Annalog

Until this morning I had attributed this gnomic wisdom to the dress designer Chanel but according to the search engine it is variously credited, mentioned in song lyrics and even the subject of a book. I last thought of it when I watched the great and good and not so great or good at John McCain’s funeral and wished somebody would be brief.

Speaking the eulogy is a snare and a delusion: setting out to list the departed’s strengths, you want to include shortcomings too, lest he or she sounds boring or inhuman.   |If (s)he has lived a long and eventful life, you’d like to cover the range of that.   You want to be well thought of by your listeners, all of whom will have their own version of the departed and some may have quite a lot more to say in one direction or the other. The temptation is to speak about how you fitted in with the dead man or woman. Resist. You are still here and can account for yourself.   (S)he is silenced, and it is to honour the absent one that your listeners have gathered. But, I want to whisper, remember the old show business adage “Leave ‘em wanting more….”

meet snappy!

And the more is not just to do with length but also quality.

I didn’t set off to write about funerals and memorials. I haven’t been to very many, though this may change.   Slightly older friends who, where they used to go to dinner, now go to funerals and get upset and tired – largely because, in spite of protested faith, neither has reconciled to the end of mortal life as we know it. I don’t understand this. I thought the whole idea about having a set of religious or spiritual beliefs was to be comforted in the inevitable.   I am.

Wal announced he didn’t want a funeral, he had been to one too many recently and they were all conspicuous outpourings of money and time which had very little to do with the departed and a whole lot to do with those left behind.   Mourners need a mechanism by which to grieve but I think we could do it a whole lot better than we do.

Less is more is one of those sayings that suggests an alteration of focus.   In a film with all sorts of gifted actors called This Beautiful Fantastic (Simon Aboud), my only real cavil was that the ending seemed to be in quite a different style from everything that had gone before. And if the preceding story was in the key of less, the ending was too much more. I loved the film, I’d recommend it but I want to embroider “Less is more” on a sampler for the film maker.

Wal’s mother, one of the early executives of a US film company, wore couture. She even had her shoes and other accessories made. Her jewellery was mostly real.   And she taught him “Look at yourself before you go out and take one thing off. Less is more.” While at the other end of the pay scale entirely, my mother practised the same style.   The only exceptions to her rigorous trimming down were the Royals (“well it’s all real and symbolic so that’s different”) and Rosalind Russell who could and did wear trimmings a go go, and still managed to look elegant.

Heaven knows, less is more when you cook.   Plain is much more fancy.   It took me years to understand that the answer to new friends was not a new recipe, but an old favourite.

I cannot think of an area of interest in which the maxim does not apply.   There are swathes of music which are more more more , so ornate the ears protest.   There are furnishings that set my teeth on edge.   There is writing which indeed may be English but I wouldn’t swear to it, where you read a page and you have to go back and read it again: after 20 pages or so, you’re punchdrunk.   I may be disappointed that I am not as intelligent as I thought I was but the truth compels me to admit that I don’t understand what I am reading – so it’s better gone. And I can go on to something more …  

What a week.   A friend’s brother flew over from LA, cleared in his latest round of tests, well and happily spiky, only to collapse and die. “Can’t talk” she emailed. “Wanted you to know.”   Another friend reviewing documentaries found her professionalism worn thin through hours of rape, the Rohinga, rape, Isis, rape, Myanmar, rape, knife culture, rape, gangs, Grenfell and rape.   After a blissful week of quiet, my upstairs neighbour returned to unpack and trundle around, mostly after midnight. There is nothing of her sideways and she sounds like a troop of horse. My first sleep broken, settling down again (getting cross doesn’t help), is unlikely.   Second go at Aftermath – an exhibit about the art emerging from WWI and the years that followed: terrific (look up George Clausen whose portraits are a bit twee but whose landscapes are notable) but not lightweight.   Another friend spoke about the number of Jews planning to leave Britain: her calm shook me rigid. She doesn’t want to go, she was born here and prefers it to anywhere. “But don’t dismiss the intention” she said. “It’s real.”  

