Annalog

Pushing his nose at the kitchen window this morning like some be-winged bassett hound was an enormous bumblebee. (plus) The garden‘s comeback against the cold driving rain of earlier in the year (all sorts of things just didn’t make it) is a symphony of red hydrangea, darker red calla, salmon pink geraniums, daisies and green green green. Yes, I water. (All pluses – I am never sure of the plural of plus, indulge me).   I love the sunlight and walking in the shade of a building with a breeze. (plus) I love the washing drying on the line (plus) and the smell of it, clean and fresh, even in The Smoke. (plus)

A wise friend remarked that you didn’t have to spend much money on summer clothes in this country because you wore them so little, they lasted for ages and although struggling retail prefers to blame the long cold spring and the internet, we can’t go on shopping for Britain. The future is obscure, money is down in value, you don’t buy if you don’t have to. And there is a notable absence of wow in clothes shopping.   I don’t shop for white goods ie sheets and towels etc., or electrical bits and pieces unless I have to and in the matter of clothes, fashion journalists keep on writing about “the dress you must have”, “this summer’s shoe”, “bags of style” and I keep shaking my head and muttering “Wouldn’t wear it to the bin”.   So we’ll count that as a minus.

It is wonderful to eat every kind of salad (plus) though I belong to the Rabbit Club and eat green every day of my life. Salad is never boring and this year (Skye McAlpine, plus) I found a recipe for panzanella I could make and eat with enthusiasm. I was particularly excited about this because I saw another one a week later which was the bread edition of the limp lettuce, tomato and salad cream of my youth: in a word, ugh.

The range of cosmetic products which can be sold in the summer – endless cream and lotions and boosters and fake tans, masques for the hair, the nails, the feet – divide into two groups, the ones you “need” because you are going away on holiday, and the ones you “need”, presumably to make up for the fact that you are not.   I thought the whole idea of sunshine was that I should wear the minimum on long suffering largely misunderstood skin and let the shining Vitamin D do its thing.   Yes of course I know that, if I sit in the sun or labour in it, I will need something on bits of the body where the bones come near the surface – sun screen, sun block – dependent on my age and colouring. But makeup in this weather ?   No way Jose.

Repeatedly asked where I am going on holiday, I keep on saying I am on holiday – it is called retirement. I don’t want to go away when everybody else is going away. Heaving humanity at points of departure frankly unsettles me (minus) and the idea that I have to go through all that at both ends of an outing stops me from even thinking about going away very much.   If you work, a change is as good as a rest.   If you don’t work, you use your time the way you can, the way you enjoy it, the way it works for you. Walking around in the relative cool of the morning is lovely (plus) and sitting down with a book is lovely too, though hardly dependent on the season or the weather.   It’s my perennial.

Periodically I feed the housework dragon because in this weather you can do all sorts of things, enjoying a task begun and completed, with doors and windows open to fresh air: floors and surfaces dry easily except for the drip under the sink which will require the attention of plumber number three shortly.

When the summer sun first arrives coherently (ie for several days in a row) everyone perks up.   Voices soften, smiles are more frequent but you only need one diverted bus and a woman talking into a mobile at the top of her lungs unintelligibly for two hours, to understand that summer is no more perfect than any other season. It’s just hotter, quicker to sweat, quicker to crease.

Noticing things is the present tense of memory and memory is rarely straightforward – leave “never say never” out of it.   Memory can be an act of recall or a lone pinpoint that highlights something treasured or important from your past, perhaps something you didn’t know you knew. Unpleasant memory is often locked off so that it may be even more unsettling when finally permitted to be. Memory is prismatic, reflected through personality and experience.   Two men crossed the street at the back of Victoria the other day, in overalls, sandwiches in hand, and I laughed aloud at the doubletake of the driver paused at the crossing, at the sight of the Herculean black man who then looked over and caught my eye. I explained myself. “But were you afraid ?” he asked me, grinning.   “No” I said. “The first man I ever loved apart from my father was the same colour as you.” Paul Robeson.

Clearing up the files in the doctor’s office where I worked in my twenties, I turned up a Paul Robeson, Jumel Terrace and, stunned, went to ask my boss “Is it … ?”   It was. I met his doctor that evening, Sam Rosen, who just happened to be passing through.

