Annalog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

but I am getting there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

unbearable

This is the heading over a review of Pulp,

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

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

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

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

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

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

  First time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

People use words differently.  It is a mark of friendship

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

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

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

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

Friendship is a matter of degree

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apparently it was General Douglas MacArthur

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.