Annalog

I was really excited to see two things I liked in Saturday’s paper – a seriously overpriced but utterly beautiful rose

gold bracelet and some equally impressive Scottish textiles, for mouthwatering sums.    I don’t need either of them – just as well, because I couldn’t afford either of them – but that isn’t the point.  And it’s not just champagne taste and beer money.  The point is that they pleased me.  

Always interested in clothes and fashion, the shape and the colour of things from cups to shoes, recent photographic spreads I have looked at were just horrid, charmless, self conscious, and bank breaking. And barring a large sweater which certainly should be warm at those prices, I was beginning to think that I had finally turned into the Granny Grim Natasha made a small statue of, all those years ago. Because I could make lists of what I don’t need or want for Christmas.

I want health for people, I want lungs, I want them to be able to catch their breath literally and figuratively. 

And you can’t buy health, retail or wholesale, giftwrapped or plain. I want kindness and peace and a bit of imagination – like the Fire Fairy (to do with the colour of her hair) actress, director and teacher, now librettist and published poet, speaker of five languages and owner of a dicky knee (Signora Patella) – who simply said “My turn to buy the calendars” and we shall be meeting on Monday to share them.

Last year I sent her a Christmas card with an Inuit image – I very much admire Inuit art and own two small pieces, the carved vertebra of a sperm whale and a ptarmigan made of the handhewn tip of a narwhal’s tooth – and when she whooped with joy, bought her the calendar. 

So perhaps we founded a tradition.

Years ago I parted company from stollen, mince pies, Christmas cake (although in its time, I loved my mother’s) and Christmas pudding. Boxes of sweets and chocolates, and biscuits do nothing to me.  But panettone does, and when it arrives,  I swan around eating it for breakfast on Christmas morning, trying not to gollop it because I like it toasted too.  Buns –  so named because he does have a sweet tooth – calls me Pans for short.  None of this sugar foresworn is to do with dieting because I put weight in the winter like an old bear, but it is to do with taste and sugar for the sake of it has no great appeal to me.

Enjoy your turkey if it’s what you like, I shall enjoy something else – probably a chicken or a bit of duck with lots of vegetables and lots of fruit, and enough nuts to turn me into a (red) squirrel.   

I’ve kept few decorations but pine cones fascinate me.  I have some carefully silvered which I put about in a large glass bowl or across the sash windows.  The doorknocker is a pine cone from Wal and I have two pine seeds in my wallet.   In Jack London you hear about “roaring fires of pinecones” and apparently that’s OK out there in wolf world

but not clever for a domestic chimney.  And last year I bought a Scandinavian straw wreath  and I am so glad I did because the shop is no more.  It reminds me of the ox and the ass, in the stable with the Baby.

I always have an angel shape, usually hanging on the shutters.  I always have mistletoe , a much older tradition and I look yearningly at the rowan at the street  corner  which is covered with swathes of red berries (druids again).   My attempt to grow a sorbis failed ( a regrettable combination of purple fingers and  dubious soil) and I wanted it even more badly when I had learned that in the Celtic calendar it is my natal tree. 

All the Christmas decorations I collected for my son when he was small are, like his books, waiting for my grand daughter to be just that bit older, beyond finger and discard.   I look at them lovingly,  I remember his shining eyes. “The nature of all exile” writes Alberto Manguel “ is that it affirms the perseverance of memory”, even if the only exile we’re talking about comes through age and time.    

A change

is supposed to be as good as a rest but I’m guessing that’s a small change like seeing your mother every fourth Tuesday instead of every third Saturday.  The change currently around us – whether we progress it or react against it or try to think about something else – is enormous. You can block out what may be happening until it is under your nose, like Carol (not her real name), 27 years down the line of full time work  from being a Saturday girl, and made redundant at the end of December.  Happy New Year.  And sadly she is far from alone.

