Annalog

The house on the curve of the street was once owned by a disagreeable dipsomaniac. You never knew which way she was going to jump and she wound up hammering on my locked door with half a brick. In this connection I met the sort of officer who gives me hope for the Met. “Do you “ she asked with admirable calm over the telephone ” want us to send somebody over ?” “No” I said. “But I want a record made and I’d like a copy of it. Once is once. If she does this again, I am coming after her.” The document arrived, I kept it pinned on the notice board till fate intervened and Mrs. Disagreeable moved out.

A bush of glamorous red and yellow roses grew to one side of the house (Mrs. D was a great gardener) and my revenge was to steal one.   I could not often afford flowers and there was nobody to miss one. In the first year after the new family moved in, I asked the lady of the house if I might have one and she said yes. She was gracious and I never asked again and I think of this, when I buy flowers which I mostly do from Son, Dad and Nan* (three generations of flower pitch) who now have a tiny shop tucked under an archway locally.

Like all sorts of cash crops, flowers are often forced so I don’t buy them regularly. Affected by heat and cold and frost and travelling, they don’t last five minutes. But yesterday Dad had white anemones.   Irresistible. Accurately, he had white and blush blooms and when I chose them, instead of just wrapping them up, he selected a mixture, laying them very carefully flat on paper, put in two beautiful long stemmed tawny pink roses, and turned back to me.

“Man I know came in this morning” he said. “His daughter died last week. She was 13, on the Saturday. And he wanted to give everybody roses, sort of a happy memorial to her. So I’m giving them to my regulars … “ I caught my breath. “We hade five women on the forecourt this morning, weeping about it, and that wasn’t what he wanted at all. So I’m giving them to you, to make you happy.” “How lovely” I said”, thinking what do you say ? Dad deprecated: “ ‘s just a coupla roses” he said. It was Chanel who said less is more.

Long ago true love was the name of a song and a boat in the musical High Society and Valentine’s Day beckons, set aside for the worship of one of the world’s oldest miracles, with champagne, chocolates, frillies and red roses.   I confess I shy away from codification by common agreement and the heavy hand of merchandising. ( Can’t drink champagne, pass on frillies, not keen on red roses and like to choose my own chocolate.)   Though I do believe in true love between people, whether of the three wonderful months or thirty years variety. True means real and love is a small word of infinite variety and application. You can truly love all sorts of things in all sorts of ways from loving kindness through mad passion to deeply felt visceral affection, your country, a parent, a partner, your job or your pet.

There is a language to flowers and whether they grow wild in the hedgerow or are cultivated in pots or gardens, over time they came to symbolise different things until superstition darkened them as it darkened which gems decorate what colours we wear.

You love ? You love. Love is personal. Your love isn’t mine. Funnily enough, by using the word more, we have not learnt much more about what it means. So we look for things that symbolise how we feel. What you can afford comes into this, personal taste, fashion and so on but really what you’re looking for is an image of your love.   Flowers come in many shapes and colours, die and come again, smell special– you can see how they fit into the picture. And if (as the song says) only God can make a tree, you can see He had a field day with flowers.     

* not their names

Daisy doesn’t like the telephone. I am not sure if this was always so, whether she associates it only with work or bad news but she prefers the email and she is one of several people whose needs dictated that I learn to use the screen. The rules of engagement – as the degree of involvement – vary.

Avi only uses the screen once a day. She opens it up in the morning, deals with what is there and by midmorning, it is closed down till the following day.   She doesn’t like the electronic presence and prefers the telephone.

Nearly 20 years ago, BBC Radio 4 brought together a man who had written a book about Bette Davis with a woman who had written a monograph on Joan Crawford. Which is how a tall aquiline greying man came to stand over me in the lobby and said “Hello, Joan” to which I replied “Oh hi, Bette” . We did well on air, went out for coffee and stayed friends.   One way and another, I see him every couple of months and we email variously.

