It always has been but more than ever , just what I think. All written in advance because I am about to go down the tubes or up a flue and I wanted to offer something before my worst fears are recognized and accursed technology takes a bite out of me.
Likes for annalog have been absolutely heart lifting, enormous thanks.
Money runs through the hands of Sarah Ferguson,
erstwhile wife of Prince Andrew, like water. She has never had enough money to live as mythology suggests she might. So , whatever the greater ramifications are, she was nice to the disgraced Jeffrey Epstein because he gave her money. She has done a lot of things for money, most of them worked only for a short time and financial difficulties occurred, occurred and re-occurred. No dough. Heaven knows what she spends it on.
The Prime Minister
may have all sorts of moral and ethical ideas about Israel and Palestine but I suggest that recognizing the state of Palestine was actually a sop to his younger MPs, who want to be seen to be being effective in their first Parliament and who themselves or their constituents are largely swayed by the horrors of Gaza. Of course it isn’t as simple as that – but it is. It is called realpolitik and I looked the word up before I used it.
I have been very interested to see two US clinical psychologists talk a great deal of sense: one working in media and clinically (Dr. Martha Deiros Collado, who made the point about the addiction of anxiety I quoted) and Dr. Marc Brackett who has founded a department of emotional intelligence at Yale, whose programmes are used to some small extent in this country – and about teaching children to express and negotiate their emotions. The Princess of Wales rates him.
And for both of them – in the very limited amount I have read – the elephant in the room is parents.
We increasingly ask teachers to do what we don’t or can’t do or just don’t want to do ourselves – just as we all too often ask the police to act as interim medical aides or social workers – and complain mightily when due to sheer lack of man and woman power , they can’t and won’t.
Running standing still means none of this is new. It’s where we are. The names of the commentators may change and how they package their ideas may have a new title but bottom line, this is where we are. Both of the two I speak of know we have to start somewhere and neither of the two I refer to think difference can be made easily. Hooray.
President Trump has his views. The driver on the way to hospital was a former Afghani farmer and he talked very intelligently about mass production of food and abuse of hormones up to and including the imbalance of the genders: more women than men
because of the hormones in mass produced food, especially meat. This is not new but people won’t think about it. This is not an attack on farmers, I am not a closet vegan. But for the majority of us who like a varied diet he talked a lot of sense. And we have to keep on talking about it because people won’t think. Nobody can think for you, you have to do it for yourself.
And something happened to me last week, that I have seen on film and read about but have never experienced before. On the bus were a couple, Middle Eastern, neither dripping with money nor starrily lovely. And she was wearing a dark grey roll necked sweater. Not £800 ‘ worth of cashmere – but it is rare to see a woman from there in a dark colour. And we had already grinned at each other.
Getting off the bus, I said “How nice you look in that colour ! And I am old, I am allowed to say this…” And she took my hand. Which she held gently and lightly throughout a brief conversation with both of them. So for those few minutes not running, not standing still, just breathing the sweet air of kind difference – which is currently pretty rare.
Tempted to call this “radio silence” but out of respect for my earlier life – in spite of “soft” publicity telling us how BT hates to lose us,
it is unlikely they do. As long as there is enough money in it.
So I have been helped through transition to “port” my line elsewhere and may thus be in the darkness of no telephone connection (unlikely) and no internet (possible) and if this happens to interrupt my usual writing schedule, you may think I have shuffled off this mortal coil, without so much as a kiss-me-quick and I wouldn’t like you to think that so … all things being equal which we know they are not ..annalog will continue for a while yet, bloody but unbowed. If not . there will be a pause and resumption ie “normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.”
I don’t know about “port” but I could certainly stand smelling salts and brandy.
I was so busy reading, my coffee got cold. So when I had absorbed the best edition of the paper for a while, I came back into focus and reheated the drink. Can’t stand cold coffee. And I thought all over again of the vagaries of communication – not just modern communication – communication period.
