Annalog

So many people don’t reply. Large swathes of the business world have tossed acknowledgement and response as part of the deal. Even when a project is ongoing, maintained exchange is rarer than hens’ teeth.   When a friend’s much publicised BT broadband went awol and BT accepted that it was their responsibility, they made engineer’s appointments one-two-three – and defaulted on all three without a word.   So much for being in touch.

My last professional outing was hallmarked with politeness: I thanked my interviewer and the young woman who provided the social media conduit.   They responded. The producer emailed, and the name interviewer did too – family bereavement prevented her from doing the job – and of course I wrote to them.   All those courtesies took less than 15 minutes from start to finish. But before I ceased fulltime work (10 years ago), we were already aware of the ambivalence of communication.   The other side of communication is cut off.

“Warm Gun/Wall Street International Magazine”

It always was. I remember meeting in the street a man who had assaulted me, weeks after I had got away, and staring straight into his face without a word, daring him to speak to me. He didn’t. There is power in the stone face.

But right now I have three letters outstanding.   I wrote to a writer whose book I had ignored (out of blind prejudice) though she asked me not to.   Some time later, I was lent it, it’s a fine book, well written, so I found and checked a reliable address and wrote apology and appreciation. Not a word.

Then I saw a print in the window of H&M, discovered it wasn’t theirs but last year’s IKEA, they couldn’t sell it, it shouldn’t be in the window of the flagship shop or if it is, it should be marked “display only”.   I wrote to the company’s nearest UK office and three weeks later, it is clear that nobody with a brain could find five minutes and an envelope to write a polite brushoff like Dear Madam, I am sorry you were disappointed.   This matter has been rectified. Assuring you of our best attention at all times. Not a word.

And then I wrote to the gardener. He’s only round the corner but he isn’t great on the telephone : he doesn’t take it away from his ear long enough to get incoming calls I think. A week has passed …. Maybe he’s given up gardening.

But if we look at the this from the other side, the writer I upset may feel she cannot forgive me – why should she ? Time has passed, I disappointed her and she has moved on.   H&M have decided that they are not going to make any money out of me, so a reply is a waste of time.   And maybe the gardener has trouble, other things nearer the top of his list.

Just as when people withdraw from relationships via prevailing media, it may be as much to do with their own inadequacy as any disappointment in the other.   And the cutoff in the light of text/WhatsApp/mobile/messengering that colours social interaction today has become known as ghosting ie you make a ghost or you become one.

And though ghosts still have a presence, there are contexts for this. The most outstanding is that much of what is called communication is only on the way to any real communication at all.   People don’t cut off to spare your feelings or their own, they do it because it’s easier. It gives the illusion of control. However bad it makes you feel for doing it, you don’t feel as wretched as if you were trying to interpret how the other person really makes you feel or how difficult you find it to talk to them. You thought if you could put it in words, it would be easier and surprise surprise, it isn’t.   Technology makes communication look easier, it doesn’t necessarily make it feel easier. There is no short cut to emotional exchange. And if you are not getting what you want, and you don’t know better how to go about getting it, it may be less painful to cut off a finger than to risk a hand.

The terrible thing about life is you can’t stop and start again. You can reorganise your desk or the kitchen shelves, bury your pet or change your partner – but though you may sing “Stop the World, I Want to Get Off” you can only achieve that for a short time while you journey to the back of an increasingly accessible beyond or stand awestruck in front of a natural wonder.

“Lake Gattain in Kashmir”

And then life moves on, carrying its self incurred problems on the psychological cowcatcher like a heavy breathing train.

So when we make mistakes – and mankind has made some terrible ones – we can only work our way through recognition, acknowledgement and contribution, to some kind of resolution. And sometimes it all looks so overwhelming, the whole process short circuits. It is easier to think about something else. Which is why problems beget more problems.