When you can’t sleep, never mind why, whatever else is in your mind becomes distorted and frightening – but even so …   The background noise is threatening to spill over into the foreground any minute now.   A correspondent half my age said it reminded him of the “phoney war”, those weeks when WWII war was declared but eerie calm prevailed while government sought to rally the military and prepare the public. With the present Labour and Conservative incumbents at each other’s throats, do they even think of us ?

I went yesterday to a section of London near me that I haven’t been to since I fell and had to walk my legs in again. The only flower shop sells artificial, fashion shop(upmarket) is now a juice bar, fashion shop (humbler) is empty and boarded up. Gone is the pet parlour, four other eating places, the cinema … I stopped counting empty properties.   This used to be a neighbourhood. Now it is three bus stops on the way to another neighbourhood.

It is customary to complain about rent and rates and invoke the internet.   Personally I hate shopping for anything of colour, texture or fit over the internet but for others, the speed and so called convenience is preferable to shopping as we knew it. And once shops go, other businesses do too.   Sometimes I feel that living in a consumer society is particularly corrupting, all I Want alongside Me Too.  

And then you have a moment. Not desperation or rage or ineptitude, but joy.

I was on the bus going home, I could do commercials for the bus even though the experience is often close to 19^th century shipping steerage. A man as tall as my son, very dark and neat, got on and beside him, the most beautiful child – a little boy with skin so dark it’s pale, lit from within, enormous eyes and the whole attitude of the body unalloyed curiosity and pleasure. “Upstairs, daddy ?” said a very clear little voice and his father gently explained that they would be staying downstairs, it was only a few stops – so I leant forward and said ”If you get tired of him, I’ll have him …” And we beamed at each other. “He’s just two and he doesn’t know all the words, he’s just so excited they’re coming out of his mouth” and he moved him into a seat by the window while he, the father, sat on the gangway opposite me.   I held out my hand. “Where’s the family from ?”   “Nigeria” he said and shook hands.   I said, thinking of my son’s “brother” Uzo “You’re the same size as my son- and he (indicating the child) is beautiful.” He thanked me gravely and the little boy peeped round the bulk of his father, smiling . “Yes, we’re talking about you” I said. “And if you listen, your ears will turn pink !”” Delight.   We spoke a bit, not much and then they went to get off, till the boy turned to me as he left to wish me goodbye, the very small prince of a nearly forgotten kingdom.

This little word has an impact like few others.

“Dancing may be part of the buildup…”

I never knew who came up with describing the long running show I did at the first incarnation of Capital Radio as being about “personal, sexual and emotional problems” but whoever it was, I am most grateful because, I discovered, for large numbers of people, the word “sex” or any thereof derived like sexy or sexual, dismissed any other consideration. (Remember, this is without image).   And the powers that be have just “got” sex televisually – not sex in context, not sex imaginatively – but moody shots of this bit of the body and that, her falling on to a handy surface, him following her down, rumpy pumpy.   And please don’t tell me how good Line of Duty was. Because a writer does one fine series, it does not follow that he or she is thereafter infallible. Television may wish it were so, but that is another matter.

Sex sells.   It sells everything, whether inferred, laughed at, referenced wittily or so obviously that it either pleases you or it doesn’t. Evidence, heaven forbid, you have passion fatigue – you know, like compassion fatigue. As in headache.

Sex is a drive.   In the right place – as in the case of a young woman advising against sex in the shower( “please put me on the record, don’t do it: I nearly broke my neck”), at the right time (that’s a moveable feast – I’ve known men who loved the idea that somebody was coming upstairs, you should pardon the expression).

Sex can become a compulsion.   I knew a woman, secretary to a subsequently disgraced MP, who quit because she said “No mention of enthusiasm for you, nothing. It’s just one of those things he does. You’re there. It itches? He scratches.”   And make no mistake, just because you can’t see an unmistakable physical sign, it doesn’t mean there aren’t women like this too. As in “this is going to happen sooner or later, let’s do it now, it might be fun..” And if it is, we’ll do it again and if it isn’t well hey, can’t win ‘em all … (Please use a condom : even lovely people have venereal disease.)