In an age of increasing division, there are two nations – those online and those not. When we began annalog eleven years ago – I say we because it exists in communication – some kind soul wrote and said she wished I would be on Facebook, I had so many friends out there … And even then I knew, just as many enemies.
I spit on social media.
I am sure it has uses, some of them good, but I like my private life. Maybe I am the last generation who will have any grasp of the difference between public and private life , the difference between spoken and written, any sense of “haven’t you got enough problems ? What do you need any more for ?”
In current parlance , you can get hold of anybody. But you can’t. You can send them a message but there is no guarantee who receives it, what happens to it or how it is perceived. Finding a written article about Erin O’Connor
was like meeting a friend. I did meet her once in the street, six feet tall and colouring to die for. I said “ Excuse me but I admire you so much. Please shake hands with me” and stretched out my hand. She recognised me, we shook hands, and I told her of the early spread she had done which I kept. She said interestedly “ But why ? That was a long time ago ..” Which was logical if you spent much of your professional life in fashion. So I explained: she has a nose, I have a nose, as a definable feature we’re a group, she laughed delightedly – how you want a heroine to be.
If I were depressed I would explain that the cost of stamps is now so prohibitive that the post will die out, or be reborn again as a private paid for service because stories about things not arriving are legion, like a Christmas card in August. And lack of acknowledgement rules. NOT OK.
For all those who live through social media – even when it causes problems (like the 12 year old quoted by a sensible sounding clinical psychologist, who gets 200 hits
to start the day, loves them but finds the time and energy she needs to deal with them makes her anxious) – few have any insight into the pressure. I wonder if anxiety is as addictive as the process of using that all dominating click, while a young person would not necessarily recognise that disruption wasn’t only exciting, it was harmful.
There were always trolls, fixated people who can’t wait to be acknowledged for how they upset you. There was always somebody in any size audience and you learned to be ready and wary. Now they have an additional credence – the message is widely disseminated, which give sit a kind of acceptability. I don’t accept it.
I could write a list of people I would like to be in touch with , to commend or condemn but I have to admit (to myself as well as the reader) that part of that transaction is the acknowledgement.
Which is not under control. You may write to Keir Starmer expressing concern for his response to Mandelson – not only for what he (KS) didn’t “get” but for what Mandelson is, was and always will be – but there is no guarantee it reaches target, it is open to perception and abuse by every pair of hands through which it passes – hard copy, on the way to the bin or the shredder: electronic comment – well, how long is a piece of string ?
When I speak about communication, I mean me to thee, thee to me. Having written for publication for years, I accept that the words are open to interpretation which is why I am serious about what I write, Throw that into the public pond – and we’re back to throwing stones into water
If you really want to see panic in the streets, ban peroxide. Once on a bus I saw a dazzlingly pretty woman with the best coloured hair I have ever seen, completely fake, imaginative and becoming, several colours, seven strands at a time. I am sure it cost the earth to accomplish and she was willing to pay because she knew she was on a winner.
Of course – the Princess of Wales is perfectly allowed to do whatever she wants to do in the matter of her personal appearance.
I just hope – as a widely experienced hair dresser friend said to me -that the hair technicians have thought about the drugs she has been on and is probably still using in connection with her cancer. And I don’t like it. She isn’t “everybody else” and it has to work rather better than it is, to my disappointed eye. But I’d rather she let it go and grow, than tried again. Give the body a break.
The account of Orlando Bloom (poor baby, not as well known as he thinks he should be) faffing about with having his body rebuilt was mentioned alongside the singer Lulu and the late Duchess of Kent, both bemoaning over exposure. You do wonder if these people ever had any real friends – anybody who said “Great – but it comes with a very hefty price tag.”
Don’t wish for fame, says Lulu, promoting a book about her history and shortcomings . But the business in which she made her name is built on reinvention, keeping yourself up there, putting yourself forwards,
doing the next thing even if you don’t feel like it, being popular and staying in the headlines, no matter the emotional cost.