How revealing, that as I recoil from a young mother teaching her child elementary conditioning to an amusing screen to keep her quiet on a bus yesterday, the same executives who have flooded the world with smartphones and all the rest of that techno hardware are paying a lot of money to have their children educated in a “no screens” environment, “not till they are 12 or 13 and recognise the device as a tool, rather than being led by it.”

Sometimes the language used to describe something changes but the experience of it doesn’t.

I spent the years of six to nine with foul phlegmy colds and chest problems then known as “lung shadow.” The industrial north east didn’t help, with wastes from steel mills to laundry to ICI. I was treated at home and I didn’t realise until much later how ill I had been. When you are ill as a child it’s your life.   Now I am hearing the whole thing all over again relating to poor air quality. The figures for asthma and other breathing difficulties are very high – yes in China but yes in Britain too. It’s always so much easier to point at the other country than to look at the mess that is being made in your own.

And campaigners for cleaner air muddy their own water by telling us half the story. The logical progression from early factories through coal burning fires to leaded petrol and lying car manufacturers is a bad enough story, well documented as it is. But nobody has yet explained to me why we have to get our pee in a froth over woodburning stoves or even the odd open fire when, all the way through Europe from the Nordic countries to the Mediterranean, wood is burnt as winter fuel.   Do all these countries refuse to collect data on damage to breathing ?   Do all of them have higher rates of upper respiratory cancers ? Do all those governments lie about air quality ?

This is the same kind of division of facts that gets the idealistic young diving for plastic (thank God) to clear fouled waterways and spare animals being starved and tortured by it, but so far has not motivated picking up litter, largely because of the sense of defeat about what happens to it after you have picked it up.

Some months ago I was asked what I thought about #MeToo and I wasn’t happy.   Over simplification and generalisation have been lifelong enemies: you can’t just say “man is the enemy”, any more than “woman is the friend.”   There are few absolutes in life and I don’t think that is one of them . So it is a biased sample of men in bad suits (most of the House of Commons) attacking Theresa May as she offers her best.   Hooray for the two women who remarked via TV vox pop that none of the people opposing Mrs. May could do any better, most of them hadn’t a plan though they did most desperately want their name in the frame and any advancement that was going.   If ever a woman needed #MeToo it’s Mrs. May – and she’d despise it because, with all her faults, she is a public servant and a professional – and she believes that she can’t stop and start again.

There’s a new book, the title of which says it all (Death of the Megafauna by Ross DE MacPhee, an Edinburgh born paleomammalogist at the American Museum of Natural History) for it occurs to me to wonder if I am more of a Woolly Mammoth or a Sabre Toothed Tiger because, either way, I am (horrid phrase) going extinct.

“I prefer this!”

Please don’t think that this is a whinge about not working any more. I rode those overcrowded trains three rush hours in a row to record something and I pass, thank you.   Nothing lasts forever – no matter how big, bright, wealthy or strong.   I had a great time and I still am, in a different way, though I’d be a liar if I said the difference didn’t bother me, more about meaning than money.

My friend Pam the Painter (one of my “characters”, read back to catch up) was once head of corporate PR in national TV. Occasionally she uses a dismissive phrase I always loved: “(s)he’d go the opening of an envelope.”   I was not a networker. When work came to me, I took it with both hands. Occasionally I put myself about but Borgian plotter I am not. So when work ended, it ended. I had a few tough years where I was not old enough for pension, I didn’t earn and realised painfully, that I had relied, in every sense, on work going on for ever. And it didn’t.   We might call this The Mammoth Moment.

But I am blessed with what my much appreciated first therapist called Hunting Dog Syndrome. When humans were evolving into so-called higher beings, they still had various animal attributes, one of which was something of the sense of smell we envy in dogs, whose heads rear to put the nose in line with new, whatever it is. In humans, if you push the head back too far and unnaturally brace the neck, you get tension headaches.   I had a lot of those. But Flood (his real name) gave me an idea which tied with another earlier one, and they were the basis of learning to live in the moment.

