Annalog

Growing up I had several books about Marise who was a pilot in the Winter War

between Russia and Finland (the present horror should end so soon).   I remember vaguely one of the covers and some of a saying “Something is as full of wisdom as an egg is full of meat.”  You can tell I was struck by this because it has stayed with me.   Vegetarians look away now, meat to me meant meat -stew, roast, chops.  I’d never thought of using meat as an alternative word to food,  I think I probably checked up on it with my parents.  Maybe it stuck because it’s single syllables.   Maybe it just produced an image that lodged with me, slices of something in a shell.

I had chocolate eggs,

of course I did.  The family predilection for plain rather than milk persisted.  My much older sister and my mother went to trouble to get me plush covered eggs in lovely colours which they then filled with pretty silly bits.    I was a fortunate child without much of a sweet tooth.

Easter soon became a couple of days off.  And now, an elderly non driver, I avoid the lemming rush that Easter has become, made more pressing by the lack of freedom of movement and sun.  I had a different kind of Easter.

There is an agapanthus

in the garden which expanded and split the very pretty earthenware pot it was in.  I kept looking at it and it looked back.  Eventually I raised a hand to take away the broken piece and tried to ascertain whether I was going to be able to move the beast.   Moved a little too far towards me, I wound up with something very heavy above shoulder level and braced muscles I knew should not be involved.  As quickly and carefully as I could, I put it down.  Swearing.  Dead pot, must get something lighter.

Early that evening I saw Sarah Super Neighbour unpacking her car.  She is a gardener so I asked.   (Don’t ask, don’t get is a great rule – provided you are prepared to be refused).  I explained and she began to smile, raised a hand and walked away from me into the doorway, returning with a big light planter she had just bought from Lidl.  “Will this do ? “ she said “I just bought two because I can’t handle the weight any more.” I looked at her.  “Happy Easter” she said.  I offered to pay, of course I did.  She waved it away.  And it’s perfect. 

  (She went back and bought two more, I offered to buy those too, but she declined.)  

Later I exchanged greetings with the young man who lives on the other side and reminded him that he had offered to lend me his father’s long handled clippers to deal with the honeysuckle which needs what is professionally called a light pruning.  I have been in touch with five gardeners including the man with the white bull terrier but none of them apparently know how to say “Sorry, small job, not worth it.”  There isn’t an app for it.   “I’ll get the ladder” he said, “I can reach that. “  And with the existing shears and instructions from below (me) he did just that. 

He later turned up with a vase full of variously coloured tulips

and a covered dish.  “I’m going to my dad’s tomorrow” he said “ and these are just going to die.  So I thought you might enjoy them.  And this is leftovers from the salad to pick at …”  So he’s definitely a double yolk.

When I went for a walk on Saturday, I smiled at a tall slender dark woman incredibly 44,  brought up in Tanzania,  and as she was in Ramadan and I am not keen on bought coffee, we just skipped that and talked for an hour till her daughter arrived (quite lovely, reading politics at Bristol).  Both of them hugged me in farewell.   Never underestimate the hug – it is invaluable. 

And thus uplifted, I fell off the wagon and bought two books and a half a bottle of brandy.  Kindness,  generosity, open heartedness, thought, good humour, personal warmth and constructive self- indulgence – my eggs were full of meat.

There are people you don’t like. 

You may hardly have met them but you don’t like them.   Like the girl I went to school with, who made my hackles go up like a hostile dog’s, and that was before we were seated together when she took some skin on the inside of my arm and twisted till I was breathless.  I stayed as far away as possible from then on.

Non verbal communication is fast and rarely without a point.

  You don’t like the feeling you get about that woman you’re going to have to work with ?   There will be a reason …   As people revisit the horror of Jimmy Savile, I remember that I only watched television at my friend Muriel’s house. My mother came to collect me from there one day and looked briefly at the screen.  “What a horrible person” she said, “ .. those hands.  That is a Bad Man.”   You could always hear my mother’s initial capitals and the phrase came from her childhood.   Darned right.

