Annalog

I wonder who first used the phrase “fake news”. Was it the Great Faker ?   Or some hard pressed hack on one of the US’s remaining great newspapers ?   Anyway, it was vivid enough to catch on and is now a staple of today’s vocabulary.

In my mind, I keep hearing the voices of my youth muttering about “ you can’t believe everything you read in the newspapers” to which several and various voices would be raised in disagreement if not dispute , claiming degrees of reliability and commitment in the newspaper they took.   This is all very dated.   Even newspapers that still sell aren’t selling as they used to and the pressure to find something to shift one edition after another must be considerable. Very little is done for the good of our health, political, psychological or physical. It has to show value and value means it has to sell.

Yesterday I watched a long time BBC presenter and a political correspondent only a bit younger head up a newcast by debating what the Prime Minister had or had not said to his Chancellor – something they couldn’t have known. When opinion becomes a staple of national news, you may not have fake news but you do have skews – skewed news, very often stewed news (endlessly repeated till the flavour has gone out of it) and certainly stewed in another way, made up of bits and pieces which might be intellectually nourishing – if not exactly good for you.   Skewed news in plain language means bent. Most of it is and we are encouraged to think that if it is, it is benignly so.

The hallmark of a good journalist is how he or she gives you a combination of information and word picture.   That this is open to abuse explains why announcing you are a journalist to certain people makes you far from popular.   Long ago we used to say “Just give me the facts !” but nowadays you’d be pressed to find them. Journalism is a weird hybrid, involving all sorts of skills dictated by different contexts, skills and instructions. It shocked me to discover that the people who wrote the best tripe were often the best educated. You need to be clever to be a fool.

And you can get very hung up on the truth: what truth ? whose truth ? how much truth ?   Very little truth is absolute outside certain scientific disciplines and like beauty, it is framed in the eye of the beholder.

“Ballooning costs and delays to the HS2 rail link are expected to be confirmed by transport secretary Grant Shapps.”   That’s what we can safely say – coloured by knowledge that the line is in chronic overspend, was the vanity project to end them all and will be communicated by a man with a charm bypass, a little short himself on the public credit side.

“Boris Johnson has ordered a review of Europe’s biggest infrastructure project, which could lead to its top speed being cut or the plan being scrapped altogether.”   The Blond has been in spending mood, well again – the appearance of spending mood. Probably his father told him, this is how you get the public on your side. So we’re due for something cancelled and HS2 has cost shameful amounts of public money. We’ll see.

This is all about degree – the degree of the truth, the degree of expediency, the degree of what the public want to hear – and crucially, how it is packaged. Virtual reality has entered every kind of food chain. It is rare to want to know how bad it is, so that you can prepare yourself.   Most of us want a couple of sunbeams in amongst the grey. Which is why you so often wind up with good natured idiocy, appealing kids or furry animals as the last item on the news – perfect example of skews.   This bomb, that war, this shooting, another rise in addictive death, schools falling down and roads with potholes, likelihood of flood, fire and civil unrest: don’t worry !   Here’s a kitten ….

Yesterday morning I had coffee with Kay (not her name).   I so rarely have coffee in the middle of the morning , you could claim never. I have coffee for breakfast, two cups of black, percolated and that’s usually that. I remember the caller who said he drank more than 12 cups a day, wondering why his stomach was in uproar. But Kay is the living breathing example of the time it takes to get to know people (long version).

I have her acquaintance for about 10 years. She is as thin as a lath, with quite a deep voice, and she tells good stories. One of my favourite French words is “histoire (f)” and there is history to Kay. I may never know it but if I listen, I may get bits of it.

So we sat in the sun – never done this before – and talked. And when we said goodbye, I became aware of a fine tremor in her, and the warmth and sincerity of her “see you” double kiss.

I don’t know Carol Vorderman but we briefly shared the same working space. What I remember is that, when I went to say goodbye, she unexpectedly hugged me warmly.

