Annalog

This is a Peabody area

with several Peabody buildings abutting the back garden..  George Peabody was an American philanthropist who invested in modest homes for what we used to call the working class.  Over the 25 years I have lived here, the second floor hall light has been left on for weeks at a time.   I have counted my blessings ie it isn’t noise but from time to time, as it shines right up the length of  my small garden, I gnash my teeth.   I have asked the people who live there. Blank.  And I have heard other stories about Peabody deaf ears. So  I wrote to the CEO on 26 March, offended by the light, the lack of consideration and the conspicuous waste of energy.

On 15 April I received a letter from the so named Executive Enquiries Lead/Customer Experience Team, saying that a repair order was raised 11 April and hoping that by the time I received the letter, the problem would be resolved.  Welcome to Planet Peabody. Don’t hold your breath.

Rosie (not her name) has a long, intricate and serious medical history and she was injured 18 months ago in a car crash. 

She was briefly and effectively hospitalised, and it was agreed that the injuries she sustained made her existing problems worse.  She should claim damages.  Since then she has seen the medical specialists designated by the insurance company to assess various aspects of her claim up to and including clinical psychologists.  The suggested techniques for treatment included exercises based round rapid eye movement (from which she was ruled out because of advancing neurological illness and  existing double vision) and cognitive behavioural therapy

– which is everywhere much praised.

For whatever reasons she is disposed against CBT.  She is not against psychotherapy having previously made some effort to find treatment for herself (privately).  But she is now being told that she must have 16 sessions of CBT with the designated practitioner or she disqualifies herself from her claim.  

So is she to lie and welcome a treatment she is not sure about ?  Is she to try it in good faith. saying she is unsure about it and see what happens ? Where is personal choice in all this, not to mention delayed treatment of psychological impairment attributed to the crash ? The appointed solicitors have already changed her representative once without reference or explanation and do not reply to letters, email or phone messages. To whom does she turn ?

While Wal and Howard (not their names) who live in a semi detached property which houses the accrued investments of a lifetime (including jewellery, antiques and furs) for which they pay heavily to have made secure, suddenly couldn’t activate the alarm Wal sets faithfully every night (apart from the timed lights and the locked doors).  

Wal rang the well-known US company.  Six hours later, the last of several unimpressive  operatives opined that he could do nothing, he was working from home. He thought it might be the batteries ?   The company is paid £700 a month and is supposed to check/change the batteries every six months.  Wal and Howard between them changed the batteries and Wal was so distressed, he was still shaking when he rang.   “Nobody cares” he said.  “Nobody.  We are paying for a service that doesn’t exist.  In the past, your last engineer would enter the date that the batteries next had to be checked.   Not now.  And nobody cares.”  I told him about Rosie.  “Blackmail” he snorted.

All I know is that, when you get in a jam,

you are very lucky if you can find somebody who will do anything.  And nobody talks about why.   Part of the problem has to be sheer numbers – the population is staggering and goes on growing, you wonder if the island will sink ?  Companies are vast and belief in technology is crippling.  (my final account from edf is variously six pence (really), £13.50 or so, and £39 plus:  they may trust their machinery, I don’t.)   In the past money bought you a kind of immunity.  Not any more.   The helping agencies are swamped, I have chosen three stories – there are others, and you really don’t know who to turn to hence the title: cries unheard.

There were two things missing

from the item by Gideon Falter of the Campaign Against Antisemitism writing for the Sunday Times about how ineptly and incorrectly he was treated by the police, how he was made the problem, why the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police should be removed.

One was any acknowledgement of the limitations of policing repeated sizeable demonstrations – the standoff between pro-Palestinian supporters and any kind of Jew being frequent, expensive, troublesome and to be contained at all costs, not the least because of hurt and damage and the inequity of numbers involved.

And the second was because you are asking beat coppers – ordinary police men and women – to use language as flexibly as Tony Blair (who trained as a barrister, remember).   And they can’t.

