Annalog

I was brought up to believe that if you liked someone, you would find a way to relate, to talk, past any social difference or difficulty, because you liked him or her. Out of that communication everything else would follow, easily or otherwise.   By the same token, I was brought up to believe that if you had an immediate animal doubt, respect it, act on it.  Move away, stay guarded.  In adulthood, I often learned to apply the two at the same time ie move forward verbally and keep your ears pricked.

I remember my mother trying to get me to go to parties (I rarely enjoyed a party) explaining that it wasn’t about being a wet blanket.  It was about what you felt, really felt, not spoilt brat pout. “And if you feel something’s wrong” she went on, “get them to ring me.  I’ll come and get you.  Best polite excuse is food poisoning.  Nobody wants proof of that!   But I want you to at least try and see …”   It was a long time before I realised the size of the freedoms and responsibilities with which my parents had imbued me.

When I was about 8, the older daughter of the family at the end of the road arrived late one evening, and asked to speak to my mother.  My father went to the house, Pat talked to my mother in the front room.  Her father lashed out when he was in drink, this time it was bad.  Her mother was hysterical, her younger sister frozen in fear.   Between them my parents helped to sort it out.  When I asked the next morning if Pat was all right, my mother said quietly that she intended to marry her boyfriend and get out of “all that” (she gestured).  “What about Valerie?” I asked, who was though older, nearer to my age.  “You choose when you can” said my mother.

Last week a woman I know a bit and like a lot asked if she could have a word with me?  And when I said yes, she drew me aside.  “What would you do if you knew someone was being knocked about by their (sic) partner?”   I said ring the police.  She said “My husband would kill me if he knew I got involved.”  I said you don’t have to give your name: you say you want to report domestic violence, you will be asked for the name and address of the person at risk.  Her eyes filled.  Or, I went on, you can get in touch with Refuge (founded as Women’s Aid).  “Where will I find them?”   Online.

This morning a neighbouring flowerseller said in the course of pandemic pleasantries “It’s all very well, this lockdown, but it’s not easy to be at home with somebody, all day every day.”  Figures for domestic violence are up over 60 per cent.  When times get hard, far too many take it out of the next rung down in the pecking order.

So I rang the only person I know with a brain and a radio programme, and told him about it.  And Lisa (not her name) is ready to talk to the police and fight back.  Imagine all that over the head of a small child and with the long hours of a who knows for how long job.

“doggy paddle – keeping going “

Could the violence have been anticipated?  Was there something, some sign you should have seen but missed because you were trying so hard to get things right?  I don’t know.  You don’t see what you don’t want to see, that I do know.    And then when you have acknowledged something is terribly wrong, what do you do and where do you go?   I know a woman who waited till her violent husband went away on business, packed up herself and three kids and came back to England from abroad, with nothing, to start all over again. Her hair fell out and never regrew. How I respect her.

Because my life’s work has been communication, to find the words, to help other people find them and use them.  Using the right words is less emotionally expensive or physically painful than a blow. And violence never stops with one blow.

In the dear dead days when media still expanded from time to time and that didn’t have to mean unreliable rubbish, you could build items into the early morning news programmes around other people’s findings, in the form of surveys and quizzes.  If it came from a big enough institute of learning, the numbers involved would make the findings tenable but even if the numbers were smaller, and the whole thing was probably based on a straw poll in the office, you could still make a “talker” out of it, ethical light relief.   I’d be called at five a.m. because I was up the road from one such station and had learned long ago to rationalise clothes and presentation into 15 minutes max., get in the car and somebody will tell you what you are talking about – quite different from what to say.

There is a current study out of Princeton (American Ivy League, so far unTrumped) which says that gardening is good for you. It mitigates (I quote) against isolation and promotes EWB (emotional well being).  YKWIM  (you know what I mean.)   But nothing beats loppers.

