Annalog

They came into the circus ring, over a dozen, each holding the tail of the one before.

These were elephants and I was five or six.   The only other elephant I had seen was Babar and he was a drawing. Clean, cared for and vast, these were real. 

I am happy to report having my face examined by a young elephant’s trunk – she happened to be  there for some other reason entirely when I was doing a “bit” at London zoo.   I was covered with chewed up green but who cares ?  It was a real live curious elephant.

Then, four or five years ago, a name came into my head, I could give you the route but it doesn’t matter.  What matters is that, within a week, a pristine paperback turned up in a secondhand bookshop, the story of an old soldier who after WWI applied for a job in elephant management in what was then Burma now Myanmar and he spent 20 years with the beasts he loved –  less Mr.Williams and more Elephant Bill.

There were wonderful documentaries, indicating the difference between African and Indian elephants, those of the forest, those of the plain, Daphne Sheldrake’s refuge for the orphans, victims of the rise in poaching.  These were eclipsed by the endless ads from the World Wildlife Fund telling us about poachers who kill and maim.   I think I might make peace with a level of killing if they weren’t so mindlessly cruel. 

And here we are, in the last quarter of a bitter year, and as you well know misery, real and manufactured, is almost omnipresent: you can’t get away from it.  Very fashionable, misery.  So when I saw a headline which read “Elephants free to roam rainforest as poachers flee”,

I read on.     

One of the things you must remember about a dream is that you have to dream it again and again to make it come true.  You have to accept the limitations of your dream.  Life is not magic.    You may  have a vision but if the vision is not faced and re examined in the light of day, it will fade, like every other dream.   Dreams are the embodiment of  “if at first you don’t succeed, try try try again.”  Yesterday I met on a bus an Indian professor of computer science whose first love was physics   –  but the study of it was in in decline when he qualified  “and” he said “you must be practical.” 

President Ondimba of Gabon has been just that.   The son of a longlived dictator, he loved the forest which covers much of the country, and its gorilla and elephant.   It is where he stayed when he came home from the Sorbonne and Harvard – Gabon is a formerly French colony that joined the Commonwealth in June 2022.

  Ten years ago, this part of the Congo rainforest, second largest after the Amazon basin (now in destructive hands) with much higher carbon absorption, was doomed.   The President set his face against that and the man he chose to help him was Professor Lee White, a zoologist from Manchester who came to the country in 1989, rose to become director of the national parks agency and subsequently minister of the environment and maritime affairs.

An odd couple, they did what they had to do.  Armed war was declared on poachers, through park rangers trained and equipped by the British Army and both sides took casualties.  (In dreams they may not but in wars, they do.)   Ondimba passed legislation against poachers, ivory smugglers and illegal logging while, at his side, Lee and others laboured to enable legal logging, palm oil production,   using the forest  for those who live there, with new methods of farming

and a greater appreciation of its worth.   Such an easy sentence to write, much harder to make happen.  

Seeing elephant wander forest pathways and gorilla calm enough to notice intruders but not flee is good news.   Seeing two such different men united in a common cause is good news too.  And seeing an African politician set his face against what he thought to be wrong, without quarter.  Seeing any politician make thoughtful choices is heady.

 A wholly unPC friend sent me a silly story about the gifts God gave Adam and Eve. 

Adam got to pee standing up and Eve got the brain.  Did I laugh ?  Yes.  Do I believe it ?  No.   Can’t be true because I have just completely mislaid the cap to the disinfectant (I was cleaning a dishcloth).   A turmeric moment (annalog/turmeric) not to say green apple (annalog/the lost apple) moment.   So, if it isn’t just about the brain, what is a woman ?  

The plastic surgeon I worked for 50 years ago was affiliated to The Gender Research Unit in the now gone Middlesex Hospital.   That work was based on 13 chromosomal variants (I think) between normal man at one end of the spectrum and normal woman at the other.  

Normal is used in the then scientific sense of the word – it is not a word I throw around.  Value judgements attach to it too easily.  

