Annalog

I thought of the kitchen appliances as I awoke – the neat row of fridge, freezer, sink with a cupboard underneath and washing machine, all shut tight and wiped down. I saw them closed, then grim and then smiling

– and I began to laugh.  And then I thought of the Christmas trees at home and the ones I made for my son.   And I imagined another tree which I dressed with people I have met, or loved over time, legion kindnesses., with warmth and humour and generosity of spirit – which I had to imagine of course – how to package and how to hang on a tree.

This is a benign form of the Christmas itch,

the sort of countdown which builds from acquiring the comforts of a pleasant day off with those you love to  “how much can we sell you, for how much, before you notice you don’t need any of it ?”  Like Buns calling from Mayo – you could never call Buns Scrooge   But he’s not keen on the Christmas hype so he rang and asked “Have you bought your Christmas china?”  What ?   “Have you ever heard anything like it ?” he asked.  “You use it for two days’ max and then where do you put it ?  Have we not all got enough stuff ?”

Stuff is the stuff of the consumer Christmas, totally unnecessary bits and pieces and trinkets  – some of it seductively pretty, but frighteningly expensive. Six carefully chosen items will stun the wallet.  And as Denning said yesterday over the phone “It’s not December yet !”   Hence the Christmas itch.

Looking forward is part of the human DNA and for years Christmas was contingent with family happily reunited (even if you had to get over your father’s wind or a disagreeable neighbour), time off,

the rewards of food and wine and warmth, maybe for Christmas week, otherwise for two or three days at the most. Boxing Day sales were fun, you went out of the house to look as much as to buy..  You dressed the house with evergreen, you bought holly to go on top of the pudding and mistletoe to go in the hall so that everybody who arrived, was kissed.  

The itch now starts in late August through September.  (I thought it was bedbugs or allergy – but no – though as pernicious as the one and as hard to diagnose as the other.)   I confess I tire of Christmas movies, I’m very weak in the “aaah !” department, and the price hitch which gets worse and worse as the season builds among the harsh glitter..  I love carols, but not offered as a musical cue to “what can we sell you ?”   And the machinery is terribly effective because none of us want to be the pooper at the party

or to be left out.   So you have to choose how much you scratch.,

I love Christmas cards – to send and to get – but I don’t think they are long for this world given the price of postage, the state of Royal Mail, and roulette of delivery.  But this year, yes – on more time.  I have a red box with the lists and the cards including spares.  And – bearing in mind it’s always personal – sending them is an act of affectionate remembering. 

My Christmas list is shorter than it has ever been. It’s not that I don’t love you but because the things you really need – warmth and food you can afford, health and some kind of hopeful continuity– can’t be giftwrapped.   And I am damned if a toy in a fake fur coat, even labelled “from  Love Island” will “say” it or do it. 

On my happily imagined itchproof Christmas tree, hanging in a crystal ball, is the gift of communication, how to say what you really mean.  Too may people take refuge in formula like “Y’know what I mean… ” Supposing they don’t ?   Yesterday a really handsome young woman made room for me to pass and I thanked her as I did.  Then I turned back and asked please, where was she from ?  She told me The United Arab Emirates.   I said “Then you come from a culture of courtesy and I am its happy beneficiary.  Thank you.”   No itch.    

I don’t hate Jews.  

They are the only tribe that ever claimed me without introduction, no word spoken, sometimes in a foreign language. Who knows how ?  My model of Jewry is Yiddishkeit – northern European Jewishness – the word Dov (Israeli, brought up in a DP camp in Ulm) wrote in the front of my first Isaac Bashevis Singer novel.  I had to ask what it meant.  I am not a secular Jew, rather an ignorant one.   I did not know about my Polish Jewish grandmother until I was 15.  Nothing sinister about that.  I was the much younger (by 13 years) of 2 daughters, all the grandparents were long gone and my parents weren’t geographically or emotionally close to their siblings. 

At about the same time, I learned that my mother’s father  –  the same genealogical distance on the other side – was Rom, gypsy, big south east of England clan called Lee. 

The Jewish line is by matrilineal descent so I was ( as a man said to me, live on Radio Four) “nothing.”   Years later, I learned from a Joseph Kanone Cold War novel the term from the Nuremburg race laws “mischling” – mixed.  That’s me.