In the longest period of psychotherapy (5 years plus with the wonderful Heather) I remember recounting a dream.  I don’t very often remember my dreams but this was very clear.  I was carefully removing from the apple tree in the back garden of the marital home every dry leaf and faltering twig, obviously to promote its health, and I remember saying that I didn’t know what the dream meant.  My therapist’s eyes twinkled.  “Ever heard of dead wood?”

I thought of this when I did the careful preliminary strikes on the winter broom and the laurel (annalog “don’t get around much”).   The laurel shook its head, took a deep breath and normal service was resumed.  The broom continued to look peeky.  “I need loppers” I told AJ on one of his periodic visits.  “You don’t want to carry those, they’re heavy.  Get them on line” he suggested.  I hesitated.    I don’t mind ordering things online, it’s all the other stuff that incurs. ( I have never forgotten 181 explicitly sexual emails from Russia). “I’ll get them” he said and he did.

They aren’t heavy, they are light, well balanced and if I (current holder of the Golden Ham Fist) can use them, anybody can. I cut away the over growth with grace and power.   And there isn’t much I can do with grace and power nowadays.  The broom is a mass of new growth and considering its options.

I was reminded of my loppers last night when I set out to watch a film I expected to like and didn’t , followed by another I expected nothing of and was rather pleased with (Films 1 and 2).   Film 1 was losing me to a complicated scenario when Wal called.  It’s much easier to talk frittata with Wal than to sort out celluloid time zones and social insensitivity.   So I gave up and waited with every kind of misgiving except the actors, for Film 2 about late life change.    Generally speaking these films leave me cold.  They are either romanticized muck and brass or they are all Belgravia botox.  And though I could pull this product apart and toss the remnants, there were some stand on your chair and cheer verities.

Things didn’t move easily, there wasn’t endless money, people had to contend with the ugly face of Alzheimers, terminal illness and bereavement in life, as we do.  It was too long but the length was used to make you see how hard it is to do something else.  There was some good music, some happy times and some smart asides, just enough courage and hope to avoid a hearts and flowers ending, fiction used to enhance fact. More and more I think of movies, past or current, in terms of pick and mix.  You look for the bits you respond to and forget the rest.   And sometimes, in trying to get your head round enormous changes (the pandemic) you wind up absurdly happy with something small (the loppers).

Loppers by Presch Tools gmbh

Film 1: Goodbye Christopher Robin

Film 2: Finding Your Feet

And a toast: old wine to drink, old friends to meet, old wood to burn.

13 years older than me, my sister was a child of WWII and my mother took her to the country where the bombing was less.  They moved into rooms in a country vicarage a long way away for the time (hardly any petrol for cars, few trains) while my father stayed at the local aerodrome with the Air Training Corps.  My mother became a magistrate’s clerk in a nearby town, and she told me as a little  girl, about getting up in the morning and pulling trousers and a coat over her pyjamas, to make tea and get my sister and herself ready for the day.  I can’t explain to you why this image of my pretty mother (I’d seen photographs) pulling a tweed coat and corduroys over her nightwear stuck with me but it did.  I smile as I remember it, I bet she put on perfume too.

There was a robin in the garden one day last week and I sped from the kitchen to the other bigger window, picking up my glasses, so I could watch without disturbing him.

When he flew away, I went and put on newspaper collection clothes – pants, trousers, socks and shoes, sweater  – no bra ! – and a soft and voluminous jacket that conceals all.  If I am knocked down by an errant vehicle, everyone will know.   I put my far too long, Noh play lion, hair up and taking my purse (check for keys) and the bag that stands ready, I walk the five minutes up to the main road where two white vans pass.  From the window of the second comes a young man’s voice shouting “I like your hair !”   I gape and raise my arm.  And from the window of the van up the road, I see a young man’s dark arm waving back.

Irving Penn (1917 – 2009)

When people talk (and they don’t much, it’s a journalistic thing) about the pandemic influencing us for the better, they are not talking about mass movements.   We won’t suddenly all become good neighbours or better friends.  But there might just be a renewed interest in the small acknowledgements, politenesses and behavioural generosities that make the day brighter.