It is fine to say (and I hope it is so) that as one door closes,

so another opens but you might like to reflect on the number of fingers that get trapped in between the one and the other.  Figuratively speaking, trapped fingers – actually, jobs lost.  Because if you can’t earn the money, you can’t spend it.  Never mind consumerist Christmas with its tinsel hams and fairylit mince pies.  You can’t spend what you haven’t got –  on groceries, on rent or mortgage, on utilities or putting petrol in the car – and while I too long for the day when the cars are rechargeable, you’ll still have to pay to make them run.  And if you haven’t got, you can’t spend and the money won’t go round to anybody else.

Back at the beginning of the year, a friend with often impeccable intuition said she thought things were going to change, meaning in the sense of less greed , more kindness and a more responsible attitude in the world (see The Ellen MacArthur Foundation – it made me cheer.)   As a fully paid up member of the Cassandra Club, I knew that the route we were embarked on was fraught with pain, muttering up my sleeve “Be careful what you wish for.”   She is more hopeful than I can afford to be for change is not accomplished with the whisk of a wand. (re Ellen MacArthur, the work of the foundation is ten years on).  Minor alteration is one thing, social upheaval is something else.   Change is OK if you have resource – money, clothes and shoes, places to stay and ruggedly good health, better still if you are on your own  – but if you don’t have something to fall back on and others depend on you, the winds of change blow chilly and the upheaval is less of adventure than a sore trial.

Like a lot of other people I just get used to things, the things I like being in the place that I am used to find them and it is a shock when that pattern changes.  Carol told me what was happening to her because she knows I’ll miss her.  I shall also miss Andy and Liz, neighbours from heaven with a boy and a girl and a rough haired dach.  They are off abroad, he’s a linguist and neither of them want to stay through this stage of the Covid fallout.  They’ve found a house, rented theirs, put books out on the garden wall and they’re off on December 13.    It’s not as if I was round there every day for a cup of sugar, it’s just that we talked easily and well and widely, and that is sufficiently rare to be cherished. 

My son usually works through Christmas and we don’t know whether we shall see each other or not yet.    We talked about presents and cards, giving each other the freedom to choose or not choose without obligation:  money’s tight.  Best hang on to what you have.   I don’t know the first thing about economics  (there have only ever been three public economists I could understand – David Smith, Faisal Islam and Peter Jay) but I do know that the country is in the cart financially.  

  The dream of what government can and can’t do is filtered through what it will and won’t do, which depends in turn on who it wants to influence for the best.  

My change is to give fewer gifts: make modest contributions to five charities : send cards (I bought them reduced in January): prepare to light candles, use the telephone and get on with it.  I am not cancelling Christmas and it is not cancelling me. 

In anticipation of the lockdown ending

in time for us all to get sick over Christmas, I have received a two page printed letter, marked on the envelope as addressee only and confidential, which is designed to make me feel like an anti vax rat and send me off to have the flu jab.  I’d love to know how many of these were sent because – gilt on the guilt – it goes on to infer that by not doing as I am told, I am wasting NHS funds.  Three minutes with a sentient human would establish that the flu vaccine was contra indicated by a doctor. Much cheaper.   Of course, there is the matter of who you trust – the NHS and the system in general, me, my former GP or the current practice, etc.   I shall reply in due course.

As I left Waitrose on Friday, a voice said quietly, very close to my ear “You have the most wonderful hair.”  The owner of the voice came unmistakably from the US 40 years ago (Philadelphia), was a teacher married to a documentary film maker, and has been ill. 

We spent 10 happy minutes nattering round our masks.   A Good Thing.

The autumnal corduroy wide legged trousers I bought atypically for £20 in sale  have been approved of by three younger women – a neighbour who beamed and pointed approvingly,  Olya an architect from Belarus, here 10 years, and a woman waiting with me for the till in the supermarket.  I mention this because I have friends who are good at bargains but sadly my instinct for a bargain is psychically undeveloped.

Whereas while I wouldn’t say it is routine, it is not unusual for Wal to get £60 of shirt for £24 while Pam the Painter enters TKMaxx like Sir Galahad at the gallop.  