Six weeks ago, a man who said he was 33 wrote me a note about my professional presence favourably mentioning my face. (One of my favourite New Yorker cartoons shows two dogs conferring, screen on the desk, one saying to the other “Nobody knows if you’re a dog on the internet!”) I replied to acknowledge his remarks. He emailed occasionally. Mindful of not knowing who he was, I replied carefully until he wrote “Do you have a partner?” to which I replied “Not since the second marriage to someone I loved broke up 18 years ago. Another life.” I have never heard another word.

Daisy is a dear friend and her husband is ill. I’d like to ring but I know that it might easily be as wrong as tugging her sleeve when she is pouring hot coffee ie it might do the opposite of help. The rules of engagement are governed by estimating when to accept and when to push.

When Ginny turned up on my doorstep, laughing and happy with Jo, I thought I was looking at a marriage made in heaven but x years on, it has become denial, disappointment and unacknowledged power games. Emerging from a relationship of investment takes courage and time but once she had broached it, I stood square behind Ginny. All too often, “we’re staying friends with both of them” means we can’t be friends with either of them. And she made the transit out acquiring painful personal knowledge. So it has been wonderful to see her sense of humour flourish, her friends rally and her ability to say “it was a bad day” followed by “but at least I didn’t have to pretend about it!”

Because sometimes you can’t accept.   My first husband was always a man in pain, very bright and insightful about all sorts of things but not himself. In his mind, women fitted in with the stove and the bed. So, when we met again after 30 years and more, and I thought we could be friends, it was not what he had in mind.   I called up my courage and told him “You are one of the people I care for and there isn’t much I wouldn’t do for you but if you think the road from the kitchen leads to the bedroom, forget it.”   To which he tellingly replied “You are a sexual being, you will always be a sexual being. You can’t just switch it off.”   “Ever heard of acts of will ?” I asked.   But he pushed and side swiped until I withdrew completely.   I couldn’t accept his way and he couldn’t accept mine.

Whether we are talking about friendship or its extension, there are places to go and places not to go. The great challenge is judging when to go there. There are places you feel you must go, the relationship can’t go on until this is discussed but the other fellow won’t have it. And there are people for whom the very word “discuss” means hitting the table and shouting, though you planned to be nothing if not reasonable. It is the issue that shouts.

*The rules of engagement are the internal rules or directives among military forces (including individuals) that define the instructions, conditions, degree and manner in which the use of force (or actions which might be construed as provocative) may be applied.

For the first time in his life, a fellow broadcaster whom I shall call by my nickname for him Bunslove (he has a sweet tooth) fought back. Of course he has before but very often he has acquiesced, agonised, sweated blood, made up the difference and all the name of the work he loves, radio. This time the suits mucked him about and he walked away. I am delighted because it represents better care of his admirable self but this morning I was asked why I left radio and I want to stand on a box (or several boxes) and shout – “I didn’t leave it, it left me !” There are other wellknown djs in the same boat. You take what they give you – which isn’t much – or you don’t work.   This is right across the board from music to politics to what we used to call magazine programmes.   All problems are now met by the internet. Really ?

When you hear or read that this concern will run by robots and that by drone, I feel that I am hearing the same arguments of 30 years ago between television and the print. They aren’t the same thing, they are complementary and there is a woeful lack of vision for the future. There are always exceptions but in the main, the last group for whom media is put together is the consumer.   Or the consumer has been so shaped that he or she will take whatever is on offer which has led to a diminution in range and quality.   Sure, the money men are making money.   To quote another friend’s great line “We worked for X when it was a radio station, not a company that owned one.”

Two friends have taken over a year to find a job: another woman of my acquaintance is watching her skilled son in law go through his third experience of “last in, first out”.   Of course things change but the love affair with the machine is not in the interests of the subtlety and individuality of humankind. Not for nothing is this column called annalog ! A machine is a machine, and it takes a human to work one.   The division between those who have a great deal and those who have nothing much is very wide, with less and less between the two.   And all too often those at the poorer end of the spectrum are rendered into human machines, service for have’s.