There are a group of people who are working harder from home than they ever worked in the office and may I say that 12 hours a day on the screen is tough on the eyes and the back ?  Yes I know, theoretically you should stand up, stretch and move every fifteen or twenty minutes but you don’t, you forget, the next thing happens and you go on.

And then there are all the people whose work has just closed down and heaven knows where they go from here.  One minute, there were three young women in publishing living next door to me, offering their mobile numbers in case I should need them.   But they were gone overnight – no income, no rental.

Ian Matyssik

And alongside the small courtesies which take no time and cost nothing, there might be a greater appreciation in the subtle gradations of meet and greet.   We don’t all become friends.  Friendship is  a very high order of social and emotional connection.   I can’t stand that phrase “my new best friend” unless it’s said in jest.  Nor can I remember the last time I heard someone talk about an acquaintance.  It risks sounding chilly and formal.  We must all be friends – thank you, I prefer to choose mine rather than have them foisted on me.

But there are two women, slightly older than me, whom I met because I said “Good morning.”   Obviously I look as if my neck is clean (and my bra on) so they would risk returning the greeting and we are free with each other for all sorts of subtle personal reasons, because we  “recognise” each other but also because these are hard times.  This is not The Great Mortality (see John Kelly’s book on the Black Death) nor the Second World War.  But it is quite bad enough.  This is the Third World War and it will be fought every way except militarily – economically, socially, medically, psychologically – not made any easier to bear by the political aggrandisement of several men who are a disgrace to the genus.

Eyes are precious. Yes, I am as scared as the next person of being unable to breathe or dying in agony but I am so scared of losing my sight that I shrink from writing the word “blind.”   God spare me this.  Eye problems changed my daily prayer from “if it be Thy Will “ to  “Please God take me before You Take my eyes”.  So when the right eye went into spasm and the image I was watching on tv became more and more misshapen and (briefly) vanished, I did what you do when you don’t know what else to do:  I went to bed.

The next morning I wrote through the blur

to Prof (my specialist) via his enormously likeable and capable practice manager whose initials are AA.   I confirmed we had already been in touch (routine check, delayed of course), none of the tests were available and asked for help.  (I spell this out because I regard learning to ask for help as one of my few conscious steps towards maturity).   AA rang at 9.00 the next morning to book Prof, who spoke to me at 11.00, his most pragmatic and thoughtful self.  He advised warm compresses to relax the eye and improve the blood flow, frequent use of eyebright and blinking more, a lot more – in fact, when in doubt, blink – all of which has been amazingly effective.  Plus of course the psychological aspect of putting me back in charge of my own eye.

Reconciled with my flawed but functional peepers, I read a piece in the New York Review of Books about the Sahel – not a word I knew, I had to look it up.  Turning the page, I noticed a note which said look up metmuseum.com for the exhibit so I did –  gasped with pleasure – and learnt something: how much I had missed new things to look at, things to learn about (see Merlin in The Once and Future King).

I don’t miss most of the ghostly shops with their boarded up or empty windows though they look eerie as they are and their display was part of my visual background. I wonder how many will ever open again, how all that empty property will be used.  Online purchase has been restricted to   expensive face cream (my age, you know) which Wal found for less and cheap loppers (see below).

Though the QuoG (queen of gardeners) lives up the road, I am not she.  For years I thought my fingers were purple and my touch toxic, but however wonderful her horticultural gifts, she cannot or will not communicate them.  So, never a pruner, I tried and as the first attempt survives so far, I tried again, this time with an untrammelled laurel.

I cooked something different and bought the ingredients in different places.   The first two servings were a cheering success, the third (different sources – no pun intended) less so – but it was new to me.

In common with a lot of other people, I went through files and cupboards, tearing up and throwing away.  And like a lot of us, there were whole days that passed in a psychological monotone. We are not all buoyed up by online cocktails or “flexibility furlough” and as a friend put it “I am not depressed but this is depressing.”