It took years for me to realise that I was quite well served on the last day of sale because what I want, few others want anyway.  I am wary of reduced prices I can’t quantify – and like many of us, I have lived too often through the false euphoria of “two (or even)three for one” – toothpaste yes, but unless something to eat is your real fave, it goes off or you get bored with the whole idea.

When we lived a life in which freedom of movement was a given (I admire spontaneity though very wary of the word normal)  Ginny and I had supper roughly monthly and, both red wine drinkers, worked our way through blends from SA and named Italians, which included Primitivo – a vinous panther, not often sought because it was pricey.   And recently, in giving the shelves my careful attention, I discovered the beast reduced by £3.   Reader, I bought it.  

  And when I discovered the same offer 48 hours later in another branch, I bought it a second time.   A Good Thing.     Two inches of Primitivo is worth two thirds of a bottle of lesser stuff.   I sipped it while watching the opening half hour of Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth, a production which scrambles history to the good end of emotional truth. I didn’t stay with it because I was drowsy and I thought I might sleep, also A Good Thing.

A long time ago McVitie Digestives made a marketing decision – same number of biscuits but smaller for the same price and I think I have just seen the same take for the second time.  My favourite bakers (French, two shops) stock a pumpkin seed loaf of delicious durability ie in a ziplock you can keep it going for a week for toast.  The bread is as good as it ever was, the price the same but the size is noticeably smaller.  I looked at it, it looked at me – oh well, I thought, you can’t have everything in a world where the payback is just beginning to be visible. 

It was still A Good Thing.

And then there was a good thing that was really an aesthetic investment because cheap it was not.  I bought 10 bronze chrysanthemums.  I know they are not everybody’s choice but they are mine.  |I love the colour, the smell, perhaps even the fact that they aren’t often available … six in the living room, four in the kitchen, course work on blessing counting (107) complete. 

Endlessly interested in character actors,

I catch myself wondering if they are really as they seem –  so dour, so ditzy, so dangerous – or whether in real life they are all perfectly ordinary men and women (whatever those are) who just happen to have a cast of countenance useful in a particular story and the way the camera sees them.

“Don’t look like that” said my mother to me, as far back as I can remember.  “You’ll turn the milk sour.”   Or even more intriguing was another remark, usually addressed to her reflection in the mirror when she was tired “Oh dear, I can’t take that out – it’ll frighten the horses !” 

When I was small I wanted to know-why horses ? – and she had to explain to me that when she was my age, quite a lot of vehicles were still horse drawn.  I thought this was very romantic and she left me with that lovely image till, much closer to adulthood, I saw some programme about the rise of the engine, to which she commented drily “More dust, less smell.”  If you’re allowed horses as in fairy tales, the reality of horse manure comes as a bit of a shock. 

But I’ve thought of the sour milk image several times this week, when I see people rushing off with 27 packets of loo roll and enough dried pasta to feed an army.  And I am sure I look disapproving.

Probably one of the reasons that a tv career was not open to me was because, no matter how controlled the voice, one look at my face and you’d know exactly what I was thinking.  My radio crews tumbled to it and laughed in the production booth, my son still teases me about it.  And as I get older, my facial expressions echo (as do occasional vocal inflections) what I recall of one parent or the other in particular circumstances.

For example, the boys next door woke me from deep sleep the day I came home from the eye hospital.   I lay there, listened for a minute or two and reached for the dressing gown, convinced it was about 4.00 am and this wasn’t on.  So channeling Hecate,

white hair to the shoulders in a long robe, I opened the door and said to the group trying to extricate an unwilling passenger from the car they share, in tones just like my  Edwardian mother at her martial best “It is very early in the morning.”  They stopped dead.    I said it again, the voice of authority in received pronunciation.   James said  “Oh Anna, I’m sorry, did we wake you ?” to which I rejoined “Sort it out”- that dates  me, right there – which I reiterated when he tried to say more.

