Annalog

Christmas was brought down to earth early in my life by lack of money and death

in the family on Christmas Day.  Nowadays we don’t use the “p” word (poverty) because we are all poor compared to somebody and your poverty isn’t mine.  When I try to recall what was expected of me and the family as a general rule, public holidays no exception, it was do your best and have a nice time.  And we did and we did.

The robust characters of my parents made for level pegging.  She didn’t “do it all” and he did more than I knew.  I had some ridiculously luxurious years

when I was married to Supergoy, truly lovely (I was just as spendthrift) and generous beyond the dreams of avarice.  But after the divorce, I made a journey into what I really believed, wanted and didn’t want, and it has served me well. 

This year – because of Covid and the looming shadow of Brexit – Christmas is being talked about as something we “need” (annalog/want and need).  And if we can’t go to the city markets across Europe (spend spend spend) they must come to us.  Which is how I came upon the street where I shop half closed off with vast scaffolding vans, lots of stewards and endless black containers of sound equipment: a small number of gift and clothing stalls, a beefed up number of food stalls

and the pretensions of a pre-Christmas fair drowned in soggy rock.  Gotta be merry.  I baled.

Outside the Tesco where I planned to meet a friend, there was a sudden eddy of people surrounding a tiny fragile little girl

who couldn’t or wouldn’t speak, who had got separated from her parents.   Somebody found another Oriental family (I had seen them on the bus -parents, child and two uncles with their adored French bulldog) but they couldn’t help.  There was a man on a mobile – is it too much to hope that security has a loudspeaker in a shopping mall ? – and a visibly upset fluent English speaking Eritrean (I asked) shop assistant who wanted above all to comfort the clearly shocked child  “How can this happen?  You don’t lose a child, it’s the second time in a week.  At least the little boy could speak to me, this child cannot say a word.  If you do this to your children, you shouldn’t have children…”

I was reminded of the wisdom of the tribes who teach “one child to walk, one child to carry” and no more, already too much for some in a supermarket.  When the parents turned up with the other child in a buggy, I’d like to think that their closed deadpan faces were a way of trying to rebut the concern and anger of those round them but they were not particularly keen to soothe the little girl who had passed what I suspect were the longest 20 minutes in her short life.

Nella (Not Her Name) who used to live upstairs invited me to lunch.  She is a 25 year old Italian architect in training, just moved in to a riverside apartment with two other Italian girls.  I had lent her a couple of books on Middle Eastern food by Claudia Roden about which she was enthusiastic and we all liked it.  When her third flatmate arrived home, she came laden with the makings of the evening meal.  All we did was eat and talk in benign warmth.  It really felt like a foretaste of Christmas, sheltered from the cold outside.

My Christmas Is very down to earth, heaven is not in my atlas.  People who do things for others, who share with the isolated.  Can the plastic pine cones and know that there is nothing you or Jamie Oliver can do to a sprout that will endear it to my son and since he likes every other vegetable, I don’t understand the imposition.   The endless reiteration of things for the sake of it is just that.

Sometimes you have to reinvent, allow something new into the mix.  For without meaning there is no Christmas – hence the title.  

Why don’t you

write a book about it ?  is one of those things I am asked from time to time and the truthful answer is, I long ago admitted to myself that I am only so much of a writer. I really need speech and interaction.  I don’t miss a thing she said, the friend I fell out with a year ago, but I miss the voice.  I am not proud of admitting that but so help me, it’s true.

For example, the other night out of the dark up loomed the tall figure of the art teacher next door, a doll of a girl and I asked where she was off to.  Going to see the boyfriend.  The same boyfriend ?  She grinned, yes. 

She arrived on my doorstep a couple of months ago and said “You look like a person who might have a potato masher, do you and if you do may we borrow it ? “ Delighted to be asked I went for the  utensil and she said “Come and meet my boyfriend.  We’re making a shepherd’s pie

for comfort food.”  So I met him, handshake, grin, a human , hooray,  wished them luck with the cooking and she returned the  masher in due course.