Getting paid mostly wasn’t part of the deal, but once I had figured out how to survive in this new way, I enjoyed it. It had unexpected freedoms eg., annalog is the logical extension of talking to myself, and into the mirror.   And if I could “reach” her … I could try with all sorts of people and I still do.

So I was shaken when, several years ago, I heard the handsome and personable Rachel Johnson tell an invited Athaeneum lunch that she was the last generation of journalists.   And I thought well, with those looks, money, connections and CV, you know something I don’t know and I began to think.

Last week I had lunch with Petra Boynton, a social psychologist whom I first met over the telephone when she was going to do a piece for the Telegraph on agony aunts (she was then theirs). It didn’t happen but she and I did, to my great joy, for she is a good woman.   I don’t see her often. She is married and has two sons and is always working at something.   We have occasional long enthusiastic telephone conversations in which we swap bits of our lives.   And catching up, she told me that she had contributed to a documentary which was marked out for praise at a sort of awards ceremony involving a lot of other documentary makers. One of the things they all discussed was that there were fewer media outlets, the ones that existed really were usually not interested in stand alone film making unless it could be tied to a celebrity, so publicity for the product was nearly impossible.   And I said that was why I still read US publications and moreover, one of the more cheerful things about the US midterms was that Katty Kay (Beyond 100 Days, BBC4) said radio all over the country was the go-to medium. We agreed – can’t stop the clock, the role of the voice, the forgotten warmth of more human media – and she gave me a book. And when I saw what she had printed in it, I cried and cheered.

*NDY = not dead yet

“Natalia Makarova”

Coping with Pregnancy Loss by Petra Boynton published by Routledge.

Ugg, a range of overpriced sheepskin

Lincolnshire Longwool

boots, sort beyond fashion: on the positive side, warm and soft and flat and on the bad side, too flat, too warm and no support for the foot. Every so often I read about how little sheepskin is worth in the UK and then see some other price hike for sheepskin slippers, all too often from abroad. Ugg is part of Australia’s revenge for historically sending our felons there .   My slippers – British sheepskin, weatherproof soles, a fraction of the cost – came from Westmoreland Sheepskins in Harrogate (Yorkshire forever).

I ‘m never going to get used to children sitting down while grown ups stand in the bus.   Of course if they are ill or fragile in some way, fine. But what happened to the adult sitting while the child either stood close by or sat on an available knee ?   Nor am I going to accustom myself to the (mostly) women who settle on the outside of a two seater bench, only to look askance when you ask if you may have the other side of it ? Or, they fill the other side of it with an enormous handbag which they clearly don’t want on their laps where it will crease their clothes.   Pity.

I am never going to get used to the streets full of people running in all weathers, but having their groceries delivered by somebody else, their houses cleaned by somebody else, their dogs walked by somebody else: all the things we thought of as exercise in earlier generations.

I am never going to get used to the “holier than thou” attitude of all too many cyclists. Bike is a four letter word.

And although I understand that most of the rest of the world seems to think that dragging the ubiquitous wheelie behind you is some sort of mark of belonging, I am never going to get used to people shopping with them.

I have just about come to understand that for some, a small fluffy dog is a soulmate but I’d rather not trip over it or its lead because you want it to express itself unchecked. Your foufine has less brain than I and is much more easily comforted.

I am never going to get used to the idea that giving offence is a matter of such dread that we settle for boringly bad communication (initials anyone ?), for example, an hour of being talked at in terms which may have been English but the level of jargon made it unclear. The surgeon for whom I used to work was associated with the Gender Research Unit at the Middlesex Hospital. I am not unsympathetic. I defend your right to express yourself, even though much of its more florid forms might have been called social inadequacy, but I am not going to get used to a lack of enthusiasm being automatically interpreted as a criticism .   That level of defensiveness is a psychological problem, regardless of sexual orientation.