In my thirties I found the writings of Studs Terkel. Terkel was a radio man for all seasons, five days a week in Chicago for 45 years. He believed that while stars may be stellar, so were “ordinary” people. I knew about him but I couldn’t read his books. (I can only read what I can read and remain convinced that reading is as personalised as appetite). Then, towards the end of his long life, he changed editor and publisher and I read his last book rejoicing. So dazzled was I by the difference that I went back and tried one of the earlier offerings: still a lockout.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t read Gary Wills’ book on John Wayne, I was afraid to even try (my pa walked just like JW and I couldn’t have borne that memory disturbed) but long years after its publication, I read it and was knocked out by it. I found Wills at North Western University, and wrote to say how splendid it was. And he replied.

In the current New York Review of Books I read in a tribute by Gary Wills that Studs Terkel’s radio shows have been digitalised – and the article mentions that although Terkel eschewed politicos from his show, his roster of interviewees included all sorts of creative people, known for the integrity and breadth of their views. Including Paul Robeson.   Hence the title of this piece.

People search for connections, I know they do, but I am in the hand of God. If there is a connection, it will come. I will recognise it and shout hosanna, whether mine or somebody else’s. Like the professor of opthamology whom I asked about his unusual name.   “We don’t know where it comes from” he said, and told me what he did know.   A year later I was reading The Golden Legend by Nadeem Aslam (whose earlier novel The Wasted Vigil is among those never out of the house) and there on Page 244 is context for that most distinctive name .

Memory encompasses every sense – sound, sight, smell, texture – and the interpretation of them which is why the loss of memory is truly savage. I am not sure if I write to remember or remember to write. They are surely connected. Memories range from the small to the big – who’s measuring ?

“my fathers shaving cream”

I keep my bullterriers’ collars – they don’t eat and the smell and feel of them makes me smile. In memory what is small to one is a big deal to somebody else.   And sometime you don’t share memories for fear they will not mean to another, even a beloved other, what they mean to you and sometimes you are given a wonderful generous surprise, that your shared memory is not only understood but validated in some way you could not have imagined. Perhaps memory is what we keep to help us through the sea of knowledge, an ocean so vast that you need a line, a chain to help you through it.

It is much easier to write about what is wrong than what is right. A great deal is wrong and it’s much easier to bitch and moan and stamp and rage – and of course I could. But you can’t live on a diet of displeasure (if you do, it ill becomes your face) and last night’s wildlife programme taught me something.   Don’t hope for too much. I went towards it expecting a wonder which it certainly was not. There was indeed some rare film of a panda mother and baby in the wild but otherwise I was left drowning in sub Wagnerian caramel, watching BBC recuts … and I gave up halfway.

In a week where both ends of the computer function conspired against me in the middle, I am happy to tell you that two friends who have been through years of travail have emerged into the sunlight of relative happiness. Nova (not her name) spent years picking up after her adored but difficult father who eventually died leaving an estate scattered far and wide for her to settle, further complicated by two brothers who just wanted the money, and the disintegration of a long relationship with a man who doesn’t want her but doesn’t want anybody else to have her.  Then, as we say, she met Someone. No knight on a charger, no flourish – just quiet steady happiness – and much funnier about it than Mesdames Keaton, Bergen, Fonda and Steenbergen in a film I keep being told I’ll “love” though I doubt it.

While Bunslove shinned down his ivory tower, went and met and talked and spent time with, and managed to make a move towards buying a house because, he said, “I can’t go on not knowing where my pants are.”   To begin with I thought he meant pants (US) as in trousers but no, he has been betwixt and between for two years and while this has been a useful change of pattern in every sense, he now no longer knows for sure if he’s dressing in Dorking or Dublin. I offered to buy him spares but he says he can’t go on doing that so the offer is in, for only in a place of your own can you be sure what’s in the drawer !

And as he was telling me all this on the phone, and I was hearing his voice working through “what have I done?” to “we’ll see”, I was watching my garden, then sporting a full complement of robins, great tits, sparrows and blackbirds.   I was thinking about smaller simpler animals, closer to home, not because I have become disinterested in the faraway but sometimes just because you must look at what is there in front of you, rather than far away.   Far away is almost easier, rather remote from you – yes a challenge, yes a dream – but you have to look at what is right in front of you too.

