Annalog

The first polar bear cub born in captivity here was called

Brumas and we all bought pictures and cooed with excitement.  Such a thing triggered all sorts of fashion and comment and jokes.  My father remembered every funny story he was ever told and told them to collective family mirth.  My mother remembered very few, like the one about two polar bear cubs  called In and Out, there’s a lot of In and Out as you would expect, and In gets lost.  When Out eventually finds him, mother bear asks how ?  “Oh” comes the reply” Instinct.”

Instinct was respected in my family, running parallel with education and intellect.  And I think of it every time I meet a particular neighbour who speaks to you as if you were a small child with dirty knickers, very full of himself, probably not helped by the fact that I am not a man.  I want to smack him.  I don’t see him often, thank heaven, and then I clench my hands for this is not the moment for instinct to out.

And then there is Tito, the opposite end of the spectrum, older, poorer, Afro-Caribbean, conversationally gentle but if there is time to exchange more than two sentences, he immediately launches into a long unwinding discharge of every bit of bad news and conspiracy theory

you have ever heard about and 26 you can’t imagine, unconnected.  I wonder how it all began, why he thinks that this stuff is any more use than the garbage through which we are wading at the moment.   I gently ease myself away, telling him it’s cold, go home.

And of course I had to meet both of them, one after the other, in the cold and pouring rain.  I can’t wish the Bully badly, his hidden good qualities have brought him a delightful wife and a very bright and beautiful son.  And I don’t wish Tito badly – I just want to know where he gets all this rubbish from, how it started, what is its appeal to him, other than endorsing paranoia.   While my instinct is completely contradictory: I want to hit the twit

and be very patient and gentle with the other.

Instinct is sometimes impossible to explain.  And I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about analysing it.  I respect it, acknowledge it, file it and draw on it.  It’s useful. What you feel is your reality and if that’s what you feel, there will be a reason for it. 

Deep in conversation with Snowdrop who had rung from the frozen north, I confessed that I found the present Attenborough series on BBC1 difficult to sit through because of the music.  Snowdrop is a film and radio academic – he understood immediately.   “Too much music” he said “distracts your attention from what is in front of your eyes. 

  It’s pulling you in another direction, delivering cues you may not need or want … and interfering with the voiceover which is Attenborough at his best.  I am sure it sells it to a lot of people but it is unbearable to me.”   Thank you.   Not just blind instinct but instinct as a trigger to thought, a process of choice …   We are all different, thank goodness but I don’t want music and speech and pictures.  The bits don’t fit.  Each to his own. 

Perhaps we are not really talking about speech or music (or speech and music) we are talking about sound.  The other day by chance on PBS (an American network I have had to explain twice in 2 days) I saw Ben Ferencz, whom I did not know and whose name I have never pronounced, now 100.  At the time of the Nuremberg Trials he was the youngest attorney (27) and it wasn’t what he said  but the sound of it that I found really uplifting because it was pragmatic and plain and accessible.  He was dry and funny and I know that part of his appeal was his very old hands . 

I like old hands.  They’re like maps .   When you ask people to go through terrible things, you must be prepared for them to reach deep into their instinct to survive and go forward.     Better if they can explain some of it to you.

Because I went to the US when I was young (19), certain images have remained with me.  It was in New York that I saw my first dead person, a girl propped up against the top of a subway entrance.  I asked the policeman how old she was.   Same age as me.   “What happened ?”  “Drugs” he said wearily. And in New York

 the streets were marked out (mostly) in blocks and I still refer to blocks.

My mother too referred to the block opposite the house (Cleveland/Kingston/Greenwood/Briarvale) as the little block, the loop that included Kingston as the bigger block.  I still hear myself refer to a shop as being “on the block near Sainsburys” or somebody’s house being “two blocks over.”

I was walking up the street one block from home when I saw a collection of objects on the left hand wall: a jug labelled Thousand Island, a glass container with a matching lid, half a dozen any old how plates, two bashed up paperbacks and a candle.  

by Bert Broomhead

  Still Life in the time of Covid, I thought. 

One of the things that time on your hands has made many of us do is go through the drawers and the cupboards and the files.   Both the Swede (next door but one) and my lovely friends who left for Turkey (currently roosting in Dubai)  put out books in boxes and I did well out of them.   But what I saw (eyesore)is a perfect example of the difference between a discard and a dump.