I had to face the fact that, just because a film is old, it doesn’t follow that I want to watch it and have I turned off some rubbish !

A new friend posted me an old book I had always wanted to read, beautifully wrapped in tissue printed with Hokusai’s waves and a black and white postcard which said “I really want you to have this.”   Birthday, Christmas and unexpected gift all rolled into one, her thought and the text.

And the sunshine, though very convenient for drying things and airing the rooms, showed up walls in need of a once over and even (I blush) a cobweb.   I can only hope I spotted it before anybody else.

After a telephone call from someone who clearly believes in science as 15^th century scholars believed in alchemy,  has lockdown been eased too early ?  I don’t know.  And neither does anybody else.   We’ll see.   Just remember to wash your hands.

soap rules!

Generally speaking, I support the printed word and one of the thrills of my working life was to be given a set of national newspapers daily.  I still buy two newspapers most days, occasionally a third but I admit to pet hates too and suddenly The Evening Standard began to be delivered through my letterbox.  This is a publication I would only use under my shoes.  Friends told me they were not so honoured and I now have a notice on the door which says “Please do not deliver The Evening Standard here.”

I would write to the editor if I thought he’d get my letter but he has repaired to the country.

His name is George Osborne and he featured on the cover of the Saturday Times colour magazine this week, because he was formerly Chancellor of the Exchequer, he is rich, recently divorced, has a new girlfriend, has lost weight and has “never been happier”.  If you care.

There are people you can’t like.  You don’t know them but you can’t like them.  Your dislike isn’t reasonable because you don’t know them but there is a kind of animal recoil.  Hooray for animals.  Unable to speak, they have enviable instincts and perceptions.

George Osborne is not a pretty man but then neither was Les Dawson and I adored him.   GO has an unfortunate speaking voice and a patronising manner.  Perhaps this should be addressed in preference to which sneakers he wears.  Voices matter, the manner of presentation is important.  I bet I am not alone in being turned off merely by the sound of what he says, never mind what it means.  I am sure he is comfortable in the boardroom but I do wonder about the social skills of a man who has been married for 20 years and sired two children, on record as saying he has never been happier.  Thanks chum, that’s somebody else’s life you just dismissed. Of course it is possible that he is just another one of those people who went along with the conventions and then found them wanting – or that the interviewer who had some slight previous acquaintance of him misquoted him.  But he’s an editor and presumably has at least one phone to use if he had had the slightest pause over this representation.

However,  if the article initially comes over as midlife crisis, a bit further down the text he advises the PM to tell unfortunate truths, to say publicly that we can’t continue with the lockdown, economically we are on our knees.  We are going to have to face the presence of the virus,  even as we try to manage it, and that means living with death.   This is important because death is out of fashion and surrounded as we are with those who break the current law and then pretend it doesn’t matter, it is restfully clear.   Marks for this.

“you have to do this through voice and manner if you are speaking PM to population”

If there is one quality politically wanting in the last weeks,  no matter how  unpleasant, it is clarity.

And the mysterious delivery of the paper is revealed too.  The Evening Standard is a freebie.  It depends on people stopping you in the street to hand it out.  And of course they can’t – social distancing forbids such an approach.  It is piled high at railway stations for commuter collection: but the stations are closed and the commuters aren’t travelling.    Heaven knows how they selected where to deliver the journal but it was dumped on us.  And like every other freebie it winds up blowing down the street, or lodged in letterboxes where it advertises absence.  There is a financial implication to have whole editions left in your lap but wouldn’t it have been greener and thus a better story all round to pulp the lot ? Wasn’t there a process by which you could make this all smell a bit more like roses and a bit less like getting somebody else to dispose of it ?  Oh well.  You were a Teenage Werewolf ?  I was George Osborne’s dustbin.