Sometimes of course you are helpless with inexperience, embarrassment and fear.  And as such you are a suitable target for such a person whose own perception finds you with frightening ease.  And while you grow up, grow older and can take better care of yourself   – what stays in your mind is the time you couldn’t, you didn’t.

Dazzled, I went to a party with some people slightly older and a whole more sophisticated than I was and I hung about to be backed into a corner by a drunken fool who held me with one hand and masturbated all over my skirt with the other.  When I could get away, I fled to the bathroom to sponge myself down, went out, got my coat and left.  Halfway across a darkened square,

the driver of a black cab, having a quiet smoke, suggested he might take me home.  I thanked him but said I didn’t have the money.  “Are you all right ?” he said.  “Get in the cab – I don’t care about the money.  You’re the same age as my daughter (17)…”   My hired car of choice for the rest of time, bless him.  Not that I could tell him what really happened.  I later learned that the group referred to the young unknowing like me as “fresh meat.”

Both my parents endorsed in different ways and probably by different routes the use of animal perception – they openly endorsed it, they always had.  Finding my feet in London, I learned the value of what they had offered me.  Nothing is infallible, you can be wrong. If so, you apologise.  There are lots of stories about men and/or women who didn’t like each other on sight and came to see each other differently but there is a mutuality in that, which is usually missing from the experience described above.  There are people you like as inexplicably and strongly as the ones you shy away from – the positive

is just as magical as the negative.

The other night on television there was an item on rape as a weapon of war.   Are there are still people who do not understand that humiliation and starvation are of unparalleled efficiency when destabilising a population and making it malleable ?   And sometimes even without thoughtful reporters, government spokespersons and just the knowledge that for the first time in a couple of generations, war is on the doorstep – the combination of inflation, household bills, the price of everything, lingering Covid and staggering institutions combines into real fear.  And many people combat fear

with rage.  And the rage bounces up from the street and you wade through it.   It’s frightening.  You can almost smell it.

After a couple of days of this, I made a magic.  Ignoring the electric light, I lit candles, closed the shutters.  A fire sign, I lit my illicit fire.  And in the glow of those benign lights, I watched the first segment of Art That Made Us (BBC2) which had more going for it than against it and as my art historian friend remarked, I saw early things in the light they were seen in when they were new.  And the air was warm, I hid from the horror – and slept.  Gratefully.  

What’s with the bare ankles ? 

  I understood it last summer when what you were demonstrating was  perhaps that you could turn yourself inside out, redolent of feline, to get your fake tan round those tricky bones.  Or that you had been somewhere warm, in one of those hard to organise pauses in the pandemic agreed between heaven and Downing Street.   Or you have white ankles (or pink or grey) because you won’t tan/can’t tan/don’t care  – open to interpretation.  And of course the British are endlessly hopeful about spring – three green shoots, two warm days and it’s pink linen and summer time.  In this I am profoundly unBritish.   And of course I am old, so I feel the cold.

And in the cold snap, the bare ankles continued like a badge of honour at the bottom of the athletic gear which confirms the wearer as a runner/exerciser who won’t be giving in to the chill as the rest of us experience it.   It looked odd to see people wearing hats to keep their ears warm, muffled in fake fur, with two inches of bare ankles above trainers.

The prize goes to a woman I see often, in her unsmiling forties, glued to her mobile, swathed in sweaters and a thick coat and scarves but with her feet shoved into flip flops.    A gold star in ambivalence.    

Wal’s best ever advice may not be the most glamorous but it was warm – a small inexpensive (to purchase and run) radiator with wheels to take the chill off the long double room – one end sitting room, one end office.   And I am wearing sweaters, thick tights (successfully bought in sale when Tabio’s lease ran out) and corduroys.   I look 142 but then I feel 142.   I love the sunlight but the weather in itself is a mixed message

and the world is full of them.