Later, walking through a once attractive road now full of boarded up buildings acquired for great trading names and scaffolding, as they are all over London, I saw a slight gentle faced woman, sweeping in the front of one of the remaining small shops.   I smiled and she smiled and as it was early in the morning, I crossed the street to tell her how welcome the smile was. She greeted me warmly, we exchanged a few sentences and she commented on the radio past of my kind heart. I caught my breath, recalled all the times I had psychologically pushed and shoved (I don’t regret it but it risked sounding harsh) and thought to demur – but you can’t wave the offer of a kindness away as if it were stale bread.

So I carried that away with me, to an unfamiliar market of junk and jewellery, where I found a paste necklace which I priced. “I couldn’t sell it to you “said the stallholder, a heavy pretty woman with a mane of hair.   “But I like it,” I said, not understanding. “It has no catch, it will need repair, take it” she said.   So I kissed her cheek and said thank you and she looked at me. ”You’ll be Anna” she said.

Sorry we have technical problems! See you next week…

It’s the last line of Some Like It Hot, a wonderfully silly clever film without a duff performance, a remark open to interpretation because the millionaire who utters it is carrying away into the future a man dressed as a woman.   This is beginning to sound like a motif for our times…   But the phrase is a major thought.

Not to go back into the manufactured confusion of whether addressing women as Mrs. diminished them but then, how could describing them as heroines rather than heroes apparently diminish them too (o journalism, what knots are committed in thy name !), no person of major standing is ever perfect. Whoever they are, whatever they do, no matter what sex, they are human. You could argue I suppose, superhuman, but what makes them admirable is where they fall short and continue, as well as where they move forward and accomplish.

Hero and heroic are words thrown around and I worry about that. Earlier in the week I read what I would call a whinge from a woman probably 30 years my junior about discovering that her earlier feminist goddesses (her description, my vintage) disappointed in the present instance.  Perhaps it is worth pointing out that the woman who triggered this dissatisfaction is nothing if not an academic, and we don’t take tall bright women into the heart of our academic establishment unless they can bring something to the table, even if the dish they bring raises other questions. What was outstanding was not that she disagreed with what Greer said or the way she said it, but that she preferred to dismiss rather than debate. And she was not alone.

It is a mark of maturity and security, personal and public, to be able to agree to disagree.   I can’t think of any single person dead or alive whose every act and utterance I agree with. And incidentally the first time I heard a famous feminist describe rape as “a trivial crime” was forty years ago, in a meeting under Chatham House rules, the personification of “off the record”, and in the presence of the Metropolitan Police commander (female) who had already done a great deal to revise her force’s primary response.

Apart from a visceral desire to shake the silly woman till her teeth rattled, I learned that day an early instance of informed debate.   We talked about what she had said.   Interpretation of law has to strike very particular balances, between what is said and what is done, what is meant and how that perceived and interpreted, by other humans and by law.   Remember, the statue of justice is blind.   Honourable mention here to the senior judge who told me on camera that there was nothing wrong with the existing laws around rape: what was at fault was how they were interpreted.

How we long for things to be clear – what we used to call black and white – how clear it is that very little is straight forward in that longed for way. Isn’t it a definition of slavery that our blacks are diluted with white ? And how many of our whites are mixed in with every other colour and creed including black ? Nobody’s perfect, right ?   Exchange is risky, sometimes downright unpleasant, discomforting, but it opens up rather than closes down. You might not like it but you might learn something …

What most of us learn is how slow change is to come. Very few of us learn personal responsibility until it is thrust upon us. In the noise of the modern world, and especially the pubs and bars that spill out on to the street, I am not sure that anybody can hear what is happening, what they are agreeing or not agreeing to.   They probably think they’ll send a text if it isn’t consensual. God forbid they should talk about it.   Not cool. Cool is on my list right behind should as a concept about which I am deeply doubtful, perfect would be in the top ten most overused words of the last twenty years. God bless Billy Wilder, Jack Lemmon and Joe E.Brown – three men. Whaddya want ? Nobody’s perfect.