BBC dominates radio nationally and locally, and independent radio is an amorphous and largely betrayed dream in a country where management skills are notoriously uneven. I worked in independent radio for 40 years plus, used occasionally (sometimes very enjoyably) by the BBC – but then there was also increasing friction, evidence of a changing culture.   If you are the age of most of my radio friends, they are going to go on fighting for bits and pieces for their professional pride as well as their principal earning. Buns has diversified into all sorts of corporate stuff and he is a very handy techy. And I made the decision to stand back – based on a dozen things, not least on my father teaching me when wasn’t my turn: based on a wonderful innings contrasting unfavourably with the lack of courtesy, professionalism and omnipresent haggling.

I have had many better than good experiences, am still called on occasionally but I am older and have decided (again) that one of the few great freedoms in life is when you have nothing: there is nothing to lose. I have wonderful memories of radio and I use the same skills to talk to people on the bus that I used to pour into the microphone. Filling air doesn’t do it for me.   The key word is interesting: surely we should be able to use our voices – we are the only species that has highly codified the voice – to reach across time and space and talk to each other, yes, even disagree and go on talking – though at the moment that sounds like a revolutionary idea. I am of the opinion that when we cease to do that, we shall cease to be human and I am coming back as a Canadian lynx.

I like buses.   It is possible that, because buses took me to and from hospital when I was very young and they signalled my “growing up” in facilitating attendance to a less than handy school, that I have positive association with them. Or maybe I just like them.   You can always open a window or get off.   I know they are much slower and they certainly aren’t much cleaner than the tubes which weren’t an option in the town where I was born.   And you have only to look at annalog to know who I have met and what adventures I have, what I see and notice on the bus.   The mayor of London, himself the son of a bus driver, recently waved through taking your credits with you, if you transferred from one bus company to another: hooray.

Then, last week, bus passengers were submitted to a repeated announcement on a loop, mistimed so even more inappropriate, to “please hold on – the bus is about to move.”

“This is what white noise does.”

By now 20 yards down the road, I would like to point out that there would be a real problem if the bus didn’t move. The same announcement featured at every stop.   Not very good for the mental health of the beleaguered drivers. Fine for all those with headsets though these are fewer in number on the cheaper transport. By the time I had completed the outward journey and returned with this mindnumbing mantra at every station, I was ready to spit feathers.

I looked for the street address of the bus company but couldn’t find it.   I was invited to speak to an advisor.   What a way to earn a living, phone sex with buses, spending all day over a headset, listening to the bus riding population of London bitch and moan about the bus not arriving. I am sure you fill out sheets – and dump them.   I am sure by the end of the day you are exhausted and rarely to any purpose, in spite of all those protestations about “we really care you think” – yes of course.

There was a time when buses had closed circuit tv in them which ran the same few ads and promotional films over and over – the same thing for the eye, “the bus is about to move” is for the ear. I grumped to friends and then the “i” (tabloid edition of the old Independent, excellent value) ran a piece headed “Bus warnings drive passengers round the bed” (20.01.2018) and the place to complain is Transport for London. And I will.

I do not spend my life complaining, it is so bad for the ageing face.   Cold weather is cold weather: it comes every winter and I derive an odd satisfaction from knowing no politician can do anything about it.   That costs go up in shops (and they have) is the inevitable consequence of emergence from the EEC. That there is nothing on television but oversold soaps and endless repeats is something to be put up with. Lord Hall doesn’t seem to be any better about that than he has been about sorting out the inevitable pay war between bbc men and bbc women.

But please, don’t mess about with my bus !   Bad enough that a perfect service, running from just across the street to Oxford Circus, now doesn’t. It stops short of Oxford Street , presumably in anticipation of the projected pedestrianisation of the shopping area, an idea of singular silliness.   I will put up with that. But I don’t want to be crooned at by an electronic voice that sounds like a cross between a bilious pigeon and a bargain basement dominatrix.   Noise is pollution: discuss.