While I suppose that the late Duchess who married young (and even younger then because of her class, upbringing and expectations) just thought she’d manage – a devout Christian – on the invocation of prayer and duty,
But if you are on show – everybody wants a piece of you. They check you, your hair, your face, your makeup and whatever else you have done to yourself, your clothes, how you are wearing, never mind the clothes. Days off are rare, becoming rarer as technology explodes and there is always somebody watching.
And performers risk being chewed up and spat out, in favour of the next “new” thing.
I recently read the account of a day in the life of a young actress who is going to be a big star and the relentlessness of it repelled me. “Doesn’t matter if it’s 23 hours a day” she was quoted as saying.
Well, lots of us have done a version of that to achieve longed-for goals, but over time it affects your skin, your hair, your mental state (very popular, mental states). And ignoring the impact doesn’t make the problems go away.
I went through a phase where I felt I had to put on makeup to put out the rubbish. But it I didn’t last long because I was a radio girl. And I used to say that the day I was recognized (from some piece of itinerant tv) was always when I had a spot – which was ultimately humbling. Subsequently I took refuge in the mantra of my youth – doing my best.
Occasionally I did look splendid which was lovely when I was recognised – but nobody was bothering me as they now do celebrities, royals and pop stars. And, should my head swell even temporarily, there was always somebody to take me down a peg. Not that I am accusing any of these people of conceit – I am not.
To be an actor who is denied success in the terms he hopes for is disappointing. To be a star is mostly to be on show – pictorially and verbally – with rare exceptions (like Katherine Hepburn or Robert de Niro.) To be royal is to have a whole complex of hopes, wishes and dreams projected on to you, which means (primitively) there may be clues in how you look.
Fame and success are relative terms – they mean different things to different people. Accolade is lovely but you can’t eat it. And being seen doesn’t always mean you’re there ….
I emailed Susan not to come for coffee because my nose just runs and runs. Though I am grateful that it is running (the idea of a nose with feet is bemusing) because for three days straight, I coughed and couldn’t breathe and nothing happened. At least now, I can blow my nose. Of course it’s too much of a good thing, and I can’t move without a loo roll and the carrier bag for the discard – but it beats the impasse where I couldn’t breathe or sleep and was tired and scared.
Susan emailed sympathetically that colds are nasty – this one has a Putinsque leer.
So please – can I try again next week – having just discovered in the low autumnal sunlight, the discard from an enormous bunch of lavender all over the kitchen floor… but of course I wasn’t looking down. I was en route between the bedroom and bathroom with really not much thought in between except coughing and spluttering and wondering where I got the bug and knowing I wouldn’t give it back – it’s so horrid.
Julia Samuel called August “a month of Sunday evenings” and this is September.
for Wal was difficult. I’d get hung up in what I wanted to give him – I am crippled with good taste. I couldn’t afford it, I’d check with him and that wouldn’t work either because he wanted a surprise. Then, breakthrough … I set a limit, went to a good TK Maxx, selected carefully and bought him all sorts of unguents and cosmetic nonsense – sometimes for content, sometimes for aspiration, sometimes for amusing names or even packaging. Success.
What we give people, tangibly and otherwise – the intended not the inferred – can be very difficult. A friend’s birthday tomorrow is best not marked with a card – short term memory impairment – doesn’t remember. And what could I give Elizabeth (not her name) ?
She had a horrible, emotionally exploitative childhood hooked to respectable Catholicism on the one hand and abuse of everything that taught on the other. She has made sense of it, and of most of her life – we all falter somewhere along the line. She has picked up and rescued her husband ,equally compromised, down the years, this made more complicated by a personality that doesn’t care.
For years she has bailed him out in every way and he has just had the second wanton accident (in contravention of earlier medical advice) and expects her – without acknowledgement or discussion – to take him home and rehabilitate him. Again. She has taken legal advice, told the hospital and her estranged son (estranged from them both but still expecting her to pick up the pieces) and the aforementioned husband that she won’t be doing it.
