Annalog

Why me ? has a direct answer – why not ? 

  Nobody is exempt from trouble though you do wish  people would do more to help themselves.   However as I have been told at least twice in what follows that I do what is recommended, you come back to my father’s WWI phrase – my number came up.  Jewish beshert, Muslim insh’allah, all purpose – my turn.  Meant.

Tuesday 30 May the amlodipine prescribed to bring down my high blood pressure was doubled.  Friday 2 June I went to go down the two shallow front steps and the right side of my body absented itself.  Unsettling. Didn’t last very long.  Drew breath and went to get the paper.   Sunday 4 June lesser reprise of same sensation while on a bus, again over soon.  I rang the GP first thing on Monday 5 June and was asked “Which A&E do you usually go to ?”   I said I had only been to A&E once – St.  Thomas’s.  

Told not to go on the bus I foolishly thought I could find a cab.  I did eventually.  

I was in St.T’s for four hours plus, every test they could think of, wonderful personnel – Irish, Australian, mainland Chinese, British and African black, and more.  They could teach manners.   Fab.  In the afternoon Niamh told me they had consulted with Kings College Hospital’s more comprehensive stroke unit and were transferring me.   By ambulance,

with Oakland from California, Charlie and Mathilde, a Portuguese African with a face of handsome symmetry.

Waiting in KCH took five hours, blood taken, questions asked and when the registrar (Joe, looked like a fox) got to me, I was starving and short with him.   “What you don’t understand “he said “is that I have to deal with everybody who is more ill than you – so three strokes …” I apologised, said I was told not to eat and –   “Five hours is normal” he said.  “We know we are not offering the best service.”   If this is the NHS on strike, I’d love to watch full stretch.    

At 2.00 after brain scans and radiography accessed by wheelchair, Joe decided to keep me overnight where I was monitored throughout and woken hourly.  He suggested that I had some narrowing of two access points of blood to the brain, probably narrow from birth.  As I aged, the blood pushed a bit harder to get round, and the blood pressure went up.  The medicine prescribed to suppress the blood pressure confused the body  – hence TIA (transient ischaemic attack). 

Red light time.

On Tuesday morning after we had all laughed at me discovering the split up the back of the hospital gown when the doctor asked me to walk, I was allowed home on the promise that I would take the medications provided exactly as described and if I had any symptoms in the next two weeks, I would get back to KCH fast.

Classic example of the life you live until something big changes.  My son said “I’m so sorry you had to go through that alone.”  I’m not. Why should somebody else spend five hours sitting on uncomfortable chairs to hold my hand ?  There were people and as long as there are people, I can cope with a lot.  

• and that would be a lot of people

Some time in there I began mentally packing the bag for next time – clean knickers, warm shawl, water, fruit …  I took a book and a scarf.   I thought about who to tell and how to tell.   It’s oddly consoling to be taking exactly the same drugs as the mothers of two friends.    I was taken aback by Dan who in the midst of his own difficulties, organised a mobile phone and took time to explain it to me.  Linda sent a blood pressure monitor.   Annie asked why didn’t you call someone ?   And I had to try and explain I wasn’t looking to make a problem.  Not a hero.  It didn’t occur to me.

But as of now, I asked people to check on me. I ask for help,   I count it as late but essential growing up and I want it made mandatory that you can’t hold office as Secretary for Health if you don’t spend  one night every week overnight in a hospital.   If you haven’t seen and heard it, you don’t know – and I am glad that I do.

40 years ago in South Africa I met a banned lawyer and his wife, a university lecturer. His name was Unterhalter.   I asked what it meant.  “Entertainer,” he said wrily. 

  I thought of him this morning when I looked up who wrote the song I’ve used in the title.  Herman Hupfeld, supplied the search engine, American song writer.  Indeed.  No show business without Jews and gays.  And if Casablanca  can be shown several times recently, I can invoke the song memorably sung by Dooley Wilson.  Because time is currently impactedly slow and whips past, all at the same time.  It’s June and all I have to show for May is the payment of several bills, the advent of hypertension and reading a book I would never have tried if it hadn’t been given to me (The Magician, about Thomas Mann, by Colm Toibin – fine writing, highly apposite.)