I’d say I was a fortunate woman and the other night I stood and looked the books I cherish and the  things I have collected and been given and thought “Yes and one bomb through those double windows and it’s all gone.”   Life is fragile

and it always was.  The realities vary from how the leaders perceive them to how their military are instructed to respond to them, from the military through their armaments, from the armaments to the resistors, who is supplying them and how long can they resist.  While on every side is the detritus of war – the fallout, the fall down, the collateral damage – people caught in the crossfire, starving animals, contaminated land, blown up , destroyed and wounded, and the dead. 

A quiet man with an accent explained on a news programme that 40 per cent of the refugees were children and they were traumatised children,

enduring inexplicable noise and disruption, losing their pets and their friends and leaving fathers and other family members behind.  “They are going to need a lot of help” he said steadily.  And I thought of going to visit one of the first people I knew who had a flat rather than a room in one, five locks on the front door and asking “What … ?”   The woman who had lived there was a Holocaust survivor. 

And after several weeks in which I read newspaper articles and watched my allowance of broadcast news and for the first time I can remember, couldn’t read – I finally read history

which, as my mother always said, is very restful – because it is over.   And that got me to pick up a book about Rudyard Kipling and the writing of the Just So stories for which he won the Nobel.  And he too was a survivor, of the habit of sending the children of the establishment home to school in England from the outposts of the Empire, to the detriment of his relationship with his own parents and a lifelong pull between what he wanted life to be and what it was, how he wanted to be and who he was.  I  wonder if and what he learned from the contemplation of his past.    I wonder how much any of us learn – too darned little and too darned slow.

“Are you doing anything special for your birthday ?” 

From my mother, I inherited the idea that it’s my day and I can do anything I like with it.  To have a day off was special for her, freighted with things to do.  She let me be (not a party animal), undisturbed by what other families did but I remember cards and cake and a wonderful sense of build up to the day.

My 40^th birthday was worth waiting for, everything my 21^st was supposed to be.  I felt better, looked better, had work I loved.  There was a man and a child, a dog and a home.  I’ve always enjoyed the rattle of the letterbox

and the thump of the mail.  Forget the cake.  I once bought mortadella for my birthday.  But between advancing tech, declining mail and busy lives, my birthday seems to have become less of a date and more of an area. 

Bet (NHN) sent me an email to say thank you.  She said she grew up with me

(I can’t tell you what a compliment that is) and she had seen me (recognised by voice), hesitated and the moment was lost.  The enchantment of this kind of communication does not fade – indeed you could say it gets more precious.  Her timing was apt, enabling me to do my bits of washing and what not, wreathed in smiles.  It’s 12 years since I was in the public eye and people are very generous.

Then I heard from Mark (NHN) whom I met when he was a tv researcher, now working on some sociological project in which he thought I might be interested/of interest.  He remembered the programme he involved me in, the restaurant he took me to – this was a long time ago.  I asked for a telephone number and rang him, we were both pleased at the exchange and will be meeting later this month.

You may not think of these as cards but I do.  Goodwill

is in short supply and to be offered it warmly and willingly seems like a big deal to me.

When Ginny (NHN) rang after a few days R&R in Ireland, it was hard to know which of us was more pleased.  She has had a year she will never forget, stretched to the limit by her mother’s cancer (so far, so good),her own health issues of which Covid was the least, working from home to hang on to a job, driving the considerable distance between her mother’s home and her own, her job and various hospitals.   No better present than good news.

Nella (NHN) moved across town from the upstairs flat (my loss and the landlady’s, the best cleaner ever) but was in the neighbourhood and came in for a glass of wine.  She is her first job, training as an architect after a formidable academic beginning, and we talk easily and well, she as much as me !  I never fail to be touched – she is 25 to my nearly 78.   But when she left 3 hours later I realised I hadn’t eaten so I scoffed an avocado

and made a small bowl of pasta to avoid waking ravenous at 4.00 am.  It must be very clear by now that exchange is very high on my list of pleasures.  Even after all these years, a human voice is a good start to the day.

