Annalog

There are all sorts of things I hope to be spared and being trampled to death in a crowd is one of them.   I’ve been in big benign crowds but not often and my hackles go up like a threatened dog if the mood changes and I stop feeling safe. Yes, I am paranoid, I do know what it means. And I trust my animal instincts deeply.   I am not claiming that I would know when I was going to be attacked. Nobody knows and in a world which is increasingly complicatedly clever, the most effective advantage is always the simplest: surprise.

But apparently in a crowd, people feel safe – reinforced by the many, the normalcy.   Except it isn’t normal to me. I don’t see crowds, I see a lot of individuals – which I prefer. At some profound level crowds frighten me. I’ve never understood why you would want to celebrate a wedding with thousands of people. I can see the regulated attendance to a lying-in-state or a funeral but not the crowds.   I am not saying that the flocking to disaster and laying of flowers and other tributes is insincere. On the contrary, it is probably very sincere but I don’t share the belief.   Masses don’t make me feel secure.   They can turn on you, they can – and do – lose sense , they can be manipulated into a big powerful thing with no head. Watching some of the thoughtful coverage of the anniversary of the partition between India and Pakistan – about which I know shamingly little, shamingly because if you want to do business with people and live peacefully alongside them, you must try to understand something of their history – I was appalled by the numbers displaced: millions of people walking away from everything they had known. Those laden trains, staggering carts, crowds and crowds of people.

Every year, people go to festivals – music festivals, literary festivals – and the press riffs on what they wear and who’ll be there. I went once for fun, once to work. You can keep it.   Every year the hype around sports grows, making people more conscious of their physical fitness and making money. Not for me.   Yet I love a market, I go to one every Saturday. There’s one I go to on Sundays too.   And the markets in Rhodes and Crete, the old souk in Port Said remain on the back of my eyelids as places I was interested and safe and happy – what you might call a natural crowd, with a purpose (food shopping) and the crowd gathers, moves through the area and disperses again.   Large number of bodies for the sake of it don’t make me feel safe.

As you get older your notions of permanence may change.  The roof can blow off, the plane can fall from the sky.   These things don’t happen very often but they can happen. Like somebody dying of an unsuspected complication.   You see that, however many bodies there are in a crowd, they are breakable, fragile, and as my favourite fictional private eye says, nobody carries a gun to scare you.   A gun is to kill you.   Of course I have sat in the cinema and laughed or been thrilled as the car cuts a swathe through the crowd or leaps over the gap between two buildings.   That’s fiction. Not any more.   The line between fiction and fact is blurred.   The latest weapon is not a sophisticated explosive device. It is a truck driven by a misguided operator.   It kills a lot of people and it stampedes a lot more and this device will be used wherever there are big unsuspecting crowds.

There aren’t a lot of options.   You either avoid crowded places or you get on and live your life and hope.   I listened to people in Spain, nationals and visitors, saying they won’t give up and they won’t give in.

I have given in. Some of it is to do with age, some of it is to do with taste.   The crowds that cover the pavements in the centre of my city do not inspire me. I’d rather go early, do what I have to do and leave, than linger.  Safety in numbers is a myth.    

What happened to the amber light ? The crossing near me has become a much less organised affair with red for longer, green for longer and open to the interpretation of the wheelwackos, who target anything in their way “because I am riding a bicycle” – ie flavour of the clean air month, no registration or licensing system and cannot be held accountable: file under “can’t catch me !”   Transport for London recently asked for feedback on a cycle super highway : it’s a waste of public money. Large numbers of cyclists only ride to dodge in and out of the traffic.   They don’t want a special highway. They want to dice with death, trespass into the bus lane and demonstrate their personality defects masquerading as psychic musculature.

The amber light did not deter them, they rode through it to green – but then they ride through red too.

The amber light was a combination of warning and getting ready. Do we no longer need to be warned ? Visitors from places where jay walking is more stringently forbidden freeze.   I watch people, hesitating, obviously confused or nervous, simply unable to interpret the signals as to whether to run across (some lights display a ten second countdown) or delay. Why is it presumed that everybody with a vehicle is in a hurry while everybody on foot can just wait ?

Ours is not an amber light culture.   Pause, thought and action is an unfashionable sequence.   We do go/go/go or stop/stop/stop or “I know it says stop but go anyway”.   Is this latter the amber light de nos jours ?