When sleep won’t come,

I choose the road I was born in and begin to follow every road I can remember, every house and who lived there, every shop – till sleep comes.  The other night I cast the memory net over my early days in London – where I stayed, where I went, what I saw.  I have lived in London ever since except for two years out in New York and I like it less than I have ever liked it.

You may have noticed that I don’t spend a lot of time on negatives. 

I acknowledge them and I try to work through them because I know that going round them, trying to avoid them, won’t answer.  For me.   You can’t avoid the numbers in London, the mess in the street, the shuttered properties mostly but not exclusively commercial.  You can’t avoid the contrast between the privileged of which disposable income is a great part, and the rest of us.  It is there, staring you in the face.

Yesterday I met a very pretty woman, becomingly dressed and as she came down the bus aisle, she asked if she was on the right bus for … and I said “Yes and you look wonderful, sit here “ indicating the seat beside me. 

And she talked about living in rural Kent,

coming up to shop (“I want a Zara and a Uniglo”) but she also said how drowned she felt in the numbers in the street, how she couldn’t remember feeling so before, was it just age , did I think ?   And children, she said, children everywhere … so I remarked that, listening to the recent report on child poverty, how I had waited to hear a comment on what we used call Family Planning – contraception – “More than our lives are worth to mention it” she said, a shadow of weariness across her face.   “But we thought” I began  – “That was then and this is now.   Time goes by” she said.

Time has gone by for any love affair between the actor Rowan Atkinson and the electronic car.   He loves cars, he has qualifications in electronics, and he has looked at the provision of the shortlived  heavy batteries which  use up all sorts of resources and are necessary to the electronic car.  And he says of cars – barring diesel – what increasing numbers of people say of clothes – make them last longer. 

 It’s part of recycling and we can all do it.  The woman to whom I lent a novel a year ago  returned it  with a nice note and the used edition of a book she thought I’d like (I did) writing “Used the new new.”

The train crash in India killed and injured the very poor, right out in the back country where trains are overcrowded and neither they nor the lines they run on are well maintained because that is not the face India wants the world to see.    When you see numbers of the poor discarded like that – and it happens in every country in the world – it is an abstruse form of birth control – later on in life, an early death.   If you have a belief system, it comforts you.   But that child, that person never comes again. That time is gone.

If you asked me, I would say that I was usually a truthful person. 

  A sight too truthful for some of my friends or much success on popular television.   But like everybody else I know without exception, if truth is portrayed as white,  I’ve told stories varying from pale grey to charcoal, and one or two outright black lies – though in one never to be forgotten case, I told the truth later and explained why I lied.  

Like most people, I have packaged events or achievements to get a job

or keep one.   I shall never forget being asked in passing if I could use a particular tape recorder (this is years ago) in order to get an interview with a well known doctor.  So I just lied, said yes, and prayed.  Then I went downstairs to talk to my favourite engineer, who explained.   I thanked him, went out, prayed some more and used the machine, thanking the Almighty fervently when it all worked out.

Do you remember Aunt Ella in Oklahoma ! saying “Let’s not  break the truth – let’s just bend it a little … “   I’ve done that.   My rule for those evasions is that you never tell a lie you can’t deliver on. 

  That way, nobody knows and you don’t have to disturb anybody else’s sense of the truth.  Unless they are shrewd enough to rumble you.  And most of them won’t care if you can bring it off.