When I first moved to this part of town, the bus service wasn’t good. It is now much more reliable. Bus drivers – a working example of trying to do two jobs at the same time – are either good or bad: nothing in the middle.   I greet, thank, wave to and encourage every bus driver I can, for I am one of the six million daily bus riders.   This is my chosen public transport with more going for it (for me) than any other.

* with thanks to Michael Flanders and Donald Swann.

When I couldn’t sleep one night and even the rocking of the red boat with a painted eye in the blue of a Cretan bay didn’t work, I began to think about Middlesbrough – no, not the football team, though my father did traffic duty at Ayresome Park and I was thrilled to discover that the name of the school where he last taught was that of the father of Gertrude Bell (see Daughter of the Desert by Georgina Howell).   I began with the ginnel.   I had to look the word up.   It says “northern British, probably a corruption of “channel”, a narrow passage between buildings.” I don’t recall anybody ever saying it except my parents.   I closed my eyes.

The ginnel led from Thackeray Grove to Briarvale Avenue, between houses, earth and gravel underfoot, the odd groundsel and dandelion, the boards of the edging fences dilapidated and worn. But once you got to the ginnel, you were nearly home because Briarvale was a cul de sac and we lived at 21. I was bullied at school, wrong voice, wrong face: the ginnel was safety.

Behind my closed eyelids, I began to recall house by house, who lived where in that street and in the adjoining Greenwood and Cleveland Avenues. At 19 I left 21 for Tenafly, New Jersey where I cared for 11 rooms and four children (16,12,10 and 6) – for $25.00 a week which even in 1963 wasn’t much – but the faces came back clearly – and benignly, voices, gardens, kitchens, clothes and incidents – and I fell asleep. I have revisited since, and it makes me think that there are places where you are emotionally as well as geographically located.   Things come together and stay with you, they have special meaning. Looking back I see that what I had at home far outweighed what happened to me at primary school.   Bless my parents, if I had gone shopping for them, I couldn’t have done better.

In a recent newspaper, there was a picture of a faraway man leading his working animals through rice paddies in China today.

It reminded me of a print I bought from Getty Images, the original dated in the 1920s, and I was struck by the eternality of it. Maybe that’s what made me think about how some scenes stick, why they stay with you…

For people who live outside it, the city is a constant, the stones and bricks of us and them, but we who live here are very aware of how much the city changes like an architectural amoeba that pushes against an edge and retires from it, only to surge in another direction, apparently unchecked.   Whether Brexit is hard, soft or another Sarajevo (ie the beginning of the end of an era), the pulling down and the putting up, the installation of wiring, train lines, sewage and technology is going on all round us.

So the places that we remember, unchanged, associated with that time and place and feeling, are the closest to eternal we’re going to get and have all the more importance for that.   Remembering somewhere by smell (my first arrival in Crete) is different from remembering how I saw the sunlight fall on the beachfront at Sitia. I remember the light on the Seine but not the sound of Paris. Though I don’t have to close my eyes to conjure George Washington Bridge in New York, or to hear the noise of the street, either at Bleeker or by the Plaza Hotel.

There are places where the quiet is a sound of itself.   I remember like a stop shot my father at the kitchen table the Sunday morning we knew that my sister’s fiancé had been killed.   I remember the delight on my little son’s face when he saw the table and his first Sunday roast – “Pretty, Mummy, pretty !”   I can smell it, hear it, see it, feel it – that same voice that welcomed me back from Dublin at the arrivals gate, racing from his father’s hands – “Mummy, mummy darling !”- everybody turning to look at the big little boy with the dark brown voice. I keep very few pictures – they are in my head. And I hadn’t thought a table or a metal gate would be part of my emotional geography.