I dream of a manageably large single story unfitted building like a garage, dry, in which friends and I could set up a book store: oh yes, one entrance and one exit, two prices (£2 and £5), strictly masked and not more customers than whatever it is – three or five – at a time.   You’d have to do with people who like books because only they can even approximate alphabetical order. 

The charity book shop which took me through my leanest years was run by a former bookseller so you could find things.  Now it’s huggermugger which encourages lingering and fingering but not buying. 

When it was raining the other day a friend said he went through all the cupboards to put out two black bags of things he’ll never miss – but not the books.  I am in the same boat.  I have homes for one or two special volumes to go to but it saddens me that the only way you can get rid of a collection is to give it away.  Well fine if you want to endow somewhere  – but where ?  Books are heavy.   You are not going to send them far.   Teachers are weighed down

with extra responsibilities under Covid, the absences from Covid, the suspension of the syllabus and so on.  It isn’t fair to ask them to take on incoming books in number which have to be catalogued and stored.

Book burning heralds shut minds and the fear that comes with it.  Drowned books – sodden and impossible to dry and if dried, unusable –  are a sorry mess.  But books ignored, killed by neglect, by being dumped  – and thus you come to why (lockdown permitting) I hike my disposable reading matter along way over to a charity book shop that treasures books.  “Why bother ?  Why don’t you just take them up the road ?” friends say but you see, up the road, there is nobody I know of in any number to buy them and they will be dumped and pulped.

It’s not about making money, though I am very happy to make whatever we can for my charity of choice.  Or yes, when I look at what I have spent, I’d like something back.  Something – almost certainly – towards the next lot

because (as my son long ago discovered) you can always give mother a book.  And very early on we arranged that whatever else, I would give him a list of book suggestions so that he need never risk my notorious taste.   When he began to buy things for me independently it was thrilling. Though this year we agreed – no shopping – no presents – lovely cards.  And that too is a sign of the times.

As I walked up the road for the papers, the sky

was a sort of washed out beech leaf gold and as I came back it was quite definitely rosy.  Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning – the weather is changeable, and I am ungratefully sick of the rain – but thinking about Wal organising the commissariat made me smile to myself.   We are both crazy about roast chicken and Wal said he had found the best. So he brought it, and two breasts of guinea fowl to go in the freezer, half a celeriac and two boxes of Tesco’s finest water softening tablets.

I have not had deliveries of groceries

for the simple reason that I have no reason not to shop.  I buy as I need and I recoil from this “everything being done from home” idea when it isn’t necessary.  I understand e very effort being made to control the spread of the virus but there is only one of me.   I go out every other day.  I rarely go to more than one shop and I come home.  That is exercise, socialising, variation, air. Pam the Painter walks, she’s nearer to open country, but to walk I would have the share the park with entirely too many people, so I do it this way.   Two birds, as they say.

And then I saw her as I was walking home, a tiny skinny woman and I went past her – I am not proud of this – thinking no, no, go home – and realised she had no shoes on,

only stocking feet.  And that she was dressed in those gaudy unsuitable clothes that people buy because they’re cheap and cheerful, almost mocking, all wrong for whoever they are given to.  And her hair was untidy and her face was lined.  And she was not in this world.   So I watched. 

Not another person came down the street, but she was looking for something, the familiar shape of a letter or a figure on a gate, so I watched her up the street, afraid to disturb the concentration of fingering some remembered thing that might get her home and out of the cold. And I saw her go into a house, she had a key.

And I thought of Ruth Coker Burks’ book All The Young Men (just out),

about a woman who went to visit a friend in hospital and saw an early AIDS patient dying alone – it didn’t get any better – and – unsung and unchampioned – went and saw him out, and many others like him.  And campaigned for better education to combat hate and prejudice and fear.

When I was young I bought A Bright Shining Lie, Neil Sheehan’s book on America In Vietnam, and I have never been without it since.  It feels like a breast plate, waiting for me on the shelf.  Neil Sheehan was the New York Times reporter who appropriated the so called Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg.  Sheean died last week, God rest him, and there is no point in remembering war if you’re not going to learn something from it. 

  And there are all kinds of war.

A teacher friend of mine (I’ll call him Manny) isn’t really a teacher, he is a teaching assistant to children with emotional and learning difficulties, a career he came to late, almost like a second life.  His family didn’t like him and were appalled by his homosexuality.  He disliked himself and was unhappy for many years till he’d worked it through to the point that he could be Manny.  We met at a bus stop several years ago when he had just begun his job with the children. 