Among all sorts of misty branches on the family tree – Irish, Spanish, French – I had the security of a loving family and a liberal tradition at home and at school, so I laughed with my mother when she said  “Mongrels are the best dogs – intelligent, nice natures, bright eyes “. 

But there is always another side.  My experience of racial prejudice is small compared to the number of people who didn’t like me or my speaking voice.  But as a child, if they didn’t like me, what I was or might be, soon came up.

  I couldn’t be my parents’child – they were too old, I was too dark, they had adopted me.  I told my parents.  They told me honestly what they knew and thought, and backed me.

Living now through the daily coverage of war, we hear two versions of everything, at least two –  we find it easier to dismiss what Putin says because we know he lives in his own state-controlled world.  And we side with Ukraine, well served by a devoted leader and the enduringly courageous. 

The Unkrainian Trident

In the Middle East we have to contend with what the Israeli Army (IDF) says, this is what Hamas as the governing body of Gaza says.  Other Israeli voices are added – various sides of the political spectrum, the families of hostages, the critics of Prime Minister Netanyahu, this voice from the US, that one from the Palestinian Authority, another from the West Bank, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon.   Not to mention who is caught in the crossfire, justified or not  – the collateral damage of children on both sides, the ill, the frail, the powerless.  And journalists looking for emotive pictures. 

There are always two sides to everything, mostly more.  

Look at what we look at, aside from endless repeats..  Because this is a wonderful series or film, it doesn’t follow the sequel will be any darned good at all. (French Connection Two is the rulebreaker, better than the original.)   Re Australian screen product, The News Reader (BBC2,series one and two) has been great: Scrublands (BBC4) may have been a terrific novel – but whoever says that what works in a novel will work on screen ?  Monotonous.  I bought the impressive Killers of the Flower Moon in hardback –  but nobody could ever have thought it would make a film.  Except Martin Scorcese in the long fight of his old age as an auteur, to make one more movie…  hours and hours of it. I think back to the discipline which formed so many scriptwriters, cameramen, actors and directors – two hours was exceptional, aim for 97 minutes.

There are other sides of fashion ie from high to none.  There are fashions in skin care, health , education, thought, social interaction.  There is even another side to common sense.  At the moment, it is noticeably missing (£146 million spent of the resettlement of refugees in Rwanda so far -and nobody has gone there.)   It’s about perception.  My commonsense may be your unkind judgement, the other side of whatever is under discussion.  

On Saturday evening I became a fully paid up Old Bat. 

I had watched some news coverage – I can’t imagine that the blow by blow coverage of a war is going to do me any psychological good and I am haunted by my mother’s words through tears over coverage of the Troubles – “They worship the same God !”.  I watch serious reporters, mostly BBC News Channel and Channel Four. 

Cathy Newman (C4) interviewed one to one Steve Hartshorn, the head of the Police Federation and a former Met Police firearms officer.  Nobody sounds authoritative when shrill.  He handled her well, refusing to be drawn into any opinion about the Home Secretary’s remarks or anybody else’s which could be construed as political.  Not the role of the police.

As Ms. Newman’s teeth closed once more on Hartshorn’s turnup, I switched off.  Well named, Mr. Hartshorn – we used to mix hartshorn and water to revive the fainting.

I rang the relevant section of the Police Federation.  To the woman who answered I said “To whom do I speak to express my appreciation of the handling by the Met and other forces of the demonstrations today ?”   I don’t think such a question had come her way before and she got her manager to whom I said “I just want to tell you how grateful I am to the police for their efforts at appropriate response and containment today, and tell your Chairman he handled himself well on Channel Four News this evening.”  She acknowledged the call, I thanked her and rang off.

I then pulled up the Met on the search engine and found a form where I could express my thanks, again as matter of factly as possible.  They knew the job and they did it. 

Other than personally, it has become increasingly difficult to say anything pleasant let alone express thanks because everybody is busy being guarded against the nasties.     Perhaps a good sociologist would explain that this is how human society works, certainly in the 20^th and 21 century, it swings one way to open and then closes down.  

Being open will come back into fashion again, if you can wait so long.  Not in my lifetime I fear.   

In the past if you wanted to tell a publication how well they had done in an article, or in the comments of some particular columnist, you rang and left a message.  Good luck with that now.  I don’t think they even pretend to acknowledge you or pass the comment along.  Expensive letters are not often acknowledged.