So the other night we stood and laughed and talked (I hate chatted and this exchange was as good as a weekend in the country).  Then I sent her on her way having made sure she had a scarf – it was chilly – turned back into the house and realised – oh greasy fingerprints of age across the screen of communication – that for the moment

I couldn’t remember her name.  It came back but I briefly felt 127.

It’s no secret I love books.  When macular degeneration was diagnosed, my daily prayer became  “Please God take me before you take my eyes.”    Spare me the blandishments, I fear what I am not capable of. 

Some of my earliest books await (I hope) my granddaughter’s enthusiasm.  If not, hooray for Oxfam. If I could drive, I’d love to fill a truck with used books

and take them to children in Africa.  Mind you, you don’t have to go that far,  All too many schools are short of books and I shall never forget the girl I taught English telling me of her school ”We don’t have books.”   What an impoverishment.  Not just what’s in them but how they feel.  

Talking to my son about my Christmas book list the other day, I said (as I have for years) paperbacks preferred – and he asked “ Do you really ?  I prefer the feel of hardbacks – “   I said I like the feel of them but not the price and  paperbacks are  connected to being in the US 50 years ago when the covers were a breakthrough and I never looked back.  I don’t remember much of Mishima but I remember the cover of the first book of his I read.  Snowdrop is in the final stages of a book on Diana Dors with a terrific cover.  Don’t judge a book by its cover ?  A striking cover really helps.  

Fascinating to read a review of My Body by Emily Ratajowski and get a feeling of that modern estrangement between what someone looks like and what he/she/it might be, how a person might be interpreted by context (even erroneously), what clothes might mean and what they don’t, how you can overcome that and how you cannot.  Sometimes what you look like lies across the path of communication like a tree trunk.  Another book about how I have suffered and been humiliated while earning heaven knows how many million dollars – so that’s all right then – to be washed in money. 

And still so much to learn ….  As if humiliation is always a learning curve ?  Books are cruel in what they intend to reveal and what is discovered unintentionally.   That is true of conversation too – even conversation by email or in the letters I used to read long ago.

But in conversational exchange there are all sorts of bits of information – what we call non verbal communication – going on in and around speech – the sound of the voice, the way the head is held,  where the eyes look and where they shift to, what the hands do, what the body does  – rich rich – the diet of my life.  Can I have both please, books and bodies ?

My father died

when I was 24 and I was furious with God.  My sister looked more like his side of the family, I like my mother’s but inside (see annalog/outside and in)  I was him and she was she and it only became more so as we grew older.    I didn’t read anything about bereavement until years later but I recognised all the stages and the terrible impotence.  Gone is gone.  Except that my father had made me a promise.

Recently Wal described to me that the memories of his beloved long dead mother – indeed the visualisation of her hands – is one of the few things that holds him steady in a world he increasingly dislikes.   I am sure he is not alone in that though he used a phrase when we were talking one evening which shook me.

  “It’s the death of beauty” he said.

The perception of beauty is very personal, the word frequently misused and it means different things to different people.   I shrank from the phrase which I could understand intellectually but my perception is that beauty is always there, the recognition of it is a strength and I have to find it – a bird’s feather, a child’s fingers, a particular quince, the sky at five.  Still, he feels differently.

Wal is travelling to supervise the decoration of a wealthy client’s house in Washington DC which represents some upheaval.  He will be away from Howard with whom he has lived for 25 years and their complementary vagaries, he will be away from his home which like most of us, he cherishes, away from his beloved dogs.   “ And what do I do if I lose those hands ?”  he said to me. 

  I assured him he won’t. “Are you sure ?” he asked.   While we have great differences, we also have deep sympathies – in the true meaning of the word.   “Yes” I said.  “I am sure.”  And he asked why. 

