Annalog

Luxuries are

having the newspaper delivered and stamps.  There’s glamour.   The whizzy young man from next door who is kindness itself arranged the one and I totter up the road to the  sub post office (where AI could be the tech servant of everything the one counterhand knows) or into the bookshop for stamps at regular intervals.  

Stamps are now so expensive that when I sent something I thought might be important through to my son, he recoiled from  the expense … and yesterday I did not watch the news because television news is so often so badly conceived and presented – and yes, I realized, looking back through old copy that I have been banging on about this for years.  Hasn’t made it any better.  While the day the new Pope

was elected (good luck and God bless) you’d have thought the entire world went into  gearbox neutral while for hours highly paid commentators said the same thing with slight variation. I read the newspaper.

The newspaper is not Holy Writ but it’s pretty  good, not that I can tell my favourite  columnists how much I approve or like them because they will be inundated with internal communication which has sadly derogated the process and using one of those hideously expensive stamps doesn’t guarantee that a letter gets through and should it, that there will be a response.

Having been the recipient of mail for years,  a loop  usually sounds like a loop, file in the waste paper basket . 

Everybody else deserves acknowledgement.  Basic PR.  How you build a public.

The lack of response is often unsettling.    Manny (NHN) has  various health problem s which he is attempting to navigate through a doctor who initiates appointments but doesn’t respond when one is requested  and a recent  exchange with the teaching hospital involved (by text) which resulted in him being sent two letters, one dated 2023 and the other 2024.  This sort of dilemma suggests sandwiches and a stool and a long long sit-in to get sense out of face to face.

Common sense

has been  unfashionable for years but perhaps when a thing is out of fashion, it is really just waiting in the wings to be reinvented and  thus – fashionable again.  

So, of course OF COURSE, the  most dangerous prisoners should be kept without other contact and access to  kettles or cooking facilities BEFORE another prison officer is injured (one with  hot oil, one with hot water) preferably before another incident.  And please, not the old “human rights” argument in dealing with people who brutalise and don’t care, already sentenced for just that.

And on the good news side, the young  staying out of university are flourishing through ( pains me to say this but I will) the positive use of AI to find key skills rather than qualifications – instead of starting with “and your degree ?” which dogged my  youth.   Graduates got the opening, especially  male graduates.  And I was one of the lucky who learned at what I call with affectionate respect the coal face – on the job – which brought me a life changing break.   The  preoccupation with degrees has been named somewhere along the line as “the paper ceiling” 

and while I can’t snipe at paper (no paper ? no journals, no books, let alone lists and where would I be without a list ?  And forget the screen – some of us really don’t like it)  I am delighted that it has only taken my lifetime to realise that, whatever else he was right about, “everybody” (that word again see annalog last week) having a degree was not former PM Tony Blair’s best effort.  What we need is opportunity, not more exams.    Not all of us are good at exams.  Oh we are bright, with wonderful skills – but they don’t fit into the framework of  pass or fail.   I was briefly employed scaling exam results while waiting to go to the US.   Ruthlessly narrow.

So thank you Hadley Freeman for putting the boot in to the last  Met Gala which was depressing in its predictability: Dominic Lawson for a perspective on Reform: and Matthew Syed for writing about time.  I wish I could tell you myself but there …

I shall not be writing about

Harry Sussex because “everybody” else will.   Well no, not everybody else – but you know what I mean.   Oh, damn generalization without qualification.   So often I feel like radioactive dust, swept up into all the rest to make a headline.   So let me outline the sort of sweeping statements that really give me indigestion. 

Everybody loves a festival.   I went once.  Call me defeatist but all I remember is discomfort, chill, damp, sweat, mud – and the mess afterwards, which was as nothing compared to nowadays.   If you want to convince me of an alternative society, show me that you know ugly and potentially destructive rubbish is – and liaise in the disposal of it.

Everybody loves kittens.   But kittens become cats and while I have owned two at different times in my life, cats like bull elephants or babies, are very different one from another. The first cat was a kind of seal on getting married and keeping house.   He ran away when I left.   And the second was a brown Burmese called Chocolate Pud because, curled up, that’s what he looked like.