Once in the waiting room where I worked, I saw a dazzlingly pretty, slender woman with dark hair in a red Mongolian lamb coat on whom I commented when I took in the next mug of tea to my boss.  He looked at me and smiled.  “I knew her when she was a little Maltese boy, running round Soho.” 

That the world comprised more than men and women was clear to me from my first paying job in the theatre.  I was brought up to be interested in people so who they went to bed with, how they voted or worshipped was part of their backstory.  How they behaved as people was much more important.    

Reading Tomiwa Owulde’s thoughtful review of The New Puritans by Andrew Doyle  (Sunday Times 28.08.22), he makes reference to impossibility of disagreeing in the minds of what is now called variously woke or identity politics, or (new one on me) the Elect and Critical Social Justice.  And he likens the response to the Salem witchhunts in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible in which I played a small role at 14. 

How my parents treated me and how they made judgements about me and with me seems even at this distance to be remarkably enlightened.   I knew I was a girl, womanhood was something to aim for and you can credit my tough little mother.

 If that was a woman, I was going to try and be one.  The whole aberrant thing about staying a girl for as long as possible and the insane pursuit of a veneer of youth passed me by. I was brought up to make the best of myself in every way and I did, I still do, so that if somebody came after me now and tried to tell me that I wasn’t a woman because of this, that or the other thing, I think I’d laugh. 

But then I am out of the public eye, exempt from social media, no longer important if I ever was– so I am safely left to get on with life’s long journey.   And I wish I could say, this moment or that experience made me feel like a woman.   The truth is, I have never questioned it.  I went through years of being described as “unfeminine” but I knew who I was.  

  And the idea that somebody would find something I say not acceptable and therefore judge me not only as lacking but wicked is – pass double take – unthinkable.  But then as Tomiwa Owulde says, very few women have the financial means of JK Rowling to protect themselves. 

When I was thinking about this writing, I asked myself, what made me feel like a woman ? And sadly, like a lot of things, it is easier to define by the negatives – when I didn’t feel like one – than the positives.  I am not going to do that, we currently do entirely too much of it.  I am sick of people telling me the price of their success.  There always was a price to success and there always will be, however you define it.  Sometimes you think you know the price and can pay it and sometimes you don’t think.  We have all made mistakes and that’s called life.  (Fade in Peggy Lee singing “Cos I’m a woman – (spelled out) W O M A N.” )

Do you remember p’s and q’s ? 

That somebody very much the wiser might have suggested to you that in that circumstance of being interviewed for your first job, meeting future parents in law, presenting the details of a case you hoped to win with the help of a famously acute solicitor –  “you might like to watch your p’s and q’s.”   Stands apparently for not confusing your pints and quarts (a quart being two pints) on an ale house tally (1800 or thereabouts)  P’s and m’s aren’t the same.  They’re much simpler.  P’s and m’s just stand for plusses and minuses.

They came to my mind

when I read an extract from a book by a woman who stayed with her husband though she was unhappy and serially unfaithful to him up to and including his early death from cancer – but who now feels liberated by that death.   (All of This by Rebecca Woolf published September 1, £20)  It’s one of the few times I can remember that I felt p and m in equal amounts: I admired her for trying to face some difficult facts – though there is a glaring hole in the middle of the extract of her account as I read it – nevertheless (p).   Though with four children I wished she hadn’t gone public, hoping for a bestseller (m).  

I starting thinking of minuses the other day when the neighbours over the back got raucously tipsy for the third hot night in a row and there was nowhere in my flat to

escape the braying.   I try not to look for minuses.  I confess I have never missed getting drunk with the girls which I would see as a plus.  I have great women friends, but I prefer to be with them one at a time.  And we have got drunk but not to the disturbance of anybody else (surely a p)

I have never seen Everest (m)

or come to that, Tierra del Fuego (the landscape of infrequent dreams) but clearly if it was so important to me, I would have done something about it.  And I wonder if in going off to see the mountain now, I’d have to face the spoiling of the holy Bagmati River with sewage and trash (see NextDraft, edited by Dave Pell).   That would be a minus.  And I can remember coming to the conclusion that most of my journeys were inward (p) rather than outward, just as  mass tourism began to destabilise and soil old walls and wear out paving stones never meant for the abuse of thousands of extraneous feet (m).

