Annalog

Over a two page spread on how to spend money you haven’t got,

I discover that fashionable nails are short and square.  Forget fashion, I just want my hands to look tidy.  I giggled over vegan nail polish (who eats it ?) while noting “hand peel rejuvenation” as a swiz at £59  when the best of it can be done with a lemon, some granulated sugar and glycerine at nearer 59p.  Is this what Wal calls “reassuringly expensive”?

Come spring, I admit I want to be rescued.  No I don’t mean a knight on a charger.   I mean touched by a magic wand that will make me over into bien dans la peau (one of the best French phrases ever).

  Some small thing that will work a miracle.  Spring (sorry Will) is ”the winter of my discontent”, pulls me down like a wolf to a lamb every year and I was almost comforted to discover my Italian friend, a 25 year old neophyte, working like a fiend in a city she isn’t quite at home in yet, feels the same about the first quarter – ie get through it and think about something else.

Will the budding Japanese aster make it through another day of cold wind ?  Will the house opposite  fly away, borne by the polythene sheets flapping over

the incomplete loft ?  You can have BBC3 if I can have BBC4.  The situation in Westminster depresses me into the ground, thank God for Anne Applebaum writing about Putin and Gavin Francis’s new book on convalescence.    What can I do about 38,000 tons of discarded clothing a year in the Atacama Desert, about children bombed, brutalised and starved into discard like broken birds ?  Are the dead and the dying an ugly version of birth control – the only way we might get mankind back to reasonable numbers on the face of the beleaguered earth ?  Doesn’t make me feel any better.

Ironically what lifted me through this year’s spring sag wasn’t new but old.  I had begun before I fell (that, as my father would say, didn’t do me any good) to look at the books I have kept and couldn’t remember – except that I must have been moved or impressed once, because I kept them.  And I don’t keep everything by a long chalk. 

I read the beginning of something and it went into the Oxfam box.  I began another, ditto.  Tastes change.  But on the third time around the shelves, I found some short stories by the Australian Tim Winton which never fail.  And then Love and War in the Apennines by Eric Newby (look him up). 

Kept at large in WWII’s beleaguered rural Italy by the sheer generosity of those he met, the land he describes has as much of a personality as the people.  And he meets Wanda, a personable Slovene, with whom he falls lastingly in love.  (I have interviewed her and I wanted to curtsey.)   The world of silence and stones and sharing not very much seemed oddly consoling after the last two years.  

And then on Saturday night I sighed and wondered whether I could watch The Untouchables again …     So I began scrolling through and I found Burn. 

I haven’t seen it for nearly fifty years.  I wondered how that would be ?  The director Gillo Pontecorvo is more famous for an earlier film The Battle for Algiers, the story of the making of which is almost another movie … 

When I saw Burn I was married to my first husband, a complex uncomfortable man (absolutely not  “bien” in his “peau”), bright, opinionated and a film maker.   The film starred Marlon Brando – he thought it some of his best work, before he was bloated with calories, confusion and self hatred.   

I watched it and it worked for me.  I saw different things, I made different criticisms but overall, it was a pleasure. And I remember the first time, coming out into a street in the light in Soho, smiling and shaken, in possession of one of the first political and philosophical lessons of my life : nobody gives you freedom, you have to take it.

“Please don’t go out” said a friend’s solicitor to her – they are in process of selling a house.  So she waited in,

for the call that never came.    “I’ll call you next week” said a woman I rather liked.    She didn’t.   After three times trying to reach the editor of a national paper, and receiving no acknowledgement  –  I gave up and declined to buy the paper again.   I wrote to the specialist who diagnosed and helped relieve difficulties with my back.   No reply.   I wrote a letter of appreciation to a named journalist (I didn’t gush)–  not a word.  And I hear over and over how this person emailed and that person left a message, how this one wrote snail mail in desperation and that one is facing some kind of telephone or other problem and is dreading having to deal with it because it takes hours and “they say they’ll call back” – but they don’t.

Delivered to your door seems to mean any time after 9.00, and while my upstairs neighbours sleep through the knock at the door, I don’t.  So it’s delivered to my door.  I can’t be horrid to somebody working their butt off to keep going – but “anybody can have anything” is an imperfect model (nearly as imperfect as “anybody can do anything.”)