Sex is attractive. We’re animals. Highly developed but animals and if through the development of human history, mating has become separated from being able to conceive, that’s just made the codes and the transgressions of them occur more frequently and as a friend of mine said petulantly “Harder on the hair…”

Sex can be used as a weapon – no I am not being cute. The language of soft porn from (pulling a name out of the ether) Harold Robbins to 50 Shades of Grunge is about being taken against your will so you take no responsibility except possibly for having a suitable body cavity: an interesting rework of victim mentality. I haven’t gone back into history, when different behaviours were acceptable and then transgressed, or changed and faded, before being almost tidally re-asserted. Nothing changes absolutely in human history.

It is possible to sit quietly fully clothed, man or woman, and describe rape as sexual violence but it is unreasonably powerful because when you are in the situation, there are other transgressions involving vulnerability, humiliation, pain – all horribly effective – and rape is acknowledged as a weapon of war. But in the situation of rape you are emotionally engaged – not dispassionate.   And while we are doing this apparently endless rap about the equality of women, leaving aside the issues of nourishment and exercise, men are almost without exception heavier and stronger than women.   And you’d have to be very much in tune with yourself (and not off your face) to employ self defence when you are so attacked – always remembering the element of surprise is overwhelming.   And men are raped too.

In its broadest meaning, sex is one of the great pleasures in life, so far untaxed.   And people have very differing appetites, needs, recognitions, triggers and meanings.   You may think it has no part of your life but that is to define it by its absence.   There is a vast range of sexual practices I recoil from, starting with bad manners and bad breath and ending with genital mutilation, but sex is.

The great thing about the life of Senator John McCain is that the mistakes are on the record and there’s quite a list: nearly bottom of his class at Annapolis naval academy and generous with his sexual favours, he took every flying risk as a pilot. I bet this wildness stood him in good stead when   he was imprisoned during the US war in South East Asia and over time, beaten into submission. (On the record: “every man has a breaking point”… Forget superheroes). He chose Sara Palin as a running mate, he was criticised for taking funds for his campaign inappropriately … and he stood up, said he was wrong, laughed when he was right and, in the words of Marlene Dietrich’s character in Touch of Evil, not only Americans thought he was “some kind of a man”.

The terrible thing about public life is how short it can sell you, whether you are buying or selling.   You just don’t know who is nice and who is nasty, who tries and fails, who would never dream of trying.   Public figures get caught up in what you want people to know and the context in which you wish them to know it.   The press and modern media take pleasure in finding you out and if they can’t, they make it up.   Fake news isn’t news.   When it’s a slow day you look for a story to inflate and if you can’t find one, you make one up.   Joan Collins told the story of being at Cannes and meeting the press corps, grouped sagging round the bar. “Joanie, it’s such a boring beano this year, you won’t mind if we use you to jolly things up ?”   Whether she said yes or no, they made up a story about her throwing wine at somebody important and she said it simply wasn’t true.

I suppose the benign aspect of this is public relations but public relations ceases to be benign when there are interests at stake.   Have you noticed that since formerly Trump lawyer Michael Cohen answered the wakeup call and realised that his wife, his children and his country were more important than the platinum jack rabbit currently residing in Pennsylvania Avenue, he’s dropped 20 lbs and looks like a much happier man? The physical impact of lying for a living should never be under estimated.

“Pinocchio’s nose gets longer as he lies”

There are things we all want to remain private but in public life – unless you are in the top most echelon – they come out sooner or later – and even there ….   Reputations are made and broken on what can be reshaped into something more palatable and which myths can be sold. (See the Kennedys or the Windsors).

There are several flashpoints in most public lives where you lie and are found out: or you tell a truth which is not liked and by extension, neither are you: or you evade and it changes how you are seen. Better by far to accept that there is no “off the record”.   Public life is on the record.   Better to say your piece and get on with the work than to try to wriggle away by sidestepping.   Interestingly it often plays by opposites. Do you think half the people who have paid tribute to McCain would have done so if he had not admitted his mistakes ?