As politics has moved increasingly towards a glutinous mass in the middle with extremes at either end, in daily life any kind of middle has been increasingly eroded.   There used to be cheap shoes, expensive shoes and shoes for what was called a reasonable price. (The fishermen who evolved espadrilles would have hysterics if they saw the price of the fashionable edition.)   Clothes prices were cheap, dear or bearable – this last obviously varies widely.   Books seem to be relatively sorted out (you can either afford hardback or you can’t) but any toiletry or cosmetic epitomises “how much can we get away with ?” For example, shampoo ranges from £3 to £35 a bottle.  As men have become users of carefully marketed preparations above and beyond soap and a reliable deodorant, the market has widened and the prices have gone up again because men have more disposable income.

The recent price hike by British Gas is best described by a friend who said:” It’s disgraceful but where I live, it’s a fight to find a reliable plumber so if I change my utilities supplier,

what is the service guarantee ?”   (Which is why I still have a BT landline. It isn’t that their engineers are wonderful, it’s that others are worse.   In an attack of good citizenship I once wrote to Virgin to let them know about a vandalised terminal: all replies came from a computer with late stage alcoholic confusion. “Oh yes” said the BT engineer “they’re the worst, we’re always being called out to them.”   I mentioned it to a friend who knows Richard Branson.   “Hmm” he said. “Afraid the company’s got too big.”)

And there is no amber light anywhere in sight in the purchase of food or anything for the home (paper products, laundry requisites etc.)   It’s one thing if there is one or two of you to provide for but people with families are really feeling the pinch.   I know people who have gone from everything at Waitrose and M&S, to embarking on their very own product-to-basket research into Asda, Aldi, Lidl, old Uncle Tom Cobley and all. The grocery version of the car boot sale is upon us.

I suppose the idea of an acceptable middle ground is a remnant of the rise and rise of the Victorian middle class, a notion of acceptable aspirational fulfilment, what you could afford that would make you feel better about where you’d got to in your life. In the present economic climate, it’s about something much more prosaic: making ends meet and not getting knocked over by a cyclist.

I am not very good at the nasties by which I mean – I see them, I acknowledge them, in my limited way, I understand where they occur but I do not seek them out. I do not want to sit and watch how horrible people can be, even if it is only a re-enactment. And I remember interviewing a fine writer after he had just spent a couple of years in daily research into the story and ramifications of a serial killer. He was emotionally exhausted and, after an hour with him, I was too.   What can you do ?

You can be a witness. This is quite different from being an ambulance driver or a specialist in mental health, a police officer or a prison visitor.   To be a witness is to be willing to see what is there and sometimes hearing is as shocking as seeing. A police officer who was present at the beginning of the Moors Murders hearings said “People threw up”.   We all interpret differently, we have different machinery to bring to bear, different life experience, different understanding, different vocabulary.   And it causes us discomfort not to say pain that however we may feel, we can’t do much.

Of course there is an immediate recoil in the form of “Thank goodness I don’t have to deal with that!” which runs parallel with the car crash life often is. Some of us have an even more violent reaction, almost a primitive fear that trouble is catching.

Very often, when I was looking at what a caller or correspondent thought was the problem, we’d have to go back into the history of a family or a relationship. Sometime this was relatively straight forward.   Because I had positive experiences with my own psychotherapy, I know you work with the person in front of you, their parents and their parents again.   Familial history and influence are fascinating. Though often there is something small and painful, ready to wrench your psychological ankle on the tortuous footpath out of the dilemma. And sometimes your caller or your correspondent just doesn’t want to go there.   And you, the adviser, can’t make them.

Then there is the very primitive and powerful business of denial. People think that if they shut the horrors out, that will be it.   In my experience, bad stuff often slides under the door you have just so firmly slammed like the plagues of Egypt in Dreamworks’ 1998 story of Moses (The Prince of Egypt) – like smoke, an intangible miasma of misery, tainting everything.

People think if they work hard enough, save enough, have enough fun, do enough good, they will outstrip the hound of heaven.   Believe me, it’s a pious hope. Sooner or later, that dog wins. He carries the bone of your problem in his teeth.

It’s never been necessary for me to look for problems.   They came to me. I had my own and I was interested in other people’s.   I saw how people handled them, obviously very differently, one person from another.   I met people who had worked them through or put them in a particular place in their lives so they could go on.   I met people who kept them central in their lives because they couldn’t think what else to do and didn’t understand either, that this was the rock on which other things foundered.

I have just read The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrere – the title is an old name for Satan – and I found it difficult because it is a printed nasty.   But it taught me something and my father long ago instilled into me that nothing was wasted if you learned by it.   It is remarkable for its lack of psychological jargon. The book isn’t new and even 20 years ago, you might have expected certain kinds of explanation but they just aren’t there. What is there is a picture of the duality of religious belief – and this is pretty current as the world is full of all kinds of violence in the name of somebody’s God.  What I am left with – and it unsettled me – is the idea that without certain kinds of psychic manure, faith wouldn’t flourish.