Touch is a hard sense to quantify in the sense that it is very personal. You get messages, as in – years ago I had a close friend whom you couldn’t touch.   Well, you might, but she froze. I come from a fairly demonstrative family so I had to make an effort not put my hand on her arm, or hug her when we met because she clearly didn’t want me to. And one day, unbidden, she began to tell me about her father’s abuse and her mother’s alcoholism.

One person may take your arm and it’s “giving.” Another will only take. All the massage techniques hinge on your finding a practitioner whose pressure suits you. What is uplifting with one person can be frankly uncomfortable with another. While if you can’t feel that the pressure is committed to you, that’s another kind of irritation.

Neck Massage Techniques to Relieve Neck Pain

You can shake hands with one person and it’s fine while I met a world famous clairvoyant and got the nastiest vibe through that hand.

The world is full of air kissers and schmoozers but somebody like the two women described above kiss your cheek and it means something entirely else.   The place of the kiss in history is as fascinating as it is among people. There are touchers and non touchers and the reasons for their touch or the lack of it will be different – personal, cultural, social – and the rest. And I do believe that sometimes emotions are too deep for any demonstration (part of the appeal of the film Twilight).

All gestures of touch are open to interpretation.   Scientific observers assure us that non verbal communication is most of our exchange and goes on all the time. It may be misconstrued, but not often. “I just didn’t like her” we say.   Or “not sure about him.” My mother told me over and over again to trust my hunches. “If you think it is, it probably is” she said. It was a big gift for a little girl, to teach to trust her judgement and to regard the odd failure or shortfall as humanly inevitable.

Wanting someone to trust you doesn’t mean that they will or that they will not use the “key” of your touch against you.   You spend a lifetime learning and you don’t always get it right.   Like most human journeys, touch is two steps forward, one to the side, two missed – and try again.

Sometimes though, you get a real present like coffee with Kay or the total stranger who began a conversation with me over a corner bed of community planting, just up the road. And within three sentences, he had gone on into Brexit, about which he was most interesting. I was fascinated.

Three or four weeks later, on a very hot day, he came up to me in the market and reintroduced himself. “I remember you “ I said. “What I forgot to say” he said “is that you were the ikon of my youth. I never thought I would meet you, so I never thought I would say it.” And forget all that smart stuff about ikons hanging on the wall, and sweating like a small horse, I met his gaze and said “Thank you.” We kissed each other’s cheeks, he went off to have coffee with his wife and I went happily home.

“Arne Jacobson door handles (handles as icons – discuss!)”

A friend wrote “I have a great sense of what on earth is happening ?”   She is a former listener, who found me through annalog. She has health problems that make you feel very humble, even as your hair stands on end.   She is trying to work out – after a lifetime of taking care of other people – what she can reasonably have for herself. Time has passed, things are even less good than they were. And because she – like so many of us – has been brought up to think of others first, this is particularly difficult.

As we age, it is presumed that you will not want to make ends. Particularly with people.   You must hang on to them lest you should be (sharp intake of breath) alone.   But many of us who loved and lost, perhaps not had the breaks we thought we might get, borne down by age and health even as we fight back and assiduously smell the roses, face letting go rather than put our collective heads in the lion’s mouth once more.

Putting your head in the lion’s mouth may be an act of faith (God will provide), or an act of courage (as in “I just knew … “), it may be plain stupid or it may be our old friend – try again – and see if it plays differently.

The truly frightening thing about friendship is you can only see it from your own side. And it is my life’s experience that while men and women can be highly intelligent, it doesn’t follow that they learn much or that they introspect about what they learn.

“hard to learn”

Introspection is a very loaded dice.   My mother used to tell me I thought too much and I hate to tell you, I think she was right.   The phrase we used at home was “chewing” about something and I chewed a lot. To cud.   But introspection didn’t necessarily change what I was going to have to do.   So you’ve introspected and you still have to choose.