The job and the life are not the same thing: the life is part of the job.

I once watched the former Liberal leader Paddy Ashdown walk in to a press conference in a lesson in confrontation. “ Good morning” he said. “You’d like to know if I had an affair ? Yes.   Does my wife know ? Yes.   Is it over ? Yes.”   And a few more points dealt with just as crisply until he said he was very busy, he expected they were too and left.   His popularity was never higher.

This is a perfect example about how what comes over as confidence makes a public person deeply attractive.   Attractive doesn’t just mean good looking, though that helps.   As watchers we feel that the features so enhanced embody the morality within.   And we are short of it right now.  

It is said – don’t tell anybody your dreams (or wishes come to that) because then, they won’t come true. But most of us tell somebody some time.   The dreams (I’m using this term as a catchall for wishes too, because your dreams often give shape to your wishes – or your wishes against) vary wildly.   I was always interested in the interpretation of dreams. I do not dismiss Sigmund though I see him in context. I haven’t read Carlos Castenada either.   I get pictures, I interpret them. And the last thing I would do is take any kind of stimulant or depressant before trying to read the signs.   I listen. Indeed my mother remarked, I listen remarkably well for somebody who talks as much as I do.

I’m not big on maxims and I accept the power of the subconscious – oh boy do I ! – but consciously I’d advise you to dream the possible dream. The impossible can break your heart. I wanted to be a model, long before so-called supermodels and the rise of the brand.   And I was so thrilled to meet one of the two or three models I really admired. But this did not help me to acquire the basic equipment to be a model.

Nowadays the emphasis is so much more on the photographic and the technology able to tinker with the same, I might get a bit further – but nowhere near enough. I am a very average five feet four, there is a bump in my nose, a bosom a bit further down and I had a waist twice in my life, once when I fell in love and once when he left me. Not a hope.   Both parents taught me to think about how I carried myself and my mother kindled a lifelong enthusiasm for how clothes are made and what they can and cannot do, literally and transfiguratively, ie the codes of clothes.

I dreamt of being an actress and I failed.   I liked acting, rehearsing, theatres and sets, never aspired to camera but the periphery – agents, auditions, presentation, photographs and other actors – was less like dreams than nightmare.   I told my father I had wasted my life (I was 19) and he said kindly “No darling, you’ve just begun.”

Did I dream of being a secretary ? No, nor of being “discovered” and rescued except in the soppy way we all do when things get tough.   I didn’t know where I was going, I only knew I was – travelling towards something, not away from it.   The most modest form of journalism was the first time I escaped from crippling self consciousness. And on from that, once you put me in front of a microphone, I realised I was free from image, only to spend the next 40 years being fascinated by image and reality, where they meet, divide, and cohabit. Because of course, a voice paints an image too.

Nowadays I respond like an animal to voice(s).   Six minutes into something, I can’t hack the sound even if the style or the content interests me.   I have all kinds of appreciation for this one, that one and the other but I don’t want to listen to them. I can’t stand the squawk – or the baying of the evangelical channels – the unctuousness of anybody’s extreme Right, the proprietorial cant of the extreme Left. I had read my first Anne Applebaum and I was (shock horror, dusting) when I hear a low pretty educated American voice and leapt across the room and it was she.

A friend once went through my records and asked why there were so many women ? A good woman’s voice is a wonderful thing.   Mahalia Jackson, Phoebe Snow, Barbara and Francoise, Etta and Odetta, Marion Williams – and then Aretha.

I asked for Amazing Grace as an acknowledgement for typing a script and I played the title track whenever I was low, or on Sundays.   Aretha’s voice was a way to express consummate musicality, the kind of wonder that comes out of doing it again and again and again, till it takes off and becomes its own thing.   Aretha’s voice was my church, a dream come true.