After I had moved him twice and he had generously adapted, I had to move a third time so I let him go to be among others he had already met and liked at a place in the country, where he happily adapted.  He was beautiful.

Everybody wants children.  If I could tell you the number of kind thoughtful men and women who have had to negotiate a partner’s change of mind, both for and against… And we all know you don’t get to send them back.  

At one of our first shared suppers, Pam the Painter told me warily that she had never wanted to be married or have children -and I said  “Yes.”   Which decision you make is your affair but babies (who grow into adults – all too fast) are not bricks to shore up a relationship or make you feel fulfilled.    Some of us prefer small children, some like them older and some prefer adults.  Getting there is a long haul.   And know – before you start – that you can’t have it, just because you want it.  

Everybody wants and loves instant. 

Maybe I have a different idea about the speed of things – you’d expect that, older generation and all that.   So, while I love the moment you see light or scenery revealed – and then it’s gone, I spent years explaining that your doctor was not negligent or uncaring because s/he had not referred you both to an infertility specialist when you had been married ten months . (People confused getting married with getting pregnant   the falling popularity of marriage has knocked that one on the head…)   He/she was asking you to wait – which is nowadays a revolutionary thought.

Everybody loves on line.  Well I don’t.  I won’t bore on about wardrobe colour, texture, proportions, quality but in the last two weeks, I have come across two references from people younger and infinitely better qualified than I – one a man, one a woman, just to be really even handed – both referring to addiction to tech.   They are looking at the everyday and the younger among us, as well as malleable young.   The confusion over M&S online is not a one off.  It will happen again.  If you can open up these possibilities, you can pervert them.  Not for nothing is it called a portal – and most openings go both ways.   

Everybody loves a white wedding.  No way.  Not even when I was a little girl.  And now, when weddings are business and the  industry babbles on about  budgets/honeymoons/table dressing/favours (ugh !)  quote “something people want to keep not leave on the table” unquote, clearly manners dumped with the gift/custom shaped eyelashes (false eye lashes are the lipstick of the 21^st century) and to my taste (not “everybody’s”) inappropriate dresses, I am repelled.  If you can work your way into something kind and committed through this snowstorm of unnecessary expenditure – you both deserve to be happy.

“Everybody “ makes whatever is referred to sound acceptable or understandable.  A sort of false truth.   I don’t buy it.  Beyond the needs of media and publicity to try and remain relevant, who is everybody?

What I don’t know

would fill a book.   Illnesses I have never heard of, bones I don’t know the names of, writers and films, tribes and traditions – and that’s before you get to food or languages.  Or art.  Or teaching.  Or keeping the boilers stoked.  Each to his own, we say.    And if there is an illness from which  certain kinds of journalists suffer, it is that they feel they must offer  (presumably as part of the job) an opinion, the subtext of which too often implies “I know – but you don’t …”

I see I don’t know as a statement of strength – or courage. 

I remember Jake Sullivan  US National Security Adviser under Biden saying it in a live press conference.  Twice I think  to make his position clear – he didn’t know:  if he didn’t – probably nobody else did: and surmise, he said, could be dangerously irresponsible.  Oh, the dear dead days beyond recall !

The getting of insight and reliable information is a journey.  There is a first person piece about the actor Jeremy Renner’s accident with a snow  plough in which his daughter is mentioned but not her mother – not even in passing,  Did he do that too ?  And I long to know more about the wife of an author I admire  – Richard Flanagan – because he rewrote his last book several times and, knowing a bit about creative types, I should think that was tough to be around.  Of course  it may simply be that Renner has an agreement with his daughter’s mother not to discuss her at all  and Richard Flanagan’s wife is perfectly happy in the background and doesn’t want to be interviewed.   And interview is as variable as any other  journalistic form. 

I don’t know.

I listened to a new friend (ie within the last  year or two) talk about her increasing dissatisfaction with a woman she had known for a long time, a saga of  insensitivity, unawareness and plain  bad manners, and at a pause I asked “Why did you put up with this ?”  No answer.   Perhaps it was too direct a question, to answer it would be too revealing of self. 

What she said is “I don’t know.”  But if you won’t face up to not knowing, you won’t learn.

