Annalog

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!”

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 ….