A long time ago, coming to the end of our journey, my therapist asked me “What do you want?”   I said I didn’t know.   Silence.   “I could tell you what I don’t want” I offered. She shook her head. “Won’t do.”   “Why?”   “Because even if you can tell me what you don’t want, you will try and get what you do want … under the table, as you always have.”   First of two occasions when everything changed.   Eighteen months later, I emailed her with – among other things – a list of the wishes I could verbalise. Peace sets in ten minutes after rigor mortis.

So it’s hokey to begin with what I don’t want but I don’t want Boris Johnson for Prime Minister.

“where the first Prime Minister Robert Walpole belonged”

In my only genuinely up market secretarial job I worked for a grand old American Republican who, sent a letter from the US Embassy asking for his endorsement an executive called Thomas Jefferson Trump (made up name), wrote in his wholly legible hand across the bottom of the circular “I would not vote Thomas Jefferson Trump for dog catcher.” And signed it.   And that’s how I feel about Boris. I would be worried about Boris anywhere near a dog.   Oh and it’s not Brexit. It’s anything. “Ooh” people say “he’s a bad boy …” Twinkle twinkle.   Well, I have had to do with bad boys too and I came off worst. He doesn’t care and he is marked all the way through like Brighton rock – not UK or GB – just BJBJBJ.

And when I contemplate Jacob Rees Mogg – which I try not to do before food – I think of Hilary Mantel’s masterly evocation of Thomas More – a man who lived a secular life because a religious one wouldn’t satisfy him.   I don’t want him anywhere near power either, a smug Home Counties version of Savonarola.    I don’t want Head and Shoulders shampoo supposing that I would want my hair to look like Claudia Winkelman’s. I met her briefly, good looking, lovely voice, apparently intelligent. But that was some time ago: heigh ho, the price of fame!

I don’t want to be offered the same films (I think they’re on a loop) right across all those television stations which remind me increasingly of the US ice cream manufacturer Howard Johnson’s boast “25 flavours ! “ “Oh yeah” we used to say “and all of them vanilla !”   Don’t promise me great drama in the autumn … I should live so long. I want to watch something interesting now.

I don’t want to be invited to sympathise with somebody who has made a complete mess of their financial affairs from the starting point of £40 million.   I put my hand up, having made every mistake known to man except scams, but very few of us have a million to play with let alone multiples.

And although apart from her neck and her nails I don’t want to hear any more about Madonna at 60 or any other age, she once talked about having brought in the best people she could find to manage her money. And I rated her for that.  If you can’t do it yourself, you find somebody who can help you. And pay them properly. And invigilate the whole process.

I don’t want to stand on the side lines and watch the truly terrifying US opioid epidemic happen here.   Ban the bloody things !   You have to face pain – I’ve had to do some of that and it is frightening and distressing – but what is the point of substituting one problem for another ?          This is when I know what an old person I am because the whole drugs thing disturbs me profoundly and always has, since I knew my first two addicts (one heroin, one pills) when I was 19.   I don’t want to alter my mood by taking something.   I want to alter my mood by doing something. Music always took me higher – and beauty and the joy of exchange, like Mo who got out of his truck to ask “Was you on the radio ?”   I have been grinning at him as he drove past for years. That I want.

“the ghost cat- the only kind of cougar I want to be.”

Somewhere I read that the Native Americans wore moccasins because that was the thinnest and most natural layer between themselves and their mother, the Earth and the animals from which the buckskin came were part of the Earth too. Though Wal hates his feet uncovered and in fact always wears slippers or sandals or something. Whereas for me, barefoot is comforting. It makes me feel better somehow, like long loose garments, even in winter. And there was a film in the fifties called Woman in A Dressing Gown

“The lovely Yvonne Mitchell, indelibly 1950s”

which my parents chuckled over.

My mother did everything she could in her dressing gown (first of all the old blue one and then the clove carnation Pyrenean wool number – most of my childhood memory is about winter) before she got dressed and went out, utterly unperturbed by the sniffs of the neighbours, and sighing with relief when she went back to it, some evenings – “God, I do think clothes are over-estimated !”   And once I had a serious show of my own (five days a week) I methodically stripped off my jewellery and my shoes before we began, only to reassume them when my slot was done.