Heaven knows it is easier to put up with the unbearable than to make an end, ends are almost always difficult.  We shrink from it in all kinds of social relationships, from partnerships to pals.  Some relationships, it is true, function on fratch, disagreement, even rows.  You’ll  recall the comment on a famous couple (I can’t remember who) that they loved fighting, because they liked the making up so much.   No thank you.

And like all acts of will, you can decide not to know, turning a blind eye

to  everything from infidelity to embezzlement.  If you decide it’s not happening, it is not happening and too often if somebody,  for good reason, tries to tell you, it is easier to turn on the would be benefactor than to look at the steaming pile of difficulty and  ugliness in front of you.

I don’t know  P utin.   I don’t  approve of his mindset as it has ever been reported to me and I don’t  believe in the invasion of a sovereign state.   However much background you accrue, you can’t know the outcome.

I don’t know Trump. I know about him, and I’d like to believe that his behaviour is devoted to a series of recognizable ends.  But I don’t know. 

I don’t know the ins and outs of diplomacy and how it is decided what people say or do.   I feel for Starmer because whatever he says, he has to try and keep the electorate safe with something to eat and no bombs.   Is  this  the way to do it ?   I don’t know.

What’s worse is that it is harder and harder to find reliable information – which means information you can accept – and thus harder and harder to see where we are going. There will always be interests dedicated to keeping the public in ignorance so that they are manageable.

I don’t know.      

You  believe what you believe, and I believe what I believe.  

 I am not anti anything in the way of faith.  I have had the acquaintance of  Jains, Mormons, a wide assortment of Hindus, Sikhs  and Muslims, Jews, Christians (conventional and cult) with a liberal sprinkling of  professing agnostics and atheists.  

But I do find it bewildering that the great comfort offered by the Christian faith is so rarely mentioned,

that death isn’t the end, and that there is a life hereafter.   Pope Francis has gone to glory.  At the risk of sounding sour, he was 88, had been ill before and had had double pneumonia.   And he died on the day  Christians believe the Christ rose from the dead.  Yet in all the endlessly repetitive coverage of that morning, neither the life hereafter nor the day of Christ’s arising  was  mentioned.   And if his confessor didn’t bring it to his attention, I hope he thought of it for himself.

My father was the son of a Jewish mother which is to say, a Jew but he was brought up out of Judaism,  singing in the choir of the local Anglican Church.  His mother married out, as it was called.  I only heard about the Jewish heritage when I played Anne Frank

in the theatre, aged 15.

From young manhood onwards he wasn’t interested in the Anglican Church beyond a sentimental attachment to  certain hymns and carols, and the Watchnight Service, known elsewhere as Midnight Mass and held on Christmas Eve.

He believed in the majesty and wonder of nature, and the possibility of a second chance.   I think my mother’s beliefs were similar, respectfully prosaic.    

I read a lot about Yiddishkeit (Jewishness) and twice thought about conversion.   The first time I mentioned it to my father, he said gently “Jews are born, not made.”  And years later  when I offered to convert in order to facilitate my Israeli boyfriend bringing me home (his parents were observant Jews) Dov (his name)  was appalled.  It is a long  endeavour, outcome not guaranteed.  I went no further.  I fitted nowhere,

that was the deal.

But  I pray. 

  I pray  often, in passing and more deeply and I pray to a God that is just that – a power and an intelligence far about the minds and hearts of mankind.   I pray for God’s mercy and I thank him for beauty.  I pray every time I write copy and every time I have to have an injection.   And no I am not phobic about needles – I am just a wuss.

I have had two crises  when I got lost in what seemed to be a long dark tunnel and I couldn’t see how to go on.   I’d like to tell you  there was a hand, or a warmth, or a presence.   I don’t think I could define for myself, let alone anybody else, how I went forward again but I did.

Somewhere in there I shed everything except belief itself.  The words that I use comfort me.  As I believe  God knows everything anyway,  my confessions and requests and enthusiastic thanks come round in a circle back to me.  Like when I opened the front door to see two magpies  (one for sorrow, two for joy) and exclaimed “Oh thank you Lord.”  

I still like the term the Almighty – says it all.