Disher came to supper, a vision in a guava coloured tailored shirt. I had a top that didn’t work for me, in which I suspected she would look wonderful. She handed me the shirt. “Try this on” she said.   But it’s new, I protested. “I am not wedded to it” she growled. I did as I was told (you do with Disher). “Wow !” she said. “Swap !” I put the shirt in the wash and a button came off (are you listening, Conran?) and of course I hadn’t got the right colour cotton. I remembered a fabric shop up the road where they might …. On the way I went past Edwina the milliner, the nicest woman, and I saw her at the door. “ By any chance, do you have … ?” I asked, showing her the button. “Of course, come in” she said and swept me through the little shop into the workroom where I stopped, struck, hand to mouth.

Though a gynaecologist once told me that men’s spatial concept is far better than that of women, I’d guess this a floor space no more than ten feet square and nearly twice as high, piled with buckram, feathers, flowers,

“flower making tools.”

ribbons of silk and velvet and veiling, hat blocks, needles, pins, threads, pieces of fabric every colour and shade, order books, binders, references, notes, bits and pieces, petersham, bindings, hats begun, imagined and reformed – it was a little girl’s real life magic workroom.

I love hats. Just before I ceased to be able to wear black (kills me where I stand and not being able to wear it taught me a lot about colour) I bought a small close fitting number with exquisitely imagined black felt roses which had to go to Daisy who can wear hats and can wear black. Dammit.   A couple of years ago, I went in to try on one of Edwina’s hats which made me so happy, I almost bought it – though I was deep in survival mode and you can’t eat hats , can you ?

The hats I have collected are deeply personal and they don’t date: a structured beret in leopard (I love leopards and that cat was long dead before I got to it): a re-imagined 1940’s cocktail special by Jane Taylor: an Isabel Marant knitted number which only works because there is enough of it to drape a bit, kinder to the face: a feathered beauty by Nerida Freiman which took me from bat mitzvah to Buckingham Palace with several years in between: an Armani turban in natural linen, plain and perfectly cut: and a fisherman’s straw (£5) from the days when such things came from the country of origin and not China.   In the winter, I wear hats.   I am still adjusting ageing thermometer to summer, the quality of the heat having changed to something much less benign than it used to be. (Did we ever think what would happen to climate when millions of people all had freezers and fridges, power showers and dishwashers on top of electric light and stoves ?)

And once upon a time, hats were essential. In Enemy Women by Paulette Jiles, the first task of her heroine up on escaping is to find something to cover her head, recognising that without, she would otherwise be wholly noticeable. To cover the head was a token of respectability, even modesty.   In various places in Africa, it still is. The family is extended, you might meet an older relative and you must be ready – head covering is de rigueur. We used to say “If you want to get ahead, get a hat” but nowadays, unless you wear one for essential warmth or shade, they are the province of high fashion, idiosyncrasy, or expected formality.

I remember reading that the Queen’s hats have an arrangement in side them that make them stable, so that no matter the weather, Majesty is never seen to touch her hat.   I hope it isn’t too uncomfortable.   Men wore hats too, sometimes doffing them, then more recently touching them with a finger in salute.  When that happened to me, earlier this year and the first time for ages, tit for tat, I bobbed a delighted curtsey.

*titfer comes from rhyming slang, tit for tat = hat.

It’s always personal.   That line in the Godfather films about it “only being business” is the ultimate copout (no pun intended).   So I don’t know what Prince Harry said to Meghan as they waded through their nuptial ceremony. I can guess but that is interpretation. I don’t know.   What I do know is that you see things the way you want to see them, they mean what they mean – to you.

On Saturdays I go the market – there are two near me. I am convinced that pound for pound they are no more expensive than anywhere else – you get a bit of exchange and chat both with stallholders and other shoppers, two or three things are special – the chard and cooking apples from Chegworth Valley, the venison from South Downs Venison – and I love the trip.

On the way back this week a bus pulled in to the stop where I was waiting, driven by a man in his fifties, with long greying hair knotted off his face and shaded glasses. I smiled. (I do a lot of that.)   He mouthed “You all right ?”   I nodded, pointing at him with my index finger, and mouthed “You take care.”   This unrolled quite slowly as he considered me, so I thought perhaps he recognised me.   People do, years on, white hair, tinted specs and all. I don’t live for recognition, though it is often rewarding when it comes. But that morning, I wanted to believe he knew me.

