Annalog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Devastation by Graham Sutherland, in the Tate.

I wish.

Last week I went in search of the dream. 

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

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

I admit I loved wrappings,

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

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

sealed of course with a label.  No other wrapping.  

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

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

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

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

Billy Graham

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

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

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

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

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

On the bus a man sat down,

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

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

I think

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

Mishugas by Jacques Lipchitz, the Israel Museum

(Another man – sorry, Charles.)

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

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

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

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

From the trenches in Ukraine

The ship was as big as a block of flats,

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

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

Friends of the Earth / uses for old newspapers

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wanted to wash my hands

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

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

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

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

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

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

An unknown writer sent me a photograph of himself. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

juniper signifies wisdom

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

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

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

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

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

We say “there is always somebody worse off”

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

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

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

Thank goodness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there are one or two things which madden me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I went to my first wedding

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

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

After the ceremony, lunch was in a country pub,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

just as the Greek Government starts encouraging us back safely.

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

P.S. Don’t forget the sunblock