And I believe that if I don’t get help, if the needle hurts, if I can’t reach somebody  or help or turn aside from the blackness that threatens  us on every side – that’s meant too.  Get on with it, God helps those who help themselves.

I have known some splendid examples of Christianity, emphasis here on quality not quantity, like the Irish Catholic nun who came towards me down the corridor after I had been questioned live on Irish TV many years ago about abortion and as I straightened my shoulders to take my medicine, she reached for both my hands which I gave wonderingly.  “Miss Raeburn “ she said.  “I don’t agree with a single thing  you said but you’re a darling girl.”   I think what cinched that was the man who shouted at me, wagging finger and all, that I would answer to God.  “I expect to” I said” but to no man born of woman.”

Please notice this is a four letter word.  

  Nice is a word we were forbidden to use writing English essays in my grammar school , a lazy word, think again  … but nice is also a neutral if you want to be agreeable and not commit, or a word understood between friends, a step in the right direction word, with all sorts of bigger and more complex and subtle ideas attached to it.  

The supermarket has a scheme called “It’s on Us” which means that we can’t sell this, it’s past its best -but  you might enjoy it for a few days.  On such a basis Sise brought me flowers including protea

for my birthday and the young woman to whom I was speaking about bath cleaner, asked why and I heard an accent.  She was from Albania.  I explained I was a frequent customer and the staff take very good care of me.   I was winded with delight when I walked round the next but one  fitment and she presented me with red tulips “for your birthday.” Nice.

A friend sent me a  bookmark with the old rhyme about “Monday’s child is fair of face”.   I was definitely Wednesday’s child

that week, full of woe.  So having bent Denning’s ear, I followed my own advice and went off to do something – anything better than sitting and whingeing.

I rode the bus which has finally come back to its  recognized route, got off walked, and was disappointed.  What used to be endlessly interesting is now closed or relaunched into the expensively commonplace.  I went to two favourite chemists, a book shop (end of ranges), a card shop and bravely hiked down the  stairs  into the tube, feeling that if nothing else I had walked and breathed, the wind in my long white hair.  As I got up  to get off the train, an Oriental  woman in her late fifties or maybe a bit more, with a chignon and good earrings, remarked “Pretty hair.”  I stared at her.  “ So pretty” she repeated, gesturing with her hand.  I said straight into her face” How sweet of you, thank you ..”  

( I tend to  say  madame with the e on the end like the French) and she beamed.  As did I.   Nice.      

And  Alex and his girlfriend , her brother and his girlfriend drank Prosecco

with me for my birthday  – and I would not have gone if the normally peaceful Snowdrop had not put a squib under me.  “What do you mean,”  he demanded, “send an email and say you’d rather not ?   Go and brush your hair, put clean trousers on and go !”   Sir, yessir.  I went.   We had a fine time.  I drank three glasses (no head) and wound up devouring crisps and humus at my kitchen table, stayed up  much later than usual.  Even the indigestion was nice !

I know I am open to all this.   I have advantages – white hair, clear fluent speech.   I am well disposed to the world till given a reason to do otherwise.  But I am only some of the transaction.  You  have to want to take the risk to interact.  Nothing to do with new best friends.  It’s do with human acknowledgement.

When I came out of the book shop in the Friday sunshine, there were three little faces beaming at me, through the glass of the bus shelter, led by an Asian boy, gesturing towards me, a girl probably his sister and a darker  girl – all seven or so – with  somebody’s mother in a rose coloured sari, on the  phone.   I stopped.  I looked, they looked, all of us smiling.  I pushed the dark glasses into my mane, and said “What did I do ?”   More smiling, shy waves.  I went round the corner of the shelter and Boysie crossed in front of his mother to hide his face in her shoulder.“ “Oh you’re not going to play shy now ! “ I said as his mother put away the phone laughing and beamed.  I  bowed, they watched me, eyes enormous.  “I think you are all wonderful” I said and everybody beamed and waved good bye,

including  Mama.  Nice..   

My mother said “misery loves company” and that troubles come in threes. And I am on the third. I’m not listing them but I couldn’t sit, let alone think so you have no annalog till (I hope) next week and the resemblance to Eeyore has been striking…see you soon.