I am not going to get used to a very large number of women between the ages of 40 and the rest of it who can’t smile. I used to think this was due to an overuse of Botox or perhaps paralysing constipation but now I fear they belong to that growing number of people who think any form of pleasantness is a waste of time if it doesn’t get you something.

I am not going to get used to the new model of weather forecast, which used to involve a short round up of advice on the evening and end of the day, and then propose tomorrow.   Now we rush through today and tomorrow and start talking about the rest of the week. Since it is scientifically agreed that our weather is ever less predictable, this is probably pointless and comes pretty close to wishing your life away. I don’t know about the following weekend if it’s Monday or Tuesday and I doubt if most of the presenters do either.

I know the above makes me sound like 100. Believe me, sometimes I feel it.

A fox’s footprints

Usually I like talking to anyone who wants to talk to me. And most of the time (bighead) I like being interviewed. Occasionally it becomes horribly clear that an interlocuter doesn’t know you or your work, presumes your intentions and tries to tell who you are (which is like a red rag to a bull) but in my life, these occasions have been blessedly rare.   Most of the time I have conversations which send me off to look at some other aspect of human behaviour, my own or somebody else’s, and I am very grateful for the exchange that prompts this.

Earlier this year I met my youngest ever professor, and she is the only person who questioned the difference and the similarity of the work I did on radio and in print, which I did in the same time frame, saying she couldn’t think of two media more different. I saw them as asking different things of me and keeping me fresh.

When my friend Snowdrop (a reader in film and radio) asked me to be interviewed by one of his doctoral students, a Greek, she gave me one of the finest experiences of exchange, storytelling and insight I’ve ever had (remember you are only ever as good as the questions you’re asked) and this week she put one of her students on my trail to discuss phone-in.

It’s always unsettling when someone talks to you as if you are a character out of history. A young Irishman wrote me earlier in the year because he had turned up a live appearance on RTE where I neither offered nor conceded on abortion.   Effectively he asked me how I came to be so brave in the 1980s?   A pusillanimous wuss, I was delighted to tell him that the decision was to be who I am – or backpedal – so I chose, stood up and was counted. And I told him the back story of the clip which he couldn’t have known. The date didn’t cross my mind.

So when Jane (not her name) asked me yesterday whether I chose the subject matter of “Anna and the Capital Doctor” trailed as “personal, sexual and emotional problems” to be sensational, I said with immediate watchfulness that I never thought about it. “But in the seventies …” she said, making it sound hundreds of years ago. I hauled off and gave her a snapshot of my background which I always imagine will clear the air. But it isn’t guaranteed.

The main thing I want to convey is that the words are the thing.   You either value them and use them imaginatively and accurately or you hide in a 50 word vocabulary and the ensuing programme has the consistency of lukewarm soup. It might be nourishing but it isn’t appetising. If you’re broadcasting, you have to appeal beyond the person you are talking to, to all the others who are listening.

Anybody who knows me, knows that I love to talk and I love to listen to other people talk. A correspondent said she could imagine me in a lone house looking out to sea – but I’d miss the people. And when I came to conceptualise it (after long years of doing it) I thought that my talking permitted the other person to talk, this was exchange, it wasn’t an exercise in “I know something you don’t know” though I might: we could work that in later.

I can’t remember the name of the Home Office psychiatrist whom I recruited into the Forum Personal Adviser but he was the man who suggested that there was no point in trying to make sexual matters sound unimportant or unexciting – “What people bring you is what you work with.” And I had an absolute conviction only extended over time that using the formal words was the right way – the message of this was “I take you seriously”.   I have rarely used the vernacular, have rarely had it used to me but by the same token, let’s use the real words rather than euphemism: that’s what they’re for.  I see words as bridges and being described as a bridge was one of the best compliments I have ever been paid.   Was my work done ? No. Do we need better bridges ? Yes.