The girlfriend of a friend’s son (late 20s) remarked that she didn’t like saying thank you,

“sweet peas mean thank you”

it made her feel obligated.   Less a chip on the shoulder than a whole sack of potatoes.  I have a particular relationship with courtesies in general and thanks in particular and off the top of my head, I can’t think of a circumstance in which I would feel obligated.  Wal taught me late in life that if somebody really wanted to buy your lunch, (a) they could probably afford it and (b) you should let them.  The rubric about “no such thing as a free lunch” is another matter.

My mother used to growl about gratitude being a dangerous emotion and in context, I can see what she was driving at.  Grateful that someone special (business or pleasure) noticed you, took you to dinner, took you to bed was a hiding to nowhere in particular.  Your gratitude might be expected – not appealing – or ignored – rejecting. There must be a better basis for social transaction.

I am sure I was just as resistant about thanks as every other small child and had to be encouraged to acknowledge effort, kindness and /or the gift of the last toffee but encouraged I must have been, because it is deep in my marrow.

And it didn’t take a pandemic to get me to notice the efforts that made my life easier.   Thank you costs nothing, takes a few seconds and often, means a lot.  So I was shocked when last week I thanked a man in the supermarket and he said with a shrug “No choice.  If I had a choice, I wouldn’t be here.”  OK.  So now I am facing 30 years of disappointment.   I said very levelly “There is always a choice. I’m just thanking you for being here today”, collected my shopping and the foot I had put in it, and left.

The same thing happened in M&S where a woman said “Don’t tell me, tell the management.   Makes no difference if you don’t” though other sources tell me M&S have been assiduously supportive of their staff.    As Abraham Lincoln said “You can’t please all of the people all of the time” and I used to add, only a fool would try.  The warmest thanks you ever get is for doing your best.

I risk going “on” about my parents because they were outstanding – with a full set of ups and downs, and family rows and difficulties.  Light shone round them, nothing to do with haloes.  They were married 48 years when my father died and in some ways it was a deeply conventional marriage (she cooked, he smoked) but it had roots of commitment and honour and respect.   Apart from loving each other, they liked each other and they bore each other up in times of trouble.

All the way through my childhood, till I was 17 and left home,  I remember my father thanking my mother as the punctuation to the end of a meal whether it was what she called “scratch”  or something with a bit more finesse.  My father knew that my mother always did her best and he thanked her for it.

It didn’t take a pandemic for me to realise that thanks is acknowledgement and in an increasingly greedy and materialistic society, you risk feeling that you are worth nothing if it’s not reflected in what you earn, or what you’ve got.

Thanking my dustbin men started years ago, when I realised what a decent bunch they were.  They’d take anything as long as it was properly wrapped.   I am capable of standing at the door and applauding the man with a vehicle called a Scarab that sweeps up dead leaves and the rubbish in the gutter, both of us grinning.  Who loses ?

One of the great freedoms of age is that you get to spread thanks around.   I don’t care if you think I am a mad old bat with white hair – I am – but I will stick my head round the door in a quiet moment, 24 hours later, to thank someone who tried to help me in the chemist –  no money, no calories, no problem – reciprocal magic.   

My first non secretarial job was with a sex magazine.   My first journalistic job was with a woman’s magazine.  For the next 20 years I was told at intervals that I wasn’t “a proper journalist”.  When I went to women’s magazines, they were just beginning to buy computer time to help with the compilation of quizzes.  Very popular, quizzes.   And I was bemused by the way the findings were packaged  – sometimes in fractions, sometimes in percentages, sometimes in ratios.   Usually in all three but never just one.And I learned that the object was not to tell the truth but to look as if you were.  Sound familiar ?

Yesterday a friend, who is actress/teacher/poet, speaker and reader in five languages and no fool, confessed that on Friday she’d been as low as she ever wanted to go and we discussed why.  Like a lot of us, she finds the sense of being played for a sucker punitive.  Work beyond her desk is closed to her.  But what most unsettles her is  an almost permanent sense of distrust and an outrage at the amount of plastic – PPE, disposable this, throwaway that – and we are not discussing what we are going to do about it, because “news”, like government’s coverage and update, is divided into bite sized pieces, right by size if unreliable in content.  See the line above .