And Alex came in last night to tell me he had enjoyed Ralph Fiennes in David Hare’s play Straight Line Crazy, about Robert Moses who designed the wonders of modern New York by rolling over whoever or whatever got in the way unquestioned, an exercise in power.   Alex is young too, works and plays hard regarding an expressed concern for his tiredness as a slur on his masculinity: just about to drive home to dogsit and breathe for a few days. 

And in conversation I showed him the picture of my parents, from 1932 on the front at Deal in Kent, with my sister as a toddler because, forget the faces, it captures more of the spirit of my parents than any other picture – and that spirit comes closer as I get older.   And he understood.  That’s a present.     

NHN – not his/her name

There is that wisdom which says something to the effect that you have to recognise unhappiness to know when it ends

and you are happy – but the relentlessness of the turning world is all around us.  I sat with a woman friend in a restaurant where I ate a piece of halibut which was a thing of wonder and drank a Bloody Mary.  That’s what we had – one plate each, shared fried zucchini and a drink  – no multiples of white wine, no moody puddings.  And she talked mostly about her husband, to whom she was married long and miserably, and to whom after a divorce and the love of her life dying of a heart attack 10 years in, she returned (don’t ask).  He is now deeply uncomfortable in terminal illness. And the sun shone.

It feels terrible to be sipping spring

while Ukraine is being bombed into tomorrow morning and for the record, I wept when I saw the destruction in Syria and cursed Assad. I am not blind to Vladolf’s sense that deeds speak louder than words, what price war crimes on a man who doesn’t admit to making war ?   And the contradictions never end.

You do better if you live a small life, not a narrow existence but something in human scale, accepting that, while you may think about all sorts of things, thinking is all you will do.  And the more intricately busy the world gets, the more important it is to understand how various it is.  And your choices, whether made through a process of thought or apathy are real

and they all have costs.  That you may work in media (40 years in print, radio and TV) and never have thought of marketing to the 2 to 5 year demographic (yes the tinies)

images already made popular through YouTube (see Moonbug) via your phone.  

 I am not keen on seeing the screen offered to the very young.  I believe that the size of the screen makes a difference in perception.  And if I am going to read an article about Moonbug, I want them to read David Smith’s The Big Screen.  If the related industries thought the founders’ acquisition of rights to material already in the public domain wasn’t relevant  – and it proved to be just the opposite with lots of lovely money – I want them to read the history of the screen and think a bit.  It may not be relevant now but I bet it will be.

Dov served in the Israeli army through a war and wound up one morning in the Negev,

his best friend dead, thinking  “I don’t want this.  I want to be at the beach , eating ice cream,  looking at pretty girls.”  He called his country “the land of blood and orange juice” – it shocked me.  I think I imagined the blood in the orange juice and that disturbed me even more.    

This morning before the convenience store opened – always late on Sundays – I flicked on tv (unusual for me) to hear an ITV reporter speaking to a women of her own age (mid thirties) about being trapped in one of the Ukraine cities, under bombardment and asking “So tell me what is your life like on a day to day basis ?” That’s a quote.  And I switched off.  I am not sure what the blow by blow account of a war in real time will do to you,

but it won’t do me any good.

I can’t fight and my techie skills aren’t sophisticated enough to be useful.   Rolling bandages and knitting socks is a bit old hat and anyway this incursion unrolled so fast there was no time for either, even if they had been relevant.  The British government that is allegedly dealing with the national interest in this situation, isn’t a government in whom I repose much confidence about anything but that’s who we’ve got.  The good news is that the European countries (including us) appear to be speaking to each other again with rather more clarity and good intent than for the last several years.  Maybe we can keep the blood out of the orange juice.  I hope so.

We have had many good years of peace.

  What wars there were, were far away.   And from time to time, one person or another has wondered, often aloud, if we have not become spoilt and take our advantages for granted, if we didn’t need a war to shake us up ?    File under “be careful what you wish for”.