I told him again (we repeat at intervals and make room for it, friends do) about when my father died and how bereft I was.  “But he promised that he would never leave me. I must have looked at him puzzled and asked what he meant.  “When you put your hands up in the air, above your head” he explained “that’s not just air.  That’s me.”    And no, I didn’t try it out.  But I became aware of it.  Your security is your security, and mine, thank you heaven, is mine.

I would be speaking somewhere and I would feel him near.  He was a big man and he stood behind me, sometimes I could feel his breath on my hair, his forearms parallel with mine.  I never turned round to check.  If he said he was there, he was there.

  And you can imagine the vividity of my recognition when I saw a man pushing around an elderly dog this week, watched, tried to leave it and then stood summoned and felt rather than heard my father’s voice (way down in the chest) speak in very much in my father’s terms out of my mouth -“Leave him alone, you bastard” I roared.  “He’s old and he’s doing his best – and you’ll be old one day.” (Bastard pronounced as if with a double “s”, only when he was truly angry.)

And there was a moment of “Goodness, what was that ?”, mine and other people’s, and then I walked away, looking back at the angle of the dog’s head, wholly used to abuse.  All you can pray for is that the dog dies peacefully in his sleep.   But I crossed the road smiling, lovely to know after all these years that a promise is a promise.  

A couple of days later, when a very gifted friend of mine arrived with her arms full of roses from the garden (I swear they grow in the snow for her) she told me that she had managed to mend fences

with her new daughter in law, after seeing a shade (her word) round her that she recognised – my friend’s punitive mother and her daughter in law’s ditto – and asking her about it.  And out of that exchange, they managed to be open and move forward, good for both of them and everybody else concerned.    

Saturday afternoon found me trying on a pair of shoes

– or at least, preparing to.  I haven’t done that for two years because whatever I want shoe-wise, I don’t need and these just filled in an unexpected “It would be nice if …” So of course, the guardian angel applied the brakes and they weren’t available in my size. My Saturday afternoon purchases included light bulbs (get ‘em while you can) and a plastic box, too big for purpose. Poor spatial concept, I hear my first gynaecologist saying.

Nowadays I am sure young women would bridle but at the time, I just thought he was a man who knew his job (which he did and practised it with skill and sympathy) and that was a comment based on his experience with students and trainees – not an attack on the nature of women.  I neither wanted nor needed his comment but it was a propos pain I could have been spared if the doctor whose mistake had led me to him had known better. Don’t worry I am not going down this road for long though I do think it’s fascinating that with what you might call the female surge, we have a rush of books about miscarriage, infertility and menopause though when I wrote about the war I had been through and its consequences 30 plus years ago, it was regarded as unnecessarily outspoken.   Do we want to know more, do we need to know more or this just the vagaries of publishing fashion ?

What do I want ?  Umpteen books.

I spent a happy hour in a bookshop recently, attracted to this, curious about that, but leave it, leave it – don’t need any of them.  What a book appears to be and what a book is are two very different things and you can spend a lot of money pursuing what isn’t there in cardboard covers.

I want a dark violet roll necked sweater. 

Two jumpers died this winter and it has left the wardrobe  (you know, the one in the East Wing …) depleted.   Years ago, the writer Vanessa Friedmann described colours which were no longer available, unless you were in a small town that made its own dyes and dark purple is on the list.   So is wool and anything, as my father used to say, long enough to cover your kidneys.   Do I need this item ?  Somewhere between the two.  The constant reinvention of self beyond bad black is essential to the ageing face.

I want a gardener.  Or at least I thought I did, mostly for advice and a course of action on four plants, nerved to pay.   Gardener One has never come back to me, I hope success chokes them.   Gardener Two arrived with an English bullterrier so that the non follow through doesn’t count because I got to see a favourite dog unexpectedly.     And then came Dinah (NHN)

one of those immensely capable women, law degree, wonderful cook, fluent French and a diploma in deprecation who talked more sense over soup and toast than I had any right to expect.   I thought I wanted a gardener but actually I needed Dinah – sympathy about the lack of professional response (“I know, they don’t want a small job…”), clear instructions – every home should have one, just enough hope that you don’t feel a fool.