I relocked the door and swept into the living room, furious about being disturbed in my own home, wah-wah-wah, checked with the speaking clock and found it was 12.02 am.  Was my face red.  And then, thank you Robert Burns, I saw myself as others see us – and it was truly horse frightening.  So when that evening, James and Harry arrived with what are known as “a few flahs”,

we all laughed.  I told them how I had misjudged the time and how I had “seen” myself and they told me they had been trying to get rid of the gatecrasher for an hour or more but that  he left a few minutes after I spoke.  (When I told Buns this story, he said he thought I should retrain at once, I clearly have a future in security.)

There is a place, of course there is, for the expressive face, the wonderful speaking glance you exchange with a perfect stranger and just know without a word spoken, you are on the same wavelength – or maybe just one word.  “Indeed” you say and reap the harvest of acknowledgement.

Much more recently, in what is laughingly called maturity, I came to appreciate Wal’s theory about the power of confidence – not bombast, not throwing your weight around and being disagreeable – just being able to be and letting your face speak for you.  But when skin is so thin and so many people are on the jump, you have to be prepared to give account of yourself.  Or huddle behind your mask.

I wrote about division last week and even the garden

doesn’t know whether it is coming or going.  There are flowers in bud, flowers in bloom, there are green shoots, brown leaves beside green ones and wintry stems, all in just about equal parts.   Sounds familiar ?  The division in the UK over Brexit was just about half and half – just like the much larger, much richer and more violent US of A in its recent protracted electioneering.

Some years ago an American client told my then husband that he didn’t like either of the two candidates on offer and he disliked profoundly the system that made them what was available to him. 

“Too long and too expensive” he said “ and that means the people you’re interested in drop out.”

But some stay in.  Boris Johnson made it to Number Ten and Joe Biden made it to Pennsylvania Avenue, third time lucky.  The British press is full of stories that the Blond was disagreeable when he met Biden as Obama’s vice president and that he (Biden) has a long memory.  In terms of trade, need and cooperation, we can only hope that he will like us even if he doesn’t like him (BJ) – as we have felt about Americans for the last four years.

So I don’t envy about-to-be President Biden his inbox,

the snarling writhing spitting opponents, social conflict at every level and how many of America’s most important institutions have been run down both in numbers and quality of personnel.  I don’t envy him the bitterness with which he will be greeted by those who hitched their dreams to the wagon of the outgoing reality television president.

The United States into which I arrived at the age of 19, where I worked and paid taxes for two years, now seems remote.  Last night, a friend who spent time there as a youngster and for whom it was always top of his list of favourites, told me he doesn’t want to have anything to do with it for the foreseeable future.   “They’ve lost the plot” he said. 

And some of us wonder what we ever really knew about the United States.

We put bad news aside. We chose not to remember that even the personal friendship between  Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, men of similar status and Churchill’s mother was an American grandee, even so – the special relationship was not enough to bring our greatest ally into WWII.   We owe the Japanese for Pearl Harbour.

America puts its own bad news aside.  Sooner or later a presidential candidate has to invoke “the American people” – those same American people who were systematically lied to through Presidencies of both parties, which threw all sorts of securities and loyalties into doubt during the protracted war

in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.  

The old echoes of “Secession !” and “States’ Rights !” which characterised  the outbreak of the American Civil War (1860/65) remain as unresolved to some as the period of reconstruction for freed slaves.   There was more hope in the 1960s and there was more honesty.   And honesty has no colour.

And I don’t envy Mr. Biden the sheer physical and mental burden of office which we have seen cruelly age every incumbent.  I don’t envy him the stick he is going to take in Congress and the Senate, the bad mouthing he will face for his Vice President – a woman of colour with a brain.

We all have decisions we’re unhappy about, among our own and our neighbours, nationally and internationally.   There are things we cheer for and things we regret, things we can adjust to and things we just can’t.  And the higher up the chain of command you go, the more strenuous is the negotiation.

But Joe Biden wanted this and he got it.  Because of this long long run up, he knows more about how the machinery of American government and public life works than many people.  And for me, the single most encouraging thought so far is that he is noted for “reaching across the aisle”.   I don’t even know if this is too little or too late.  I hope not.  I wish we had access to the same.    

I am tired of division. 