So if you wear what European Jewry called a yarmulke and the more modern call a kippah – that little skullcap -you are a “discernible” Jew.  Deduction is not an insult, even in parlous times.  Demonstrating crowds turn uncontrollable with horrifying speed, and violence against Jews and Muslims has increased since the war began..  Containment may not be comfortable,

even occasionally discourteous – but it is an unarmed and often effective method of policing, albeit expensive in budgetary terms..

As when, some time ago, a policeman approached me in my fur gilet and asked me if I could get off the street (now, there’s a line !) there was an anti fur demonstration just round the block.  I said gently “But this is fake, it’s made of cotton …”   “Madam” said the officer wearily” they don’t know the difference, we just don’t want any more trouble.”   I went and had unwanted coffee.

In the age of reruns, the Foyle’s War segment (Saturday 20^th,9.00, ITV3) was positively valuable.  Never mind Sister Act for the 40^th time, that script (FW), one of the later ones, contained historical reference people don’t even want to think about. Britain is involved, from before the founding of the state of Israel, from the division of who gets what in the Middle East, after the First World War (see the Sykes/Picot agreement).

The Middle East – all of it, and that’s a lot of territory – is an inflammatory mess, largely armed by one Vladimir Putin, and the war between Israel and Palestine is the present chapter of how two wrongs only ever make for a third.

It is both true and untrue that I have been trying not to write this piece.  My politics are my own – yours are yours – I don’t want to interfere in something to which I am peripheral  though I deeply believe in the importance of information – whether it’s about power then or power now.  

Hamas is a death cult, never mind whose death, and sections of the Palestine community turned a blind eye to that knowledge and caved in, because they were already desperate and disappointed past bearing with the Palestinian Authority.

Under its present government, Israel took its eye off the ball of national security.   Hamas violated Israel on 7 October with rape, torture, murder and kidnap – what is called “terminate with extreme prejudice” in bad movies.

  It is war – hideous, expensive and destructive.

And here we are.

The Metropolitan police force isn’t quite as much maligned as Israel but it has its problems – flat recruitment, lack of funds (Mrs. May’s worst day’s work) and appalling management which fails to support the men and women who try to do it right, at every level and in every way.  And they incidentally only have income because they work overtime as a norm.  The money just doesn’t go round.

Rowley will stay where he is for the same reason as Sunak will stay where he is – because another change is not helpful to an already beleaguered government.

Enormous numbers of police from various forces will try to keep the two sides of stand off bitterness (Palestine and Israel) from violence on the British streets, which seems desirable to me.

The broadcast media will finally get its collective head round the fact that war is horrible and stop going “Ooh” and ”Aah !” to the joy of the bloody brethren of Hamas , the British will have a General Election and with luck, so will Israel.

All parties file under “must try harder.”

Accepting that everybody’s taste is different

and it would be a dull world were this not so,  Pam the Painter  asked  me to try the second episode of The Cuckoo (C5). She and I have  taste that diverges widely and suddenly crosshatches perfectly. In this case, I lasted five minutes.  “Wow” she emailed.  “Five whole minutes ??? You really tried …” So I explained that I only have to see those moody camera angles and hear the menacing soundtrack to think  “No thank you” and switch off.  And I don’t care about any of the characters, fortunately a yardstick with which she can empathise.

There is a bad version of don’t care when you tank through the world over everybody’s toes, physical and other, and a good don’t care when you refuse to rush, take the next bus, dump the lilac tshirt your mother gave you (never liked it), read and watch only what appeals to you.  When somebody tells me they feel they must try and get to grips with whatever book it is, I am likely to say “don’t”.  There are few exceptions.  And the world is full of books you might like better.     

So frankly tv, film and print picky, last night I came a cropper.     I watched a Norwegian detective thingummy, seduced by the speed of editing and the opaque storylines into watching both episodes.   Past my bedtime.  Nodded off.  Can’t remember anything about it.  Shaming. 

And I have tried.  Hence the title.

