have to have a story to tell and they talk up the bad stuff because it makes for threat and threat is exciting. See Titan. And how it offended me – unless there an agreement I don’t know about – that the ordinary mortals on the submersible, the ones who weren’t worth billions, weren’t namechecked.

Sometimes a few words cut to the chase.  My father’s first question on the phone was always “Are you all right ?” 

which meant to me that everything else could be managed.     A friend who has been through serious upheaval and been out of touch rang me after my health scare with the same phrase.  A doctor, she took me through all the details including drugs, concluding  ”Please take care.  I love you.”   Took my breath away.  The sun in the morning and the moon at night …Kevin Bacon’s finest hour in Footloose when his girlfriend comes down the steps to go to the dance …

Talk’s cheap, we say.   But sometimes it’s the very opposite.  After years of thinking that I wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans because everything I did was transient and intangible, I learned that words – sincere words, (heaven help me) the right words, careful (ie full of care) words – could cross rivers of pain, indifference and confusion, class, colour and gender.   I thought of it as temporary but I met people who remembered such exchange for years. I learned to find the tone like a musician.  I blench when I use words badly or ineptly  – or  to be honest when I know that I have.  If I have lived by “do your best”, I can add “know what you do.”

Apparently it was General Douglas MacArthur

(look him up) who said that rules were made to be broken and went on more interestingly to add, and for people to hide behind.   So I guess it depends on whether we are talking about rules as in customs or rules as in laws.   I watched a seriously disabled man who crawls  – it’s not a walk – to do his shopping being approached very quietly  by a  woman who pointed out that his hand pushing the shopping cart had caught his  tracksuit waistband, exposing his  bottom.  “I know” he said quietly.  And once wedged in a corner of the bus stand, did his best to put it to rights.  

There are rules which if broken lead to friction among family and friends (card games, board games, who has the remote

when the football is on) and rules less applied now than when I was a child – how to behave at meals, eating in the street, bedtime, bathtime. All at the mercy of the goddamned and bloody Smartphone which throws all that up in the air because its 24/7,365 or 6 days of the year offers a parallel reality.

There wasn’t a lot of “don’t do that” in my home, most of it was to do with being graceful,  while outside, my mother’s rules are best summed up as  “do as you would be done by”.   I thought of her when I saw a vision in white floaty with fashionable white trainers,  hair admirably atumble, eating with her mouth so far open I could tell what she had for breakfast.  Yesterday. 

We could all eat the odd thing in the street but as a rule, ma didn’t like it.   She didn’t like it for other people.  And that’s the great change in focus. 

In the past we lived as members of society which meant at our best, by custom, we lived with each other.  We were all in it together.  Now we are separating like cake mix gone wrong

or off milk.  And when you bridge the gap  – thank somebody, hold the door open or offer a seat, put yourself forward to help – it is less what all of us do and thus the more remarkable.

Most of these rules (expectations, customs) work for us all.  It isn’t a is to b, as b is to a, it’s a kind of investment, ie I greet you in the hope that some other person will greet me.  I have American neighbours opposite – mum, dad and one of each – and they remind me that when I went to NYC 60 years ago, you called everybody ma’am and sir, regardless of whether it was who sold you coffee or your boss.  Common politeness, now uncommon.  Rules as expectations.   And Tricia taught me something only yesterday

without knowing it, that her capacity to communicate, her energy is such that I expect it to be topped off by the odd expletive (I confess, one of my less attractive habits) but she doesn’t need it, because she can express herself without.   I was inspired.

Infringement of the rules backed up by law is called law breaking and then it’s a question of how grave, who’s involved, to whom does it matter, if you get caught,  and what’s the answer.   We live in a country of overcrowded prisons, the system of which has never decided whether it is there to rehabilitate or to punish, and a bit of both isn’t the answer and nearly unworkable for those doing the confining. And it depends on what you feel about those rules.

We have recently been treated to the spectacle of a man who, no matter his other gifts, ignored them, nothing to do with him.  (Quote of the week is Martin Samuels in The Times “ Johnson is to aplomb what Rees-Mogg is to racing whippets.” )  And I looked up aplomb – its root is French “a plomb” (dictionary) and is to do with rightness by law of gravity, earth not earnest.

The above riff began because I caught myself scrubbing the kettle at 6..20 am and thought – well, no law against it” and it made me laugh.   No law against that either.

• Thank you to everybody who wrote and rang, after annalog/at a stroke.   I am very lucky to have you.  Stars , all.