I am tired of the old being arbitrarily separated from the young, the young from the younger, the boys from the girls, the straight from the binary, the black from the white.  It is not how I was brought up.  I was brought up that the cover may indeed inform you about the book   but only that it is possible.   Generalisation is only a discussion point.  Fluffing up one group like a pillow isn’t so that you understand it better, it is so that you can market to it and manipulate it more successfully, whether ideas or pet food.  I am tired of that.  I was brought up to believe in circles and journeys and a central spine to life, like the spinal column, from which everything derived, often interrelated and to which, sooner or later, everything returned.

And just because I am primarily a dog person, it doesn’t automatically follow that I don’t like cats.    Groovy Kitten (named in the sixties) ran away when I left Michael.   And I shared two moves with Chocolate Pud (he was Burmese) but I couldn’t do that to him again so we found him a home in the country with a cat he got on with, companions to cherish him and trees to climb.  He was beautiful.  

A friend has been throwing away old papers

and we agree that there are things you can’t toss till you’re ready.  And I shall never be ready to part with the worn edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, one of a set of books my father bought and which both parents read to me.  And of course keeping the book is not just to do with the stories but to do with memories of my parents.  And I find recall is like a mental tree, like those lovely drawings of the Tree of Life,

or Joshua trees, or the baobab –  once you start, the mind begins to project images, and the nose to recall smells, your ears hear voices and even the fingers twitch at the remembrance of this sheet or that coat.

Kipling’s story of The Cat that Walked by Himself came to mind last night, because it was Halloween which was originally Summers’ End (Samhain) in the Celtic calendar, one of those permitted because it couldn’t be overcome festivals that the Christian church let be, especially if they could doorstop it with All Souls immediately afterward.   Last night  Samhain (when the barriers between the dead and the living were thought to dissolve, gods and devils came among us) was also the night of a full moon, and this was the first time the two had been together since 1944, my birth year.  I have never needed to wait for more than a nudge to respect the old.  And I remembered the Woman who lived with the Man in the Cave of the Kipling story and how she made the First Magic.

In my childhood there were no pumpkins.  Halloween lanterns were made of turnips.  And if we were lucky we’d be invited in to play bob apple or to eat sausages and potatoes cooked over an open fire (delicious), on the common at the end of the street or in somebody’s back garden.  And we respected what went before because we had imbibed that wisdom which says that if you have no past, you have no future.   No root, no bloom.

All fire is wild and I have the greatest regard for it, from bonfire to match, and its concomitant, light.  Fire drives away danger, light banishes fear,

candles keep you company and offer respect to the old and the new, and the power of both.   And I thought of pine cones which symbolise renewal and the Third Eye.   So I arranged a line of nightlights across the sash window with careful spaces into which I put the cones.  I sprinkled salt around the perimeter of the house and I went to bed, oddly comforted at having made a small gesture at pulling the bits together.

In the middle of the night, I saw a face, the face of an African child.  I can rationalise this for you but I’m not going to.  What is interesting is that she smiled warmly and sweetly, and that I smiled back in the darkness of not quite awake. 

 *dreamtime, the Golden Age when the ancestors were created,

   from the Australian Aborigine – with respect. 

I don’t believe Donald Trump ever had Covid.   From the moment

I saw the doctor who isn’t a doctor coming out on to the steps in front of the medical centre, surrounded by a chorus of batmen in white,  I expected them to launch into barbershop harmonies.  Smell ? It reeked.

I don’t believe Jeffrey Epstein,

nearly as rich as he was unpleasant, killed himself.  I am sure the job was paid for. 

I don’t believe the Prime Minister gives a damn.  He wanted power and the country delivered it to him.   And now we know that all that burble

is all there is.  

I don’t believe the Chancellor is any better, just a newer face.   He may pray more often but that’s for his own soul.  Not ours.

I don’t believe that there is any great difference in mindset between Piers Morgan and Boris Johnson.  The only audience either of them care about

is the image in the mirror.  Whether it is media or Westminster, get between those guys and the glass, and you really will be unpopular.