A true journalist can work anywhere, anytime, wearing anything. I find the brain becomes engaged when I free the body. Hate tight, especially in the heat. Which is why this morning, having just been told how elegant I looked by the local Battersea Dog walker, I came into the house, ate breakfast and took off four garments and shoes, to put on one layer of cotton and go to work.   Stripped for action, you might say … It’s not that I necessarily believe in stripping off. The dress I am wearing is made of Russian cotton from the 1930s, impeccably modest, round neck, half sleeves, full length but soft and comfortable and unrestricted.

One of the reasons the famous nude calendar picture of Marilyn Monroe is remarkable – apart from her youth and the beauty of her body – is how comfortable she appears to be – what the French might call “bien dans sa peau” – a wonderful phrase.   Apparently (I once read everything there was to read on MM) she liked her body. She wasn’t always sure about liking clothes, having a fine sense of how they packaged you to be and an equally fine sense of how to manipulate the packaging. What is covered and what is revealed is always interesting : in this hottest of summers, I keep seeing women with their hair pulled back under at least two layers of veiling and thinking how uncomfortable that must be, though there isn’t a pearl of perspiration in sight.

And you can pick up the key of how women dress in public – to tell you they are at 60 what they were at 30 (spare me !), they are serious or seductive (according to which play or film or album they are promoting), they are in control (Theresa May’s little jackets and outsize beads) or they’re not for sale, having already the most expensive gear on their backs (from the Kardashians to Melania Trump). You could comment that they were already bought by the highest bidder – but then by whom and in what sense ?

What is hidden and what is revealed varies from country to country, and age to age.   What clothes “allow” shifts along with language, food, custom and almost everything else.   (30 years ago, the ENT surgeon asked me if I was prepared to be the most unpopular mother at the school gate ? Slightly taken aback I asked why and he described tonsillectomy as “an unfashionable operation.”) It is customary to talk about fashion in relation to clothing but I think it relates to everything from language and medicine, to history, warfare and politics.  What was once accepted is now open to question and this morning I read

“It is only when science asks why, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atomic bomb.”

Thank you, Ursula Le Guin. It’s Hiroshima Day.

“Mend? Yes
Forget? Never”

The young woman helping me buy a hat had a slight accent, like a check in the voice. The hat was a knitted shape too often made in massive reproduction, becoming to nobody save the very fortunate and under 18. This was the pricey upmarket version.   “Tell me what it’s made of” I said “because if it’s acrylic, you can keep it.” She turned it inside out and read the label – wool, polyester, angora – until she paused “I do not know this word.” I peered at it. “Alpaca.”   “I do not know alpaca” she said.   “Like llama, with attitude” I said. “Very warm. We used to make cloth coats out of it last century. Where are you from ?” Her father was Russian, her mother Iranian.   “So you’re from up on the border ?” She beamed at me.   A week later on a bus, she waved to me and called “Bonjour, Madame Alpaca !”   Appreciation is free.

At 14 I wrote an unsolicited letter to Ginette Spanier, directrice of the House of Balmain, sometime columnist in my mother’s magazine. (You could call my mother’s journalistic reading matter aspirational, you could call it pretentious. It is long gone and I enjoyed it.)   Spanier wrote back on company letterhead with beautiful watermarks through the paper and I carried it till it disintegrated. I sent a card to Yaphet Kotto when he played in a West End production.   I wrote to Libby Purves at The Times. Though nowadays a letter may not get through, presumably because it requires a decision to answer it.   I wrote to the oddly named optical consultant and it took over two weeks to find a human who knew how to process it, I won’t bore you with the allies and byways I had to traverse – hardly an advertisement for private medicine. But appreciation and/or acknowledgement are necessary, do great good and take five seconds. I can imagine one of those terrifyingly intellectual articles stretching before my eyes which discusses the social implications of appropriate psychological investment.   Or as Nike had it, “Just Do It.”