Not this time.
When her son jibbed at it, she said quietly “Why don’t I put him on the plane and you take care of him ?” She is coping remarkably well – discovering mess in the house, unpaid bills, presumably being alone has a down as well as an up (doesn’t it always ?) And yesterday I was wandering round when I saw a book on the shelves of the local British Heart Foundation shop. I looked at the cover, I recognised the author whom I met and interviewed, and the photographer, and I bought it for the price of little more than a card.
I wrote her a note which said “think of this as a card ….” And yes, I know, it will be pricey to send but we learn over and over again that you get as much from giving as the recipient gets from the gift.
When at the end of one of those weeks when you think nothing else can go wrong, I lost my credit card, I had just found a pair of competitively priced solid winter shoes
not quite – but you know the kind of thing
which I didn’t want to lose. I explained to my son , would he buy them and I would pay him on receipt ? He said yes and did it, but when I raised the subject – he wrote and said “If I can have a moody holiday, you can have shoes – you don’t owe me anything. Shush mum, there’s a good girl … “ So I gulped, and wrote to say – I thought the holiday was well deserved, thank you for my Christmas present, I hold myself free to retaliate !
No matter your background, you chose to act out of it or against it and many of us do a bit of both. Occasionally I hear my fierce little mother issue from my lips, complete with intonation. One of the saddest things about abuse is that abusers were often abused in their turn. And then I’ve just read about the chief scout Dwayne Fields who without the personal charisma and commitment of his grandmother and his aunt when he was very young, had the kind of background where you wind up in prison, dead or addicted. Clearly not him .
I had a bad time at primary school – wrong face, wrong voice – until my father lifted me on to the kitchen table so I was closer to his big height, my mother to the side – and told me “Do whatever you have to do – your mother and I will back you. 200 per cent.” My mother nodded emphatically. And I fought back. I loved the generosity of the 200 per cent. Gift for life.
we had a period devoted to community singing. We gathered in the hall, the odd lyric on a blackboard, song books some of which seemed to have come from the BBC children’s programming. Older children, younger, all of us ? I can’t remember but we sang together, occasionally cheered on or criticised. This was not a fill in (as in the “Mr.Elson is away so we will be in the Hall for …”). It was on the schedule.
Memory comes and goes, I’m not going to say with age because it always did, personal or collective, triggered by temperature, taste, smell, association of ideas, a word, a gesture, a snatch of music, a sudden revelation -often when you are completely not expecting it.
Sometimes memorial ritual is enacted but slides away into the shadows, recalled perhaps in a context that seems unreasonable years later.
A dear friend’s husband died last week, a long time sufferer from Parkinson’s Disease. They had gone to live in Spain, recommended for PD, second only to the US. And often, the more important people are to you, the harder it is to find the words. So I prayed and I wrote. And I was lucky, she “heard” me.
It fascinates me, what history remembers and what it forgets and when remembrance breaks through, how that may be distorted over time. I read a wonderful novel about the Pilgrimage of Grace. I thought it was made up and darned clever – but no, it was history I had never heard.
History is not a person so the people who come after choose – remember this, just put that aside and this week on VJ Day
at the elegant National Arboretum, tribute was paid to the unsung suffering of the communities of the Far East – which perhaps because many are now independent, and as we say “moved on”, raised the difficult issues of Empire, colonialism, destruction and suffering which are much harder to remember than winning. I’d say surviving all that was another kind of bravery.
The theatre of war in the Far East in WWII touches me because it was the biggest army from India, then not independent or divided, as well as thousands and thousands more. And forgetting them
was a rerun of the small army in WWI in which my father served, in India and Mesopotamia, pushed aside by the catastrophic losses in Europe.
If there is a positive lesson from all this, it is that “this too shall pass.”
We all come to the end. I do hope the resurgence of Christianity among the young will teach a more useful acceptance of the end. Because everything ends. No matter how mighty, every civilization falls – to war or pestilence or geographical infelicity (wrong place, wrong time).