London buses

– unsung, wide and useful service – have a most irritating habit of pause.  They come along, you get on and three stops later, they stop while an unctuous electronic voice says words to the effect of “The driver of this bus has been told to keep the  bus here for several minutes in order to regularize the schedule.  We apologise for any inconvenience to your  journey.”  Growl.   

The other morning I got up and got off.  The sky was clear.  If I only walked one stop it would be a step in the right direction  and as I began this, I greeted a woman my own age, a little taller, pretty, shabby and she called after me “It’s so nice when people say good morning.”   I went back  – “But you’re Irish

–  you’d expect it.”  She smiled at me.  And I went straight on  (the sin of the elderly and lonely is that they talk too much – and I am guilty) to tell her how my father had described the Irish – that they are NOT the English and that the Romans never got there, followed by another story and she said “ You’ve made my morning” I said  “Mine too” .   And we parted in approbation.

I thanked a girl on a bike who waited because I can’t scurry.  I asked where she was from in the  US,  Montana she said adding  “This person in the White House is nothing to do with me !”

Coming  back, a woman in her fifties struggled to the bus stop, in pain  and overweight, who knows which came first ? – disordered hair and clothes ( I shouldn’t think she cared, understandable in that kind of pain).  I moved back so she could sit down.  She spoke about the weather  and then she used to me a word I have not heard for  70 years.  She said I had an accent.  I said  that was unlikely, I was born here, both parents were.  She insisted adding – “Or you just talk posh.”

and mimicked what I call the “Daddy Was A Colonel” voice.   I let her say it and then I replied “Parents from WW1 – and it used to be called  Received Pronunciation.”  The bus came.

We were driven by one of my favourite bus drivers – he is Ghanaian and if  he were my son I would burst with pride – he is beautiful.

There was a man about my age buying what I call a proper newspaper to whom I said softly  “It will depress you but the coverage is good” and told him about something I had read that morning.   He came after me in the queue.  – “And this ?”  he said, holding up a journal.  I said too far to the right for me but I believe the writing is often very good.  He used an old phrase.  “That’ll do me” he said.  “I buy to read.”

The first shop assistant was Mauritian, and the second, and the third whom I thought might be French, with a timeless chic – dark blonde hair, a good figure, even  nice shoes (I peeked over the counter) – turned out to be from Kazakhstan, “a long way away.”  I agreed but told her I had a wonderful  book on the ancient treasures of her country … “How did you find that ?”   I said it was an exhibit some years ago at the Metropolitan  Museum In New York ,had been featured in a newspaper and I had hunted down the published catalogue – which my son gave me for a birthday. 

And I bought  something  I was too lazy to try on  but have and it doesn’t fit but I can return it.

I thought about “posh” at school and the roughhousing it got me into until I learned to use it against myself and be amusing.  The lesson took time.  I thought about my  voice which has brought me so much, whether my actual voice, remembered, or imagined voice in writing.

There are people I meet and never see again, people I only meet on the bus or at the shops.  And I think of my mother describing enthusiasm as being worth 10 times any cream ever invented.   “Stay interested” she said, “helps the face.”  Wise woman, bless her. 

her favourites

The floor of the entry hall

of the house in which my sister and her two friends  had taken up residence to  further a small company was black and white marble.   I was 14 and we had just driven through from Yorkshire to Hampshire.  And I had raised my voice against my parents.   “Are you going to fight all the way there?”   They stopped.  I don’t remember being invited into the conversation so I didn’t have the opportunity to tell them how frightened I was, that I had seen my mother hiding letters from my sister in her dressing gown pocket until she could read them and then offer them to my father as lunchtime post.   And my father had taken advantage of my mother’s absence for her two evening shifts a week, to talk to me about how worried he was about my sister.  And my mother.  And now they were arguing.

When we arrived in that hall, my sister thought she was right and my parents thought she was wrong, and my father took me out of it into the garden for a while.   Nothing was resolved.  I’ve thought of that floor a lot recently.

I like black and white – print of course, prefer black and white check to black and white stripe, black and white films and photographs, understand oh deeply that everything is not black and white, and I suppose the most important aspect of the floor was not what it looked like but how well it fitted together. 