In the supermarket early one morning just before Christmas, apart from the staff, there were maybe  half a dozen customers.  Those who were going away had left or were home packing.  And the others would come along a little later, unhurried.  While the store looked richly wonderful – clean and neat and glowing with every kind of fruit and meat and vegetable, all the dairy, all the confectionery, boxes of this and cartons of that, overflowing grocery possibilities in seasonal finery, and I thought how privileged I was.  This is what was on offer and I was free to chose from it.

I thought of it again last week as people tried to get out of Mariupol for the third time and we heard that the heating was blown, it was snowing and cold, and they were sitting in the dark, short of food and water.  

  And I thought of the boys I saw on the news, from a Scots soccer club who had sponsored a small orphanage a long time ago , visiting regularly, and who had gone out by lorry or minibus to take food and do what they could, who have brought blankets and toys and raised funds, have a place for the kids to go back in Scotland, sponsors for them – and momentarily can’t get them into the country.  “Don’t they understand” said one young man to camera, “we are familiar to the children,

it’s much better for them to be with us ?”  

And yesterday I met Vanessa, a retired businesswoman and she told me that she had had contact with the vicar of the Anglican Church in Moscow and tried to persuade him and his wife they’d be better off elsewhere  … “But you know, people make up their own minds” she said wistfully – before going on to tell me that she had made her contribution to Ukraine through the Salvation Army because she dislikes the deduction from our gift to administrative costs.  I have just rung the Salvation Army (thank you Ed), been reassured as to how they are helping and made my donation through their appeal.

As naughty schoolgirls we used to say “Cast thy bread on the waters and let it be returned in sandwiches.” I don’t think much is going to multiply in Ukraine except sadness and disappointment, broken hearts and loss.   The sheer destruction makes you feel sick.  And then you see a commodities broker, a woman broadcasting from Turkey, analysing how the wastage of vast amounts of foodstuffs

will impact throughout Southern Europe and Northern Africa, a cry taken up yesterday by President Macron – not because there is an answer but because he wants the question to be under consideration  – as of now.

The Fire Fairy (so named because of the colour of her hair, among other things) had a brother who died very suddenly.  I never met him.  But he arrived in my dream

and I recognised him.  And I woke up wondering why in the world am I dreaming about Mike ?    When the FF and I sorted that out, she was not in the least surprised that I had “heard” him.   Given that we all dream all the time, I don’t remember most of mine but the ones I do remember have a logic of their own.

So perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised when a day or two later, and I was due to work for the Radio Academy with two women I had never met (Emma B and Sangeeta Pillai – in the event,  delightful) – I was very nervous.  Tossing and turning , unsettled through the fretful night, when I did fall into some sort of stupor, I heard low voices, the odd cry, the sounds of broken sleep, bodies waiting, turning, waiting again, the crackle of hands held against the dark – and I wondered if I was hearing Ukraine, knowing it was only a matter of time to the next round… And of course I woke again and again, listening for the sound of waiting, powerless.

* by Sir Thomas Wyatt

Vladimir Putin

(excuse me while I spit) has made the old choice: either be loved or feared, and he has chosen feared.  Firing on mostly women and children on their way to or through what was believed to be a safe corridor is a new low in the Kremlin War, my name for it, because so many Russians are appalled by this international violence, in under and around a state media which has raised brainwashing to habitual consumption. 

But you must remember – dictators don’t fight wars by laws.  They order whatever seems expedient.

I have never been a fan of rolling news

which is described as “a 24 hour a day news service.”   I only  worked in news as a temporary presenter during the Gulf War when I learned that, for a lack of something new, you reshuffled the order of the stories you’d got and read them again.  It is still done. That was the time to push if that was the direction I wanted to go in, and it wasn’t.

If nothing is happening, rolling news is pad pad pad and if something is happening, the watcher is plagued by the feeling he or she might have missed something.   The way news is “made” is a story, and it is not mine to tell, though I am allowed as a consumer to comment on it.