There are sins of omission and sins of commission.   The first is Aunt Ella territory.   The second is to do with self interest.  You must be seen to be white or at least white-ish.  Hence a black lie.   And the problem with sins of commission is – who else is involved ?  Your life partner, somebody you’re crazy about, your professional associates, the one assistant or offspring who picks up the vibe and just knows – this isn’t right – who then has to decide whether to confront you the liar with the lie, or leave it, cross fingers and get on with life, probably to revisit this territory in a future where the power structure has changed, and the perceiver is older and wiser or cares less about the outcome.

I am more interested in the truth. 

  Although I go through phases of liking fiction, I prefer information.   Occasionally there is a wonderful exception where fiction highlights truth, makes it more accessible to understanding.  I spend a lot of time looking at fictional behaviour in drama and thinking “Naaah …  Not in this life.”     Though of course sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction, nowt so queer as folk.

And down the years I have met people who nursed a truth they couldn’t bear to tell the people round them – so they told me.  So I learned that how you tell the truth is important.

In a public context telling the truth may require skill – not because of evasion but because of placing that which you discuss in a place where it can be publicly seen for what it is.   I saw Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper (one of very few politicians the years have improved)

explain truthfully why she would not answer a question which could only be different if time had gone on and her party were in power. “Otherwise, you see, “ she said “I will give you an answer on which I can’t deliver.  And we have had that for some time.  “

Treasured friends tell me truths and listen to mine.  Though I have dear friends who live in what the French call folie a deux and I don’t think they have ever got to grips with what we might call fundamental aspects of character,  less what or how than why and what that means.  They just go on going, repeating the patterns.  You can’t live for people, they must live for themselves.   And the worst person to lie to is yourself.    But then for some the truth and its opposite have no real meaning.  It doesn’t matter, except it erodes trust.  We all make decisions about truth and lies, black white and grey.   And those decisions all affect how we feel about ourselves and how others feel about us.

Everybody I speak to loves spring. 

Pam the Painter loves it because she is a devoted gardener and it leads to summer.  Yes, the green, yes the light, yes the young – the robins have hatched in the jug in the garden.  Yes, brighter light and longer evenings.  But spring is moody.  It flips from almost muggy warm to suddenly chilly – and card carrying POT (poor old thing), I feel it.  And shorts. 

  Oh Lord, it’s the same as Lycra – everybody who shouldn’t wear them, does and you long to tell men nicely, you don’t beat the bulge – it beats you.  And shorts sitting under it don’t help. 

Soft warm light fell this morning on a Middle Eastern woman in a long pretty shaped garment in plum over a very dark navy dress and I exclaimed at the colours.  She was delighted.   And the gardener came, more hairdresser than horticulturalist, absolutely unreservedly worth waiting for – polite, professional, careful – and left me with neatened everything, minus the laurel that was ravaging the bed outside the back door, carefully pruned viburnum,

honeysuckle and broom.   Everything swept, everything watered.  I keep going to look at it, like a child with a new toy. 

People seem to be going for holiday earlier this year  – Ginny is off to Sardinia  on Wednesday, Wal is  looking at china on ebay in Spain.   Not sour grapes, I don’t want to go away – as Linda says, no matter what money you have, travelling nowadays isn’t fun.   And the big set pieces of international diplomacy stand like heavyweight screens around the wounded body of the world,

saying what I regret we thought they’d say and leading to a columnist I respect writing that the words he would like to hear from a G7 leader are “Honestly, I don’t know.”   And saying just that in a professional context is how I come to know the name of Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor, US .   Sentimental admiration aside, to admit that you don’t know everything and haven’t got all the answers, takes guts and some skill in public address and is more use to those you serve than blandishments.    

Every so often I haul off and write to a public figure,

not because I think I will be recognised, but because I must.  I wrote to the head of the National Farmers Union several years ago when foreign labour shortages began to bite, with a suggestion about employing able bodied pensioners.   I wrote to Lord Rose, formerly head of M&S, because I saw him speak sense about Covid live on tv.  I wrote back to the man who came after me for a comment on meeting Barbara Cartland.   I wrote to the founder of Bloodaxe Books on his birthday which I discovered in the Times, to tell him that one of his collections changed my life.   Responses vary.  But I am going to have to write to somebody about building new houses because, before we do, we have to accept that it is not “new “ we need but units.     