I was never any good at science or maths, a considerable regret to my secondary school headmistress, herself almost overly qualified, who spent her time trying to encourage girls to “do” science.  The other day an old acquaintance sent me two youtube segments of distinguished scientists talking about aspects of corona response and I realised that – apart from unusually poor sound quality – I simply couldn’t understand what I was being told.  I watched 15 minutes of one, glanced at the second, muttered “God forgive me !” and put them aside.

But I do know about media.  And the daily press briefing is a disaster.   Yes, different ministers have a chance to shine but then some of them really don’t.   They wouldn’t if you polished them for half an hour.  And the tone is wrong.   It is a weird combination of Butlins and bluster.   It supposed to sound confident and make you feel reassured.   But you’d have to be committed to those feelings rather than an appropriate sense of human curiosity before it would work for you.

And those figures – oh, those figures.  I hear my father muttering “Lies, damn lies, and statistics.”  Back to where we came in.  Move the figures around.  Make them sort of truthful – but don’t commit yourself.

Instead of standing up and saying “We can’t give you reliable figures.  We have figures for deaths in NHS hospitals.  We have an estimate for figures in care homes.   We have an estimate for deaths in the community.    We are not going to marry an actual figure with an estimated figure because that wouldn’t be reliable.     The disease moves very fast and quite particularly.  We are still learning about it but you must know we are on your side and we’ll do our darned best for you.”   Not a chance.

Whoever is in charge of the press and publicity of the prevailing party has not realised how sick of cant many of us are.   The endless repetition of something doesn’t make it true.  And changing the slogan doesn’t make it any less robotic.  There isn’t an overview of the pandemic outside the current model of medicalisation with which we approach the world and that was already giving us trouble.

The Churchillian quote that appeared at the end of Darkest Hour is oddly relevant:  “Success is not final.  Failure is not fatal.  It’s the courage to continue that counts.”   Of course that presupposes that the continuing courage is dedicated to the wellbeing of an essentially trusting public, not the balancing act of party politics.  And this morning Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter who knows far more about figures than I ever did or will stated on the record that the public was “broadly supportive of the measures” and “hungry for genuine information”  but was being “fed this what I call number theatre.”

*see the meaning of Spiegelhalter.

When we saw Disney’s “Lady and the Tramp”, I was 11 or 12 and my mother whispered to me how clever it was to draw Lady as a spaniel so she could toss her ears back, like a girl tossing her hair, and Peg as a Pekinese so that when she shimmied through her torch song, her tail did it for her.   I’ve been big on ears and tails ever since (noses too, if you’re human – but that’s a whole other story).

So as I was switching through tv channels the other day, as you do and particularly at the moment, I came on an animal, prone, surgically blanketed, with a white coated vet standing alongside and the camera zoomed in on a badly torn ear, and I saw that I was looking at a not fully grown kangaroo.  The way the vet acknowledged and touched the beast was appealing, and he explained that the ear would have to be stitched  “… and now I’ll show you my secret weapon.”

He brought forward a jar of  very thin mother of pearl buttons, something like the size of an old copper penny and real nacre, and stitched them in, individually and carefully at three separate points, to support the ear as it healed.  Then, as the animal came round, he carried it back to its owner, a younger man plainly concerned, and they sat while the vet explained what he had done and how the supports could be painlessly removed.  “Is he going to be all right?” asked the kangaroo’s guardian.  “Sure” said the vet “ look …” and he showed if he pushed the palm of the roo’s paw, it was increasingly slow to fall back.  “He’ll be round in a minute.”    Forget Van der Valk, give me the vet.

I watched this same man talking to a turtle, stroking its shell while he and a knowledgeable woman discovered where it was injured, uncomfortably but not too seriously, which he could deal with there and then – this was part of a WWF project into turtles in that bay.   And with all the animal films I have watched – and I have watched a lot – I have never seen anybody talking to a turtle or stroking its shell before, though a friend tells me they feel everything through the shell.  I like that image.