He worked with one very isolated little boy who didn’t speak but who came up and walked with him when he was on dinner duty, and held his finger for 10 minutes at a time, no glance, no word.  One day, there was a sudden smile.  Then, weeks later, the child left his side halfway through the lunch hour and joined in a game. And Manny was told to write a report, it represented such a breakthrough.   I love that story, I can see that smile on the back of my eyelids.

Is “lol” laugh out loud or lots of love ?   Anyway I would like to thank the Sussexes

for a headline which caused me to laugh out loud buying the paper in the convenience store this morning  – “Harry and Meghan quit social media” – and a man I’ve never met before, busy restacking a shelf, came racing over to ask what I was laughing at, so I showed him. And we had a conversation of mutual accord, beaming at each other round our masks. 

I have long believed that social media, the love affair with the mobile phone, little children taught to use screens from their earliest beginnings, records on line – all of it – is some kind of fashion,

aggressively marketed for the rewards of Croesus.  Of course I can theorise about it but I doubt very much that anybody reading 700 words approx. of neat wordage wants pseudo intellectual whiffle. 

Every time our relatively simple tech has pre menstrual tension, Pam the Painter – she bigtime corporate PR in an earlier life – and I take turns to tell each other how what we really long for is paper and pencils, carbons and a typewriter.   In the old days (yes, we say this to each other, giggling) we remember how much was done with half the kerfuffle.    I am just waiting for televisual notice from a lugubrious fellow in a bad suit who will turn out to be the Cabinet member for “stuff” telling us the grid’s on the blink, the banks have fallen

and the government has had to make the painful choice between keeping us warm and letting us liaise worldwide about the conspiracy theory in Wuhan, the Putin variant or why Orange Man is right.  Which will take two weeks.

And once again it is the middle ground that is missing.  Choice is being eroded.  A woman I like pointed out to me a year ago that, to manage my life, I might have to have a mobile.   The Fire Fairy (so named because of the colour of her mind let alone her hair) – deep in alternative medicine, serious reflection on the law and the meteorology of our threatened life – wouldn’t waste the time of a policeman on demonstrating about the conspiracy of the virus.  Oh, there’s a virus all right.  And like most viruses it mutates. 

Smart beast.  And the model with which we are trying to contain it doesn’t work.  And the present powers that be have taken too long to make decisions which might have been more effective which, coupled with the over medicalisation of our perception of ourselves, have made the system stagger.    Not so much Happy New Year as same old, same old.

Gosh it was nice to laugh.  And I wish those elderly children who beat it to California all the luck in the world, living in a staggering state at the heart of the Covid beleaguered citadel of the US of A.  And I loved America.  Really.  In life, you do what you do. However, what you have to accept, if you do what you do with a virus, is that some other poor devil winds up paying for it  – in skill and sweat to save your life,

or not. 

Two girls decided to go for a walk in Derbyshire.  They got in the car ( we presume they are in some sort of bubble, maybe not) and drove five miles to a beauty spot, to walk.  Where they were arrested by the police and fined £200 each.   What became clear in their interview is that “local” means different things to different people.  That what was presumed to be clear, isn’t.  Wal thinks if you get in the car to take the dogs to the park, to walk them – it’s local.   I think if you can walk to it, it’s local.   In the parlance of the pandemic, what does “local” mean ?    And if we have to ask so late in the day, you can see why the lockdown is inefficient.   Which means the police will be increasingly invoked to enforce it – without benefit of testing or vaccination, although they are front line.

No I don’t mean when you think you have learnt

that the Princess Royal had electrolysis or “that nice boy” is having an affair with a married man who happens to be your nephew.  I don’t mean when your daughter who has always planned to be a nail technician announces she is going to be a wildlife ranger – or the other way round.  I don’t mean putting your hand on to or into an insecure power point or the sinking sensation that accompanies  the opening of your credit card account.  Shock has a medical meaning

– look it up – it’s fascinating. 

Attending for the fourth in a series of eye injections at Moorfields, I recounted to my surgeon that the only thing I couldn’t work through and rationalise is the shock.  She asked what I meant and I explained.  So far, I leave the hospital, come home, eat something light – ideally soup, soup I make is the answer to quite a lot of things –  lie down, get warm and go to sleep.  That is what the body demands.  I am very pale and quite cold.  A minor form of shock.