I want transformation, I do two or three times a year and that’s how most of the more lucrative parts of the markets for women sell.  On hope and dreams and wish fulfilment.  Sometimes you have a breakthrough, though not often, and the hope of it keeps you wanting it – even as you deny it.    

 I want world peace and countries to talk to each other and something practical to come out of the Climate Conference.  And as one small human, I need all those.     I want a sensible discussion with the energy supplier on Monday.  There are lots of things I may want but I don’t need ,and lots of things I need that I can do without.  If the last 20 years have taught me anything, it is to acknowledge the difference and incorporate my whims and wishes in a more constructive way. 

Pouting was not popular at home.

  My much older sister had had a fearsome scowl as a child (I’ve seen pictures) and if I looked disagreeable, I was warned either “I shouldn’t look like that, dear, it might stick …” or “That face would turn the milk sour !”   Of course between my youth and the young women I see around me, Brigitte Bardot to name but one gave the pout adorability, cuteness, sex appeal – all possible if you have one of those neat sweet little faces.  Pass.    

I thought of all this the other day while waiting for a bus beside a young woman

who looked as if she had half a golfball inserted into her upper and lower lip. 

I thought of John (not his name) a gay ex cop (never was the word gay less appropriate) who after a year of worrying about uncomfortable skin eruptions admitted he had had the lines on his faced injected some time before – by a woman who did it cheaply in a garage.  It makes you wonder …  God knows, you have trouble enough with bad builders.

  Do you want to let them into your body, the only one you have, unknowing what, how, if, longterm consequences, etc ?

There was a great turn of the century beauty who had wax injected into her face  – a treatment at the time – but it moved and melted till she was eerily ugly and became a recluse until she died.  And even that’s a story of privilege – for the rest of us, you’d have to go to work, hideous or not.  Though often I think there is a major disjunction now, between what you look like and what the rest of us see.    

What you do to make yourself tolerable to yourself varies.    I say this in genuine humility, never having had a serious accident or (for years) a life threatening disease.  There was Angela (not her real name) a doctor who had re imagined her hair to a dull golden brown straight bob and her nails to hyper natural involving tips, an immaculate French manicure and more maintenance than a Ferrari.   That’s how she felt like Angela.  Late in the day, she confided that she had been violently sexually attacked on a working trip in the US.  Truly horrible, so you forbore questions

but I wondered if the reinvention was part of how she coped – because cope she did, admirably. What happened to her was just as shattering as a bad car accident and she was left to pick up the pieces.

It’s a long way from making the best of yourself – drink water, don’t smoke, eat green vegetables, take exercise, a cream that suits your skin, a shampoo that suits your hair – to accepting that you only feel like yourself (never shall I forget the woman who wrote this to me) at a certain weight.   Look – I feel better when I weigh less.  I have been both more and less but I have never attributed my mood to either one except in passing because my waistband feels more comfortable or I don’t like that curve on my back …  Myself is not lodged in any external feature, good or bad.  Myself is me, my soul, my spirit, my personality, the inner woman … 

So strongly do I believe in her that I take her out and use her with the intelligence of mature life experience and the hopefulness of a child.  I’d say, I don’t take unnecessary risks but I take necessary ones.   Necessary because I am haunted (see annalog “because one has no friends..” etc) by how lonely people can be, how much a kind word matters.  So I am a dedicated little human bridge builder, even if the bridge only last 15 seconds and a grin.   And increasingly I am aware that – mask or no mask – I am committed to try and make connection through voice and eyes and my voluble hands – anything else that works.

A new tall young man has begun to work in the nearby convenience store.  Locked off.  Not a flicker.  Next time I saw him, I made a remark about a newspaper headline.  He looked surprised. The next time after that, he teased me by hiding a paper reserved for me.   This morning we greeted each other with smiles.  So far, untaxed.   