Silence and quiet became increasingly something to treasure so although I have hooted with joy at blues and clapped and stamped with enthusiasm at rock concerts, I have never had anything to do with karaoke which I’d say was a plus.     

There is only one piece of synthetic fibre among my outer clothes (p) and my raincoat is actually waterproof (p).   Over time I was able to look at the shape of my life and see that it was different  after my  second marriage ended in divorce (p) and  that’s best summed up by a line in a film about Elizabeth I

“I have become a virgin !” (p)   I was immensely damaged and began again in a different direction, though I suppose you could see that as a minus because I didn’t dare to try. 

I am not keen on oriental cuisine beyond variants of Chinese and Indian – Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese doesn’t do it for me and I loathe sushi (m).   It must be a minus because so many other people like it.

I have had my hair coloured by never bleached (p).  And the current passion for overlong, flattened, sub-Cleopatra locks leaves me cold (m).

Although I read widely, there’s quite a list of stuff I wouldn’t give houseroom (m) and in some cases I have tried (m) but what I enjoy reading, I really enjoy and I still read more than most people I know (p).   If you have relative health, enough to survive on and the personality to go with both, age is a plus.  I call it The Last Great Freedom, much more p than m.   

So far, so good

– my memory unreels.  Not often nostalgic, I have never forgotten the old lady who said “People say good old days – they were bad old days.”  And looking over your shoulder, there is a list of things we now take for granted which were not attainable to us then.   I hear people go on about reunions and where I grew up – and think well, good luck to you.  Not for me – but my mind unwinds with stories and voices, sights and smells far back – it always has.

Flattened by the heat, I looked at the chest of papers and it looked right back.  And I knew the time had come.  I dread leaving everything for somebody else to clear up,

perhaps because I have been that somebody.

And so I sat and bagged old videos, put a few treasures aside and shredded old documents and letters.  It is so unusual for me to throw away evidence of any work I did, that I sent a wholly spurious email to the lovely Linda who used to manage me.  She didn’t need it, I was instantly ashamed of what a weak kneed thing I was.  And went on.

I must emphasise that I am careful when I dispose of things.  I don’t throw away and then regret.  I sit and comb through, deciding and choosing.   And I had files of stuff from long ago that I had kept out of a sort of trust – you trusted me and I could be trusted with it.

And trust is such a rare word now.

Eventually three black bags stuffed and foul with dust, I got to the bottom of the chest and cleaned that.  Amy Able upstairs likes it and I have just told her, it is hers in my will.  In my last paid job, I had emails and phone calls and texts.  I was very quick to stamp on texts, “don’t use them if you are not going to give me enough detail to respond.”  But one says “In two sentences not addressed to me, you have wiped away 20 years of guilt about my marriage and my children.”    Radio was always special. 

You heard it the way you heard it and nobody else heard it like you.  Another says “Each day I listen to your show, I feel stronger in my many day to day life problems.”   And I think of the BBC receptionist whom I’d seen several times who told me he was HIV positive, and I hugged him.  Not getting rid of that text either.

Please don’t think there is any favouritism in this.  I remember stories and voices and faces and although I have been out of the public eye for a long time, I still recall and you still recall and long may it be so.

I can’t part with an email that says “You weren’t even talking to me but you sounded as if you were and last night I stood up to my controlling husband.  And yes he came back again and threw his weight around but I stuck to my guns and told him to leave.   I cried all Tuesday  and yesterday BUT I SLEPT ALL LAST NIGHT

for the first time in three years.”

I have a wonderful letter from James who became a nurse (he started listening as an adolescent carer) and Martyn who didn’t need me but liked me, Carole and Arnold who both wrote about  handling their marriage and their son, Tim who lost his.  I have a letter from Michael who said I was “taller, strong and more noble” than I thought I was  – where did I think my son got his height from ?    Letters from a man who opened his heart to his long dead father and thus allowed him to be a presence in his life, from a child protection social worker who wrote to help a caller, and this by the poet Tagore: “Death is not the extinguishing of the light, but the putting out of the lamp, because Dawn has come.”   