I am looking, of course I am, for positives.   I have just had to for a week while the internet provider chucked his weight about and the one of two positives I got out of that was when my own technical advisor pointed out that I was luck y to be able to speak to a person – widely now  bots, AI and nobody to address.  The other positive is that the machine has been regained – I don’t have the language for this. 

I loathe it.  Pam the Painter and I regularly bemoan the passing of typewriters, carbon and copy paper and the telephone – answered by a human.

Much of the reportage – whether in print, audio or visual – is either wonderful or awful.   Shades of grey have been relegated to soft porn (50 Shades of) and it’s a black and white world except where people occasionally say what they mean, look at something from every angle and devil take the hindmost.   But how many people have time to think?

I had complimented the writer I met years ago on how good she looked – some men and women look better in age (that’s not what I said).  When she got over the fact that I remembered her and  discovered my age, she exclaimed “But you must have had surgery” to which I replied (my mother’s daughter) “Don’t be silly.  I am with Dietrich

– you don’t put a knife in my face.” 

Mary Berry doesn’t mean much to me because I don’t like cookery programmes.  But Vogue gave her the cover for her 90^th birthday.  That’s the white of it.  The black is she only gets near the cover at that age because she is on television.   Older people are out of fashion, the pursuit of youth leading to the delay and denial of death.

maybe Mark Twain, maybe our old friend “anon”.

The smart money does a lot of bet hedging and publishes the parlous state of the British economy two pages after their own economics editor suggests carefully that maybe we have the corner – take your choice.

And occasionally you even get what seems white and gets darker line by line as you read it (a profile of the US Vice President) in which the right things are said but don’t ring true.

I confess I do not like remakes – be it Bergerac, West Side Story or Cinderella.  I understand that story lines are used and reused, of course I do, but if you have a stand out knockout original – leave it alone.  And the bad reviews and indeed measured commentary on Disney’s 10 year, multi writer, withdrawn from its London premiere all umpteen million dollars of it, remake of Snow White, obviously heartfelt by the writers, made me into that horrid little girl who was punished for saying “Told you so!”   

It’s going to be a good week – Josh garnished the garden

yesterday and  there is a French film on Saturday next I haven’t seen.  It could be a bad one but I haven’t seen too many of those and I have been exposed to endless Welsh/Scottish/Irish product.  The Gaelic language thriller was outstanding  but the others weren’t.  Doubtless another BBC quota to be ticked alongside second rate Scandi in the name of the good ones which were outstanding.   I don’t  do more than a week at a time.

The key players

in the present world crisis make me angry, afraid, anxious  and to what point ?  They will do what they do, damn them, against the best efforts of an administration labouring through a system in dire need of laxative to move us on to appropriating Russian assets and splitting them with Ukraine, putting rearmament programmes in place and beginning to teach people that they have a social contribution to make and it’s unlikely to be anything to do with a belated diagnosis of ADHD or depression.  

The enemy within is the empire of the drug companies,

the acceptance by far too many people that diagnosis should be ten minutes, a label and a prescription and the mental submission posture that implies “Everybody can do something about this – except me.”

It was a bad week at the hands of an internet provider who doesn’t care and a long haul back to balance.  I met a neighbour yesterday, looking tired and frazzled, who had been trying to  buy  proper waterproof boots for a botanical expedition.  She hit  blank  indifference and disinterest, including Harrods, which she referred to as a vision of hell.  I privately thought she was a decade out to be going there.  I gave up on my favourite “big” store when it offered me a cashmere rollneck for £1200 to a background of rap, for me the musical equivalent of having my teeth filled.

Because Snowdrop and I sometimes share books, he got me to re read Henry James.  But you’re stuck with personal preference.  I couldn’t, I am an Edith Wharton girl, HJ was like homework.

What I was looking for was escapism.  I would have embarrassed to say that years ago.  My life is good, what do I have to escape from ?  But the positive side of escapism is that you open yourself to something other than what usually makes up your life.  You might see the performance of something you never thought you’d watch.  The experience of any form of reading, tv. radio, film is all based on suck it and see.   You are in control of incoming cultural traffic.   Pass on HJ, pause on Dancing Back to the Light (BBC2).