Because “thank you” never goes amiss. It is sometimes not a straight forward (say the letters aloud) ab/ba transaction but a kind word reliably goes into the pool of human endeavour and it will wash up happily on another shore, if not your own that time around. Yes, the world has its share of grumps but often a grump exists to be ungrumped.   (I think immediately of two taxi drivers.)   And face it, sometimes the most well intentioned comment is an interruption.   We cannot know what is going on in other people’s lives.

I am not big on the terminology of heroes.

“Hercules”

I am not that kind of fan.   Just because you give pleasure or you don’t die doesn’t make you a hero. Just because you do die doesn’t make you one either.   But occasionally something comes up you want to acknowledge, and sometimes you have to consider whether your appreciation will do more harm than good, cross your fingers and do it.

Sunday was a day of sloth. I usually write and I couldn’t. I didn’t get dressed, I felt ugly and didn’t want to go out.   I read and muttered and watched The Heart Guy (Drama) and Unforgotten (ITV) both of which I rate. I let the day slither by like a snake with a headache and prayed I’d do better this morning.

The “i” (tabloid edition of the Independent) is running a piece from The Washington Post by Andrea Chamblee, a US government employee whose journalist husband John McNamara worked at the Capital Gazette and was among five people killed in their workplace by a man with a grudge and a gun. The Washington Post is an old established newspaper and the piece may have been derived from interview or been written by the woman herself.   It couldn’t matter less. What is important is what it tells you. Jesse Stone says “ People don’t carry guns to frighten you, they carry guns to kill you.” Gun crime is on the rise in the UK and we often inherit US social problems.   14 news organisations got through before any of the helping agencies were able to offer a crumb of information or comfort. I so appreciate this piece, I believe Ms. Chamblee will understand that and I’m going to write to her.     

Should I complain to Wal about my noisy neighbour (I call her Clementine – “herring boxes without topses/sandals were for Clementine”) he will shake his head wisely and say “It could always be worse.” And today I learned how right he was.

If you live in a flat, you always presume that bigger premises like a house would provide you with freedom from banged doors and late night clumping. I can hear everybody who has ever had a disagreeable or thoughtless neighbour reaching for their carrier pigeons to tell m e how wrong I am and what a terrible time they had when… but don’t worry, my own word of warning was only up the block.

The section of the street in which I live is half and half, apartments and houses, apartments to the curve in the road and thereafter decent sized houses.   One or two of these properties are let and as is often the way, tenants don’t bother with premises as householders do. They are only passing through and if they make a bit of mess it is only to be expected.

But every so often there are people who aren’t just careless, they really don’t care.   They don’t put the rubbish in the bin, they haven’t worked out that a poor quality rubbish bag is a waste of money (it rips), they don’t care what they drop where or how it looks and of course if you have an area like that, other people will drop their rubbish on top of it and make it worse. If, as they say, money goes to money, you can be sure that muck goes to muck.

So up the street live three or four young men, apparently trainee lawyers, and the front of their rented house is currently decorated with a defunct bed head and slats, garbage dropped where it fell, theirs and other people’s, clumps of dry turf and dead plants, and that detritus that would give anybody a bad attack of the David Attenborough Discards ie polystyrene cups, burger boxes, fried chicken cartons, drink bottles and cans, food wrappings, ditched napkins, dog poop, dropped circulars, empty cigarette packets, sweet papers, discarded shoes and tshirts, plus several pizza boxes.

I’ve never thought to own one of these houses so this is not envy and I was never a Brownie or a Guide so it’s not about getting my Keep Britain Tidy badge. The mess offends me. It’s unnecessary for the want of wrapping it up and disposing of it. It’s unsightly.   And in this heat, it stinks.

Today I got an email from another neighbour saying she wanted to get in touch with the owners (I had heard they were abroad) and she couldn’t go on. In this weather, the whole mess was the rat Hilton and anyway yesterday, the tenants had made a noise from midday to 11.00 at night.   I expect she put the back of her hand to her head and exhaled with long suffering and attar of roses. I don’t know the owners so I couldn’t help her.