There used to be something called a compulsory purchase order and surely we need to assess how long property is allowed to stand empty in a housing shortage – for our own, let alone anybody incoming – before it is acquired by the local authority for use at the lowest market price.  It is always possible that making good will be more expensive than new build  – but it should be examined in public view, so that we could start using numbers of the unemployed or prisoners to fix the electrics, whitewash the walls, check the plumbing and move towards roofs over heads.   Homelessness is a scandal and if I had had to spend my 20s with my mother, neither of us would have benefited.

As well as spring, I am the only person I know who growls about the Chelsea Flower Show, smack on a bus route.  This year however I shall not be growling because the reallocated and rebuilt Waitrose in Kings Road doesn’t float my boat.   Economically, three rebuilds ? I have found another where …. 

That should happen more often.

Last week two vibrant young women came collecting for Scope,

and wanted me to put a  questionnaire on my phone.  I explained – no phone.  “We could do it on your email” said one but they couldn’t, to which the second girl sighed “everything to do with communication is so complicated nowadays …”   She must have been every day of sixteen.

When we went through a phase of writing notes to each other at school, I remember my mother shaking her head.  “Say what you like” she said.  “You can have an argument and clear the air.  But don’t write it down.” 

I grew up with the idea that writing things down was serious and I didn’t do it lightly.  This probably affected my letter writing, which is rarely as good as I would like it to be, though to be fair to myself, I do better at business letters than personal ones. 

So when I had to cancel gardeners number seven, I sent an email.  And then I sent it again two days later, both times asking for acknowledgement of the cancelled date.  Not a sausage.  Then I printed it off, put in an envelope and sent it marked  “Please read.”    On Saturday I opened the door at 8.00 to the young man whose time I had sought not to waste.   So I may be serious about writing but clearly his boss isn’t and doesn’t read anything except texts or bank statements.  

 Very early on the two year haul to get sense out of the energy company, I declined phone calls –  an art form of meaningless – and everything was written down.  I thought thus I would have a record and at one point in desperation,

I copied out the dates of every contact, name, brief summary and compiled them.  Not to say “… and I was very upset” because they clearly didn’t care, just to show the waste of everybody’s time.  When through the good offices of a LinkedIn executive and the energy broker next door, we got to a name and thus some sense of responsibility, it became clear that she did not read it.  It was too long.

As the audial sense of news, opinion and promotion gets narrower, more confusing and closer to the Tower of Babel, I take a daily paper.  

  I don’t have to agree with everything it says but I have time consider what I read without often discordant voices.  I find things of interest.  I spend time with writers I have learned to appreciate if not trust.   It’s not the Word from On High but it is more thoughtful and tempered than much of the fashion for news nowadays which, like the weather forecasts, seems to have been influenced by the least pleasing kind of sub-Sunday school peptalk – “Don’t worry, there is some sun coming…” or “Peace may break out …”    In Daisy’s immortal phrase (she was a headmistress whose husband has PD) gawdelpus.

What is written remains magical to me, stories untold, things I never heard of, thoughts unformulated, worlds revealed.   I sat the other night and read poems from The Faber Book of Beasts, poetry about animals.  

The candles played on the wall, the trees murmured outside.   It cost not very much and it sent me to bed with a smile on my lips.   Of course you have to be in the mood for it and if you are not in the mood for it, it doesn’t work.     You may read something again and it plays differently to you or you may read something for the first time and feel its impact land.  Either way you will avoid the repetition which is one of the most disagreeable features of our current television. 

Occasionally somebody will ask if I have a picture of my son ?   I haven’t, I never have carried one.  Various peoples including the Rom think the camera steals the soul.  What I carry is a number of things he has written – notes,  lines from the front of books, an early piece of typing.  Not much, not a library  but a few words from various times in his life which evoke him

and make me smile with gratitude and pleasure. 