Isolde (NHN) is always reading but I have noticed that though her eyes move from left to right and she turns pages, she rarely remembers what she has read or in the case of something more interesting, has much to say.  I am certain she doesn’t look up those unknown words and terms I rush off to source.  A bad sleeper, she reads – anything.  Stuff. 

Yes I know

 Drifts past her eyes.  Rarely important or interesting or gripping.   

Reading is the great pleasure of my life.  Has been forever and Julia Donaldson’s poem

I Opened a Book explains it beautifully.   Latterly it’s how I overcome the perfectly terrible terrestrial television programming   – go to the two or three charities that cherish books and buy something that hold my attention and makes me think.  And I shall never get over Oxfam finding me a book from my early teenage years, without much to go on.  And I was so glad to reread it, strengths/shortfall and all.

Whether it’s content, style or characterisation ie people – endlessly interested in people – something has to speak to me.  But if it’s gurbling in front of my eyes, it won’t be for long – because it is a waste of time.   And life’s too short.  

I have read tripe to see how it works but it has no charm for me.  A woman I know buys everything that is listed by the Booker committee.   Too clever by half .  I follow my nose.  I can get it wrong – but I can get it right !   Like the last film about Mary Queen of Scots, a character who always repelled me. 

But it was such a good film and director and scriptwriter had both read My Heart is My Own which led me to John Guy, who can weave his painstaking and unexpected research into a darned good story, closer to the truth than the conventions of accepted history ever permit us to go.

I never thought I would watch wildlife programmes with the sound turned down but I do- because of that cheap music which Noel Coward described as potent, which brings me out in hives.   Though I find bits of wildlife on different programmes are often thrilling if bloody – truly, nature red in tooth and claw – with short sequences of leopard, my favourite and views of an Africa, old and still.

I’ll spare you the list of what I don’t like or can’t watch or won’t read.  Yours will be different from mine.  I don’t hold it against Toby (NHN) whose life is informed by social media.  We just agree to differ.   And on balance, I like the wallpaper still – not that there is any in my home.  The walls are white, ready for projection of any kind.

NHN – not his/her name.

You do not often hear an old pro like my optometrist

exclaim with pleasure, because the injections into my right eye have delayed visual decline and my specs only need altering (after nearly 5 years including ageing and cataract) by a point or two.   That and her hail as she crossed the reception to meet me after two years  (“My favourite client !”) made for an early birthday card.

Somebody wished me a week’s birthday rather than a day and that wish came true.  And just as most Christmases, when there is a card that I look at wonder “now, who …?” so yellow roses and white freesia were delivered by eflorist, with no message.  Believe me, I am a good looker and I know where to look. 

But it took my son’s intervention to stop me banging my head against the brick wall of the company’s inaccessibility.  “Nobody” quoth he “ever had a positive customer experience

with those guys.  You got the flowers ?  End of.”   So somebody who was listening sent me something I can’t thank them for. 

I cooked nearly to standard for Pam the Painter the day before – but I know what is wrong and it’s not a mistake I will make again.  Ginny was coming to supper but her mother fell and is even now recovering in hospital, thank heaven.         

A birthday is the one day of the year you can do anything you like – so I did.  Nothing. 

See   Gertrude Stein “Nothing is meaningless if one likes to do it.”  I pootled about and drank coffee at 6.00 am.   I exclaimed with pleasure over who rang and what was sent.  I went up the road for the paper.  I cherished every moment and walked more slowly, balanced properly.

I saw bees hunting blossom and a pair of great tits who danced in and out of the shrubs and trees, unimaginably graceful.   And outside the supermarket to which I went for the pleasure of it (shopping

always makes me feel better, the first “big” thing I was ever trusted with as a child, just the basics, nothing elaborate) there was a tiny girl in a white waterproof with marigolds all over it, the design in keeping with her size.  I exclaimed “Oh, how pretty …”   The eyes contemplated me.  I put my hand her mother’s arm and asked her please to tell her daughter how lovely she looked.  She replied in the accent I am beginning to recognise and I know enough to say “Bella !” with a big smile which was answered.  Sometime later, they walked past me and the little girl waved and called “Ciao !”