What puts me off animal documentaries is also to do with ears.  I either can’t stand the presenter or the music, either way, aural room freshener.  Though people who give their intelligence, their energy, their lives to save wild animals capture my imagination.  I  remember a longstanding game warden, murmuring in patient Zulu to a rhino, knowing the animal could smell him but the team needed to net him and take him to a place of safety, and the Japanese scientist who designed a replacement tail fin for a dolphin who had lost his in a savage infection.

Because in all the truly terrible human suffering and endeavour of the last weeks, the animals haven’t had much of a look in.   Yes, the Chinese “wet” markets have been mentioned, where you can buy almost anything in conditions that would spook a horse – but not more than mentioned because the Chinese don’t like this laboured and we need the Chinese.   To eat wild animals is one of two strands of human behaviour as old as time – one is economy and the other is folk medicine.  It is believed that if you ingest the animal, you take on its most prized attributes -strength, wisdom, cunning and again, strength.  Two friends of mine have seen those markets and they both say they will never forget them though they wish they could.  Is it just my Western gutlessness which says if you must kill a bear, why must it be in filth and misery?

Reviewing a new book called Has China Won ?, Max Hastings writes ”A year or two ago I observed to a friend who knows Asia well that after many centuries of appalling treatment from the West, the Chinese seem to deserve their time in the sun.  “You may be right,” she responded cautiously and wisely “but I don’t think they will be very kind.”  Not to us and not to the animals.

16 bags of wrapped garden waste appeared in front of the flat next door whose owner is away staying with her elderly father – she emailed last week to tell me.  Don’t ask why she left it so late: an altered sense of time is one of the features of lockdown. So I got in touch to ask if she had arranged someone to come in to clear the garden ?  A month is a long time in garden time.  She said no.

She rang the owner of the upper flat and thus it was discovered that it wasn’t a dump – it was meant as a kindness by  the star of the upper flat, one of the young men who had already checked to tell me to ask for help if I needed anything.   I readied myself to apologise when next I met the SUF hereinafter referred to as Suffy. He knocked at my door in due course, “just checking …”

I apologised if I had caused kerfuffle.  He waved it away, less in denial than lack of interest and asked me if the woman I had contacted was a friend ?  I said no, we get on perfectly well but there is no social relationship.   “Well” he said carefully “she would immediately ring Poppy (not her name)” who owns the flat he’s in, with Poppy’s son.   I explained I had feared it was a dump because of the amount.  He understood – “ No” he said.  “I began, so I made a job of it.  But she’s tricky  -“ indicated with a sideways nod that he meant she of the lower flat.   “So’s Poppy” I said drily , looking him straight in the face.   “I don’t get it” he said.  “Neighbours in this street.”  “You may not get it” I said “ but it hasn’t been as you’d wish it.”   He asked me who I knew.

So I indicated – the nurse who has brought up her son alone, Kathy with the boss black and white cat, three at the end of the street (one away before the lockdown and two I am wary of), the therapist, the couple opposite, my thoughtful next door neighbour.  I made a comment on one which made him smile  “You described her so precisely.”.  In reply I told him a story about not judging a book by its cover and warned him – young, thoughtful, very driven and far from a fool –  that he must be wary of middle aged women living alone.  He asked why.   I said “Because whatever it is, it’s rarely right for them unless they choose it.  I told the story of you clearing the garden to a friend of mine, who fits the profile and she said immediately “Oh no,I wouldn’t like that at all. It’s trespass.”  D’you see ?”  He looked straight at me.   “Can you imagine anybody doing four hours’ clearing up for mischief ?”  I said I couldn’t but that’s how those minds work.  As socially defined as the barons, new and old, in television’s Belgravia.