The GP who took early retirement was a large creamy Irishwoman for whom nothing was too much trouble, kind, sensible – in my few dealings with her, truly a fairy godmother (TFG).   All my grandparents were gone before I arrived.   So I think I am susceptible to a mixture of common sense and concern in one I have to rely on, the feeling that no matter what it is I need or feel, it can be taken care of benignly.   In the past I can remember all sorts of friends and mentors but only one briefly known landlady in York who would qualify. She ran an immaculate boarding house for male boarders only (“easier to organise”). But she took me without demur for the three months I was there and God knows, I wouldn’t have presumed to persuade her. There were five cats, three dogs and several rabbits, the house shone, there was always something to eat or drink and Mrs. Berg was the first person I ever saw cry with joy over music.   Anything could be fixed in the flip of one of those capable hands.   And I was not a trouble – don’t be silly ! I was a joy.

Recently I bought a handbag.   (Lord, I hear you say, the excitement !)   Well, it was for me because I last bought a leather handbag ten years ago.   I have done very well with Longchamps pliage – weighs less, costs less – and large leather handbags are not a good idea for anyone who has ever had back trouble, let alone the insulting cost.   If they are heavy empty, once loaded, you need a donkey. This was a small handbag, rectangular, particular, plain and it was sold to me by two grown up women in Peter Jones. They were kind, professional, thoughtful, willing without pressing, and when I left – having practised the Shoppers’ Code (does it go with your wardrobe? is it practical? is it a good deal ?) – I reflected on what a major part of purchase are the people who sell to you.

A couple of days later, I decided to call Lakeland from whom I had had quite an order but two of the products were let down by the distributing nozzle ie no squirt.   I have never done this before – I could count on the fingers on one hand the number of times I have remonstrated let alone complained – but I thought I would tell them because their customer service is exemplary. It couldn’t hurt.   Elissa’s first words were “Oh I ‘m sorry, how disappointing !”   Give the girl a medal. She looked up my details, she checked my order.   “I’m going to credit you for those things “she said “and would you let me send you something else in their place ?”     I said I didn’t expect her to do both, but she said “I’m going to.” “Why ?” I asked. “Because I want you to be happy.”   “Do you all do an intermediate qualification for Fairy Godmother ?” I asked “ Because you are always so agreeable.” She laughed, she liked that, she said she would tell her supervisor and I said it should be part of the Christmas promotion – “Our customer sales staff are all qualified to Truly Fairy Godmother (TFG)– intermediate standard.” When the consolation products arrived, the sales note was signed “Elissa (Fairy Godmother) Customer Services.”

So, when I met one of the two Peter Jones saleswomen on the bus this morning, I told her about Lakeland and wondered if she and her colleague were graduates of the same course ? “Well” she said “if you want to spend your time being miserable, don’t go into retail.”   Couldn’t agree more.   “And anyway” she added “there is enough I life to worry about and be miserable about without looking for more to add to the pile.”

The expectation of fixing things is one with which I am wholly familiar. And in life there are big bad things that can’t be fixed and even those of us who are willing to try and help have neither magic words or wands and we know it.   But there is something wonderful about somebody who wants to help: the wanting to is as important as the doing.   TFG.  

The garden at home wasn’t one really. It was just a sort of space at the back of the house with a privet hedge, a primitive garage where my father taught himself woodturning, raspberry canes (imagine a large English bull terrier sucking ripe fruit off the core),

“I know, it’s an apple, she ate those too!”

the remains of an air raid shelter and a mint patch.   The front was a bit more respectable with a hatefully persistent elderberry, equally determined roses, a big nasturtium bed and my father’s gladioli. And this was the beginning of me as a caretaker gardener (motto: plant, weed, water and feed).

So I was thrilled when a friend walked out into my paved pocket handkerchief this weekend and exclaimed with pleasure “How pretty!” At this juncture in the world’s history, nationally and globally, my garden is a source of sanity in a mad world. I can’t not watch the news but I freely admit it unsettles me to frequent sleepless anxiety.   Going out to prink in the garden helps a lot.

And there is only one thing in this garden that remains from when I arrived – a viburnum. Everything else is the result of trial and error.   I lost three plants this summer in the heatwave, probably because I didn’t water them enough. (Pam the Painter, herself a passionate gardener, advises that you can overwater a pot but not anything in the earth, which wisdom I have stored away for next season.) But otherwise everything has bloomed and I am so grateful.