What I loved about my old community singing was the inclusion. I am deeply grateful to my parents, schools and life for teaching me – not that everybody is nice or worthy or you want to be best friends with them – but that we are all human. And humans end.
The pursuit of youth, youth delaying age, delay of age putting off death defines the age we live in, the subject of endless lucrative and often unbecomingly desperate preoccupation – diet and exercise, mental disciplines, sleep, surgery and all the rest. This is a millions miles away from taking reasonable care of yourself and making the best of yourself so that you feel as good as you can to face the day.
There are people who can’t do death. But war or illness doesn’t ask you. It takes. And you are left with whatever it is, to get on with afterwards. John Harlow just didn’t make it (he died in the runup to yesterday’s ceremony). He was on the last surviving submarine laying mines and he said he always thought of his colleague Mark, with whom he had trained, on another vessel . “War doesn’t grant you the luxury of goodbyes” he said, ending “ there’s no pride and no glory. So, forget war and pick peace.”
For the rest of us, life is war, often including dying – and death is peace.
When my son was in a push chair we took him to Crete
for holiday where we had been before and Sonia Dioxinadis moved heaven, earth and chicken to turn up with a dozen eggs overed with bits of grass and hay. “From the farm” she said. “Not the store !” That’s a gift and don’t say – but it’s only small. Who’s measuring ?
I gave my mother her first cashmere one Christmas. She muttered something and took the dog out rather quickly. I was a bit dashed. When she came back I was in the kitchen, ministering to food, and she came and put her arms round me from behind, whispering almost awed in my ear “I am wearing cashmere – and my daughter gave it to me !” Forget jewels.
There are people who don’t know what to do, to respond to gifts. They say thank you and the day goes on. There are people who don’t know how to give them or how to receive them. Of course you can save up and buy a luxury, but it is often imagination – or even chance – that makes a gift.
Last night was the end of an era.
The Boys – three young men who came to lodge in James’s stepmother’s flat five years ago – have moved on to the next stage – Harry to girlfriend, James to girlfriend and AJ staying with girlfriend. I did not go and say a collective goodbye having said a quieter one to both the men concerned. And when I thank ked Harry for all their kindnesses and considerations, he said “ But Anna, it’s mutual. I never had a good neighbour before” which meant so much to me, I wrote it down.
(I have always written things down and sometimes even that doesn’t help me to negotiate self centredness and Swiss Cheese Syndrome ie holes in memory.)
And today he topped it. He arrived with a book and a card in which he has written all the nice things you might expect, having some social grace. Though Harry is a velvet glove over a steel fist – I recognize it and I think it will serve him well. We sat in the kitchen while he drank a glass of water and told me about his promotion. All three of them lefthanded, he wrote his name and his new address in the book and I promised him a Christmas card.
So little is free nowadays that you can’t wonder at the success of a book about raising a leveret
by Albrecht Durer
and returning it to the wild (Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton), more goodwill than money, with more attention paid to the animal and its history, the weather and the vegetation than anything else.
Gathering to moan about this or that may be a negative gift perhaps but a gift. It’s free. People say talk’s cheap but if it makes you feel better, it’s beyond price and it’s not cheap in this house.
I prefer to call talk , exchange
by Hedwig Oehring
because that’s the gift for me ie I tell you and you tell me or the other way round. Benign verbal tennis. I don’t know why the sound of the spoken voice became so important to me – but I recognize where it falls short. There is a term in opera for a single singer half speaking, half singing over a narrow range of notes – recitative – and we have all been on the end of those. Worse still, you can offer suggestions and advice which are shoved aside by the leviathan of lonely complaint. Not everything can be fixed but quite a lot can be ameliorated. Not interested. Callers used to tell me their story over and over, as if repetition would magically fix it. And it didn’t. Thank heaven, not many of those.