Then we come up against our old friend “the right decision”. Very few of those are right as they issue from your brain and your mouth. The right decision is what we perceive afterwards – “I wish I had” is just as heartfelt in some cases as “Thank heaven I did”.

But the lion’s mouth provokes an image to me. You see, it has to close.   Poor beast can’t stand there with his mouth open all day. And if your head is there, your interests are under threat, the lion’s mouth will close on you.

You cannot live without risk. (Risk is one of those big little words I cherish deeply).   You can minimise risk by learning but learning is painful and takes time. And it is human to wish that if you play the same set of circumstances over with the same participants, maybe – just maybe – this time the outcome will be different.

Then it gets literal.   I am pretty sure that the lion’s mouth stinks – meat eaters, no toothbrush – so it is reasonable to suggest that if you are going to take this risk (again), it would be sensible to learn from the clues that are on offer, few though they may be.   But short of an announcement in The Times, lots of us may drive fast but we think slow.   We want it to be better and harshly I must tell you wishing don’t make it happen.   I sometimes think that people treat their lives like jigsaws but instead of trying to fit the pieces together, they throw them up in the air in the hope they come down somewhere different and more sought after. There is a lack of will in that which is also an avoidance of responsibility.

The friend with whom I began is trying to balance between the deterioration of her health and the demands of relative social normalcy.   I am watching another friend go through a dance which has gone on for five years, she dances away, she dances back, she tempts the lion with considerable charm and morsels. I long for her to dance away from the lion because I cannot estimate how much his mouth closing will hurt her.

A long time ago a friend described being chased by a rhino pup through her family’s East African bungalow while it uttered at intervals the squeak that seems so incongruous emerging from an armoured body. Oh, and he didn’t want to hurt her, she assured me, he wanted to play.

Last week the first AID youngster made his debut, part of an exhausting programme to save the southern white rhino, an on the edge of extinction sub-species.

And there is a stunning documentary – mercifully before the current craze for admixing music and cutery – about a safe haven for some black rhino in which all the men involved are grown up heavy set Africa hands, vets, rangers, helicopter pilots and all, which made the courage and determination, the pervading sense of duty in their project, all the more moving.   The geographical location is not revealed and when I saw the first rhino lifted in a net to be flown to safety, I didn’t breathe. I will not forget the Zulu ranger who is their “whisperer” as he speaks softly, as he has the many years of his working life, reassuring, coaxing the great animal with its fine of sense of smell and weak eyes, into trust.

There was a female panda in the news this week because she had given birth to twins, horrid little pink things a thousand times smaller than her, but twins are rare, zoo born even rarer. And I wanted desperately to banish the cameras and leave her (like every other new mother) in peace.

And then there is the story of the hen harrier chicks who have died unexpectedly, followed by the suggestion that the parent birds might have been “spooked” because of the invigilation of the nest, too many cameras, too much presence … We theorise but we don’t know. The ornithologists know that in the next generation, the birds may tolerate humans better – but in the minimum. And not the general media looking for a story.

In the various and several forms of captivity we have for the most part agreed upon, animals may eventually come to put up with us.   In the wild, they mostly shun us. It is we who panic at their presence. In the semi-wild, they treat us with indifference.   I have nothing but the greatest respect for people who spend their lives trying to spare the pangolin, for example – bearing always in mind that the overproduction of humans and the erosion of territory isn’t a great place to start. I don’t know much about birds of prey but I imagine their difficulties come under the same heading – too many humans, not enough safe peace.

You read wonderful accounts of efforts to save this or that, using every kind of human help from the commitment of hours and a notebook to the most complicated scientific knowledge and equipment, and you know that every one of those involved must believe at some level of intelligence that they are doing the right thing, that if it fails in the short term, they must try again.   And again.   And again.   Because they are fresh out of alternatives. This – whatever it is – is what can be done.   The refined knowledge, experience and skill of other people often brings you up with a jerk. Well, it does me. In an old episode of M.A.S.H., the medics talk the padre through an emergency tracheotomy.   I leave you to imagine what can go wrong with that. Best intentions not working out seems intrinsically part of conservation, great and small.