I am fascinated by how different one day is from another. This sense of difference is taken from you if you are imprisoned. It is reduced if you suffer chronic illness: you don’t have a better day, you just have a day.   But my days are one offs and I try to live them one at a time. I only do Monday on Monday: Sunday is over and Tuesday isn’t here yet. Yesterday was a pain in the (you choose).

My close work glasses fell off my nose (any cracks about suddenly developed antipathy will be ignored.) And of course (fool) I don’t have a backup pair. So I am limited in what I can do until the repair comes back and the stand by pair will take even longer to make.

Having cancelled Duchy yogurt production and bumped up that labelling on bunches of tropical fruit, (any back reference to dear old Albion being now redundant) Waitrose has now ceased to trade my favourite coffee. Today I bought two more canisters of the only polish that has ever worked on the wooden work surfaces (Wood Silk – cheapest, British, best).   I never thought the day would come when I would hoard polish.

Yesterday I tried to buy boots in Boden where they lost the right one and as I waited, torn between wanting to scream and holding on to my ratty temper (in the shop within 15 minutes of opening, only two other customers, the efforts of all concerned seriously skewed by some moody device where there is a small display and everything else has to be located by remote control out of stock) – my jaundiced eye fell on a sign which read “Johnny – welcome to my home ! – Boden”.   If it were my home, Mr.Boden, I’d leave. A serious confusion between retail, lifestyle, service and schmaltz. Staff offered to get a pair of my chosen colour in, if I would prepay them. I declined, I want to try them on. This is footwear, feet vary.   So it was agreed they’d see if they could find the right boot and I would call in the following morning. And retail wonders why it isn’t working.

Last night a wonderful friend took me to an address by the director on the future of the Victoria and Albert Museum. He got better and better as he went on speaking, and some of the projects he outlined sound fascinating. As were insights into the correlation between on line and in the door: the more on line, the more in the door. And the success of their most expensively ticketed show on Pink Floyd which brought in people who had never come to the V&A before. We then went off and ate (we were late and they were slow) and came home (oh joyous luxury, luxurious joy) in a black taxi , deep blissful sigh.

This morning I bought the most scrumptious tomatoes in the market, saw one of my favourite tellers in Waitrose and then my eye fell on an umbrella covered with leopard heads, not leopard print, the animal – so I sprang into the shop to ask if it was for sale.   “Of course” they said. I priced it and fished for the money (it will fit in the bottom of my bag). “One of my favourite animals” I remarked. The young man looked slightly shocked. ”Leopards ?” he said.   “Very good mothers” I said |- I thought talking about their hunting prowess would probably upset him. “What other animals do you like ?” he asked warily. “Rhino” I said.

I collected the boots from Boden though you’d have thought they were checking clearance through MI5 and I am happy to tell you there was a 20 percent reduction throughout the store which made them a better price: I wouldn’t have gone through this if they weren’t leather and if my trainers and my other walking shoes hadn’t decided to wear out in unison. I mean, look, it’s hardly glamorous shopping – boots, brolly, furniture polish … and then I saw my once an autumn luxury – a bunch of great gold and rust chrysanthemums.    No I didn’t need them. I wanted them. And I carried them home in triumph. Today is a good day.

Most of the street has been closed or blocks sold off to developers, the biggest of which is Chanel,

by Marjean Brooks

probably a tax dodge because the presiding designer is elderly and this isn’t going to make money. My friend the Kandinsky Kid lives opposite, in a property largely unmaintained for 40 years and has endured round the clock disturbance, Saharan dust and flapping plastic over many months. As the vanity came up for launch, she remarked to the gaffer as she went to get the paper in the morning that, as they were going to wash all the windows in preparation, they might wash the other side of the street too, so affected had she and her neighbours been by the development. And they did.   So for the first time in two years, daylight comes through her windows.