But not this time around.  The doorbell rang – packet.   The telephone too.  Then the telephone again and the doorbell a second time.   Buns tells me he has learned to ignore these interruptions when they were not what he wanted.  I fear someone at the door to tell me something has happened to my son, while early life experience indoctrinated me into answering the phone.  I lay down – again !- slept for half an hour and woke so cold I thought I had a fever. 

Feet like blocks of ice. 

I went into the kitchen and put on the kettle for a hot water bottle which I still prefer to any electric device ever made.  Hottle in hand, I returned to the living room, closed the shutters (solid wood, good at keeping in warmth) but for a couple of inches, put the heat at my feet, the rug over me and eventually went to sleep.

Three hours later, I woke. Perish any thought of waste of time.  Either one of my parents would have said “Then you needed the sleep.” The body doesn’t do that unless it needs to.  Twilight was falling,

I like twilight.  I lit the candles on the mantelpiece, the big one in the kitchen, another in my bedroom.   I made what is called a nice cup of tea, unless you hate tea …  And I sat in the half light – still a bit through the window – and read the two newspaper articles which interested me.  And I moved through the evening with profound gratitude that my eye no longer felt as if it had half a heated metal box in it.

So often, words no longer mean what you thought they meant.  You have to ascertain not agreement but mutual respect (up to and including begging to differ) before using a word like, for example, moral. 

The meaning has narrowed, the wider meanings are ignored.  Nowadays moral is too often a word to do with sexual behaviour rather responsibility to the wider society , presumably because any sense of “society” and thus social implications doesn’t come readily to mind.   Perhaps it is a new definition of friendship that there are such words, the wider implications of which you understand even if you don’t accept, in the mouth of some people.  I count myself lucky to know about half a dozen, my kind of friends. 

I am sure my body is not a temple but I am sure it is a wood.   There was a wood near Acklam School when I was a little girl, with squirrels and dormice and all sorts of birds, things that slithered and things that crept, all with systems of life that interlocked and separated and permitted coexistence.    Discovery in the age of lockdown has to be wider than online workouts and overpriced exercise gear, puppies you shouldn’t have bought and children you shouldn’t have had.  Look at the wonder of the body’s ability to absorb shock and move back into gear, a million times more subtle than any screen and finer than any Ferrari.

For years worship was anywhere I could play Aretha Franklin singing Amazing Grace in which (happy blend of cultural ideas) her voice makes shapes in the air

as beautiful as the finest European cathedrals. Which takes me to the flagstones of an old church in South Africa (Tulbagh) for the low notes… and the stave church – all wood in Norway, nine hundred years old … free association is a wonderful thing.

Now I walk and pray in the street between my home and the convenience store where I buy my papers, and home again.   I love it in the dark of winter, because I love winter but it works just as well in soft light of summer. Or any other season and weather.  I commend silently to God’s care those I love, including family, friends and neighbours, the known and the unknown, the young who fear to be forgotten in Hong Kong, the stateless Rohinga, the ravaged poor round the corner and across the world, the creatures,

the land, the water and the sky.   

I don’t pray very formally remembering with affectionate laughter the late great Margaret Rutherford falling to her knees in Farewell Farewell Eugene to announce: “Now dear God, this is urgent … !”  Laughter is irreplaceable.

Pam the Painter has a saying “Put that in your bucket !”  meaning save the memory of that kindness, that compliment, that shining moment …. The bucket is year round.  But seasonally, I feel I might extend the metaphor and talk about the stocking.

Wal has recently found, through one of those Google in your neighbourhood schemes, a gifted Armenian seamstress called Sarah and he wanted to buy trouser material which meant a trip to a dream of a fabric shop, a family business called Joel’s. Wal and I haven’t seen each other for ages, so masks to the fore, we went together. I was just there to dress the set.

He knew what he wanted, it was all accomplished with minimum fuss and maximum efficiency, and then we went to the counter behind which was a woman I knew from years ago when I used to shop there too, and a pretty woman in her fifties whom I did not recognise, with earrings I admired.  “My mother gave them to me” she explained.  “God bless your mother” I replied.  And when everything was settled, the younger woman came round the counter, stood opposite me and said” You used to have short dark hair.”   I did.  She said some lovely things and her husband murmured deprecatingly “I’m afraid I don’t keep up with the television.”  I said beaming “You wouldn’t have seen me in the last fifteen years !”  So, having exchanged goodhearted pleasantries,

we left.  It was moving to be remembered so generously and it’s going straight in my stocking.