I am the only woman I know who could have such a party with paper.

I could write a list of things I don’t want to hear about

for the foreseeable future, from the trivial to concerns in which I am powerless, things that upset and unsettle me, starting with the state of the nation and the state of the world.   The news goes on and on about the same things, peppered with deaths and beatings and the overwhelming cost of everything.   Steadier heads than mine have begun to rear like frightened horses. 

As is often the case, as the foreground begin to grim by degrees, feature articles and books focus on ever more exploitative stories from the past.   As if the present crop of troubles wasn’t enough.  Is there some idea that if we tell you a real shocker about then, you’ll feel better about life now ?  Or is it just that conventional mainstream news, wherever you find it, only keeps an audience by upping its shock/horror quotient to stay level with social media, the buzz flies of bad news ?   and if they can’t find a corpse, they’ll conjure one.

There is a new book about how humans use oil, which goes back far further into history than you think.   But it is death and destruction at every level – and Britain is only one of the rip off artists. The review alone was enough to chill me, like reading a couple of years ago about the destruction of various kinds of whales.  That’s not going to get me through a Sunday morning.

A commissioned poll ie one with the results sought, and over a wide enough number and spectrum to mean something, recently suggested (you have to say suggested because of “lies, damn lies, and statistics”) that descending numbers of people watch news broadcasts in a way that was common even 20 years ago.   But that is only some of the story.   The way news is presented is widely less interesting than it has ever been.   The repetitious content doesn’t help, the same phrases, words, intonations even.  You can switch through 27 stations and the tonalities will be exactly the same

whether you ‘re building up a shine on the car or the Third World War.   What happened to producers  – men and women who told you “don’t wave your hands”/”sorry -not that tie” in your ear, along with the countdown , who had some expectation that you would sound like you gave a damn (see The Newsreader on BBC2 – none of the fuss that has attended upon Roger Allam’s latest outing) ?

Do we any longer recognise that there is a buck to stop ?  

I am disgusted with the BBC that, after all these weary years, court cases, payments, etc., nobody can simply say “that interview won’t be seen any more” and banish the name of Martin Bashir. 

So what has restored my balance this week ?   The help of a neighbour in my still unresolved battle with the energy company  (see annalog/ghostbusters).    Being remembered by an assistant in a shop – think how many people she sees ?   Meeting  Mona (not her name) a pretty woman ten years younger than me, who crossed from being  chirpy acquaintance to something warmer because I banged some part of the ancient undercarriage and was feeling distinctly fragile.   And John, John and Bridget.  

He wrote to me at annalog asking me less for advice ( advice sounds so pious),

more for comments and thoughts.  I wrote back.  He asked  “But how do we pay you ?”   And I had the great pleasure of telling him that this is what I am good for, that I was taught “you can’t take out if you don’t put in” and he wrote again to thank me, and say they were off on holiday.

I don’t care how small it sounds, it’s human.  I loved it.  So that when my young neighbours the other side spoke so loudly that I couldn’t think for the afternoon – we got past it, cleared the air and they went out.   Whereupon  I sat and watched one of several programmes on Paul Simon making Graceland full of African musicians and music  and tributes to talent which is still I want to hear after all these years.      

The lyric of the film theme says “Who you gonna call ?/Ghostbusters !” 

  And I don’t know who else to call.   In 2016 I began to buy my gas and electricity from EDF, a large company, French holding company, sounded safe enough.  I told them I was elderly, lived alone and had eye problems.  I  was not going to have a smart meter (the promotion for which was voiced as a choice) and didn’t use a mobile telephone (clumsy, hate the sound quality and regard the philosophy with suspicion).  I paid by direct debit.  Don’t tell me what everybody else does.  I account for me. 

And of course the pandemic played hell with work patterns.  Through 2021, men (precise term) accredited to EDF read both meters 18 January, 11 February, 12 March and from then on, for no reason that they could give me, the gas meter only – 9 May, 23 August and in 2022 16 May.   I presumed (never presume) that EDF knew what they were doing.  