Human beings often discuss peace, the idea of repose, time out – but we can’t discuss it with an animal.   Safer then to suppose that, before mankind spread in every direction like dubious icing on the cake of progress every-bloody-where, animals had a chance to withdraw, to see only species in the numbers of which they could make sense.   I am not much given to anthropomorphising. A beast is a beast and another thing, not secondary in any way. I accept that – rather like therapy – the key words are watching and waiting – but that there won’t be anything much to watch or wait for if we don’t invoke a more protective overview and the experts don’t insist that we commit to it.

“watching and waiting by Ben Prepelka”

*“..liberty in tranquillity.” (Cicero)

There are things I don’t want to do or be, even at my age. I don’t want to assess strangers on the basis of money spent, except for curiosity.   Like the woman in her 30s and some of the most expensive and unbecoming clothes, coming past a bus stand where I was waiting in the company of an attractive man not more than a few years her senior. As she went past, he caught my eye and, plainly puzzled, asked “What’s that about ?”   I told him “Money. She is wearing several thousand pounds’ worth of clothes – never mind they do nothing for her – in order to tell you you’d better have commensurate income, if you aspire to her.” Bless him, he burst out laughing, took his bus and waved goodbye.

Three times now, Wal has rung me in sartorial pain over a well remunerated female presenter’s dress on television. It’s wildly funny – the sepulchral voice asking distressfully “what IS she wearing?” But it is also deadly serious. So many have a disconnection between what they want to see and what is there, to levels of distorted vision common in body dysmorphia.

“Men suffer from it too”

That and pursuing symbolic youth as if it were the stolen keys to your house.

There is a woman of my own age I meet on the bus, slight as a whippet with grey hair becomingly cut in a bob, and after we had spoken several times, I asked if we might meet, perhaps for tea or coffee. “I never give my telephone number to anyone” she said. “If I did, I would have to answer it …” We continue to speak when we meet but I am wary in a way I never was before. She was my first experience of the drawbridge being well and truly up, of regarding all strangers with equal misgiving.   It gave me a whole new insight into preferring your own company.

Wary grows like a weed as you get older.   God knows, I am not growing more attractive day by day but looks play less of role in assault than availability and I don’t feel comfortable having a man in the house I am not sure of.   I like to think I can take care of myself, but I am not about to put myself in harm’s way to find out.

And then I look at people who handed over their entire savings to a scammer, and I pause, not to judge them as foolish – but to wonder the how and why. I remember telling a man making a financial presentation I’d like him to leave, low voice, implacably polite.   And never let him in again.

I told a friend a story about jury service (I am so glad I took part), how one of my colleagues on the jury saw a discrepancy between the use of languages in the courtroom (in this case, Gujerati, Hindi and Tamil), that where he hesitated , afraid of making a fuss, I put up my hand instantly, and was responded to with equal speed by a court official. “How brave !” remarked my friend and I was struck all over again by how many people are intimidated by any process with which they are not familiar. You can get it wrong, make a fool of yourself but embarrassment doesn’t kill you.

“how to cool your face – thank you Michael Berg”

It’s not that I am brave (in many ways a distinction in wuss) but it is so easy to retreat, to only eat and watch and do what you know – sometimes for reasons of comfort, sometimes for reasons of fear. There is no point if you live alone in watching something terrifying and then spending the rest of the night behind the sofa with a torch and a poker. But I can’t see going through life not thinking, because not thinking leads to not learning and not learning is a frightful waste of time.

I think of Kipling’s Elephant’s Child and his insatiable curiosity.   I am frequently madder than fire about the “half a story” that passes for news, and the “puff” and the opinion. But I admit there are things I don’[t want to know more about, because they induce anxiety which has increased over time. Still and all, on a scale of one to five, the door is three parts open.