ITV’s Goodnight Mr.Tom

may be 30 years old but it is head and shoulders above most things about children in wartime.  Everything works – actors, script, camera, settings.  And I rewatched too the first ever episode of the House of Elliot for that same integrity and wonderful wardrobe.

Then this morning, encouraged by a second day with wind rather than rain, at least to start with, I did a small washing and put it out on the line to dry

– it smells better, even in London.  The young woman in the flat above is leaving in less than happy circumstances and she knocked to say goodbye, so I wished her well and went on to meet a woman of my own age, who lives just round the corner, with whom I had a proper conversation in the convenience store.  She is a Scot, a former veterinary nurse, enormously angered by the new anti hate legislation in Scotland and we had read the same article about it so we thought we might have tea  …  I’ll put a note through her door this afternoon and see.

Yes, I read the paper.   Once a day.   Yes, I watched the news, once a day.   Yes, I tend to see the unholy arithmetic of war, displacement, destruction, famine and natural disturbance as an   end of western civilisation as we know it, history that is always easier to read about than live through but in thanks for all the good things in my life, I shall go on looking for them, small and idiosyncratic though they may be.  A smile still uses fewer muscles than a frown and it’s a whole lot cheaper than Botox.

This birthday feels to me like passing

my 11Plus for the second time. And please don’t tell me all that “it’s only a number” stuff.     

My parents were pragmatic about age, though they adapted quite differently.  And I was never disillusioned because I was never illusioned.  “Just do this and you will – “ has its place in fairy stories but you confuse wishes and dreams

with real life at your peril.    Or as Marilyn Monroe sang “When you get what you want, you don’t want it.”

Most of us remain very susceptible to good will.  It doesn’t take much to make you feel better – a greeting, a few words, a kind action.  And thank heaven many of us know that to keep the good will muscles working, we express appreciation.  But appreciation and good will don’t work like debit and credit.  It’s not as straightforward as I give you so you give me.  I give you – and with luck, somewhere down the line, I get back what I put in.  Or something just as good.

Yesterday on the bus there came from upstairs an immense almost unintelligible wall of noise,

often evidence of an unquiet mind and recourse to the bottle.   The driver paused.  The bus was not full.  We listened, the driver didn’t want to go upstairs.  Heaven knows what he would get into and he’d risk missing his place in the schedule.   I am ill equipped by age and strength, all too aware that “having a go” often ends in somebody else having to come to the rescue.  We waited.

A young woman came downstairs.   “Drunk or deranged ?” I asked.   She didn’t know.  But as she “placed” me (elderly but OK ), her shoulders came down and she smiled. The men behind me shrugged patiently and the driver put the bus in gear. 

A couple of stops later, a young family

got on – parents, a boy and a girl under five – and they went to the stairwell, where they were arrested by my voice saying “Excuse me” twice. They paused and the man looked at me.  “There is a shouter upstairs,” I said. “The sound is horrible.  It might frighten the children.”  He and his wife beamed thanks and took the children elsewhere.    

We drove without further mishap to my stop and as I got up the children’s father said “Thank you for your intervention – it is much appreciated “.  

  I can’t remember this ever happening to me so I said “You’re most welcome –“ and, grinning at the rest of the maybe 15 passengers  -“I know, .nosey old woman !”  And they grinned back. “But it is such an assault – take care, good luck –“ the children waved me goodbye, and I went off  home smiling to myself.

I was 30 when I began as a “problem page editor” in women’s magazines before the term “agony aunt” was current and I worked in radio concurrently.  Print and sound are often different disciplines.   Part of the crossover is you can”colour” your voice, it’s much more difficult to do in print.   And the other bit of the crossover, beginning with letters but continuing through email and texts, was how often people got in touch – to say what they liked or didn’t like, had found helpful or not. It was not always a direct transition.   It wasn’t because you had called in  – heaven forbid !- but you had heard somebody to who you could relate and it clarified something for you.