Discovering I could put meter readings through on line,  I did, a number of times.  I received the same form through the post repeatedly asking me for all my details which have all remained exactly the same, and I filled them in and returned them, including once a full description  of the  gas meter as I saw it – and this I sent through the post, to an EDF address in Plymouth.  No response.

Eventually (now, I think I was slow,: then, I thought I was not making an unnecessary fuss) I rang customer services. 

Customer services online were revealed to be long on modern courtesies (“Have a nice day!”) and short on information.   End of June, I got a woman with an accent I could identify (radio ears) who told me that I hadn’t had the meter read for a long time.  The six visits reading the meter(s) “didn’t count.” The meter readings on line “didn’t count”.  And she didn’t answer when I asked why the electricity meter hadn’t been read.  I must send a photograph of the gas meter.  I said what about the electricity meter.  The gas meter, she insisted.

I explained about the lack of mobile, she confirmed by name on email what she wanted: I asked Amy Capable to help, the picture was sent.   I waited three weeks and sent all the details through again.   No response.

Suddenly EDF sent me the offer of a new tariff – yes, I know it’s from a computer but even a computer is programmed.   Miracles, wonderful, two years fixed rate at more money, £150 back to help you, in the small print it can be cancelled at any time.  And I saw

red.

So I emailed customer services and asked why I was being offered a new tariff when I was in dispute and waiting to hear from them, wrote all the details out again.  And on Wednesday 27 July 2022 got up to an email which said  “Thank you for your email, I can see this account in contention has already been ended with us, please let us know if we have missed any details … Have a nice day and stay safe.”   

I went on line, I found a telephone number, I got the voice of a young man in Kwa Zulu Natal which is where EDF’s call centre is.  I gave him my account number, he asked for my name and (first time) date of birth.  I explained.  “No” he said “ the account is not closed.”   I asked for his patience and told him the story without histrionics, but insisted he listened to the whole story, including the terms under which EDF took me on. 

He said the meter reading visits counted, though he could not explain not reading the electricity meter.  He could not explain why the readings on line were ignored.  He could not explain no response to the requested photograph of the gas meter.   He wanted to make an appointment to have the meters read.  I said “On two conditions: one, you confirm this arrangement to me on email and two, it is for both meters because the electricity meter has not been read for over a year.” He gave me a complaints number, though as of this writing, I have not heard a word.  Ghostbusters.   

Am I going away ?  No 

Prostrate in the heat ?  Not so far

Taking a break ?   Yes …

Because I can’t do annalog without help and the help is taking a pause and a breath

We’ll all be a couple of weeks older when annalog recommences in August, we should live so long !

Yes, yes, I know  – only bad news

sells – Ukraine, famine, the leadership contest, the young and desperate  spending thousands of pounds to have healthy teeth capped in Turkey and bringing any ensuing dental problems back to the  staggering NHS.  And energy companies, cost of living, police failures, and a new book about Harry and Meghan.   So clearly, annalog isn’t about money because I am not going to write about any of them.

I am going to tell you that a week in which it is noted that small independent bookshops are thriving in the US is a trend to be celebrated and I hope it crosses the Atlantic. 

Fin whales have made a quantifiable return to the Antarctic.

Every time I see a grey squirrel, I wonder if it has had its daily contraceptive which is an irreverent way to respond to serious experiments to dose the Canadian intruder into infertility and give native red squirrels a chance.  Hope it make them so sick

it makes them unable to do the damage they do to trees too.

I was pottering about in a long cool A shaped cotton dress, modest neck and half sleeves, when there was a knock at the door.  Not a week goes by without somebody trying to collect for something.  But before I could speak the very young and appealing Asian exclaimed “ Oh,  that material.  Where’s it from ?”   “Russia, “ I said truthfully.  1930s.”

He asked where I got it, made sure he had the name straight, I declined to contribute to his collection and asked if I could show him something else.  Casting a glance at his companions, who were moving on, he said yes and I raced to show him an Indian fabric so fine, you just handwash it, drip it and wear it.  He asked reverently if he could touch it, we beamed at each other.  “I make dresses” he said.  “Thank you for all this –“he gestured.  I asked his name, we shook hands.  Thank you, Ali.