“thanks to Marcel Duchamp”

A is for akrasia

B is for blond

C is for control

Or

A is for alt-right

B is for Brexit

C is for Conservative

This is from the thread sticking out of the warp and woof of my mind. (I love the idea of a Woof in my mind). We used to play skips singing “A you’re adorable/B you’re so beautiful/C you’re a cutie full of charm” and once I built a birthday address for the guest of honour on the alphabet, using it to underline different emphases and components in her life.  In front of another audience, presenting for the second day running and having discussed the previous day which magazines and newspapers, which radio and television, what freelance, I said people always asked me what I did and as the range was much wider than they expected, I proposed to answer alphabetically and it worked wonderfully well, to pull people in to contribute.

So I began with the alphabet today because I have been up all night (N for noise, O for over there, P for party) and because a close friend has now twice told me that I must just let where we are politically be. I can do nothing about it and obsessing won’t help. (See Mammy’s advice to Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind: “be like the buckwheat, just bend a little”)

The (S for) sound of the new cabinet gives me the pip, all those wah-wah voices.   It’s all very well to posit that “you can’t judge a book by its cover “ … heaven help me, if these were spoken books I’d never get past the cover. “Yes, yes” said my friend soothingly.   “Not more than one newscast a day.”

I had never heard of akrasia which apparently means “not being in command of oneself”: thank you (F for) Fintan O’Toole, writing in the New York Review of Books about Boris Johnson’s 2004 novel.   It is the stop/start blah of the sentences which highlight the fan dance Mr. Johnson is doing: isn’t there a song called “Promises, promises” and isn’t the retort – fine but what about fulfilled, fulfilled ?

And I suddenly thought about another word I only know the look of – (L for) legerdemain – which led me to sleight of hand. Of course sleight of hand could refer to a confectioner making meringues – or it can call up the picture of your favourite (U for) uncle pulling a penny magically out of your collar.   But supposing we look at the term less literally, and we see a subtle mixture of will and recognition, with historical undertones of wanting the other fellow to do it for you, a strange transaction between what you want to see and what the other fellow means, a psychological space between you, laced with confidence on his part and wishing on yours ?

Confidence is fascinating. It breeds itself. You can because you can.   The more you get away with whatever it is, the more sure you become that (a) you can and (b) even if you slip, you can get out of that momentary difficulty.

Last week Channel Five pulled the advertised Michael Portillo documentary called The Trouble with the Tories, apparently because the cricket overran. There was nothing else to watch and Talking Pictures TV was showing the 1968 film about The Boston Strangler. I had seen this many years ago, I watched for 15 minutes, then switched off and went to the bookshelves where I knew I had Gerold Frank’s best selling book which I had carried round and I don’t think I had ever read before.

Fascinating in its appal, what became clear was that, in spite of the co operation of the press, enormous amounts of money, manpower and overwhelming effort, what kept the assailant free was his confidence, his repeated double axels of assault and evasion, his innate understanding of no pattern, just his will.   It was very unsettling to read now, 50 years later. |Of course today’s context is different but the sleight of hand is familiar. 

If eyes are the window of the soul, my windows are currently swathed in red curtains because for the last four weeks my eyes have itched, especially the left one. This is not hay fever or at least, it hasn’t been so far.   In the middle of that, I saw the Prof for a check up for glaucoma and macular degeneration.   I asked him, sitting in front of powerful magnifying equipment which was focussed on my eyes, if he could see anything and he said no.   He also said that he has never seen a year like it for eye infections, most of which are unfamiliar.

In London we blame the plane trees whose pollen is highly irritant. We could also blame various kinds of traffic fumes and a building programme entailing few areas which aren’t ankle deep in every kind of dust and rubbish, propelled into decay by alternative bouts of rain and warm weather. The wind is generously blows it everywhere. And then there are cooking fumes, animal excreta and grot.