I don’t believe what bread looks like.  I believe how it tastes.  If I had a pound for every tarted up loaf I have shelled out for  – at fine food fairs, farmers’ markets, artisanal outlets  and patisseries – that looks fine but tastes of not very much, I would be a rich woman.  My son used to tease me about being the only person he knew who would go distance for a good chicken – true – and now it’s bread.

Walking to find food may not sound as glamorous as exercising to an on line tape or walking for charity but it counts as exercise.

I am still giggling about being described as a hysterical feminist. (IDBI)  I was looking for something on line (it was a slow afternoon) and turned it up.   You’ll have your own view of feminism (a bit like beauty, in the eye of the beholder) but I have never been hysterical.  It is how a certain group of men  describe any woman who gets angry.  I was born angry

–  my parents, I salute you.  And I owe a man (Dov) the greatest thanks for having told me that it was so, and the story from Solomon, and Martin Buber’s rewrite, that confirmed it.  

And while the above seems heavily laden against the male sex – may I just say I would be just as critical about women who behaved as badly, unkindly, immorally and with such noisy irresponsibility – as the above ?   And that in the last few weeks I have received several outstanding letters, all from men.  Half a dozen letters isn’t a sea change but it might be a marker.    All too often the thoughtful are shoved aside by an unthinking mass.

And that image  – the few being inundated by the many – describes why we are in such a state about several of our institutions – the NHS, the constitution,  the BBC, my God read the information from Logistics UK about the increase in prices.   No wonder people keep looking for a saint or a superhero to pull us back from the lemming

brink that looms.

The slender young woman with red hair who passed as I was putting rubbish in the bin (I have a very good relationship with my bins) was wholly mortal – yawning.   And she wore a well cut single breasted coat the colour of orange peel – over which I exclaimed, asking her to show me the back  (where cheap coats pinch and become ugly) and generally enthusing.  She excused herself (with a whisper of an accent) for yawning without covering her mouth, I told her she was probably the last person in London to do that, we smiled at each other and parted.  

Later in the afternoon, I opened the door again and on the step were 12 roses, white, yellow and orange.  The orange must have been dyed, I have never seen a rose that colour, how clever –  and a note:  “not quite a jacket but a splash of colour to brighten your home.  thank you for connection.  your neighbour, orange jacket.”

Note:

Victor Meldrew is a popular British TV character whose catchphrase is “I don’t believe it !”

I was never a big drinker

which is not to say that I haven’t tried to keep up with Wal and Howard who have hollow legs or Ginny (ditto) but I wound up belching, farting, giggling and blurred.  About as far from soignee as you can get. 

Pam the Painter and I (who have  known each other for 25 years) have been known to drink two bottles of Prosecco at a sitting – we liked it long before it was fashionable – though I remain the only person I know who can’t drink champagne. 

Two polite glasses maybe but a drop more and it depresses me to death, crying jag.  And every time I buy tonics, some wiseacre jokes about gin to which I am very nearly allergic.  One gin – pale and woffy. Two gins – lavender with taupe shadows under the eyes and most unwell.  Not worth it.

I longed to be continental, smoking caporal and knocking back Scotch

but neither liked me and I never got the appeal of white wine once I was out of my twenties.   A rose can hit the spot sometimes in the summer, though it is not what I would habitually chose.  I love red wine and Ginny and I used share supper and surprise each other variously with South African blended or Italian experiments – a long way from Chianti – cheering each other on. 

But red wine likes me less than it has ever done.  It stops me sleeping .  So I drink less than I have ever drunk, two grudging glasses of wine on a night when I think I can tolerate the second one and sleep ( I am known to have just one measurable one). 

Or a mean measure of brandy in a long glass filled with ice and tonic (always Fever Tree, who speak advertising truth to purchasing power ie the mixer is two thirds of your drink and it does make a difference) – one.  I have been known to have a second but not more than half a dozen times a year.  Come Armageddon,  I want to be sober.    But I do want to drink Vittel again before I die.