Long ago, a man rang my then newly established radio show and (as people sometimes do) went on and on telling me the rigmarole of his life, without hope or insight, clearly expecting me to be brilliant and sort it all out, the adult version of “kiss and make it better.” He never drew breath and when eventually he paused, I answered the last reiteration of a much repeated question with “No.”   End of.   I am not a shock jock, I wasn’t trying to score points or be a clever dick. I recognised that either I devoted the whole programme to him or I gave him a response he could kick at – so I did the latter.   I only remember doing it once. But when you listen to these stories, layer upon layer of misunderstanding, convention for the sake of it, confusion reinforced by endless social silt and repetition, there is little you can do. Learning how little I could do was always chastening. I remember reading in Isaac Bashevis Singer that “it is better to do a little with a good heart than more out of obligation.” I thought so.

Of course there are occasions when you say yes and regret it afterwards, just as in other circumstances you decline and wish you hadn’t.   This is not a short course in rectitude.   There is no guarantee that learning to say no will mean that you only say it at the right juncture but permitting yourself to say no when you mean it can catch you a psychological breathing space.

Although I am aware of the advantages for women alone, the ill, the elderly and so on, I have had a mobile for three months only and I have never missed it. I am cackhanded, use two pairs of specs, hate the sound quality and have a deep antipathy to being removed from focus on the moment.   I don’t want to take pictures, play music, message friends on Facebook, tweet or twitter.   I have eyes, ears, a memory, a landline and an email: that will do.   Oh and an aversion to having to have what everybody else has, just because they do.

Recently I have read quite a lot about social media, the maladaption of the young to the constant presence of some screen or other.  It is as tough to be a good enough parent nowadays as it is to be a healthy enough child.   So although I could have done without the latest Google horror story (“… makes millions from the plight of addicts” Sunday Times 07.01.18) , I am not surprised. I do not buy on line. I do not bank on line.   I live an older simpler life. I just said “no.”

It would not occur to me to say no to (small amounts of) dairy: I am not allergic.   I am a convinced omnivore, eating fruit and vegetables in every widening variety but don’t start telling me what I shouldn’t eat: I come from 1950s austerity when we were grateful for food we didn’t actively dislike and we learned to cook for taste and nourishment.

You go to the sales if you like, but surely it must have begun to occur to people that the prices are set artificially high so that they may fall and you go when you go and pay what you pay but the endless lauding of the bargain is as much a fashion statement as the updating of the mobile. Walking through a department store currently is like discovering the aftermath of a hurricane: if it isn’t nailed down, it is for sale. Where does all this discard go ? And we have been manipulated with damnable skill away from what I need to what I want, and want (God Bless Michael Wolff) is the cry of the child.   Acquiescence doesn’t necessarily make you happy.

Learning to decline was one of the most important lessons of my life. Yes was inevitable, socially agreeable, but looking at something and deciding against it was liberating. There is always pressure to agree, to concur and sometimes to say no is difficult.   But then – whoever said life was going to be easy ?

I saw my son on Christmas Eve – he was working through the holiday – and as he left, the cold arrived.   Waking at six or so on Christmas morning when it was still dark, I shrugged into a shawl and went from room to room, lighting candles in each, big fat beeswax numbers that were my present to myself this year.   And then I went back to a bed I didn’t leave except to lie on the sofa, for the next week. It sounds joyless (cough/splutter/sneeze/sweat/repeat) and it was certainly tiring, but I gave in.

I must have been ill, I couldn’t concentrate to read. TV programming reached a new low and food didn’t interest me much.   The cough medicine has been returned as unfit for purpose – now made under licence some other where which is just an excuse to shift units.   Brandy and tonic was much more use.   And lemons, lemons till I was yellow round the edges.

But the quiet embraced me. Everybody was away. I could hear birds occasionally and a brief glance into the street showed it still.   I’m trying to remember when I became so aware of silence: maybe it is just that the world grew noisier as I aged. A great deal of what the rest of the world tolerates as a matter of course is intolerable, hands over ears, to me. The quality of sound fascinates me, though what it is and how you interpret it is in the ears of the beholder.

In autumn 2017, a friend, much brighter and more down to earth than I will every be, remarked in conversation how threatening London felt – that the aggression in the air was tangible. In the 25 years we have known each other, she has never made a remark like this.   Perhaps it is simply that we use sound to deafen ourselves against the thudding of our nervous hearts or we use sound to perceive.