The irritation behaves atypically, it goes away and comes back.   The itch is so fierce, I felt I could outdo Oedipus at Colonus – and he had to use the pins of brooches.   There is no noticeable swelling or redness and such secretion as there is, is very close to what we used to call “sleeps”, a bit of curd which is there when you wake and soon disperses.

The eyelids feel like old Venetian blinds. They don’t always ease with the drops I have to use daily for eye pressure.   Sometimes they feel better when I have had a shower and sometimes they are alleviated by the spring water I have in an aerosol which I squirt careful in the general direction of the face, not directly into the eyes.

At the beginning, I left off all eye makeup. Women with eye infections do – we don’t know what is in those products for the most part, only that it looks nice. Then one day, tired of looking like a sad owl (I’ve had these dark circles for many years and if they are good enough for Anna Magnani, they ‘re good enough for me though I do like a bit of alleviation), I put on some shadow and pencil   – waited for the roof to fall in – and it had no noticeable effect. If anything, it seemed soothing.

And so we go on.   Prof scared it away for a week or so but it is back and it comes and goes and I just leave it alone as much as I can.

Because you don’t know who to ask.

See The Remarkable Life of Skin by Monty Lyman, dermatologist (Bantam Press £20) because skin is the biggest organ of the body and we don’t know a lot about it. The well known eye specialist (now retired) whom I saw regularly for 20 years made a comment that has stayed with me: “The dermatology department used to be next to mine and we referred by walking patients through.”   I must have gaped at him because he explained “There is a crossover – the eyes are in the skin.” So I wonder having read of the eyebrow mites scurrying about the face at night looking for a legover, if one of the little **** has got in my eye.   And more importantly – who can I ask ?

The GP will almost certainly give me a prescription or refer me to the eye department of the local teaching hospital which fresh out of favour with me because they missed out diagnosing the macular degeneration.

I can go to the eye specialist at the local private hospital whom I have seen once before and very helpful he was OR write to Prof who will refer me: it’s a chunk of money and I have just replaced the kitchen tap.   Money will only do what it will do.

The best relief so far followed the application of a small amount of natural yogurt all over the face – though it is not a look you’d want to share.Or I can wait, carefully bathe the eyes occasionally with cornflower (bleuet) or Euphrasia (homeopathic remedy), keep my bacteria ridden paws in my lap and clamber through the predicted heatwave.   

Game of Thrones – no. Big Brother, Love Island or Britain’s Got Talent – no thank you, no, no.   I loathe Strictly Come Dancing. I have never used or owned a microwave. I don’t have a mobile phone (perish the thought of a selfie) nor bank on-line and I use Amazon rarely (once a year).   I do not feel deprived. Hype is another four letter word like kale and I suffer only from being one of those people to whom, if you say I must, I react against it. This is childish, I am not proud of it but it’s true.

Nobody had to tell me to support gay rights, I do. I don’t always support the way that people go about getting them but then I support women’s rights and that lumps you in with people you might not want to eat with.

A couple of weeks ago Wal asked me “What is all this stuff about Pride ?”, this from the man who surveyed his first independent building crew years ago with the words “My name is … I do (details). Yes I am gay and if you think I shall be making a pass at any one of you, get over it ! …”   A plumber told me that he and his pals – some 40 plumbers and builders who all use the same local – only take exception to their landlady trying to force LGBT down their throats: what she does and what she believes is her business. It’s the social evangelism they can’t stand.

The Ulsterman David Trimble has apparently always been against same sex relationships but it is alleged, has had to reconsider now that one of his daughters is “out” and has contracted a marriage with her partner. It is thus assumed that he has changed his position.   He may have done. But again, he may not. Does it follow that, wanting your child to be happy and thus making the best attempt at harmony in the family, you are now a campaigner for gay rights?   I wish I could remember who told me not to extrapolate (first time I ever heard the word) from the particular to the general but it was a thoughtful lesson. Consideration may indicate a change of heart, but then again, it may not. Sometimes a kindness is just that.