Email ?  Well, email … I love it but there is a widening culture of people and concerns who don’t reply.  Just listen to the young trying to get a job.   25 applications and not a word.  The energy companies are probably not alone in making money out of this.  They leave you floundering, knees in the breeze, while the meters tick to their manipulable favour.

And all the rest of it from mobile phone to WhatsApp you can keep unless it works in a context for you.  That I respect.  Personal choice, horses for courses. 

In the last couple of years I thought for the first time ever, that I was glad my esteemed parents weren’t around to see the mess we are in – environmental, human, political, weather (incurred by humans), national and global – surface, surface, surface – less and less substance.  This may just be my increasing wish to remain integrated in the face of social splintering, projected on to someone older than me whom I love. 

A friend recently said asked me how I managed alone because unless you are a natural solitary (I’m not), being alone has to be managed and I said “I live a day at a time.”   She asked how I did this and I said “By act of will. I only do Sunday on Sunday, Saturday is  behind me and Monday is yet to come.”   You can’t do this if you’re working.  I lived and died by my desk diary.  But now as I set out daily, as much to avoid the dog mess as to smell the roses, I am open to every good and wonderful thing no matter how small.   It seems that has become an Act of Remembrance.   

My sister and I had a very difficult relationship

with not much in common   But the best day we ever spent as adults was with my mother, going through her little house at her request with her – deciding who’d do what, who’d have what – when she died.  It may sound morbid but we drank tea and laughed – we had a fine time.

Whether it is Ukraine’s worst attack since the war began, Sudan blown to smithereens,  Afghanis thrown out of northern Pakistan where they have sought refuge for 3 generations, or the Hamas pogrom in Israel, there is a lot of  death about.  

And I was stroke-struck five months ago which concentrates the mind so, somewhere in there, I thought I should show my son where to look when I had gone to glory.

The best word to describe the enormously big, strong and thoughtful man my baby boy has become is overextended but he had just had a break and he suggested coming to supper, indeed, he persisted through my demur with the phrase “I have to come, you want to tell me about your demise.”  Now, there’s a word. We laughed.  I made supper and showed him the preparations I have made – lists of things he needs to know, names, numbers, bequests and details, the will, the lease – that’s there and this is here.  “But Mum” he said “it’s all so organised.”  Don’t sound so surprised.   “It’s what I can do for you.”   He asked me if I had some premonition.  I said no, I just wanted – the mantra of my childhood – to do my best,  

 We both know I pray for it to be fast – not blindess, dementia or disabling stroke – but God sends and He’s busy.

When I told Wal about this, he who does not do death, he fell off the phone laughing and began using the word as a verb* – hence the title. There is no value judgement in all this.  Out of a clear blue sky is just that, you can only do what you can do.   I am not saying you “should” but I am saying – second generation of “works for me”.

In marked contrast Cas (not her real name) lost her mother when she was 16.  That phrase is for once quite appropriate.   The hole of that loss is unclosed. 

Her family is the classic two party state – here, Cas and her mother, there her father and her older sister. Not much détente.  Her father is a bully and her older sister apes him, indifference as a survival strategy..  And Cas’s luck after that beginning contains two other major catastrophes – a marriage that ended badly and bitterly and an accident to an excellence that was her secret weapon – in which she was so badly injured, she will never compete as an athlete again.   

I don’t know her well.  She lives locally, we like each other and she has been nothing if not kind to me.  But I sense that for her, as for a lot people, “managing” means not saying what you really want to say because not a lot of people want to hear it.   She is very capable, bright, attractive, working – managing. But the wounds which she told me about because I am interested, have time and will listen, remain open.  Dangerously so.

I asked her what she wanted to do for Christmas.  She told me what her father and his sweet, heavy-drinking partner wanted.  I asked her a second time.   She told me what her sister wanted.  I asked a third time, pointing out it was,  and I wanted to know what she wanted.  She said “I don’t know.”   And I said (Hecate the Hag) “Well you never will if you don’t face it. And you are running out of time.” 

What I fear for her is that she will risk her current everything, in the hope that something out there – child, trip to Samarkand, esoteric research – will resolve her pain.  I doubt it will – and what do you do if it doesn’t ?

When she left – I like her so much -I was tired to my bones.   But I felt moved, useful – not demised yet.

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