A headline last week read “Ukraine couldn’t have come at a better time for Boris Johnson.”    Forget the parties, forget the wasted public funds and heartbreak.  By all means.  Done is done, forget them.  But DON’T forget lying at the despatch box in the Mother of Parliaments.  The House of Commons may not wish to call it lying but the rest of us can.   Never mind a knighthood for BBFs (Boris’s Best Friends) the former education secretary Gavin Williamson

or a higher honour for the man who owns the Evening Standard and the Independent (!) Evgeny Lebedev.

   Never mind gongs in a dishonoured and devalued system.   Let’s have real praise for those who stand and fight and those who bring us news of them, for reporters under fire who can weave reporting and commentary into an intelligent piece to camera, over and over again.

The senior fellow for land warfare, International Institute for Strategic Studies

has written an update of the battle positions.   A major female columnist

wrote that she was not surprised that many younger women were high in their praise of Ukrainian President Zelensky –  she called it the ”natural human response of a person starved of  examples of honour, decency and courage … when seeing those qualities can still exist in a leader.”   Could we please remember Mrs. Zelensky too, because it is hard to watch someone you love in daily danger?   You’re not invested in him being a hero, you just want him home in one piece for you and your children.

As BBC’s International Correspondent Lyse Doucet remarked recently, this is a very personal war – people found ways to relate to it, through history, through being the parent of a child in need, through the World Judo Federation, through gallows humour – often the best kind.   In the long settled West we live in various degrees of security, enhanced by the solidarity of the buildings where we live  – which lasts just until you see what damage a bomb can do to a pleasant apartment block in a Ukrainian city.   

Two very different friends (both men) have told me of unsettled sleep and bad dreams.  One of them sent me a set of statistics about Ukraine, its oil, its wheat, its manganese: of course the Russian despot wants it raped.   It’s valuable.  The other man bemoaned getting old, being unable to do anything.  I sympathise, being a witness to horror is horrible.

And I have a nightmare too.  In my dream Putin, even older and fuller of filler, comes to London on a state visit.  I cannot see in my dream who is the royal riding with him in the state landau.  (It is part of the royal job, HM has hosted some horrible people.) There are crowds in the streets and not a word, not a sound …

The people opposite

have spent the better part of a year changing the shape of the house they bought.  Each to his own. My idea of altering a house is at most a minor extension.  Otherwise, a revamped bathroom or some bookshelves.  They have rebuilt the house they bought and then began Round Two which involved a loft extension.   When the storms and the winds came, that scaffolding didn’t look any too safe to me. 

In the upheaval, the houses on both sides have sustained damage and you don’t want holes in the roof if the weather is cold and wet.   You don’t want structural damage, full stop.   

Having bought a property with everything wrong with it, Buns nearly killed himself holding the roof on with one hand and keeping the cellar dry with the other.   And decorating and improving.  When it eventually sold, he couldn’t believe it.  Since then he has been to Dublin

(he is a closet Celt) and back, back to Dublin, looked at properties, stayed with friends on both sides of the Irish Sea, packed and unpacked his essential belongings, spent more money than I could bear to on storage, more energy than I could bear to arranging the transport of his vehicle, his equipment (radio man), worrying and not sleeping – both of which he does to Olympic standard.   It’s all money going out and he needs a place to call home.  He came back to the Blightly side and promptly left for a week in Spain.  I hope Spain makes him sleep, nothing else seems to.   He cannot decide until he can decide and I couldn’t live like that for two months, let alone two years.

In my life, I have lived in some horrible places, which I scrubbed and sprayed,  where I kept things in suitcases as cleaner and safer, and moved on as soon as I could.   But where I lived was mine.  I paid the rent and shut the door.   I couldn’t have survived without. 

Lack of privacy, no time to think by myself without any other input, would finish me. I could live much more modestly than I now do, which God knows isn’t glamorous, but I would still have to have such a place, where I could catch my breath, without witness.