“But” he said,  “it could all be settled by just a knock, and a bit of a chat.”   I couldn’t agree.  “We can settle things with you with a knock and a few words, but if I took you through the history of the occupants of the flat street level next door, your age rather than mine, you’d beg for mercy.   I spent the first four years on the phone to the (now defunct) council Noise Line.  The freeholder who lives upstairs and I took it in turns.  I knocked in calm and endeavour.  I knocked in fury at 3.00 am. Didn’t  make any damn difference.  I had never been treated like that in my life, I didn’t know what to do.   If I had been in a council property, I might have had recourse but in a private one, not a sausage !  And I’m just a mad old bat with white hair.  Dismissable.”  We grinned at each other.   He asked if he could put something through on the printer, save him going into the office and when that was done, I shooed him to the door.  “Anything –“ he said .   And he moved the tub I couldn’t lift,  with the winter broom I have spent all week pruning. 

The accountancy mentioned is strictly of the emotional variety.   As a woman remarked of pandemical behaviour in general “The nice is very nice and the nasty isn’t very nice at all.”   Never an optimist, cockeyed or otherwise, I expect the worst and celebrate the best.  I don’t believe Covid 19 will all turn out for the best but I do believe this is the only wakeup call the flatulent over populated spoilt world would listen to – no pop concert, no million billion Facebook friends, not the demotion of killing disease – none of that could have made the difference that this nasty bug has made.  It has frightened us half to death and we needed frightening.

You have to choose who you talk to in these terms.  The Kandinsky Kid only wants everything to be all right – her main progress in the last year has been to admit that about herself, before we were all Pollyanna’d to apoplexy.   Pam the Painter admits she can only stand so much reality sandwich at any one time but it’s more than it ever used to be.   Bunslove (having sold his millstone maisonette legally correctly) is now restored to bracingly cynical Celtic gloom and Ginny (presiding over job and house repairs of equal demand) is the blessed realist of the quartet.  You can say anything to Ginny, she won’t have a sleepless night.  She’ll sleep and fight again.  I do truly know who my friends are and I bless heaven for them.  Especially if the over 70s are going to remain in lockdown for the foreseeable future.

So when I talk about keeping the books, it’s about balance.  I felt very badly when the sun came out and I had a series of eye disturbances and head pains which frightened me, discovering that the hospital level tests are currently no longer available at the oculist ( because of social distancing) and that my specialist is doing video consults only.  But then I remembered the patient voice of my first eye specialist (now retired) who referred to my eyeballs as eccentric (very long apparently) which allows too much light into the wrong part of the eye – literally, a pain.  So while appreciatively noting the sunshine, I don my dark glasses and close the shutters. It may look precious but it’s gotta be.  I am very grateful for whatever vision I have.  Balance.

I regret to tell you that having time doesn’t make me want to study for an extra mural degree or take up yoga, though  I am impressed by the often very young who figure out how to make masks or shields or something useful.   Far too many of the joggers have the same self righteous attitude as many cyclists in the past.  They go straight at you, scattering body fluids generously, social distancing less important than the maintenance of fitness (obsession, anyone ?), very short on grin or greeting, clearly imagining they are a higher form of life.

The queues remind me of childhood.  I have always loved to talk and to be spoken to and that’s definitely on the plus side though there are still many glued to the phone.  And last week in Marks I met a Scot I know by sight (I’ll call her Maura), roughly my age, and a much younger woman and we began what I can only describe as joshing, verbally fooling about to our immense pleasure and, gathering from his grin, the delight of one of the shelfstackers.  We wound up laughing like the sillies we are but observed social distance , it cost us nothing  and when I walked round the fitment, another customer said “Thank you for laughing.”  I gave her my best smile and said that I thought laughter was power.

Yesterday I met the street sweeper whose wife has had corona.  And how was she ?  “Well, quite honestly” he replied “Better than for ages.  Because she has diabetes, and she gets bronchitis every winter, so she had to stay home and away from everything, complete rest.  She was pretty ill but she’s OK and so am I and –“ he grinned “the streets aren’t half tidy! “ Because large numbers of people are at home.   Balance.