Last week the occupants (sex and numbers unknown) fell in the door next door at half past midnight and shrieked and shimmied until 2.30 am when I got up and made ready for battle. As I opened the door the neighbour from the other side was attacking the front door. She is a young mother and I am sure the noise disturbed her child. The lights went out and silence fell.

48 hours later, just as I was updating on the news channel, there was a knock at the door.   There stood two young men introducing themselves as the new occupants of the noisy flat “just so when you see us around, you know who we are. We thought we’d just let the neighbours know …”   and one of them offered me his mobile number.   With effort I restrained myself from shouting hooray for humans (we’ll see) – as I say, sometimes a courtesy is just that.   We’ll see.

We used to say you take people as you find them but this is the age of mass – beliefs, convictions and fame are defined as much by the number of followers on Instagram or Twitter as by the number of seats sold, income generated or headlines made.   You don’t take people as you find them because finding them ie in any sense of knowing them or what they are about seems daily more difficult.

Yesterday I saw a representative of the Association of Newspaper Editors snarling about the importance of a free press.   Where is the conflict between being given the story of the Ambassador’s leaked emails concerning the Trump administration and staying their publication while making urgent contact with the Foreign Office and the Foreign Secretary for starters ?   Holding the story till everybody relevant knows what is going down doesn’t impinge on a free press, it just changes the time line.   Surely with freedom comes responsibility ?

Yesterday I had a rehearsal for what is to come. The remote control on the tv ceased to function.   Those who never look at television should leave now. I do. Mostly old films, often unexpected discoveries, nature programmes, documentaries. The main themes of programming are shamefully bad and I shouldn’t be surprised if the whole enterprise imploded like William Hill. There is much the same unreality, chance and marketing involved. You watch Love Island ? I watched The Looming Tower. One we cannot escape and the other nobody’s heard of.

Out of time I know, his new book is about Dracula, but I had just read the masterfully well written if depressing Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor (£2 in Oxfam) so a little light relief in the form of an old favourite like A Touch of Frost would have been welcome. But it was not to be.

Speaking to Bunslove, he recommended “whisking” (I quote) a cloth across the head pointing to the tv in case there was fluff or dust or a hair or something. And it worked. I watched something insubstantial for an hour, tried to change the programme and it went into a funk again, which is when I chose a book from the fire shelf, my all time favourites, and settled down. Worse, I had begun the day feeling defeated (continuing brexitisis), overcome the mixture of anxiety and annoyance, risen above it, gone shopping, got home and now – like the brat I am – I wanted what I wanted and I couldn’t have it.

But once I’d got over the stamped foot, I didn’t miss it.  There wasn’t a darned thing yesterday to miss. An hour into the book, I wandered out into the kitchen and looked at the dish drainer, a quietly camp arrangement of black wire, definitely the worse for wear. I spent some time trying to rally it to respectability but it looked like I felt.

There are men and women who will tell you that they bought a jacket or a pair of shoes that were so outstandingly comfortable/becoming/whatever, that they wish they had bought a second. Far fewer are those that will tell you that they did buy a second time around, usually without due care and attention, duped by earlier success.

Unlike love (the song says it’s lovelier, the second time around) the second go at this wonderful whatever it is, is rarely so successful. It’s a different job lot – the cut varies.   It’s a different colour – the dye affects the material differently ie you haven’t thought that a black shoe and a beige one are qualitatively different – they may look identical – but they will wear differently.   Twice in my life I have bought successful duplicates of things to wear and I can’t count the mistakes I have made. But three or four times I have bought duplicates for the kitchen.   And they WORK.

SONY DSC

I climbed the short household steps the wonderful Linda gave me because she thought they would be helpful – they are.   And I took from the top shelf of the storage cupboard the wrapped box of a replacement dish drainer, opened it, smiled and ditched the elderly one. It owes me nothing.