“Delivered to your door”

means it gets delivered when it gets delivered, to whoever responds and the options are to leave it on the step (whence in my area, it is likely to rapid liberation) or to be a martyr to other people’s shopping habits – in this case, necessitated by hours worked.

Theoretically we are more available than ever before – the mobile, the screen, the iPad and so on.   We are beginning to talk about that and how it might affect us less than positively (cue “mental health issues”, increased forgetfulness and sheer over exposure – too many voices, too much input.) 

Too often the volume is up, the content down and any kind of consideration is out of the window.  

I have just read an admirably low key and informative article on artificial intelligence (Damian Whitworth writing about Professor Stuart Russell in the Saturday Times magazine 29.1.2022)

where it is made clear that humans need to think about this NOW rather than just buying into it, because while not having to do repetitious things may be seen as liberating, if you liberate (the writer’s word, not mine) lots of people from work, what are they going to do and what are they going to live on ?  AI sounds like milk: spill it and it stays spilt.

Spartacus (movie rights acquired by Kirk Douglas, for Stanley Kubrick’s still outstanding film) covers a lot of the material in the book (by Howard Fast) but not the fact that the Roman Empire was entirely slave based.

  And we are busily creating a slave culture – disposable people, who work for little.  In the past they survived and for a brief period (historically) their rewards were modest stability and children.   The stability is gone and they can hardly feed their children. And if AI takes over, it will be  to do their jobs and they can’t earn.

Artificial Intelligence is busy getting a positive build up.  When you read about it in the general press it is because it has discovered this or that in some area of medicine and thus may save lives or heart break .  Reading about AI has the same effect on me as reading about “re wilding”.  I want to save hedgerows, birds, small mammals, flowers and plants and the rest  (I can’t tell you how excited I got when I saw groundsel growing for the first time since my childhood) but you can’t give all the farming land over to wilding: we have to eat.

We can eat differently,

I hear you say.  Yes we can but I am still talking about numbers of people and the changeover will take time and cost money – while the further down the social economic scale you are, the less likely you are to be taken into consideration. Without the Prince of Wales’ avowed interests in farming,  the farming community would be even more remote from takeaway pizza and strawberries in December.     

I love a milk churn,

though when I looked them up, I discovered that they are antique.  Me too, I suppose.   I remember the milk churns waiting to be collected, at the end of the path from the house, and how sometimes, the driver of the lorry gave me and whoever escorted my child self a lift to the village if he came before the bus.  I thought it was so exciting  to be sitting in the front of a truck.   And I cherished the milk churns because they provided an excuse for the lift.

At about the same age, I learned the magic of the rural bus,

where passengers knew each other and the driver and he stopped at the top of lanes leading down into farms, seemingly without being asked.   Once, many years later coming back from south London to north, the driver of the bus at some ungodly hour in the morning, began talking to me  –  the only person on the bus – and he dropped me not at the nearest stop but at the top of my road.  “This right ?” he grinned.  Memory winded me, I could barely say thank you.

Before the pandemic, say three or four years ago, I watched the female driver of a big red double decker bus handle the heavy vehicle to safety while some twit speeding and probably half cut briefly endangered himself and everybody else.  It was my bus, I got on and said thank you. When I got off I asked the driver, whom I saw to be Middle Eastern with a headdress but not veiled, if she was all right ?  She stared at me.  I repeated.  “Did you see … ?” she asked .  “Yes” I said “ I did and you did beautifully but that’s not what I am asking.  I am asking, are you all right ?”   And she did that lovely gesture I had only seen in a film, putting her hand to her heart, and bringing it, lightly clenched, to her lips to kiss.

We saw each other occasionally, we waved and beamed.  Once she passed me walking and gave two cheeky little toots.  Last week she drove up to the bus stand where I was waiting and stopped the bus – admittedly, it was empty – got out of her cabin, got out of the bus and stood before me, demanding “Are you all right ?”

   I began to laugh, and said I was, and I hoped she was too and her family , we stared at each other for a second and then embraced and wished each other a better year.   She got back in the cab and I thought of milk churns.   Unforgotten.

As are the witnesses, though they grow old and frail. 