At pains to reduce the amount of paper in the house, I can only do this when I can do it.   This is my past life I am shredding and as I worked I came on a folder with some of those contacts in it and the goodwill

rose like steam from the page.  And I had a belated insight into that past touched on in annalog/backwards and forwards.

Radio was for me, I was good at it – but without the callers and correspondents, I would never have shone as I did.  Forget podcasts – one way traffic – not discourse. So, dear Great British Public, thank you, thank you each and every one for exchange and time and knowledge and abiding pleasures.  Thank you for an enormous part of my life.  Your birthday too.

Where can you live but in the past?  What is the future? 

So I might express misgiving about people who live in the past but I accept that in order to go forward, I have to go back.

The future of my borough’s food waste collections includes six pages of colour printed leaflet explaining that in a couple of months I shall be given special food waste bags, a caddy for indoors and a bigger one for outdoors.   I have read what I should put in the bag in the caddy and when I should put it out more than once and I am left confused and disbelieving.  

I can’t remember the last time I cleared a plate into the waste – I clear my plate.  I discard the heel of a loaf occasionally ie not more than every two weeks. Eat it up. Fruit and vegetables – hardly ever discarded, nor meat and bones.  Eggshells once a week max if I forget to crush the shells onto the garden (thank you Phil).  Dairy ?  No, except for the odd washed out milk carton, along with washed out yogurt pots in the dry recycling.  Rarely tea or tea bags, coffee bags never.  Coffee grounds, down the sink or on the garden. Fishbones  (lovely drawing) – never.

Yes I realise this says more about me than a lot of other people but I am still being given three bits of kit and asked to comply with an additional schedule.  And if I find the leaflet less than clear, I can think of a whole lot of other people who won’t try to make sense of it,  probably don’t recycle, just bung all the discard in one bag and probably will continue to do so. 

So this is an exercise that looks like forward but leads backwards.   Minus money.  

Makeup heralds The New Matte.  There is nothing new about matte, it’s been around for ages, it is an excuse for a rejigged colour range and prodding falling sales.  If it becomes you.  It renders me a death’s head.

Do you want to live to 120 – and if so, why ?  The Nobel prizewinning molecular biologist  Venki Ramakrishnan puts it in the same category as colonising Mars.  I’ve never been very good about doing something just because you can.  I like to think I have accepted that I shall live as long as I do  – but all I can think about 120 is what will break down, how will it be shored up,  the wider costs to the medical establishment (already faltering under sheer weight of numbers).    I shall look even more like hell than I do on a bad day and be a miserable old b.   The money will run out. And Mars to me is a

chocolate bar. I am much more interested in  doing our best with this world than finding another to export all our troubles to.

The backwards of the title at this point is to look back at where I have been, what I did, who I met, how it was, what I learnt, how it felt, what it looked like.  This is like a series of internalised books, pictures and print, of which I do not tire.   Perhaps noticing things was a kind of revenge on having to wear spectacles for short sight at eight.  Perhaps it was my personality.  Certainly some of it was my parents – “Look” they urged “and ask.”   I watch, I listen, I observe – obviously with omissions because I am tired or memory falters or what strikes you didn’t strike me and equally obviously because I want to see and a lot of other people either don’t or don’t want to be bothered.

Forwards gets harder, trying to see what my little best will do.   So much easier to destroy and undermine that shore up and look at whatever it is again.  That old maxim about “a day at a time” can sound trite and smug but if you take the good with you and go forward without expectation (I can’t transform the lives of those I know and love, no matter how much a I know and love them), then  backwards becomes a hopeful way forwards.   And it’s the only way to go.             

Like beauty, humour is personal.  

Not laughing, but nice ears!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hooray for tying two ideas together

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

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

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

and IWD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, I’m here, this is modern life,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s talk about the weather.