The silence over Christmas is largely to do with the falling away of levels of sound you tolerate in a city.   Every kind of traffic slows or stops, you notice the interruptions but they are few.   And if the silence isn’t broken, you begin to listen to the silence.  Apart from silence that just is – because it occurs – there is a silence born of snow and another that comes with fog. And then it’s about levels of perception. Snow is benign if you are warm indoors and can contemplate it, less so if it’s many feet deep and you’re stuck in it. Just as fog can vary between romantic mist and deadening white out, frightening to travel through.

So the last days of the old year passed, leading up to the drama of New Year which I haven’t shared for years because a new year is like a new person, you don’t know how it will behave until you learn a bit more about it.   I think of New Year as a tiger: very beautiful but cuddly it is not. And I wait to discover if it is going to let me get past it or I am going to have to wrestle with it. I love big cats but forget the anthropomorphism.

So this is Day Two – Wolf Moon tonight – and we are in the corridor.   In the corridor at work meant where you put things you had no space for in your office. In the corridor at school meant you had misbehaved and were sent out to wait until the teacher had time to deal with you.   In the corridor, I thought this morning, the passage in between two places.   I looked it up, derives from the Latin “to run”, running between, on the way to somewhere.   Good image for New Year.   In the corridor geographically means the passage between a landlocked territory and the coast.   The journey out, the way forward …Travel safely.

“golden spike on the Eastside Rail Corridor”

It’s the end of one year:

Happy Christmas

And the beginning of another:

Happy New Year

There is a pause in transmission because of the way the dates fall this year so

Annalog will resume 4 January 2018.

Thank you for reading, writing in and reaching out – more to come.

I send you verbal flowers

Till soon …

Never has the build up to Christmas so resembled rickety stairs – here a joist, there a mousehole, watch where you put your feet. Everything that isn’t nailed down is reduced (why does the word reduced conjure a sweating endomorph in a plastic suit?) Wiser heads have already started opining that you can only have the money once and in between Black Friday and bringing the sales forward to pre-Christmas, when it’s gone, it’s gone. Fear stalks the land under the glitter – and I was never convinced that glitter was good.

An old song opines “When I’m worried and I can’t sleep/I count my blessings instead of sheep/And I fall asleep/Counting my blessings.”   And it seems to me that there is a rider this year, for however much we appreciate the blessings we are counting, they may not be enough to get us through.

This year has been a real mixture of highs and lows, neither a white Christmas nor a black one, but clearly chequered.   Because really, for every up I can think of a down, and the other way round, personally, nationally, globally. I have had medical news I’d rather have been spared but then, it hasn’t happened yet and you can’t live – at least, I can’t live – in expectation of the worst or the best. I am too busy with living each day the best way I can.

Years ago, when Shaker furniture had its moment in the stylistic sun, I read that they strove to make a chair so beautiful that an angel would want to sit on it. I can’t sit on the day but I acknowledge the sentiment.   Doing your best is a phrase out of fashion. Too often it means just doing enough. But it doesn’t to me. It means what it says and it brings me treasure.

This year, the year when Harvey Weinstein and company came to represent much that was brutish and distasteful about how men deal with women – and the bucket of dirty water flushed out men who were horrid to men too – I was the recipient of smashing exchanges with men – from the Italian to whom I gave a lift when the traffic was bunged up, who kissed both my cheeks, to the driver who saw me for the second time in London’s millions and held my hand while he talked to me, to the GP I have never met who wrote to me, to the boy who came to sell me something, came in for a warm and a glass of wine, delighted to talk about books and movies.

Like a lot of older people, I find the blurring of the seasons unsettling – many of us cling to anything that reliably marks the passing of time (my father would have said “You can’t control it, you can only measure it”) but the result is Christmas roses are flowering up the road, a red geranium managed just one bloom on Remembrance Sunday and the white ones are budding. The arums have leaves galore and winter broom is living up to its name.   It would be “I’m Dreaming of a Green Christmas” in my garden.