And I am only ever what I call a plastic Jew, a name I coined, not offered in insult or diminution but because they claimed me, people I didn’t know, met in shops,  at work, in the street ,in the US and the UK,  and it meant so much to me.  Because I looked like the real thing.  “We are so proud of you” said a woman I didn’t know from a hole in the ground, embracing me.  “You’re one of ours.” More accurately I am what the Nazis called a mischling, of mixed Jewish and other races – the predominant other being Rom (thus also a didikoi –  of mixed gypsy and other races).    Only two people in my whole life claimed me as a Jewish daughter and it remains a jewel in my memory.

I remember the painful insight of a film called Almonds and Raisins about the Yiddish theatre which bloomed briefly before being superseded by the bigger audiences of cinema. In a flash I understood how foreign these people were, how other …  how what I found interesting, others found threatening.  They weren’t the only foreigners or the only others but you know how you understand something uncomfortably, because a harsh light shines smack on it, if only for a few seconds ?    I was shaken to be unable to deny the understanding of hate.  So I remember the Slavs and the trade unionists, the Baptists and the gays, everybody who got in the way of the steamrollers of the Third Reich.  My father’s mother’s name was Julie Rosenbaum and no monument works better than memory – even a milk churn.

When I was a child, you were called a monkey

if you were mischievous, a little bit cheeky in a nice way. You were not allowed to make a habit of it.  Being a monkey was an occasional thing. Nowadays, monkeys would probably bring an action for defamation.  I never thought about the monkeys (not my favourite creatures) though in the Chinese zodiac, I am a monkey. 

You have probably heard of The Three Wise Monkeys – Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil and See No Evil. 

According to my search engine, this is a Japanese image and Ghandi refers to a fourth monkey.   I can’t be the only person who is silently screaming for mercy from saturation media coverage of  Prime Minister Boris Johnson (I’d say he was Speak No Evil), tennis champion Novak Djokovic (Hear No Evil) and the Royal Family’s Prince Andrew (See No Evil).  What those three have in common is a large dose of victim mentality – always somebody else’s fault.

The British Prime Minister doesn’t speak well. 

*

That turkey hubble-bubble, incomplete sentences, wah-wah is a good example of how not to communicate with anybody you don’t want to communicate with, ie most of us, obviously lesser mortals. It sounds as though you’re saying something but you’re not really.  All sorts of poor devils speak for him in matters great and small and they have one thing in common – when he perceives that what they have said and done hasn’t left him reflected in the sought after light of glory, if he can’t pass the buck, they are expendable.   Pippa Pig, eat your heart out.  It’s all somebody else’s fault, not a word of accusation, just –

out.

The best comment I have heard about Novak Djokovic is that, like a lot of high powered, busy people – he relied on somebody else to get the papers in order and say the right things, secure in his belief that he is so important and talented that, should there be a wrinkle, it would be ignored.  The person expounding this point of view to me said “And he forgot: it’s his name on the form.  He can’t blame anybody else – it is his name.”  His mother’s comment in a press conference where she referred to her son “being tortured, like Jesus Christ” was frankly ill judged.   The President of Serbia feels that, if the champion were from a bigger and more important country, his visa would never have been cancelled.

  Poor little Serbia.  It all went on so long, I began to wonder if this was Djokovic’s PR machine because he got coverage he could never afford.  And the Australians didn’t handle it well –  but they have made a legal decision. 

 And then there is See No Evil (Prince Andrew) who didn’t see anything because he didn’t see why he should have to look, much less ask question or make decisions contrary to his initial wishes. 

Although playtime with a convicted paedophile is a bit much, you get the same sort of avoidance much lower down the scale – the child with cuts and bruises that nobody wants to have to notice, a woman’s black eye or broken wrist, or a man withdrawn and tense to breaking point – but nobody asks, because nobody wants to know.   His point of view, it seems, is that a Royal Prince should be able to have a good time, at somebody else’s unlimited expense, without having to think about it, as in “I know nothing”.   A retired Royal servant says he was ever thus.  And even if he had better advisors, he won’t take advice.   The word “entitled” comes to mind and you can just see that porky hand waving unwanted advice away

…   Particularly unwanted if it isn’t what he wants to hear.    