If I think about home, I think of what I came from and what I took with me into the homes I made and I am deeply grateful.  Home to me means order, not obsessive cushion twitching , just space on desks, things in jars, garden tools where I can find them, all the clothes hung up in the days when I had a big enough cupboard, now swapped over once a year between the chest and the wardrobe, cleaning and turning out on the way.  Books.   A neighbour came in last week and exclaimed “Your books are in wine crates !”  I internalised that from a French book of interior decoration ideas 10 years before. 

Home.

Home means buses and tubes I know, where to buy certain foods or toiletries.  It means a chemist with common sense, and a sort of all round dry goods store, where I can buy compost.  It means the shape of the street and who lives where. You don’t have to like them all but it helps if you know their names or their faces.  They often come good in the most unexpected ways.

Home is where you hole up when you’re not well and wait till you’re better, like a beast in its den.  It means where you shut the door in the heat of summer, taking off all your sweaty clothes to put directly into the washing machine or to soak in the basin.   It means where you come in freezing in winter and walk straight through to put a light under the soup in the kitchen. 

It means where you can always find a plaster for a cut, yours or anybody else’s.  It means where the bits and pieces your friends have given you down the years have a place, on which light shines from the street.

It’s what people are fighting for in Ukraine. 

*The title comes from Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz: “there’s no place like home …”

Early afternoon the day of the storm, a man materialised on a link from the south of England to Jane Hill, BBC wonderful, and told how, with the schools closed because of the weather, he and his colleagues had “placed” several hundred school meals via social media and local contact groups. “We didn’t waste a fish finger” he said beaming.

It’s been a week of events – a friend brought me a wonderfully carved wooden spoon, my son visited with his little girl, the telephone and the screen went down for 36 hours, the repair followed by the worst artificial voice message I have ever heard, and I lost a gold pin.

For my 50^th birthday my then husband gave me two diamonds in a plastic box from Schipol Airport.  I took them to the only place I then knew to have them made into something, and while there fell in love with a plain gold pin – a bar with a curl and a clip.  I bought it.  It has been endlessly useful,  currently stitched carefully inside the pocket of the  lacquer red coat I use to get the paper – it fastens the flap across the chest and throat. 

Last night brought sleep for the first night in several, thanks to hot bath, hot milk, half a Nytol.     I got up and went off for the paper, corduroys, sweater, red coat and scarf round head. The wind may not be Eunice but it is still blowing. 

I bought four oranges for £1 (juice) and the Sunday Times.  I met Maggie who identifies me by once having discussed a post nasal drip with her.  I don’t see her often but the last two conversations over some months have begun “ You know that post nasal drip of yours … ?” in a big South London voice.  Last time was on a bus from behind a mask.  Barry Cryer lives, I thought.  Short exchange, she’s a happychondriac, can’t wait to discuss her health. My post nasal drip is merely the entry point.

  And I took the scarf off and let the wind blow.  Arrived home, came in and took the oranges out of the bag, went to take my coat off – no pin.

I checked my pockets, the floor, the table, outside the door – put my coat back on and went back to the shop where Sunday shift involves two men who can ring all sorts of bets and procedures on the till and other machines but don’t speak English.  “Pin” is beyond them.  I walked carefully home.  I saw a magpie and just as I was about to tell him/her to scat, there was a second.  I thought “two for joy” was a bit mean. 

  I came home, checked at home again. 

It was a light thing, it would be blown, and the street was full of lots of dead leaves and the detritus people can’t be bothered to wrap or dispose of properly, loads of it blowing about, and the daily discard.  But I remembered where I met Maggie, and after her, a frilly woman with a frilly dog.  That’s where I took the scarf off … go back and check.

Second outing : this is silly, even with your glasses on. A little thing like that in the street, in a wind.  Retraced steps, searching,  and turned to come back.  It’s gone.  Damn.  There will be a reason, even I don’t understand it.  Looking carefully.  And there it was

under a sapling halfway down my street.  I  looked up and the magpies did a lap of honour.  I thanked them and God and picked it up and came home.