Tina (not her name) went on holiday to France, her enjoyment somewhat dented by the loss of a suitcase on the way back. Enquiries soon revealed that it had been stolen, recorded on CCTV if anybody could be bothered to watch, but the absence of personnel makes that all too easy. Cameras usefully record but they don’t monitor. So she got in touch with Eurostar who offered her their standard reimbursement of some £50 odd pounds and asked her to email her bank details. Tina said she was sorry, she preferred not to. The man on the telephone asked if she had PayPal. She apologised, she did not. “Leave it with me” he said.   He turned up her booking and reimbursed her credit card. She sent him an email to thank him and he rang back to acknowledge her email, adding “the fault is ours, anything we can do …”

While after 2 weeks without BT broadband and the booking of first one and then a second engineer, neither of whom showed, Pam the Painter went to the local techno store. True, she’d had a nightmare there last year but she was desperate. This time, she was met by a young man who answered her every question and as she left, she asked for the manager and told him that the assistant deserved a rise.   Manager grunted glumly “That’s not going to happen. What’s he done that so special ?” and she got the bit between her teeth.” Listen” she insisted “ a year ago you patronised me into the ground. You reduced me to tears of irritation.  This young man just sorted everything out as far as he can. His service should be recognised. If it isn’t that’s your problem. I’m marking it: that’s mine.”

And I was buying 4 items in a supermarket I don’t use when I saw a man my own age, inspecting and choosing apples with great care so as I went past, I said “Spoilt for choice !”   And he grinned.   About five minutes later, I came across him again, choosing oranges with the same care.   So I sidled up and whispered, “Don’t look now but I am following you !”   He turned to me with a film star smile – “I should be so lucky !” he said, I gave him my hand and we both burst out laughing.

Every time I write stories like this, I wonder if I risk sounding like Pollyanna who only saw the best in people – and I know damn fine that’s not true.   Whether it’s in the stars, God’s will or Nostradamus, we have matched sets of anguish, stupidity and every kind of violence. But as an exclusive diet, it poisons you.   We can rail and stamp to let off steam but this is where we are – though the restrained clarity of the General Secretary of the UN Antonio Guterres in the face of the disappearance of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi made a nice change. However justified, a rant risks being lazy journalism.

The fine strong invisible threads of human intercourse are more important now than they have been for years.   They are warmer, brighter and more important than intergalactic space travel or buying a new phone, let alone a new bottom.    Good news is like a smile ie cheap and warming.

Oh, and the hellebore has just bloomed …

*the song says “It ain’t what you do/It’s…

A close up of Helleborus ericsmithii

It all began when I found a hole in the exterior frame of the bathroom window.  Well, if it’s nothing, it’s nothing but if it is an incipient problem, Wal’s the man. Wal may own a stack of real jewels and 20 fur coats but he is a detail man who has built a successful business dealing with everything from lift refits through custom furniture to serious refurbs.   And one of his mottos is “There ‘s only one way to do things and that’s prop’ly”.

But we all know it is small things that give the most trouble and that as soon as you say you’ll fix this thing or that for a friend, Fate hears and prepares to test you. Neither Wal nor I was listening to Fate on this particular morning.

“It has to be done before the winter” he said” because otherwise the damp will get into the window frame and you’re looking at thousands.” We agreed that I had put off painting the garden wall for far too long and Wal disclosed rancour at the dilapidated trellis and black metal post holders.

Living very close to various levels of neighbourly noise, what I would actually like is a very high wall – preferably one that shocks you when the voice level goes above normal speaking – but it’s not practical.   “You will have to choose the trellis” said Wal. That night I decided that I didn’t want trellis, doesn’t keep out noise or light or animals.   “What I’d really like is chicken wire” I said, half expecting him to comment – praise for economy, aesthetic recoil ?   “I see, “said Wal levelly. “Readily available and inexpensive” I breezed, not to be drawn.