These are not happy men, any of them but I will forbear to bore you with pop psychology.   What is interesting is that dozens of other men have been through the same kind of emotional confusion, uncertainty and dissatisfaction and handled it quite differently.    Human beings are fascinating. 

Boris Johnson wanted power and then got clobbered by a pandemic which made his interpretation of the highest office in the land a good deal less fun and successful than he had depended on it being.

Novak Djokovic learned he is better on the court.

And Prince Andrew will learn the high price of paying for your pleasure.

*nice poem, shame about the spelling (as in conjunctions)

In the pause between bouts of unseasonable weather Tim wrote that he had seen dead leaves falling

and swirling “like brown snow,” dead leaves blown like souls on their journey, the rest of the life cycle irrelevant.  The Americans call autumn “fall” though I was rather more preoccupied with a tumble down tricky stairs.  This morning I met a woman walking with a stick, we have grinned before, and I asked what happened. She fell at work and damaged her spinal cord, is several months into rehabilitation and will have to have to surgery. Merciful heaven.

No concussion but this has slowed me and I have seen the physio.  Nothing like a small injury for bring you face to face with how much we take our bodies for granted.  And other things too…   When something has been there a while, we tend to think it will go on being there and are taken aback when it isn’t any more.

London’s West End is currently in upheaval,

boards up, builders busy and whole streets silenced.   It won’t all be bad news, I know.  Business people take a view, sell up, hang on to the money and wait to see.  But for someone wandering through, the changes are enormous and it’s oddly post blast.

I read further coverage of the administration of a famous tailoring establishment, a couple of hundred years old, which in partnership with two other equally well known concerns, had recognised changing times and changing styles as not being in their favour, and tried to adapt. But they were advised to use Chinese money

to bridge the gap and have been left 2 years later, high and dry.  The investors will be covered by their national law and skilled workmen from this business will be out on their ear.  In response to yet more writing on the “street” edition of plastic surgery – and where it falls short – I can’t help but wonder if some of those wonderful tailors couldn’t retrain with sterilised thread:

I am sure they’d do better work.   And a forty year skilled worker in one of the surviving businesses in Burlington Arcade says their rent is now £250,000 – well that won’t last long, with falling footfall.

And I am surprised that with all the introspection nobody has yet written to theorise about the connections between the mixed messages of this time – on the one hand against plastic in the sea (and every other waterway – phosphorous in the River Wye)

but endless  rubbish in the street: trumpets for  everything natural and pure  from  juice to jumpers but cutprice procedures with  God knows what in your face, your buttocks and anywhere else that will make a few bob. And what that means and why ?  Shortage of food is imminent, if not from growing, from harvesting and transport and I am all for saving flowers and plants, insects and wildlife but farmers deserve our support.  Again, the endless playing over WWII has not taught us its key domestic messages – one of which was

grow more food, harnessed to nature rather than pulling against it.

Walking of necessity slowly, I saw a tall slender woman I should think in her early fifties, with the sun behind her and the most gorgeous hair – thick, lustrous, grey/gold, God and man hand in hand. I exclaimed “Your hair is lovely.”   She stopped “Say again.”  I repeated.  “Oh how wonderful” she said.  “I really needed to hear that, I have cancer, I am going to lose it all .”

I begged her pardon, I said how tactless of me ..” You couldn’t know” she said.  “And it is great to hear.”  I asked “Where was the cancer?”   “Everywhere” she said “Stage Four.”  I said I was sorry.  “Don’t be” she said smiling.  “They have done everything they could… that’s life ..”  I said,” I light candles in my house every night, tonight they are for you.”   And we parted smiling. 

Three lots of self realisation (and Liz Truss) in one newspaper

– Manifesting by Roxie Nafousi, James Smith Not a Life Coach/Not a Diet  Book – neatly crossed through as No Myths/No Fads/No Nonsense, Giles Coren writing that should he divorce, he would take nothing, too much stuff anyway, especially after Christmas …  so this is the reinvention of New Year’s resolutions with social media packaging to help the medicine go down.  Glory.  Am I glad I’m past all this.  Am I a victim of Santafest ?  Not me.  Did I take every opportunity offered to me ?  No – but I took most of them.  Did I believe in myself ?  Sure, but it took time.  Oh how I distrust “one size fits all”. 