What I did do was to write to the local authority health and safety and ask if there was anything they could or would do.   But that was two weeks ago before the current drama.

So in spite of Clementine’s lack of charm and her habit of shutting the terrace door above my head with unnecessary force (circumspection forbids I should tell you more), I find myself feeling rather fortunate.   In my quiet life, if you wake me, I read and then go back to sleep or I have the odd disturbed night and sleep in the afternoon.   Occasionally in the Edwardian working men’s flats in which we live – the later edition of the Victorian working men’s cottages – we find ourselves too close together and have to muddle through gatherings in a neighbour’s garden, or 10 hours of beer and voices that would go through brick at 20 yards.   But it doesn’t happen often and it is survivable.   Clementine wraps neat garbage, I’ll say that for her.   I won’t tell Wal how right he was, he’d be insufferable.

But I do.

“by Ingram Pitt”

Most of us who have opinions do. There are those we like and those we don’t like and even not knowing them doesn’t stop us liking or not liking them.   A sentence beginning with “I’ve always thought he/she was really nice – “ when the main source of information is not personally known to us? Let’s face it, given opinions may be truthful or they may be what I call “placed” and put in a particular light, to be assimilated in a particular way. For a provocative example, the “special relationship” between the US and the UK, referred to once by Churchill in specific circumstances and used by governments of every colour to the detriment of British interests ever since (see Max Hastings in The Times 7 July 2018.)

You shouldn’t judge a man by his footwear but I can’t get on with grey shoes.   My mother had a thing about shoulder length dyed hair – poor old darling, she have apoplexy nowadays.   The sweetest people have bad breath and we judge them for it – or sticky hands. Or eat with their mouths open shovel style.   Or never stand their round. It’s not just that you don’t like it, whatever it is. It is that you form a judgement against a person who would do/say/wear such a thing.

Generally sneered at, there are occasional treasures on daytime television.   But even if you find a goody (Law and Order holds up well), you have to wade through the ads. And as the day comes ever nearer, I am depressed into the ground by the notion of the expensive funeral.  Yes, the cost of everything goes up, I know this – but if you are so all fired concerned about your family having to shell out to bury or burn you, wouldn’t you make up your own mind or sort it out with them?   You see?   I’m making a judgement.

So my day was made last week by a story about a man in Michigan who asked that, instead of bringing flowers to his funeral, people brought a pair of new shoes for (presumably local) needy families. I loved this. It is inclusive: quite young children could bring a new pair of kids’ sneakers. I liked “new”, I like the dignity of giving something more specific than money (and thus less open to abuse), something essential and I thought it was one in the eye for the “we gave her a lovely sendoff” and umpteen thousands laid out for plumed horses, velvet drape, muted horns and brass handled mahogany which really only plays to neighbours, not the dear departed.

I applauded the young man in Lockerbie who has found a way to process discarded plastic into asphalt (subject to patent) so that we discard less into the sea and the water table and use it on our increasingly burdened roads.

Yesterday for the first time in my life, I took a book back.   I had checked first because I couldn’t quite believe I could do it but I bought “My Absolute Darling”, read five pages and thought “no way”: it may feature great writing style but it is still about child abuse. Beastly is beastly, I judged. So I changed it for something else and thanked all concerned. Well done, Waterstones.

But in that happy transaction (I was the first person into the shop and was of course talking with the assistants) I managed to mislay – not to say lose – a credit card.   I belted home, swearing in the sweat, to ring the company to stop it and came up with that which many of us complain of, the Asian call centre.   And a woman (not a girl) who was doing the “script” for real.   She greeted me.   The automated exchange had already taken my DOB so she asked “How old will you be at your next birthday ?”   I laughed and said “75”.   She laughed and said “Miss Raeburn, I am sorry to ask you such a question .. “ I said “Thank you for laughing.” She made all the right noises and I judged her as the happy exception to the rule.

*…lest ye be judged

“This is famous Indian athlete PT Usha and she looks how the lady on the phone sounded!”