There is no logic to my love of ballet except that it is other than anything else and watching this film (directed by Stephane Carrel) about Steven McRae’s recovery from tendon injury x 2, not 20 any more, confirmed a big insight. 

McRae is a principal dancer

at the Royal Ballet and I watched this man put all his physical and mental intelligence into rebuilding and repairing the only instrument that counts for him – his body, in dance – assisted by all sorts of sympathetically accredited disciplines.

And I had an insight into the tension between the endless work – back,legs, feet, stretch, rest – like preparing for an athletic event – again and again and again – to procure the illusion of effortlessness.

Long ago a famous ballerina said “you can have two days off – but then you have to do class.”  It’s like painting the Forth Bridge – unremitting.

And McRae is married to a former dancer (oh that’s an interview I’d like) with three appealing small children, and he came aged 17 to the Royal Ballet from a suburb of Sydney.  Dance is his discipline – and he learnt and talked of how he had been misguided, what he had to learn anew – to students as well as the camera.  

And it was not without reverses.

And I watched him exercise his straight toes – vital of course as part of support of the foot.  No foot, no float …  It’s too late for my toes  but the film shone 90 minutes of light on me in a dark world.

The connotation of saying what you mean

  is too often seen as being  disagreeable when a   more sensitive soul might have  left the matter alone,  used a gentler phrase or  kept quiet.  This  may come as a terrible shock to you but I say nice things as often  as I can and only  when I perceive them to be true.   As in the case of a young woman the other day whose coat I admired.  So I said so.   She looked at me as if I were holding matched snakes.  “Me ?” she said  round eyed.  So I said, “It’s a compliment, it’s free, non addictive, not fattening.  I don’t want money and I am not after your body.”  Whereupon she relaxed into a giggle and a smile.

Whilst in the present ongoing unholy international stew , provocation won’t help – a bit of saying what you mean is refreshing.  Last week I used a phrase from an interview with

BBC’s Emma Barnett in which she spoke about the pressure parents feel to be perfect and wanting to create a panic room for parents.  A  panic room for parents is a slick phrase (can’t beat a bit of alliteration) but the first  given you come to terms with as a parent, regardless of  whether your own were useful to you or not,  is that you can only do your best and know that, with all your  impeccable intentions, it may not suit your child.   Styles of parenting are a whole other thing.

Communication comes into this – parent to parent, and parent to child and on into education, special interests and so on.   One is never done being a parent, even if one has to learn to shut up, stand back and let be.   And you may have what you perceive as a quiet sweet child.  Until you discover that he or she has a will of iron.

You don’t need many words to stonewall.

We talk about children as a separate race because it is easier to sell them and their parents things for them that way but every child is set to grow and they change quite fast.   Speed of development varies  and perfection of children or parents doesn’t come into it.   I am very wary about perfection especially applied to people, other than situationally.  You can behave perfectly in a particular circumstance but that doesn’t make you perfect.  

Perfection is like nirvana.  You may strive for it but the journey to it is where you will learn and grow,  the  achievement of the final goal likely to be denied.    

Perfect parenthood is like perfect health.   Health is reliable, maintained through water consumption, exercise, food and rest.   And so many times  we say to each other “but I always thought he/she was in very good shape” as somebody staggers into cancer or heart disease, and worse. 

Because we are anxious (we’d have to be stupid not to be – anxiety is there in the atmosphere, running out of money, running out of time, the pressure politically ) we turn to health as something to be maintained in perfection.  

But it varies  as the weather varies.   That’s why it is so difficult to sell long term health maintenance to so many people.  They just take their health for granted till it falters.  And even if you do all the right things, it is not a marble statue – an achievable goal – perfection.  It is a work in progress and the darndest things emerge as you go on.   If you had been told about them, would you remember them ?  Not till there was a problem.

And then  we’d have to talk about  what kind of a problem.   Saying what you mean comes into that too.  And you may be stuck with a fear for which you don’t have a language – just like the hooha currently going forward with my  internet provider.   Or a child you can’t reach.   Or a  health problem that frightens you so much, you can’t think about it.   Our old friend denial- very primitive, very strong.

Communication is never wasted, even if it is awkward or unpleasant and human to human agreeably at the moment is  candlelight in several kinds of dark –  I will happily share my matches.