It’s like Jean’s one piece undergarment with crotch poppers in dinnerladies.   I remember trying one on and laughing so hard in the old Dickins and Jones, I caused a disturbance.  I was still laughing when I left.

  Sounds great – but only if it fits and, call me Quasimodo, it didn’t fit me.  More like a spatchcocked frog.  One size does not fit all.

Somewhere in the dim and distant past, I learned two thirds of a Chinese proverb ie “many paths to the top of the mountain”, the concluding third says “but the view is always the same.”   Never got that far, always a work in progress, “many paths” has guided my life. 

People do things differently – different things at different times, for different reasons and in different ways.  Sometimes the result is as expected, other times it is very unexpected but I don’t want to model myself on somebody else.  I doubt if you do.  I want to be me.   Finding out who I was took years and long after you get your feet on the right road, you still falter occasionally or have an odd moment of bewilderment when you just don’t know.

Part of the reason for the title is because I was once called a potentiator, encouraging people to realise themselves.  There were common principles and ideas but everybody was different.

  It will be a truly sad day when they are not.   Sometimes you can’t grow a person.  There’s some sort of block, like a tree across the road.  You don’t spend enough time together, you don’t know them well enough.  There is aIways a story and, for whatever reason, you don’t get to hear it – so I settle for doing the best I can with what I’ve got – the bit I know.

The husband of a pretty fair-haired woman up the road has just died.  Not only does she feel understandably awful, she can’t verbalise it.  We met twice and she told me how bad she felt but she couldn’t be more specific and I didn’t see that Q&A on a street corner was necessarily kind or useful.  But last week we met and she said glumly “They want me to go to counselling.” 

This is not the time for me to launch into what, where, who, how, counselling versus psychotherapy so I said “Well, at least that’s about you.”  She looked at me.  “The door shuts” I went on “ and it’s between you and the counsellor.  So you can talk about anger and pain and confusion and that bloody woman across the road …  It’s your time.”   She said as if it had never occurred to her” I suppose it is.”  “Very useful” I said .  “When my father died I fell apart and private work with somebody skilled was the beginning of sense in the world.”

O f course I am over simplifying.  I hope to heaven she gets somebody who knows what they are doing.  But we have to start somewhere.  She has to know that far from being the victim in this, she is the subject.  Her turn.  She can emerge from this dissatisfied and give it another go with somebody different and get further with herself.  The decision is hers.   She isn’t a malfunctioning neurotic.  She is a woman in pain.   And pain comes from a lot of places.  And the resolution of pain so that you begin to see yourself comes from a lot of different places too.

If you are going to read these latest versions in the lucrative self help market and take from them what works for you, fine.  You aren’t Roxie, James, Giles or Liz and you may live to be grateful for it.   

When we next meet, it will be a new year.

And because you know  how strongly I feel about anticipation,

I forebear to promise it will be good or bad or how it will be.

Just know that I wish you well, annalog will be back next week and

The Christmas Rose has bloomed in the garden.

Somewhere along the line, somebody said “Don’t confuse fiction with reality.”

It sounded wonderfully clearcut, something you could be sure of.  But it is not as simple as it sounds.  There is open and shut reality.  Did you drop the teapot  ?  Yes or no.  There lie the broken pieces: how did they get there ? 

And then there is all the other stuff … was the teapot cracked ? did you slip because you were trying to save the old cat from disturbance by the new dog, the baby from putting his hand on the hot stove ?   Did you really hear a noise, turn and slip, dropping the teapot

….  If the teapot is broken, does it matter how it became broken ?  Perhaps you will not admit that you threw it at the floor in temper.  

Instead of making life clear and simple for me (fat chance), reality and its multiples shade between something real and something imagined, to something totally imagined, to something unreal but chosen and played through as a reality, inevitably coloured by what is remembered. Endlessly fascinating. 

It’s a week to one of the two biggest festivals in the Christian Church and Christianity is about to become a minority religion.  Of course this finding emerges from research which is the philosophical equivalent of Play Doh

ie you can bend it to any shape you like.  Do we really hope that by lining up a full set of symbols (tree and lights, trimming, tinsel, food plus and drink plus plus, presents, extravagance – blame the Victorians) we will enter the spirit of the story of the Baby in the Manger ? Does it matter ?  Is it just a blowout and a couple of days off, “the kids like it”, expensive certainly but complete with comforting mythology about Santa Claus and the Snowman ?