This was the title of a book by Melanie Phillips

whom I met once, to review the said book and she was everything!  I didn’t think she was going to be including charming and reasonable.  Speak as you find.

I was not a prizewinner, most of us aren’t, which is why the lotteries swell to the riches of Croesus and we cross our fingers and hope.  I watch people every day buy a ticket and I only did it for a couple of months till I realised that “Why me ?” might just as well mean loser as winner, more likely in fact.

The ITV newscaster Mary Nightingale teased me when I said any award to me should be all or nothing – I hadn’t realised how it sounded – but that was 1998 when I won a gold Sony, top radio award, nothing to do with being an agony aunt.  The citation says “Talk/News Broadcasting Award” and as I walked through the applauding dark

to the stage, I had a couple of things I wanted to say.   I said among other things that we had listened that evening (big industry function) to a paean of praise to the BBC and that, while I loved and respected the BBC, the award I was holding was for over  20 years’ work in the independent sector of the industry.  The BBC would neither have hired me nor let me work as I had.  I was cheered.

I did lots of bits and pieces for the BBC, radio and television, some with great joy but whatever it was, my face didn’t fit, I don’t know – I only worked once under contract for a little series of 6 or 7 tv programmes for “Aunty” as we called her then – that was it.  This is not regret which would be pointless.  It’s a truth for a purpose.

The BBC is now riven with internal difficulties, over staffing, competition at every level and change – technology has changed, viewership and listenership has changed, the current government only wants what it wants – it has no coherent vision – which puts a public service broadcaster in between  a rock and a very hard place.   

I don’t know – and I bet you don’t either – what a “typical viewer” is.  But I bet I am not one.  I’ll spare you the list of stuff I never watch, wince at, shy away from and tell you that the fifth series of  Unforgotten knocked spots off any other police based serial.   No I am not an addict, I haven’t watched every moment with bated breath.  I can see that Nicola Walker had to get away or she’d never do anything else

“not a replacement, another thing entirely”

and that Sanjeev Bhaskar is just such a good actor.  I like the writing, by Chris Lang, oh I like the writing.  I like the technique which relies more on “out of the corner of your eye” than conventionally dramatic scenes.  I like the brief slight on the money asides which kept up a narrative drive which is my chief requirement in whatever media – I need to know we are moving forward.

Chris Lang has worked on scripts for years and you’d think was drowning in every kind of praise – but he has just written a short noticeably unhysterical piece about the lack of recognition by BAFTA for actors and craftsmen working on ITV product.   He names names, he explains the process and he breaks down figures.  I think I was more upset about the craftsmen than the actors because actors are an often moveable feast while technicians stay closer to home.  And I think of the number of times I have watched Vera (love Blethyn, hate the twang)  for the superb evocation of the odd bleak beauty of the north east of England in which I grew up.   A cinematographer

can make a story  –  just as a costumier can deliver the character.   No scripted ITV show has won a BAFTA since 2019.

Of course, Chris Lang says, it is ridiculous to take any award show seriously but this is the pre eminent award show in the TV industry and it’s looking a mite superior in its assessments.  Imagine that.   25 years on.       

NOTE: Linda McCormack – no email so I couldn’t reply. Thank you for thinking of me.

The owner of the sixth gardening concern  (see annalog/decline and endeavour) arrived in response my telephone call for an appointment he made 45 minutes late,

talked a lot and seemed to think he was doing me a favour.  I forbore to tell him money is not paid for favours.

Old friends had the rerun of a crisis they could both do without but neither seems able to avoid.  I find bright people who can’t focus their intelligence on their own difficulties and how these impact on their nearest and dearest disturbing.  It’s as if the light only travels one way.

For the first time in many years, I am reading books less at a time.  Nothing can make me read slowly, I zap through things, but I know that if I am to understand what I am reading, I must read less and allow for percolation.  It’s been oddly pleasurable, like making a quarter of sweets last longer

when you were a kid.