Well heeled women mutter resentfully “It’s quite cold now” and I restrain myself from pointing out that that they have boots, coats, scarves and central heating – this is not a refugee camp but winter in Britain and give or take a degree or five, it comes every year. I cheer for the Sally Army and Shelter and every other relevant charity for drawing attention to the want, especially to children in temporary accommodation while the brand new developments go on building unaffordable flats – one of the most touted in London just found a convenient loophole and cancelled 250 affordable homes, may they rot.   And I know you may not feel that’s very Christmassy of me, but Christmas is nothing if it is not real – real thoughts, real feelings, real plants, real food, real effort and real reciprocation.

That’s why I write cards, and I always send one or two that are pies in the sky, to people I have lost touch with, who may have moved on but I still think of them, an offering at the altar of hope.

Pure White and Deadly was the title of nutritionist Professor John Yudkin’s book about sugar, though with that title, it could just as well have been about cocaine. I shrink from demonising food, being horribly aware that at any one time, whole sections of the human community haven’t got any, let alone enough. But as her sweet tooth famously blackened the teeth of Elizabeth I, and Fast Food Nation (by Eric Schlosser) blamed salt as much as sugar (also white) for the terrible addiction to all the cheap delicious things our culinary nation is heir to, I can see that just because it’s white doesn’t make it right.

In the west we wear white to claim purity or at least the right to magnificent impracticability, while the east features white for another kind of purity, that of all passion spent – death and mourning. There are people who don’t look well in white and the perverse, like me, who prefer winter white and summer dark though, facing up to the present soiled city in which I live, I don’t have much winter white (I once had a white flannel dress) and what I do have is washable ie white corduroy trousers which have been a great success.   I dream of white silk, adore white cotton and cherish white wool.

I like every other colour pearl than white which add 20lbs and 20 years to me, though they look wonderful on Her Majesty and pounds of them on the odd model are pretty special too.

White hair gets me the darndest compliments – by which I mean from unexpected sources – and we all prefer our teeth white though there are as many shades to white teeth as there are to white snow, whose variations include 20 plus words in Inuit to describe it.

There was a famous agent in Hollywood’s heyday who only ate white food – vichysoisse, chicken hash, meringue – whose wife and cook (two different people) liaised to keep him from boredom on his narrow menu. No good to me – there is no such thing as white steak, I don’t like white wine, rarely eat white rice or white bread.   I was brought up to yearn for a bit of red, a bit of brown and as much dark green as I could eat.

There is the inference of good and evil (“he’s a white man” – no not a Caucasian, rather, a decent person) or Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, blackness inferred.   Balletically, there is the White Swan and the Black Swan though in life, they are as differently beautiful as each other – but maybe that’s the point.

For years I preferred white bed linen, white towels and white knickers: now only the last apply. Something to do with not putting dubious dye near those important parts. I loathe white fur, white high heeled shoes, white gloves of any length and we’ll just not talk about white handbags. I like white shirts, white jeans and white sneakers on other people.     I dislike white eye makeup, whitened lipstick and white nails – no thank you.

I am not keen on white furniture but I like white walls, white lighting fixtures and white flowers – any white flowers except lilies. I like white paper to write on and brown envelopes to send: my mother used Basildon Bond blue and when using it did not confer on me her best qualities, I struck out on my own.

I understand white as a description of blinding pain or light but nothing prepares me for the softness of snow light or the sound of snow.   I am of course over privileged: I don’t raise livestock or crops that might be threatened by snow. I have never passed more than a night without some heat or light or food I needed. I have never been snowed in, body or building. And I love the snow with the unreasoning always new sense of a child.

It is true, it’s only sleet and snow mixed this morning in London but the sky has the soft tousled quality of yellowing tissue paper (which I associate with treasures) and the flakes almost clear the streets of traffic and soften all sounds.   Nothing illegal, immoral or fattening about my white stuff: just lovely.