What John Bunyan called “the slough of despond” – a bit of a low – has gripped me for the months it has taken to get back into walking again after a fall and that morning had found me whimpering , thinking of what to do and feeling lost.   Millions might be uplifted by the Royal Wedding but I was not one of them – my fixes are just as quick but different.   Too often a white wedding seems like an inverted equation between taste and money ie more money, less taste – though my friend Wal’s comment “they don’t know they don’t know” is much kinder.

Interestingly – and I hadn’t looked for it – I found it meaningful that Meghan walked the first part of her entry to the church on her own, that her mother stood alone. So many people are alone – we are born alone, we die alone and it takes some handling to be alone in between.   But in the midst of all that panoply, being alone was acknowledged. Alone knows no colour. I liked that.   The sense of being alone is not the same as being lonely. That sense of being alone is sometimes induced by circumstances like illness (not necessarily your own), accident, breakup, perhaps what psychiatrists call “low mood” but equally it may be innate.   And you have to learn to be the person you are, when to take care of yourself rather than anybody else, when that is necessary rather than indulgent and to acknowledge your limitations. I keep a piece I wrote about that sense of separation nearly 60 years ago, it’s one of the few bits of my early writing I can read without a blush.

Even scientists estimate that body language and behaviour are interpreted by human beings so fast we don’t know we’re doing it. People who don’t look at what’s there, or wilfully disregard it, not trusting so to speak the evidence of their own eyes and ears, are telling you something too.   Computers are kids’ play compared to the human brain which assesses simultaneously on different levels and interprets it goes. That’s why you can’t help but notice first impressions.   They may be unreasonable to rational thought. We call them impressions rather than judgements because you may fear the egg on your face from an incomplete judgement.   You may equally well file the information rather than define it or act on it. But I bet you refer to it if you are proved right.   That’s why the old remark about “keeping your eyes open” means more than just looking.   Our animal past says smell, hear, feel, assess – everything matters. Even if it means something different to me from what it means to you.        

Take a break , my “hands” are going on holiday…

You thought I did this all by myself ?   The chance would be a fine thing !   Not so.

I have a midwife and she is going to Spain so please,

look for me on 22 May when annalog will be back on track

And miss me. That would be nice ….

The most expensive tv guide is the culture section of The Sunday Times.   And on a bad day, that’s almost all I have to show for the outlay of £2.70.   Picking through articles I don’t want to read, past pictures that give me the grump – on a bad day, the whole experience is wasteful and worse. Why do I buy it ? Because of the tv guide and then – slam bang wallop – you get a home run.

Apart from some occasionally agreeable writing, the paper offers me a round up of new exhibits, film, various kinds of music and books.   And every so often, there is something that makes me sit up, ears on top of my head with attentive excitement.   So it was this week when I found an article (The Sunday Times Magazine May 6 2018 Pages 10 and 13) about Michael Pollan, the author of four standout books on eating, diet and cooking which he summarises as “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” – and he is researching psychedelics, with regard to how they might alter mood.

What emerges from the article apart from all the interesting background and some discreet flag waving for the UK (right up there in research terms, work into treatment of depression) is that he has an integrated strong personality and, as a journalist, he will be able to describe what he experiences.

In the 1970s I knew a tv director, now a successful writer of whodunnits, who was commissioned to make a film on LSD, then legal.   He asked me if I would take it and let him film the result.   I am not well disposed to experimenting with other layers of consciousness. I have quite enough trouble with the ones I can access, having been brought up to believe that if there were five senses I knew about and a sixth I suspected, there were probably six more I knew nothing about at all. So I asked why ? TVD said “Because if I give the stuff to most of the people I am in contact with, they’ll sit there in rapt banality. You’ll talk. In sentences… “

Contact with a sympathetic psychiatrist yielded the dope and I took it for camera. I remember some of the journey to this day, going out into the garden and seeing plants breathe, the intensity of texture and colours, the sense of security and wellbeing.  I remember there was some problem ongoing at the time which had greatly distressed me which I was able to see quite differently, I would say from inside the predicament. And I remember crying briefly with relief, because it was wonderful to see whatever it was clearly and thus know it could no longer harm me. I remember that I talked for 12 hours. In sentences…

God knows, I don’t want psychedelics in the drinking water but I’m with Prof. Pollan “we don’t understand the mind very well” and rather than devoting our energies to tricking it and manipulating it, to the manufacture of artificial intelligence – I’d rather work with what we have.   You go to Mars if you want to. I want to save this world.   And the word psychedelic comes from the Greek and means soul manifesting – the spiritual experience – without which there is no life worth the name and little progress on life’s journey.