One of the few things my son asked of me was that I lock the front door and it was locked at 9.20 last night when somebody banged on it (I have no bell).  “Who is it ?” I asked and the voice said “Me.”  Fortunately I recognised “me”, she lives round the corner and owns the first female Rhodesian Ridgeback

I ever met, a dog of truly magnificent indifference to all except her own affairs. 

I opened the door and my neighbour said” I had to come and tell you – my sister has dropped the action, I’ve got the house.”   And flung her arms round me.  I embraced her, remarking as I did, that it is the first time in two years I have seen colour in her face.  And we continued enthusing, jumping up and down on the step – she wouldn’t come in – and suddenly she said “What is your name ?”  And I told her and asked hers (again) because it really isn’t about that. 

a rose by any other name would smell as sweet

It’s about somebody being well disposed to you – just someone  you see at the bus stop, or out with dog, or wave to from the car. 

When her father died – I don’t know all the back story –  his will left her very nearly everything, principal among which was a house with a garden, a little further out.  Her sister took action to fight the will.  Death and money are often closely related.  

Encouraged by her sensible and supportive solicitor, she commenced to clean up the house.  Until she showed me the pictures on her phone last night, I had no idea what this involved.  Her father was a hoarder. 

There have been various ups and downs and she has continued working on the bathroom and the kitchen.  I have seen her looking really dragged down by it all, as you would be.  She has kept going, her home, her job, her husband and family, the daughter still at home and studying.

“You’re going to move in ?”   She nodded.  “Don’t go without giving me an address “ I said “even if I only send you a Christmas card.”

“I’m not going anywhere without telling you” she said. “That’s why I asked your name.  People come into your life for a reason, you’ve got the same name as my dad’s mum, you looked out for me.  That’s why I had to come and tell you, I knew you’d understand.”  And we embraced each other again.   “I’ve got to go home” she said “I’ve got dinner to make.  I’ll see you, I’m not going anywhere yet.”   Do you know, she even smelt different ?  She smelt of hope.

So Carly came to tell me about her dad’s house and Mrs. Robin returned to the nest in the jug hanging on the garden wall.  Yes, it’s very small stuff  but it lifts the heart and make you smile and there’s nothing better.    There’s an old song that says “little things mean a lot.”

Hard times are coming if not already here but not for gardening concerns.  I feel like a wallflower at a prom, having just been let down by the fifth gardening outfit, mostly because they have not been taught in work or life how to decline gracefully. 

They can’t say “No.” 

I am a big girl.  I can stand rejection.  All they have to do is assess the viburnum, honeysuckle and winter broom (all in need of pruning), and the removal of the laurel and say “Sorry, too small for us.”  And I’d smile and try again elsewhere.  Instead of which they don’t return the call.  They don’t acknowledge those neat little email forms, telephone calls you can forget – they do.   In two cases, they come, look, estimate and go away promising contact.  Only never to be heard of more.   And dammit, these are the things I can’t do and as I remarked crisply to a friend, recognising limitation and asking for help

is one of the few signs I have of increasing maturity.  

And you don’t want to be labelled as a bothersome old thing,  so you wait.  And in waiting, your turn in the queue is not so much lost as denied. 

“Did I say I’d be in touch with you ?”   emailed Smartypants when I wrote to respectfully remind him of my small existence.  “Sorry spring is here, summer just round the corner and we’re fully booked.”  “So glad you have work for the summer” I wrote in reply.” Just hope you treat the rest of your clients with rather more courtesy” and spat bullets.

The garden is roughly 7 x 30 feet.  And staring out of the kitchen window towards the wall, there was much fluttering, eventually revealed as a pair of great tits who departed and a robin who stayed. 