A couple of days later Wal rang me. Chicken wire was absent from three big name home improvement outlets. Various trade contacts had demurred.   “I am going to Tooting” announced Wal.   “I have a sat nav” he continued with dignity. “This thing is not going to lick me.”   He rang half an hour later to tell me that he was sitting in a traffic jam in Tooting, empty handed. The place that had promised to have it, didn’t.   And he confessed that – 18^th century French china, yes: chicken wire, a noticeable blank – but he was not going to be beaten.   He called a trade supplier who got it in for him the following day.

Jim had started prepping and painting when Wal delivered the chicken wire and stayed for a cup of tea. Two days later when it came to the time for Jim to put up the chicken wire, none of us could unroll it. And Wal, who can dead eye a flaw in a diamond at fifty paces, sat at the kitchen table and picked and wheedled, remarking “I’m quite good at this usually” until he put it aside, kindly warning me not to touch it, took a deep breath and called his old friend who makes furniture.

Graham asked what length were we talking about ? Yes, he thought he had that.   Only to call back later, after Wal had left to superintend the exact placement of his favourite client’s white carpet on to three layers of adhesive and underlay (“In one shot ! “) to explain that he didn’t think what he had was enough but he’d get some more, no problem and the boys would put it up next week as they passed through.

Later that evening, Graham rang Wal again to ask if there was something we should know about the availability of chicken wire ? Why it was so difficult to get hold of ?   He had had to go to several places (this is in Norfolk) but not to worry, he had it now.

The garden looks wonderful – you can’t beat fresh paint, thank you Jim. And although it poured with rain yesterday, that laid the dust and revived the tired plants, all just in time before season’s end.

The chicken wire is still to come, by chance I have to be out that day so I shall leave the garden looking like one thing and come home to it looking like another.

And I thought I was being so clever ….  

I didn’t listen to much of the Senate hearings re Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford.   It has been described as “a watershed moment”, a phrase indicating a decision and moving on.   But history is littered with them and it is by such phrases that we know that hope springs eternal, and it will take rather longer to get anywhere different. Kavanaugh is Trump’s man and Blasey Ford is a woman who felt she must go on the record. This has been politically manoeuvred, it would be in any country, whether admitted or not. We’re just not used to the US picking its scabs quite so publicly.

The contrast in presentation was interesting: she was calm and steady, he was shrill. I doubt Blasey Ford would have put herself – not to mention her husband and family and I hope they know what they are in for – through this, if it weren’t true. Though the truth is always stranger than fiction.

When your own country is in a mess, it is comforting if not constructive to know that you are not alone. Division is international. Currently, those rocks sticking up out of the sea, colonised only by screeching seabirds, look a good deal more organised than several human territories.

In the UK, facing what a woman passer by lassoed by an interviewer described as “the greatest crisis since WWII”, a couple of years down the line and still shouting, there is less fact than opinion and a great deal of blame.

In the US, there is the same but more so, further complicated by an overriding preoccupation to be right, or to be seen to be right, and all that underpins both.   America has its own villains and media ubiquity makes it hard to know if you can trust anybody.

Somewhere in the melee I heard a male voice ask (I paraphrase) “Is every man in public life going to have to go through this ?”   But if you are innocent, you have nothing to fear. Let us be very clear.   There are some very good men around and some women you wouldn’t want to eat with. There are rotters in high places. And some women have been shamefully used. And incidentally referring back to Blasey Ford, don’t underestimate how powerful is the sense of foolishness you might have at 15 or so, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people (which you couldn’t know) and things getting ugly.

No, I was not attacked, only bad mouthed. And I did tell my parents. And was believed. My father wanted to kill my verbal assailant – at which point my mother became my heroine by telling him to sit down – “You’re not leaving this house like that.” And we talked. It was my first experience of the sink the human mind can be. But the sort of role reversal claiming all men are beasts is as irrelevant and unjust as being opposed to women having opinions, contraception and education.

I can’t be against men.   I have been married to two and gave birth to a third.   It was a much more publicly acknowledged and respected feminist than I will ever be who said to me just after my son was born “Hooray. That means one good man we can count on.”