I tend to tell these stories as they happen on the basis that, as they sustain me, they are good to share.   The world

is hard, it always was, and you don’t need a special occasion to share joy. “Joy cometh in the morning” – untaxed, unfattening, a thing of wonder and this year, my joys include –

My grand daughter who sent me (with her father’s help) a drawing of the world and in thanking her I sent a line of kisses (xxxxx right across the screen) which apparently she loved.  Stocking.

Katherine who arrived with long stemmed red coral roses in a beautiful vase (she’s a potter) and a book and a card – Raeburn gold medal – ie I was speechless.

The hound and helicopter unit (K9) in the Kruger game park which is having success at catching poachers and saving black rhino calves.   Black rhino and bloodhounds – definitely stocking

– while Declan ended his letter telling me how his parents approved of me with the unheard of exhortation “Stay awesome.”    And Mehmet declined my fare in his taxi.  All stocking.

The stocking may develop a hole, it may wear out or go missing in some dusty corner but the idea of it doesn’t change.  Remember the good and the beautiful – they lift the heart. 

*Next week is the transition over the bridge from the Old Year into the New.

Let’s not promise each other anything but hope for health and peace and better days.  I drink to you, you drink to me.

Annalog will be back the week of 4 January 2021….

Christmas is a bit like a raft.

  First of all you don’t think you can get it to stick together.  Which wood   should you use ? (Of course, I want to say pine trees)  What about the crosspieces and how will you secure them ?   Will you need a sail ?  And most importantly will it float ?

By the time it gets to ten days before Christmas, it doesn’t matter whether your festivities are elaborate or simple, traditional or innovative, a seven day blow out or 24 hours to catch your breath – you are committed to them. 

And if you are not determined to make the best of them , please don’t start. 

Years ago a young woman rang me to moan about Christmas, what she didn’t like about it, how boring it was, could she get out of travelling home ?  She could of course, I said, but not ten days before.   It’s rude.  People have hopes and they make plans, even boring old parents.   If you are going to go home, do it graciously.  And if you are not going to do it with grace, don’t do it at all – and then you have to step back with grace

and you should have negotiated that six to eight weeks ago, minimum.  Still, I doubt if there is very much in  life that you couldn’t do with pleasant good manners for two or three days. Lie in your teeth if you must about extra work or a friend you’re really worried about so that you are around for the minimum time, but make sure you are charm personified for that minimum.  A course on politeness as a method of social control and survival seems like a very good idea.

I have been fretting about Christmas because I am an inveterate old fashioned see for myself shopper and most of the places I want to investigate are small shops, fairs, sales of work and markets, all of which have taken a beating at the hands of the bug, the lockdown and so on.  And this has all been made worse by surrounding indeed ubiquitous uncertainty.  To use an old fashioned phrase, we really don’t know whether we are coming or going.

And time out from that sense of confusion is particularly hard to arrange because it affects so many aspects of our daily lives.

 And I don’t feel safe outside, not in any seriously phobic way.  Just unsure, unsettled: so I go out, do things and come back sooner rather than later, the very opposite of the committed Christmas shopper.

Came Saturday and I made a decision.  I went to an area where I like to shop, out from the centre of London rather than further in, got on a tube instead of a raft and got on with it.  I prepared myself for disappointment – and didn’t have any.  The places I value are still open, hooray !  Of course I regret the ones that haven’t survived but even so …  I found presents I had given up being able to conceptualise, I bought marmalade from a Frenchman who made my day by speaking French back to me

(full marks for flattery and salesmanship – we beamed at each other round our masks).   I picked up this and purchased that, up to and including some moody Zen based balm for my aching knee, and wonderfully inexpensive pretty cards from two girls who smiled, cheerfully and agreeably.  They run a card shop – it should flourish.     

I got the giggles in the fourth Waitrose in which I have tried to buy the tailored inexpensive candles I like – where you can have every kind of perfume, shape, container and variant of candles , but not  plain cream ones. They are not in my local because it is running down stock, and anyway they’re just not Christmassy.  So I shan’t see them again till the New Year has been and gone and we’re back to “normal life”  – a phrase the meaning of which remains increasingly unclear to me.  And I don’t think I am alone.

The imaginary Christmas raft has by now vanished into thin air, I know what remains for me to do and then the time will be upon us.

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.