Hanging on that wall is a battered dark green enamel jug, about 7 inches high, a pretty shape which I haven’t the heart to throw away.  Robin cased the joint and began collecting nesting materials.   I watched fascinated.  He worked very hard.  I looked up the symbolism of the robin online and left him to it.  

When I came back in, he brought his intended who was clearly heard to mutter something about en-suite and preferring a semi before swishing off.  He followed.  And I thought that was it. 

As twilight edged to dark,

I went out to look.   He was standing braced in the mouth of the jug, a tiny thing in a posture which clearly said “This is mine.”  I begged his pardon, softly, and retreated.  

I watched much more coming and going until I went out yesterday to do what Buns calls the messages.  I made the trip to a large Boots (a long way in every way from the Boots of my childhood), looked about, found what I wanted, stretched the arthritic knee and came home.

I’d planted the tulips Laura brought from Italy in my favourite pot, put it up on the wall and it was in pieces on the ground, not doing the cherished yellow rose (A Friend Indeed) Ginny had given me in the bigger planter directly beneath it any good at all.  I do hope the bird is safe, he was of course nowhere in sight.  I swept up and cleared, saved the tulips, did the best I could with the rose – another gardener is allegedly coming on Tuesday, don’t hold your breath.  I shall be explaining how carefully any work must be done round the jug, just in case Robin gets over his fear of the cat on the wall (?) or whatever it was that caused the almighty crash the terracotta falling from a height must have made.

It remains a thrill and a privilege to have seen the bird with spring feathers as bright as paint, the effort, the endeavour, the construction.   If there is one thing nature teaches us throughout its many manifestations, it is how many times you have to try …  only for whatever it is, not to work out – and then to have to try again.       

Jane Seymour

rarely eats later than the afternoon, so is hungry for up to 16 hours at a time.   Trained as a dancer, she still weighs what she weighed at 17 (she is now 72 ).  She has also been married and divorced four times, survived financial catastrophe thanks to one of the husbands, come through health crises, written various shrewdly marketed “I survived it and you will too” type books, designed clothes and sold art.  She is currently having a hit with her second tv series Harry Wild, many years after the first.  Jane Seymour may not be a world star but she twinkles steadily in an industry into which she and her management have long strong and professional insight.    I read this over the coffee this morning and had a bad quarter of an hour.   File AR under “could have done better.”    And then I thought.

I thought of two marriages and two divorces.  Quite enough, thank you.    I thought (sorry) that my tolerance for self help books is very low and I never wanted to read or write one if I didn’t have to.   Designing clothes that will sell and painting the pictures ditto? Well that has to be a combination of considerable luck, a recognisable name, and a willingness to put your ability at the service of

what other people think will “go”.  

If you’re discussing something with me, however and wherever we meet, I will put experience, intelligence and information at your service.   But the sound of the exchange is hallmarked.  I’m what I was, the arena of work is different.  I am endlessly interested in and moved by people.  

Jane Seymour is Jane Seymour, I am not she. 

There is a French phrase “bien dans sa peau” suggesting what the Americans call being centred, happy with and knowing how to make the best of your lot, what you can’t do without, what you must let go.  And on the way to being happy in my skin, what did I learn about myself?   

Buns stayed with friends and lived out of a suitcase for years.  I couldn’t do it.  Give me the meanest room (and I have lived in some pits) but it has to have a lock on the door.  I’ll scrub it, paint it – but it has to be mine.   I need regular infusions of privacy.

I made fewer concessions in the way that I wrote or broadcast than anybody I know.  Mind you, I haven’t spent a lot of time asking people.   It was the heart and soul of me, verbally expressed.   I was the girl who was asked for advice at school, in the typing pool.   I went on learning and I went on finding ways to express the things I was interested in, because they obviously interested a whole lot of other people who couldn’t find the words – but you couldn’t fake my interest, it was real, and you couldn’t write my lines. They were too.

I learnt that I cared much less about fashion than about style.  I have known women who keep on colouring their hair long past their sell by date but I went grey and then white, encouraged and endorsed by complete strangers as well as dear friends – always bearing in mind the man who sat opposite me on a train and said “ You’d look quite pretty if you coloured your hair !”   