Throughout a considerable medical history, the only doctor who endangered me was a woman. I think of people I have worked for and with, companions and colleagues, mentors who helped me, minds I have admired and it probably comes out 60/40 men to women, because there are still women thank heaven who do think before they try to fit children into their lives, and want above all things to be good mothers. This cannot be over simplified, is endlessly to do with individual circumstances and situations, and is impossible to make generalisations about.

In the much vaunted system called democracy – which some think is on the ropes – we take pride in being able to ask questions and debate positions.   It is a far from ideal system. There isn’t one. There are only people who make systems work and people who want to believe in them and still more people who believe that questioning only makes systems more reliable.

As your best friend aged about 14 (the artistic one with pretty hair) took up with some awkward monosyllabic spotty thing with an abiding interest in his brother’s motorbike, somebody would remark laughingly “Oh well, opposites attract!”

“look heavy, feel light”

But I always wanted more of an explanation than that. It’s fine being attracted across difference, but does the attraction endure, is it enough to override the inevitable friction?   Do you and this Significant Other learn to negotiate a pattern that works in the face of the pull of polar opposites?   Or – is the hidden truth that you’re not so different after all ?

Managing to co exist might not even be a pretty pattern, as long as it works and both sides acknowledge that it has to, though in the extremes of wealth and poverty, such patterns are rationalised or waved aside. We all live in patterns of behaviour and I have no more faith in “opposites attract” than I have in “happily ever after.”   These old saws must apply occasionally on the way to becoming truisms but it is just as true – or more so – that partnerships persist for all sorts of reasons. And many of those are a good deal less likeable than the attraction of difference or us against the world. Most partnerships continue because humans are creatures of habit who don’t like change and anyway, don’t want to be alone.

(AR and Smiley Neighbour several weeks ago:

SN: And have you see Bodyguard ?

AR|: Yes. Tripe.

SN: Oh Anna, it’s wonderful !   You are so hard to please …

No I didn’t take this position to be provocative.   I watched the first episode.  Totally unfair to make a judgement on one episode, I know, but I’d rather read a book. For me there was no opposite or soulmate similar to be attracted to, and I am not persuaded by what “everybody else” thinks.   That only means there are more of them, not that they are right. You need tension for drama and the only discernible tension in Bodyguard was in the underwear.)

Years ago before women’s magazines were just the repository of murdered trees, aesthetic surgery and transient celebrity, we used to ask our readers’ opinions – oh not about anything major – Good God, that would mean encouraging women to think ! But they replied in big enough numbers to be interesting and when asked what attracted them to their Significant Others, the standout winner was a similar sense of humour. (This is a considerable time ago and it is popular to believe that humans are quite different now – but I am not convinced. Nice is still nice, nasty is horrible and most of us are made up of both. No change there then.)

So we weren’t talking about that moody sense of opposition (or unlikely hearts and flowers) so much as mutuality, what would make you pull together, get you past the disagreement. There were imponderables like rocks in a river but the river ran round them and apparently, you could vote differently, have quite different attitudes to money, sex, when to eat and what to wear – as long as you could have a laugh about it.

And if you could have a laugh about it, dare I hope that you could even begin to discuss it ?   And instead of the cold shoulder, there would be a warm shoulder, the one you clutched as you laughed in the kitchen. I grew up in a marriage like this and it was the inspiration of my life – my whole life, not just the marital one.   I’ve lost count of the number of times I have suggested it to whoever I was talking to, about whatever the problem was.   ( I shall never forget the woman who replied, scandalised “We don’t talk in bed !” ) Laughter gives account of you and then you can begin to discuss.

Not everything works out, not even in fairy stories.   And it’s not that I think that everything has to be lighthearted and funny, far from it. But if life is a battle or a series of them, a sense of humour is a weapon, not to dismiss but acknowledge and defuse, to engender better feeling and communication than sulks and stand off.