It must have come up at school when I was 12 or 14, so that I came home and asked my mother what class

we were.   “Educated” she said over her busy hands “and there aren’t enough of us.”    My parents believed in education – the getting of knowledge and even wisdom rather than passing exams – they thought it was the most important thing and when one of the recent incumbents in charge of education was heard to mouth some inanity,  I muttered aloud to my long dead parents “ I am glad you are not here to hear this” ..and switched off.      

I really do not spend my life looking back but sometimes you have to look back in order to move forward.  I was taught to ask questions.  

Which is how I came to be on the telephone to my GPs surgery, which was busy from opening time onwards.   I was told they don’t do the booster shot and could only refer me over some distance.  Why, when we have an NHS Covid clinic next door but two to them ?  When I asked at that clinic why Pfizer only, the staff on the door were polite but they couldn’t answer.  The knowledgeable pharmacist who has let his premises for the purpose gave me lots of “don’t fuss” but no answers. 

The letter from the NHS is says do have the booster but don’t come forward unless you are frontline medical staff or have a pre existing medical condition.  Call this number ….  The related website says the same thing. 

I take no medicines except my eye drops.  I want to be sensible and I want to co operate

but unless I lie, I can’t see a doctor.  And there is no guarantee that the doctor will know what he or she is talking about.  One of the main reasons for seeing him/her (information and reassurance) is now out of the window.  This is the sharp end of the shortage of GPs and the terrifying over expectation of modern medicine at the cost of “doctoring”.    

As expected, the walk-in clinic which was converted to the site of my first two vaccinations is no more.  If you can roll it out, you can roll it up.  It is a now a GP practice – all that space and light and heat !  Notices demand  “Are you registered to this practice ?  If not, call this number … “ I felt exposed.  I had a decision to make, I was not sure how to make it. 

No wonder people queue for hours at A&E.   You may wait, but you do see a human.

A practical woman friend, to whom I had communicated my anxiety,  tried to reassure me and inadvertently, she offered me the clarity I sought. Her son in law is a cancer specialist, presumably  familiar with the structure of vaccines, and he had said to her and her husband “Just get it.”  Well, each to his own

and you have to trust somebody.     

So back I went to the clinic on the corner to enquire how to go about it, where they had a gap and swept me and my shopping downstairs, to where five of us waited, ushered in and out by Ian (“I’m 83 and at least I feel I am doing something for my country”).  A nurse called Amy took all the usual details and asked questions about allergy, anaphylactic shock, spoke sensibly about the mixture of vaccines, side effects, how it might affect me, “which arm ?” And it was done. 

I came home to feel a couple of degrees under, keep warm, doze and generally behave like an old lady.   Fingers crossed, that will be it – but the questions still remain.   You can see why people don’t like being told “just say yes”.  They want to know what they are saying yes to.   You can sense the confusion between the staff giving out the injections and the staff trying to handle everything else-  there is another world of health needs alongside the Covid world.  I grew up with elderly people saying to each other and us “Keep well.  Don’t get sick.”  And now I am one of them, for similar reasons: I don’t know who to ask or what information is reliable.

Recently the young man 3 doors down put out a small box of books and bits with a sign saying “Free”. I took Isabella Tree’s Wilding (fab). 

Last week I saw a girl putting out some other things, thanked her for the book and asked if they were moving.  “To Australia” she answered with Antipodean twang.   We spoke for a minute or two and I wished them luck.  Later that day I saw a copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  Not my kind of a thing at all, but I was curious.   And I was reminded of a friend’s recent comment about a current success “the story isn’t much but the evocation of character is terrific.” You can’t knock a book that sold 12 million copies, shrewdly touching all kinds of bases – though for me the most apposite is the outsider as heroine, who functions but doesn’t fit and will always be lonely.*

Because lonely can be disabling. 

You never kind of learn how to mix or speak or even wear the clothes that would get you to first base.  You may withdraw still more and manage alone because you can’t see how to do it any other way, or develop a false persona like a mask (defensive and protective)  to enable yourself to function without explanation.  It must help if, like Lisbeth Salander, you are really good at something. 