There are gifts that come and go, and gifts that remain, tangible and intangible. Gifts that smile or bring a smile to the face unexpectedly. Like the print of Victorian household machines from a Mrs. Beeton book – she advised on all domestic arts as well as cookery – my son gave me when he was 12. It has the air of beloved memory round it. Given.
The only person I have known who smelt wonderful in Chanel Five
was my sister. I smelt like enthusiastic dog vis a vis lamppost. I can’t remember – was I more crushed or more embarrassed ? Anyway, never again. A wistful niff in the bottle promised like the lure of the sirens but I left it there.
When I spoke about something two or three weeks hence, my mother would say “Don’t wish your life away” . I didn’t understand then, I do now. When I was so wipeout ill at Christmas last – a benchmark of all sorts for me – I had to reevaluate me and time. “Time masters you” said my father. “You don’t master time.” Where I was then, you enter time.
Like a mood or a building – to learn anew. And if that’s the image in your mind, it lingers.
This Sunday morning, so enjoying the preceding evening with Joan Hickson as the definitive Miss Marple (BBC4), I permitted myself to look at the tv programme for next Saturday to find yes, more of my Marple but also an episode of Beck.
Chickens will not be counted before they are hatched. It may be cancelled for something like a pop concert or an netball championship … You see, it’s always personal.
Not another whinge about tv scheduling, the Karate Kid on a loop, segments of Midsummer Murders so old they have whiskers and can only have sedative value but I forbear. That’s not what I want and it’s always personal.
I shall not complain again about quiz shows
and how not to make documentaries because it is always personal but so is paying a licence fee for the unwatchable and the endlessly repeated. A correspondent to my favourite tv column remarked that the BBC was charging us for programmes already made and shown (x 6 !) which was financially questionable.
I forbear to bitch and moan about wildlife programmes which feature the presenters in preference to the beasts. I shall not attitudinise about the style of some (not all ) documentaries, the lack of curiosity which must drive their making – up to and including questions asked and not answered to keep the flow of bitesized bits moving (Channel 5’s The Secret Life of Trees). It’s always personal.
Pam the Painter and I discovered the difference in our tastes long ago and she described in detail a recent visit to Dungeness
(look it up) as fascinating and made it so for me in the telling. She is unlikely to watch BBC’s European editor Katya Adler (pause for cheers ) interviewing Germany’s former Chancellor Mrs. Merkel – but she listens to me explaining why I was so interested, my interpretation presumably doing for her what hers does for me. It’s always personal.
Levels of toleration and interpretation in the evocation of style and period varies. I remember Wal ringing to inveigh about the china in Downton Abbey – “ how could they ?” Well, he was a Thomas Goode’s expert and I remember walking into a French museum with a room of full of china on the right about which he knew a great deal. Other people’s expertise seizes the imagination.
I like my detectives to be more involved in people than guns. I accept the idea of guns, and the other day I saw a bit of a Western I have never seen (The Big Trail , directed by Raoul Walsh in 1930 – not a typo – with a backstory at least as fascinating as the cinematography and the first named appearance of a 23 year old John Wayne, long on masculine beauty and short on mannerisms) – I was really delighted – something new in the antique department.
The French language Maigret on TPTV is a joy in professional integrity (casting, script, story, period and location) but I accept – it’s always personal.
And as I said to the very helpful woman at Barclaycard (lost and had to be stopped) five calls in with endless “just call our app” , “if you take my money the old fashioned way, you can help me when I get into old fashioned difficulty and no AI can do what you’ve just done, thank you so much “ – it’s always personal.
Anna's 40 year long award-winning journalistic career as an adviser (nowadays we say "agony aunt - she loves the job, hates the title) has spanned magazines, radio, television and newspapers; including a 14 year run at Capital Radio with her groundbreaking show 'Anna and the Doc', and 7 years at Talk Radio hosting 'Live and Direct' and her work was rewarded with a Gold Sony award and induction into the Radio Hall of Fame....Read More
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