Annalog

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. 

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.