Christmas is about memory

– how it was when you were a child, what was done at home, how far behind you left that or how closely you adhere to it.  Christmas is about herding together – in family units, crowds to shop, to see lights and trees and fireworks, safety in numbers, the crowd at the match or the press at the bar.  And it is widely inferred that, somehow, if you aren’t part of all that, you have missed out.  But that isn’t a reality, it is a perception, a way of looking at having a break and a nice time. 

This year, the reality is fear.  Not fear of Covid though it is an unpleasant bug.  But the fear of catching what you can’t see

and how that will affect all those other things which would draw you temporarily but none the less powerfully into community of some kind.   My son has Covid.  I have just seen a neighbour off to be tested – he thinks he has Covid.   I have spent Christmas alone before.  I do not see it as a failure.  It happens.  The fiction is “lots of friends” and the reality is the half dozen max. who play quite different roles in your life and worth more than jewels.       

And the reality is what you hear in the sleepiness and silence.  Different kinds of silence, different kinds of sleep.  It’s been horrible shopping this year because so many of the small individualised places are threatened or gone.  The largely unnoticed floods in London in the late summer have wiped out the kind of places I love and cherish and buy things in.  What might happen has made many of us wary.    

Like everything else in the world, Christmas is personal.  If you were brought up to numbers  in celebration , for holiday or hobbies, then that is what you’ll miss.   Or you’re unwilling to miss it and you’ll take the risk with or without precautions. I was brought up to take it as it comes, with respect, whether the few or the many.

My reality includes warmth, food, shelter above me, door to lock, telephone, cards, one or two new books and another year of cherished friendship, casual meetings, and annalog readers, that small cherished public, I bless you every one – for yourselves and for keeping me to what I call my “homework” – weekly writing – and your response to it.      

There is good anticipation

like looking forward to meeting again or going on holiday, some kind of a longed for date, your exam results (if they work out), something new (kitchen/coat/grandchild) – when you look forward to being pleased – and are pretty crushed if you’re not.  And there is bad anticipation

when looking forward to something already arranged gives you everything from palpitations to collywobbles and you work yourself into a state.  Almost without exception, no matter how terrifying, disappointing, unsettling the thing is when it comes to pass – it will be easier to bear than thinking about it coming ie anticipation.  And your anticipation is all your own, nobody else’s.

Once whatever it is begins to happen, your mood changes.  You are now on the road.  Whatever it is, is going to happen. That’s why the modern thing or not returning the promised call, whether it is to do with the delivery of wine or a three month wait for one specialist to liaise (his idea) with two or three others, is worse than rude, it’s unkind. 

Because you can’t say “Damn the delivery!” and go out and leave the wine on the step – it will almost certainly be pinched.  And you can’t tell the specialist how disappointed and upset you are, suspended without his offered opinion, because you can’t speak to him and his assistant doesn’t return the call.

Anticipating Christmas is not on my list of things to do, any year for the last long time, and this year I find the oversell and glitterballs excessive in the worst and most irrelevant way.  There are troops massing on a border in the European mainland.  The Chinese are pushing forward to different bits adjacent to their landmass.  Hundreds of animals (winged and creeping included)

are being wiped out.  People are without homes here, there and everywhere, in the American continent by reason variously of Covid, opioids, and savagely errant weather.   That rich rich country is poor about its poor.

Back in Blighty, we are in an economic morass, facing the simultaneous disintegration of the government in power, its system  and several massive institutions.  Why would a wreath on the door fix this – or fairylights, flickering or plain ?  And so often it seems that the wreath is to distract from uncovered mess and soaked garbage, while the Big Sell this year is more than ever based on what you’ve got to have, much of which will be dumped in the same way in due course.   How I wish common sense was compulsory.  

Last week I saw a documentary on the Smithsonian Channel about a wolverine,

filmed on the Russian/Finnish border. Solitary, savage, naturally programmed to do what she does, she isn’t beautiful though the body is miracle of natural development with tiny pretty ears, paws with built in snowshoes and a bite that would frighten a hyena.  As the film ended, I found I was smiling.  I smiled at the moon as I closed the shutters.  It smiled back.   