But lonely hits you from time to time and you have to find your way through, aided by comfort food and wonky telly, long walks and bouts of maniacal housework. You can’t escape it.  It is part of you, I used to say, like a birthmark.  It’s there.  Evasion is harder work than recognition and the development of coping strategies. 

Occasionally, wonderfully, you meet other ghost ships

like you and you pass, flags waving, in the world.   It seems a very long time ago that I moved across the Thames from north to south where first I met a woman, 20/25 years younger than me.  I don’t know her diagnosis though I admired her forever when I once asked – a propos some comment she had made – how disturbed she was and she answered clearly – frequently unbalanced, occasionally psychotic and had to be hospitalised.

She went through several years of profound religious observance which gave her a focus though little more stability.  And then about a year ago – these encounters are completely random – we met and I saw something changed in her face.   She told me with excitement she had a new psychiatrist who really listened to her, that some of her pills had been changed

and she felt so much better.  She looked it.  I said so.  She beamed.

There is an odd mixture of childishness and maturity alongside her innate personality, at least with me, and when we met last week, she was wearing a pale green

which particularly became her.  When I remarked on it, she told me she had got down from an 18 to a 16 (“I got so fat, I got so fat but next time I shall get down to a 14 and then in spite of all the lovely nibbles and things at Christmas,  I shall get down…”  )  She had a vision of herself I had never heard before and it was the longest speech she had ever addressed to me, standing, holding my hand.  And embarrassed, she wound up with Happy Christmas and I stopped her – “You can’t say Happy Christmas.  It’s only October – we’re going to see each other before then… “

“We are ?” she said.  “Look at your lovely smiling face …”

I said “You know fine if that’s what you give, that’s what you get …”  She shook her head.  “That’s not always true “ she said (and I bet she knows it isn’t true.)

“No” I admitted.  “But it makes a great place to be coming from …” 

“You’re always so kind to me …”

“Do you remember” I said ”when I was so unhappy and  you stopped and taught me a prayer, and prayed with me in the street – you made me say it again to be sure I would remember it ?”   She nodded and put her hand against my face.

We have done well with each other.

On the front of the scaled down version of the Independent in print (called the i ) is a slogan: “journalism you can trust”.    I wrote to the editor, to whom I had a personal introduction, once by snail mail, twice over the internet, about something directly to do with the commercial content of his paper

and never heard a word.  Had I ever been naïve enough to trust that slogan, his lack of response  – or that of anybody representing him or his  journal – it would have ended there.  One lost in transit – yes: two oversights – maybe:  three – not a chance.

When a young woman representing the company with whom I had tried to get in touch over a four month saga spoke to me, I had to ask her to speak more slowly.   I don’t know what language she was speaking but it wasn’t anything to do with communication…  “in the box” perhaps ? 

  In this case the box had a lid, 42 layers of packing and a message to communicate one way.

I turned into my mother, very correct, very clear, shades of Boudicca ie “you can kill me but you won’t win.” Within five minutes we had established that (yes) they were behind on what they offered though still offering it, (no) there was no acknowledgement or explanation. Which (yes) probably was worrying and even (gosh) unsatisfactory – but this was the offer – spend to get – which I declined, deloping

rather than shooting the messenger.  Who wants to do business with such a bunch ?

This weekend I met a woman I’ll call Mrs. A , already in conversation with an acquaintance of mine whom I will call Ms. C.  (Mrs. A had wedding rings on, Ms. C doesn’t)    Mrs A had a bad facial bruise and a dressing over an injury above her eye – probably a fall.  She had spent four hours in A&E, waiting, she said, to have the dressing removed and the injury, I presume, checked.   I wanted very badly to ask (at the risk of seeming impolite) if she had not quietly asked for the simple help she needed.  But I know those places.  You sit and wait your turn and the less urgent your need, the longer you wait.