I learned that I could live without flowers but I had to have books.   I learned – painfully – that you can do your absolute best for somebody but if they don’t want to help themselves,

you’re not going to get very far.  

I learned respect for my health, physical and mental, and when my son asked me the other day if I worried about wrinkles, I was able to say truthfully “Only on a bad day” though reaching for my slippers, I see the skin of my arms creased like tissue – and that’s age, nothing to do with care or cream. 

I like my skin, the one I’m writing about.  It suits me and it sounds as if Jane Seymour likes hers.  Very different, one from the other, that’s the lesson – not only what we share but where we differ.    

The garden

is doing its best but as the weather swings from one thing to another and in my view spring is still on a day/off a day, I thought I might look for a plant.  But the bus was crammed with bodies in every variant of group, every window was closed and when I got off  near the place I  go to for citrus and nothing else, I took one look at people  spilt all around as if from a packet, contagiously posing,  and thought  buy and go home and forget it, you’re no good with plants, you’ll get the wrong thing, it will die … etc.  I really don’t have very green fingers.   So I bought the only other thing I had to have and got the bus back.   And sat down beside a young woman in a black and white checked coat with the darkest skin I can recall seeing. And I began thinking about how I could describe it.

Black as night, we say.  But the night is rarely black and rarely dark, disturbed by all sorts of artificial light.  An African night perhaps,

 which appears suddenly on the end of sunset ? I haven’t seen that for a long time but I remember it well.  Black as pitch?  Possibly, don’t know a lot about pitch.   Ivory black in the water colour box ?  Not enough depth.  Ebony ?  No, all sorts of shadows and shades in the wood.  I looked up black on the internet, not that I rely on that machine, I’ll tell you.  And there are variants, some confusing –  for example, taupe.  I’d have said taupe was a completely different colour but a taupe is a mole and a black mole’s coat is a soft. shining and particular black.  I don’t think charcoal is black at all, unless you lean on it.  

I examined the young woman out of the corner of my eye.   Her eyes were closed and you could hardly see the beautifully drawn eye line, fashionably exaggerated. 

Nothing to do with bronze or copper or brown, she had equally dark hair, cropped to a wonderful head.  She wore enormous faceted gilt hoop earrings, a couple of vaguely Scandinavian sculptural rings.  She carried a Chanel bag, true or false, I wouldn’t know, held in hands manicured with medium length dark brown tinseled nails.  There was not the slightest inclination towards me, so I left her alone.  

My mind pulled up a picture from a time long predating the commercial manufacture of much makeup, when I had watched a hand strike a big old fashioned match, burn it for a minute or two over a saucer, blow it out and collect the soot, which was blended with a drop of some unguent to make an eyeline.  That was the black, deep, soft, unutterable.

She moved her hands into a gesture I know entirely too well, to shadow her eyes and press against her head.  She had a terrible headache. 

I stayed still, it was all I could do.

Halfway to my stop, I put my hand on her arm and she looked at me.  “Do you have far to go ?  Will you be all right ?”   She said yes.  “Do you have pills at home for the headache ?”   She nodded.  “I can do nothing else” I said ” on a bus.  I wish you better.” And when I got off the bus, she smiled – light delight and sweetness – quite wonderful in the grey London street – and waved.

Coming home up the street  I found a little gathering of items outside a flat with a note “Please take me/us !” with a cyclamen in full bloom.   I came back to put chocolate through the door as a thank you, realised I didn’t know which flat was involved and anyway, the occupants of both were out.  There was also a small Christmas tree in a pot, now in corner of the garden.

A friend came for tea looking healthier than I have seen him and bringing the dog of the family he is staying with in between homes, so I heard the happy click of claws and had my arms briefly full of liver and white spaniel.  I’d have to say – a long weekend but a good one.