Then I looked at Win’s name (NHN) in my address book and wondered, because she has had a long and miserable haul – her father’s illness and death, her brother’s cancer, she hit the bottle and was then threatened with the loss of her beloved flat. You can’t impose jolly.  She wasn’t up to much last year and I wondered.   Bought a very pretty card and wondered who it was for ?  Came home to an envelope on the mat with a letter – brother better, she dried out, sale of father’s house brought them both security, old flat safe in her name, love and wishes. 

I rang her to tell her about the card I had bought.  And walked about smiling after we had spoken. 

We have a grand old grocer’s nearby which you only go into for one or two things because the prices are eye watering.     I buy excellent Italian biscuits there, one for breakfast, but last week I bought a pack of ginger biscuits dipped in dark chocolate from the supermarket – saved £4.  And they are luxuriously good.  Smile guaranteed every morning…

Oh listen …  the faintest jingle …………………….

I’ve lost two friends

through the pandemic years, one a married woman with a husband and two sons she loves and extended family – I think just consumed with the business of survival.  I am sure I miss her more than she misses me.  The second was a single woman my own age whom I knew for ten years, who was one day so disagreeable to me that I snapped “You are a wonderful human being” and hung up.  The break had been coming, I had been trying ignore it and there it was.

Friendship comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes

and I am purist about it.  If we don’t meet, it is a well disposed relationship but we are not, in my opinion, friends.  I like to see the whites of your eyes multiple times, spend time, assess, look at the body language, listen to the speech patterns and learn the history admitted and discovered.    There are degrees of intimacy involved, up to and including nothing of any import, just comfort.  Some you feel instantly disposed to and you always will be.  Some start like that but it doesn’t last.  Some you outgrow.  The things that bind you to others change: paths diverge and it’s never the same.  Some last for years and then it just doesn’t work anymore.  Worse still trying to fix it finishes it.  I once bought a sweater rather than listen to a friend tell me how wonderful Boris Johnson was in the street.  We are still friends – she doesn’t know I evaded her – but politics and money are off the table.  As Joe E Brown

says at the end of Some Like It Hot “Nobody’s perfect.”

I don’t think I am sentimental about friendship.  If you share opinions and interests, even just a few and are willing to spend time to talk – you have a friendship.  No input ? Benign goodwill maybe but the big flexor muscles of friendship are missing.

Other than books and occasional things on tv, I have been borne up through two years of pandemic by telephone calls from friends.  And sometimes not.  Howard came to dinner (dinner/hot, supper/cold – yes, Wal) last week, occasioning flat panic.  I hadn’t cooked anything substantive for yonks, had something promising to start with in the freezer and caught part of a Nigel Slater cookery programme by chance which gave me a steer on seasoning.

Though an hour before Howard arrived I was as twitchy as a horse’s rump under attack by a horsefly. 

But from the moment this frequently difficult man arrived, we began to talk.  His presentation of gifts began “We don’t have nice shops so I just bought everything that looked promising.  Throw the chocolates in the fridge, do you like grapes – these looked nice, here’s the cheese and where’s the bottle opener ?” And we never looked back.    The food worked, the wine was wonderful and your correspondent got what my father used to call “nicely” and fell asleep in a chair

after he left.

I love Christmas but I don’t expect it to make up for all we have lost.   The last few weeks of getting to Christmas I have always found very challenging because, although if you’re catering several of you, you need that time for preparation, present buying, gift wrapping etc., there is also a sense of wishing that time past so you could get to The Main Event.  If I got one thing out of the pandemic apart from something resembling fingernails, it was a real sense that I could live one day at a time

and I was much happier doing so.

It’s not easy, maybe impossible, if you are on any kind of schedule but if you are not, you can really put your energies into your life as it unfolds.    There was the man at the Salvation Army who told me, yes, they’d be in the square with buckets, as usual.  “Good” I said. “Much more to do with Christmas than overdecorated windows …”  “God love you, girl” he said.  And two young women from Saudi stopped me in the street to say ”We want to look like you when we grow up !”  No parcels under the tree were ever more appreciated.