If it’s so important to you, I hear you say, why don’t you put it in a safe place, for best ?  My mother taught me best for everyday, better be, otherwise not much point.  I like to use things.   I remember shying away from confessing to Wal the breakage of some early gift.  Wal, who cherishes his possessions fiercely, said “These things happen, it’s a thing.  It is meant to be used.”    And I am usually careful. So, hooray for “we didn’t waste a fish finger ” and my haystack needle.   Little things may please little minds but small joys matter when big things start to slip.

It is nearly 40 years since I bought  a teapot,

1890s, American, cobalt blue, shape reminiscent of Aladdin’s lamp.   And it came apart in me hands, mum, three weeks ago.  I knew it was irreplaceable but not in such terms. Wal, on line wizard, offered to help me.  He sent me pictures of a dozen perfectly serviceable teapots which didn’t do anything to me, or him.  So we abandoned that.  I looked in the John Lewis flagship where they were ugly and expensive, at a name kitchenware store – ditto,  and another – same again.   

I went to Wilko -no, Robert Dyas – no and Zara Home – no (they all cross referenced each other).  I found what I wanted but I couldn’t order it and neither could the only young person I felt able to ask.

Coming back from an outing, on a different bus, I passed what we used to call a hardware store, leaped off.  Charming girl, mean teapots.  (This teapot has to meet the needs of Wal who is multi cup, runs on builders’ brew, and me – though the days when I drank a lot of tea are gone.   And I pass on the pretentious overpriced rubbish that people call coffee, preferring water).

Further down the road however I hit a home run – size, price and colour OK and a woman who wrapped it properly.  It is not distinguished but it will do.

Then I went on line to try and buy the replacement for a face cream I discovered last summer. 

”On sale in store” it said.  Well, not in the two stores I went into  – nor could it be ordered by those stores although that is how I first got hold of it.   Nailing it down on the on line part of the manufacturer without newsletters, offers, and the rest of the paraphernalia of modern marketing (pause for gnashing of teeth) took a while but we got there.  I have paid for it, so I assume it will arrive.    I could have called this annalog  “How Not To Shop”.  What a miserable business, useful only for the competitiveness of finger speed.

It’s like easy peelers, sounds like a stripper.  Perfectly acceptable, available everywhere, tastes of nothing very much.  I mean, you know it’s a fruit because you can see it is.   I wind up buying delicious expensive satsumas

which I eat one a day because they taste of something.

You will notice that this is not about the cost of things, of which like most of us, I am only too horribly aware.  It is about getting what you want, about the difference between what somebody wants to sell you and what you want to buy.   And why.  What hit me after some thought was, of course those neighbourhood stores don’t keep teapots – no demand.  It is the age of the tea bag and the polystyrene cup.

The online experience seems to be easy, provided your wishes chime with what the website wants you to do.  Misinformation on websites is rife though they would say, that in the aftermath of a pandemic, they are in a holding situation over manufacture, supply and demand.  I could understand that, if that was what whoever it is told me, as a customer.  But what is there is the breathless exclamation of how wonderful they are  – and we are for using them.  Oh tosh.    

Whatever is going to happen in Ukraine, I’d like lessons in communication and public speaking based on the presentation of the head of National Security in the US, one Jake Sullivan –

whom I watched for some considerable time last night, speak fluently, clearly and with candour about a terrifying situation and resist the temptation to simplify it or talk up the side he represents.  He even managed to say  “I don’t know” and it played like honesty instead of confusion.

I remember the Bay of Pigs (April 1961) when my mother, a pragmatist if ever there was one, shook me rigid by saying  “This is truly terrible and I should never have had you – how could I bring a child into a world like this ? “

We used to value communication, whether it was about a packet of gravy browning or a gun.  Now we are so busy scoring lingual points off each other, we’ve forgotten what’s really involved.  Life and death, that’s what.

   Whatchewant.