We have so often talked about progress as if it were a self-perpetuating ongoing tide, as if one step forward made another and another from that, and so on exponentially.   But increasingly we watch what rolled forward, taking down the trees of inconvenience like a psychological bulldozer, come unstuck under the weight of expectation and sheer numbers.   The concept of progress in many aspects of life is beginning to splinter, like glass on a rock.   And the eternal truth is that of personal progress, how you realise or make peace with or learn from, what your life is. Please note, not what it should be (how I dislike ‘should’), not measured against somebody you haven’t met and frankly don’t know about, but your own life – which is very rarely, for all sorts of reasons, what you thought it was going to be and may involve you in major reconciliation.   Thoughts worth £2.70 any day.  

Apparently, the eleventh commandment is “thou shalt not get caught” though the former President Reagan (Republican) said that it meant you mustn’t criticise another Republican. Thou shalt not get caught is a less graceful edition of “thou shalt not be found out” – an update of “Curses, I am discovered” with the last syllable pronounced rather than swallowed. Whether we say found out, caught or discovered, the implication is clearly that we are doing something dubious and it will only be acceptable if we get away with it.

When you ask people to discuss truth and lies, you open the door to the difference between what you were taught and what you do, the difference between theory and practise. And then it is personal choice. What very often governs the perception of truth or lie is opinion.

For example, I read a newspaper item yesterday by a man who had never visited a podiatrist before and went to an outfit which he left feeling he had had a positive experience and wrote, highly recommending the place. As far as he is concerned, he’s told the truth.
I have had four experiences over the last four years with podiatrists (I am older and have more difficult feet) and the range of experience varied. This doesn’t mean all podiatrists are thieves and liars: it might mean I was unfortunate: it does mean that feet vary, the age of the person attached to the feet varies (and thus their health, needs, weight and so on): it does mean that podiatrists vary, one from another and at least one of my experiences was with someone who felt she was outstandingly capable to which I can only say “Not for me she wasn’t.”

If you buy four oranges and you get them home and one is already rotting, it is perfectly understandable to return it (if you can be bothered) and get another piece of fruit. To use that descriptive phrase, the fruit is ”not fit for purpose” .
But if your friend goes to a fashionable hairdresser and has a haircut which is everything she doesn’t want, the truth is not that the hairdresser is terrible but that the hairdresser is not for her. All she can say, if you thought you try it, is “Good luck with that, I’d never go there again.”

And what about big things ? There is no major religion or system of belief that endorses killing. But most political, religious and belief systems are supported by fighting for your own, whatever that “own” happens to be. And then it gets complicated. Is the truth “this is someone who believes like me and I must fight to the death if necessary to protect her or him ?” Or is the truth “this is someone who believes like me and he or she is in danger but what happens is out of my hands – the will of God, the will of law, the luck of the draw, however you describe it – not something in which I can participate because I know my responsibility is not to kill ? “ Those who don’t fight back and incidentally kill in a circumstance where it seems to be the only answer don’t get a good press. Those who tell the painful truth (“I’d never make a pacifist”) don’t either.
Believing there is only one answer, that truth is black and white, absolute or denied, is emotionally expensive. Truth and lies are bound up with identity and we like to think we are defined by the sum of what our lives have been. It is painful to discover that we need papers to define who we are and thus what our intentions were. More painful still to discover that if papers are destroyed, no matter what we have tried to do and be, we are denied. The truth about Windrush seems to be that, when a government is looking to control immigration, it looks for a soft target. How shaming. How predictable. Hang the eleventh commandment. Always make copies of official papers and keep them safe. Volunteer to be found out because the light that is shone on you will be shone on the other side of the question too. Sometimes, thank heaven, the truth is clear.