I doubt that I shall find a third without difficulty. When I bought the second the woman very civilly told me that, for personal reasons, the business wouldn’t continue.   I said thank you and wished her well – what else ? Waitrose no longer stocks my preferred stain remover, nobody stocks my favourite skin care.   There are more and more units and less and less you want to buy.   I live in a rotten tooth, drowning in rubbish wrapped, unwrapped and dumped.   There are murmurs of disquiet on the business pages of the newspapers, this concern faltering, that one holding out for the future, fingers crossed behind the back.   Change is supposed to be for the better but in the present climate I am not sure. It will probably all get worse first but I shall acquire a new remote and day to day life will resume . I’d still rather be me than them and here than there.

There are different kinds of new. There is new to you or new to us all, very little of the latter.   A famously eccentric playwright wrote brilliantly about re-invention – your Woody Guthrie is my Bob Dylan. Many of us see or hear something touted as the latest thing and know it isn’t. It was invented before and probably before that. And maybe before that – but it Is new in the scheme in which it has been rediscovered – which makes it new to you.

I have two friends who keep a lot of their clothes.   They don’t keep “everything” because things wear out or they tire of them. But they keep a lot and one of them told me about wearing on of her oldest jackets with one of her older pairs of pants to a fancy wedding and being complimented on it. New to that group.

“ready mud stained for your use!”

And then there is new. At the end of my last full time job (and one of the nastiest experiences of my working life), the company behaved in the brutal tradition of radio ie you’re on ? you’re gone. That the broadcaster isn’t allowed to say goodbye is not explained, it’s just company policy.   But lots of people rang and wrote and were dismissed, letters trashed, simply told “She doesn’t work here any more.” Some got under the net but really very few.

I spent the next five years with people asking me what happened.

I had coffee with one of them, a health professional, and met her husband ditto. We stayed in friendly touch, through dogs and birthdays and holidays, until she sent me a very happy email about her new dog and I invited them all to supper to meet him.

Across the sash window in the kitchen I have five items – all, like everything else in the house including the owner, with history – a clock bought because it looks Art Deco: a cinder glass bottle given me by Penny in the local gallery 30 years ago: the black marble duck I bought when we moved into our new home, the man I loved and me: a slender oriental looking jar from an important flat: and a dish shaped like a Japanese maple leaf which I bought in in a shop long gone.

My guests arrived with splendid wine, the dog was delightful and dinner worked. And they gave me a carefully wrapped parcel, explaining “We go a lot to Istanbul (the dog has a pet passport), we liked this, we thought you might …” It is a pomegranate , skin split in one placed, the seeds represented by small red stones – and it is the sixth item on the spread.   If you look up pomegranates, you’ll find they are generously lucky.   It is new.   But it isn’t new at all. I can’t remember who told me “Love is about recognition, not discovery” but it has always struck me as truthful.

Recently I saw a news item about a woman of colour at a top university describing “imposter syndrome.”   Nonie Summers wrote it about in Vogue in the 1990s. It’s not new.   It’s new when it happens to you.

The cover of a newspaper magazine leers about labial adaptation and prinking the private parts. This is not new. I have a 20 year old piece from American Vogue called Designer Vaginas.   What is new is the frequency with which these interventions will be employed. What is new that you no longer build an extension to the house – you rebuild yourself.   What is new is that nobody has written about that intelligently for fear of compromising somebody’s human rights or being seen (God forbid) to have an opinion which is less than friendly. It is becoming a mark of friendship to be able to say what you really mean instead of what is expected.   Two or three of my friends and I announce to each other “And I know this isn’t what I am supposed to say but –“ before committing to the comment.   Although when Ben and Richard (not their real names) sat opposite me for coffee recently – intelligent gay men in their early fifties – they suggested that nobody talked about friendship any more.   Takes too long.   That’s new.