Discarded fast fashion is spread 30 miles across the Atacama Desert, has impeded a successful Indian industry for recycling but our often misguided government has invested in a goody – a  infrared scanner sorting through  clothes too worn to be sold in charity shops and based in Kettering, it’s a new project from the business wing of The Salvation Army.  

It won’t stop thoughtless people  dumping the unwearable in the street or pushing off the unwanted into charity shops where it can’t be used (Pam the Painter tells me she spends a lot of time sorting out the “can be sold” from the “must be dumped”).  But it is part of WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme), John Lewis is looking at co operation and the machine has four time the capacity currently in use.  Three cheers for “it’s never over till it’s over”  the  slogan for linouiio the recycling firm  of Linda and John Parkinson.

Magazines were my first print love, offering colour and introducing you to a magnificent range of  ideas.  Once (and only once) I turned a page in Vogue,  to see the fashion edition of a dress already in my wardrobe.  Usually editorial teaches you something – thanks to Loise Eccles as Consumer Affairs Editor, Sunday Times for the above – makes you think or get in touch, buy the book, ask the questions.  Just occasionally though, you smile knowingly.  Because you got there first.

In one of the trilogy on Elizabeth I , the fine historical writer Margaret Irwin has a doctor upbraid the young princess for the amount of glass in her room, letting in light.  I am not suggesting we go back to holes in the roof but I like the light where it belongs – outside.    

My flat is on the ground floor and I hate curtains.  In a city, they are very expensive dust traps.   I have heavy wooden shutters.  Keeps the warm in during the winter, keep the light and thus heat out in summer.  One time investment. 

Something I got right.  The flat is 100 years old, the windows are sashes.  You close the shutters to the light at the front, open the windows to the air at the back : good news.

It was the first place I ever felt at home in London and I go back to it, like a point on a compass. The greengrocer has a shop in South Kensington and I have been his customer at intervals for years so this time when I arrived – I was the only customer – he put his hands on my shoulders and said “He’s gone.” 

  “Really gone ?”  “Well, he’s gone as leader of the party and he’s to go as PM in three months.”  “Nah” I said.  “He can still do a lot of damage …”  and the young assistant who looks like a renegade from Gogol began to laugh.  “You really don’t like him” he said.   “No.”  I never did. 

50 years ago, I had my most prestigious secretarial job for a wonderful old American businessman, with whom I would probably disagree about all sorts of things, but whom I respected utterly.   He received a communication from the American Embassy asking him to endorse for re election to office an American politico.  “Put that in an envelope” he said to me, handing me his signed mail, and he had written across the bottom in his wholly legible hand above his signature ” I wouldn’t vote him for dog catcher.”

Although I can write about anything I like in annalog, I try not to  “go on.”  There’s always rubbish in the street  (I began my Sunday picking up somebody  else’s menstrual discards with which the foxes had had a field day from a bag dumped at the top of the road).   I could write every week about the cost of everything – I am in dialogue with edf about the so called non reading of the meter, the latest person I dealt with telling me that the men

who came accredited to my door six times in 2021, once so far this year, don’t mean anything – so who sent them ?   And why do they only read the gas meter ?  No answer. No the automated reading doesn’t count –  why ? (silence) … looks like a long haul.  And Wal who is fiercely practical and good with money has just received a demand for £700 for a month’s electricity.  Six chemists later, I am told that there is no calamine, variously, that there is a run on it (what, head to foot ?)

or that suppliers can’t get it – why ?  Item by item, shopping costs more and I sat next to a woman older than I who lives in an area of Kensington and Fulham without tube services, who is looking at the axing of the bus route upon which she depends.

Nobody is minding the store.   We are all horribly exposed.  And it is terrifying.

But when I admired the jacket of a younger woman in the street,  she turns out to be librarian for a community library so I have been sorting through the shelves to donate treasured books where they will be appreciated.  And thus found one of those books I never read  (because I was afraid I wouldn’t understand it, however much I appreciate the films of Jean-Pierre Melville )

but I am reading it now.  With joy.