  And over the hours, they deal with everything.  Until it’s your turn.  She had bottled her irritation till she exploded, lost her temper and stormed out.  I suggested she went home, soaked a clean washcloth under warm water and worked the dressing gently off herself.  She said it had never occurred to her.  

Long ago before we knew the extent of his oppression, Mao Zedong brought into being an initiative of so-called “barefoot” doctors – people of any medical background (including veterinary) which could be built on with up to two years of extra medical knowledge to a standard, and sent them out in rural China with transport and a kit, to meet limited expectations.

  I always thought it was infinitely preferable to the dependence and over expectation inherent in the western model.

I have mentioned before that, hate the mask though I do, it has its advantages: I can mutter behind it.   And I am of the age to enjoy a mutter.  My father had colourful expressions which, when I use them, call him to mind. One or two are savage, World War 1, and I shrink from them.  For some reason – I have never understood why – if he really disapproved of a man, he referred to him as a “cowson” – the ultimate insult, I only heard it a limited number of times in my life.  (My father died when I was 24, it was his birthday this week) 

More commonly,  to emphasise desperation or importance, he punctuated his sentences with the epithet “God’s Teeth”.   I am very fond of GT, it gets an airing behind the mask.  There is something remarkably savage about invoking the Almighty’s teeth – and I did it the other day when called upon to share a bus with a man who stank. 

I was in a hurry otherwise I would have got off so I sat as far away from the pong as possible and muttered at intervals to myself.  I didn’t miss him when he got off, the miasma said spoke louder than words.

Picture

a whitehaired respectably dressed woman hooting with laughter over her newspaper.  The Times headline “PM rebukes police over treatment of women,” pots and kettles, anyone ?  Of course two wrongs don’t make a right but …  Subsequent print features a long serious article on Priti Patel, she of the ill fitting shoes.  Apart from sneakers (laces attach them) everything flat or heeled falls off the back of her foot. Is she webbed or some extraordinary size like 3 and four fifths ?   Can’t a minion organise the admitted expense of a special last which means that everything subsequently fits ?  It is hard to credit her power when she looks as if most of her attention must be focussed on avoiding a over t.

Tim (not his name) lives in the country and sends me messages about the weather and the light, the birds he feeds, the glimpse of a kingfisher

-and every so often, he hauls off and has a rant. About rabid religiosity (he is a regular communicant), the manufactured petrol crisis or the Chinese manufactured security light – three days of effort, two further pieces of equipment and the patience of Job.     

I thought I was up for a rant this morning, exhausted by every new tv series featuring missing children, violence, dark secrets and something nasty in the woodshed. If you want to make a start against misogyny, television drama would be a good place to begin.

I don’t need hearts and flowers and Busby Berkeley but the misery ratio has been high for two years and I’d like a break.  There is a new David Attenborough film but he loves crawlies and I bet the venture is syrruped in supermarket music. 

Many of the doctors wish to continue to work via Zoom but the best I can see that as is as a preliminary and then some of us will have to be seen for real – and I think that’s medicine.  Private medicine in London averages around £113 per fifteen minutes but they will see you, (less than the price of many a hairdo) while in many medical contexts, Zoom is like an upmarket edition of those Victorian dolls on which ladies indicated where it hurt (too indelicate to look at for real) and the doctor wrote a prescription.    

Mary (NHN) a single mum is up the hospital for the fourth time with her 9 year old daughter’s ear infection

– three courses of antibiotics, abreaction so severe to the middle lot of pills, her mother had to take her back in the middle of the night.    When is an ear, nose and throat surgeon to look at the source of the infection ?  I went this route 30 years ago with my own child, it’s terrifying and by the time I got to the surgeon ( the then secretary for the National Deaf Children’s Society told me in no uncertain terms) my son had 30 per cent reduced hearing.

Winter sweaters need replacing (after 20 years) but the quality is questionable, thin and won’t wash.  Sheep would be ashamed of it.  So I kept looking and had a buy for the first time in Uniglo – all wool, becoming colour, nice shape, good price.   It’s not that I don’t want to support British companies, I do – but what I want isn’t there.