When I first moved in here, I was still working a bit and thus earning.  The local convenience store, which has changed hands and some of the stock but remains convenient, sold Vittel. 

And I drank it. It wasn’t cheap and I gave it up when it was an economy I could make.  A senior representative from the Water Board whom I had interviewed at Talk Radio (when it was a radio station) had written to me delightedly about being allowed a fair shake.   So I taught myself to drink

water from the tap.

Somewhere in there this was reaffirmed by discovering Sarah Helms’s book about Vera Atkins and SOE.  

I first read about Special Operations Executive in the person of Noor Inyat Khan.  The book was called Codename Madeleine and I found it in the school library when I was 14.  Vera Atkins drank two big glasses of cold water to start the day and if it’s good enough for her, it’s good enough for me.  I also drink water during the day which is what most people forget to do, under and around the two cups of coffee I purr over for breakfast, possibly a cup of tea in the afternoon and whatever else.  But I do miss Vittel.

I pass on soft drinks and cartons of juice.   I have only once drunk Coca Cola – parched, in the Kruger Game Park – and I would rather be thirsty. Mouthwash.  There was once a man who told me on radio he drank 16 cups of white coffee a day and I thought he was potty.  Once I had discovered that I was very nearly allergic to chicory,

gone off and back on to coffee, which took years – it was black as the pit, hot as hell and sweet as an angel. Quite apart from what the latte was doing to his digestion, think of the impact on his wallet.

You can live a surprisingly long time without food and all kinds of other fluid but you need water. 

Make mine Vittel.       

*Cockney rhyming slang: fisherman’s daughter /water.

The Tiger

is an experienced nurse from Bengal, not Bangladesh. It was the first thing she told me, in response to my question about her name.  Her father is a devoted GP in the south east of England.  She has seen tigers in the wild.   Music

is the surgeon who told me her name means music – when the Hindu gods spoke, it was called music.  One of her grandfathers had hoped she might be a musician but both father and mother are surgeons and she is too.   Once she had chosen the eye (opthamology), she concentrated on the retina.   If the retina can’t work, there is no sight.

I have macular degeneration and the right eye has slid from dry to wet mac.   Several weeks ago I went to Moorfields the specialist eye hospital for the first time in 50 years where there was a slender hope of a variant.  This week that hope vanished. 

The treatment in the NHS for mac is a drug called aflibercept,  injected into the eye. 

What stops people taking part in research ?  I was asked to take part in a study asking if retinal images can predict response to the aflibercept therapy (etc) and enthusiastically agreed. That imaging takes ages,

a skill of its own, requiring you to sit very still in an allocated position. Somewhere in there the researcher said “You can relax now” and I growled “Shut up”, went on concentrating till we were done, and then apologised.  From there I was escorted to a quiet room with Music and the Tiger in the research part of the hospital where I said immediately that I was a complete coward, not good with needles, needles and eyes – not to be thought of.

But it is the treatment and often effective (if I had asked, Music would have given me the percentages).  As it was, I had hoped to evade this for a time when I would be ready (never) and it didn’t work like that.   

When I met the Tiger, I asked if she held hands.  She said “Yes” firmly.  And Music explained, what, why, where and three more dates.  Ayse who is running the project put the letter with the dates in my hand.

We’ll skip blow by blow, because all interventions are highly personal.   There are men and women who have suffered pain at levels I would find unthinkable. 

There must be an accommodation over time, the body must biochemically adapt, as does the mind (pain is perceptual). There are painkillers, the right position, coping strategies, etc but nevertheless, pain is.   This is a big deal to me, because I have been witness to so much – physical, emotional, sexual, social – so easy to cause pain.  And I know my physical levels of pain tolerance are low.  (A great friend is going through a procedure at the moment which is made more difficult because she is used to putting up with pain and she has to approach it another way if she is to heal.)

The Tiger did indeed hold my hand, Music told me what she was doing as she did it, through anaesthetic, antibacterial, retractor and injection. 