I shared a bus unimaginably slowed by a bad junction, traffic lights and gridlock with a Somali born teacher who was trying to get to school early to get everything ready for open day and when the bus finally began to move, we were the only two people left on it – we cheered and clapped and the driver tooted and we made it.  Just.

I feel badly about my noisy old washing machine on a Sunday morning  but the washing was out and on the line first thing, one of summers greatest bonuses. 

Whatever his many sins and shortcomings, US President Biden’s message acknowledging our current upheaval was one of his most professional and elegant.  Damn right, talk about us, all of us, the people  – and devil take a leadership competition chiefly characterised by “Anybody Can Do Anything” –  because they can’t.  We just had three years of that dance and all we have to show for it is bleeding toenails.

An untidy lot, we had a history at home of putting something important in a safe place 

– which meant you’d have difficulty in finding it.    Nowadays the “safe place” in my mind just blanks and I sit up at 3.00 am muttering “ Stephen Boyd” as opposed to Steve Cochran and another Steve that’s still in there somewhere. 

Having a name for dementia hasn’t made it any better.  And we all have those moments when you blank, a piece of information slips.  You did when you were 12 and it wasn’t incipient dementia.   You just forgot.  Left alone, most of the time, the thing swims back to the surface of the mind

and that’s probably normal.

I haven’t spent much time thinking about normal.  Fitting in was made manageable by recognised courtesies and shrewd watchfulness, encouraged by magnificently intelligent and open minded parents who were interested in a lot of things, singularly unthreatened by other people’s experiences and differences in life . 

In a recent contribution to the Radio Academy (a fine experience, not putting it down for one moment) I was electrified to be asked “Didn’t you think it was unusual for a woman to be discussing what you were talking about on air then ?”   No, I said, it never occurred to me.   Daughter and grand daughter of teachers (my mother’s father was a journalist) – if you could find a way, there was nothing you couldn’t talk about.  And I didn’t add then, but I will now – and a good job too. 

The unasked question, the observation pushed aside,  often makes for trouble in life or the hole in an otherwise interesting script (see The Weapon made in 1956, on TPTV last night with George Cole as an opportunistic killer, so slimy that you’d expect somebody to pick up on how dubious he was).  In a word – not normal.

I came to dread normal as in being asked “But is it normal ?” 

  To which I would answer “I don’t know – is it normal (ie acceptable) for you ?”  Unburdened by preoccupations about notions of pleasure, if you are not hurting anybody (physically or emotionally) and you’re having a fine time, so be it.   I am not going to know what goes on in other people’s lives till they tell me about it which often denotes misgiving.  In years and years of listening to other people’s stories, I very rarely heard worry about what anybody else might think.  The person on the phone or in the letter is telling you the recipient that he or she is worried about its normality or lack of it.

There is a new book called Am I Normal ? (by Sarah Chaney) which charts the word moving away from the specific to something with a much wider implication and therefore influence, through the classification of intelligence in children and the pernicious burden of perceived body types .  For years I was told that I was not normal  – I was “excitable” or “melodramatic”. 

It hurt.  But it’s me.   Every time I met somebody from some more exotic location or somebody who was as interested as I was in books, bullterriers or blues – and they found me “normal” – I was reassured.  It is only in later life that I understood the range of normality – it isn’t one thing, it is a whole range of acceptable variants.   Or as they say in the north, nowt so queer as folk.  I can’t remember the first person who described me as passionate, it wasn’t a lover.  But modern parlance extends to energy.  And I love it.|I don’t know whether it is normal or not and I couldn’t care less.  If I have to be stoned for something, let it be for this. 

As in: a man under 40 got on the bus the other day, and he had magnificently defined dark blue green eyes, eyelashes to die for.  A few minutes passed and I asked  “ Excuse me, may I ask a rude question ?  Where are you from ?”   As he turned to smile at me, he said unmistakeably “Wales – but the other side is Italian.”  “Wow” I said.  “Celt and Latin – that’s a mixture –“   And we talked happily for a few minutes till he left saying in farewell ” Keep the energy – it’s wonderful.”