 I don’t drive, though Tim sent me a local story of a man shifting mortar in a tanker who was pursued by a trail of vehicles who thought he had petrol.   The queues at the local pumps

added 40 minutes to the bus journey but I am still cheering an Asian driver who refused with gentle resignation – and a twinkle in his eye – to give way to a blowhard in a 4×4. 

A visit to an antique show permitted for the first time in over a year was wonderful – full of interest and light and because it was pouring with rain, only those who really wanted to be there made the effort.  I went with a new friend (Italian) who redeemed my creeping disenchantment through her different point of view.

This isn’t a rant is it ?  I’m not really fed up  … oh good.

Sometimes you go to write something  – but before you get there, you read something along the same lines.  And then you have to choose: are my thoughts still of interest or has (s)he (in this case Matthew Syed)

covered it ?  I like Syed.  He is thoughtful and intelligent and there can’t ever be too much of that.  

Second thought on the subject is that these ideas swim to the top of collective consciousness – by luck, planetary positions, who knows ?  Does it matter ?  He has written about an appreciation of the gift of life which in the person of a well beloved (in his case, his father) is thank you

for life itself.

Alongside blessing counting which I do out of celebration as well as every time I falter, I say thank you.  Usually there is something to say thank you for – say, a night I haven’t awoken with arthritic knee on fire – so often the first thing I say in the morning is thank you.    I know who I thank, and as we used to say, it is not illegal, immoral or fattening.  I have never objected to thank you, still reeling from the silly girl who said  it made her feel obligated. 

Which made me wonder – what makes me feel obligated ?  And the crisp answer is, nothing I can think of and I have thought.

In my world, kindnesses are freely exchanged.  If there is a misunderstanding, it is discussed, resolved and dismissed.  If we can’t discuss it, then we’re never going far in the friendship stakes.  Which is part of why I blench from “Oh, you must have lots of friends …”  No I don’t but the ones I call friends are wonderful.  There are of course imponderables – things you have to set aside because otherwise the friendship cannot endure.  But that’s a judgement call.  Still a judgement call even if you do “nothing”  …

I am sure that the willingness to acknowledge and say thank you says something about class, personality and upbringing.

  Oh how wonderful to be that much older and not care !   I say thank you because I like to and because so often it brings pleasure.  It is such a small thing and it betokens a much bigger one – acknowledgement.

In the online NextDraft (mostly but not exclusively US news items) there is a story about how people struggle to deliver anything from a book to a freezer tray, remaining largely unacknowledged and barred from using the lavatory at the property.   (Shades of the film The Help).  Perhaps this is the place to indicate

that there is an old unrepealed law in the UK saying that you may knock on the door of any dwelling in the land and ask to use the privy: it may not be denied.  Of course this ruling is open to abuse, thievery and knavery but very few knaves and thieves are thoughtful enough to ask to relieve themselves – even if they call it “the toilet” (how I hate that word, reminds me of a hole in the ground). 

There are of course big thank you’s – not making it to the plane that goes down, getting through exams, being cleared at least for the time being of some big medical problem, or me the night my son was born.  Lord, I was grateful -and I still am.  Though that makes me remember another gratitude.

I co wrote a successful little tv sit com.  My writing partner went home to the US.  The TV company assigned two other writers who of course wanted the job but not me.  The writing of the second series was diminished, I was married and pregnant with a much wanted child and the men I had to work with behaved badly.  Towards the end of the writing – I had stuck it out – I got up, said goodbye and left.   I didn’t scream or shout, I was polite – but I cried till I was sick and then I rang my mother, dreading her response.  “Oh darling” she said (never shall I forget it) “I’m so proud of you .”   What ?  “You have had nothing but trouble with this experience” she said “and all those miscarriages…  I was afraid you’d go on and lose the baby …”

Thank you.