  There was indeed a moment of profound discomfort and I spent the rest of the evening wanting to shake my head like a donkey with a bothersome fly (one of my favourite poems is GK Chesterton’s The Donkey).   But there is no pain.  There wasn’t last night and there isn’t this morning.

I was given drops and told how to use them (in the worst designed ever bottle but then I am clumsy).  And they asked “Would you like us for the other appointments? ”   And I said yes please, it  would give me clinical coherence, explaining how in my professional life I spent time with people who never saw the same person twice and constantly had to go back to the beginning.  And how distressing that is, a diminishing loop.

I doubt that Music and the Tiger said anything they hadn’t said before and before, but I met them with one of my few gifts – communication – and it’s a two way street.  Two women, both mid 30s, committed with admirable skill sets and experience, kind hearts and clever hands.  My mother well wished me.  It was her birthday.

It’s all too big. 

£154 billion for the high speed rail link or borrowed to keep us afloat, a billion pound bail out for London Transport, here a billion, there a million –  £5 million for Graham Norton, £1 million plus for Zoe Ball.    Yesterday I heard the first sensible argument for the plan that reduces  “an Englishman’s home is his castle” to crumpled fag packet.  I remain unconvinced.   And however good at his job Graham Norton is, his price is too high.   To the whinny of “that’s the market price” I’d say – then let somebody else pay it.  Ditto Ball. Nobody is irreplaceable.

Small is Beautiful

is still on my reading list and  maybe, after Dick King-Smith – because after I wrote last week about my son reading his childhood books for reassurance in life’s pressure cooker, I have been reading one a day.  Let it rain.  I am dry, warm and comforted, not the least by the writing.  And they are still running dinnerladies on Sundays.

A friend rang to say that she didn’t want to talk to her grandchildren on Zoom – “It’s not the same” – and last weekend she had found a garden they could visit, she and her husband, the preserved and functioning herb garden of a 16^th century fever hospital.  The guardian took them round and showed them everything, about a dozen visitors carefully masked and distanced.  And then as they were going, presented my sympathetic friend with a bouquet

of some 20 herbs, tied in a red ribbon.  When she, thrilled, reached for words, the guardian ran through the herbs by name. I gasped when she was telling me this story on the telephone and she said she had gasped too.  “That’s what we need, a small a day…” I said, and you can make up the rest of the rhyme as you like.

When I left the house (newspaper run) I looked to my right – dumped toilet and cistern.

  Too heavy for me to fling through the window and you must get the right dwelling if you’re going to do things like that.  So I turned left, ducking under the branches of the trees in the street, heading for where my side road adjoins the main road – and there, smack on the corner were two navvies (19^th century from the word navigator – Oxford Dictionary) surrounded by red plastic hurdles and warning notices, taking out old paving stones. 

  And I said delightedly” You’ll interfere with the bikes” and started applauding. They looked at me.  “You go right ahead” I said.  “ This is a blind corner, I am an  old woman and they come down here “ I gestured” and go on to the pavement to bypass the traffic… “ and they grinned. “ Good for you, get in the way of the bikes.”  And I resumed my superficially respectable exterior and left them to it.  

I went out the other way, the road is blocked and they have a job to do.  But when I came back from shopping, there was an enormous wagon parked on the point of the corner and the two men still working, so I asked the nearest one “What shall I do ?”  He nodded and dug his spade in, walked out, held up his hand to the admittedly modest flow of traffic and waved me through.  As I went past I said ”Thank you very much” and he replied “You gave us a good laugh this morning.”   A small a day.  Please note: I am all in favour of bikes but not their weaponization.

Buns rang from a secret location –  the only way he can avoid constantly offering himself for painting, tidying up, bailing out and monitor duty is to go somewhere he doesn’t know anybody – and in a long and much appreciated telephone call, we discussed how wearying all this is.

  Not only the illness and all its preventions and conventions, but constantly having to prethink, which is in itself a problem.   I told him the two stories above, and the mantra I had devised.   

Don’t talk to me about Christmas, still less the flatulent neo-Victorian blowout which has dominated the past decade.  Don’t wish your life away.  A day at a time, a small a day …