When I arrived half the garden was subsumed to a ravenous mallow. I should have called her Melusine! She had to go.   Later I grew a ceanothus with a similar appetite and in letting that go, I did a bit of horticultural maturation.   The soil was full of discarded cement and brick bits, muddled by houseplants dumped there on the off chance.   I kept on discovering yet another pile of submerged detritus, swearing as I dragged it out, to scatter plant food of every variety far and wide.

I was such a gardening greenhorn that it took ages to understand that the sunlight in my garden is limited to the semi circular bed on the left outside the back door – currently pushing forth roses, daisies, several varieties of geranium, new leaves on the bergamot and – hooray – a bumper crop of Japanese anemones, Honorine Jobert, in papery splendour. I kept buying things, putting them in where there was no sunlight and of course they didn’t make it.

I do realise I sound like a clot because the world is full of people who just garden, often because they grew up on a farm or around someone who did. Or else they watch endless programmes and read learned books. But I need a voice, a friend who says “It may not have liked being moved” when I am beating myself up because something died. Or who says “ Dig it in deep enough” and I gratefully do. I know a superb gardener but she cannot communicate about gardening and really she doesn’t care about your garden because it isn’t hers.   I admire what she does but I have ceased to seek her considerable advice.   She doesn’t know how to share it.

The joy of the garden this summer is a rowan I found in Norfolk for literally a quarter of the price I had been asked for in London. I wondered how to get it home. Generous Gina put it in the car boot and brought it back for me.   I discovered it was a variety named for a plant explorer called Joseph Rock so of course it’s called Joe. Joe’s purpose is manifold. The rowan is benign in the sun signs of the Celtic religion and the birds like the berries.   You don’t get a lot of birds in London nowadays, what with pollution and pussy cats, but I’d like to do my best.   I spent 15 happy minutes watching three young sparrows playing tag in and out of everything the shrubs and creepers last week and when they had gone I went out and patted the rowan good morning.

“meet Joe”

The date a day desk diary shows a cartoon of four wolves in sheep’s fleeces and the caption reads “Now what ?”

Where is the leader of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea ? (wolf 1)

Where is the housing officer for the area of the Grenfell Tower ?   (wolf 2)

Who is in charge of it and who was in charge of it before the boundaries were changed ? (wolf 3)

Where is Health and Safety ?   (wolf 4)

I confess I have not read everything in the papers, any papers. It is sickening. And rolling news means just that – it rolls on whether there is anything to say or not, filling up the gaps with anger, pain, frustration, rationalisation and horrible stories…

And while Jeremy Corbyn is proving so much better at touchy-feely than Theresa May (it would be worse if she pretended to it and he’d kiss a fish if it would give him a vote) where were the local Labour activists when the Grenfell Tower Residents Association needed just a little help ?

Five years is a long time to complain that the fire doors don’t work, that there is no sprinkler system, that there are no hoses.   One solicitor with a brain could have marshalled most people into paying their monies into a separate bank account, to be withheld from the RBKC until their reasonable safety concerns were met, perhaps even paying for some of the longed for installations and providing receipts and evidence.

The rich have contempt for the poor when they try to better themselves and ignore with specious charity the unremitting work that keeps roofs over heads. Even bad roofs. When you have done the work that pays your way, you don’t have a lot of time or energy left over for anything else.   All sorts of people turn up to help when you are dead, wounded, disenfranchised or literally on the street but they are not around before the event.

Tower blocks are just about fifty-fifty when it comes to advantages and problems. Always have been.   They are not maintained because maintenance costs money and is unremitting work. Remember – it’s the poor and they are always with us.   You’d better hope they are, they keep the machine running.   And I think one of the most chilling things I heard was a woman saying that there was a policy of putting the elderly and the ill higher up where they couldn’t escape a high wind let alone a wanton fire.

The disconnect is on both sides.   Services have been run down so that you can’t reach a social worker, you don’t know who to go to for help and if you do, it involves pages and pages and pages of stuff you can’t necessarily understand.   You understand the fire.   The cladding was inflammable in the name of economy and it fed itself into an unstoppable blaze within a few minutes. You understand death. But you don’t understand that providing money takes time too.   This is not a reality show. There isn’t £5 million in gold pieces in chests in the basement of 10 Downing Street.   How is it going to come and who is going to distribute it ? When?? Where ???

I don’t know anything about Theresa May but she is not well served by her advisers.   They are out of touch with the people who were burnt out at Grenfell but they are also out of touch with the relentless speed at which media now works.

Jeremy Corbyn turns up, immaculate white shirt open at the neck, embraces, is embraced and meets local church representatives who have been doing their best.

Theresa May turns up, suited, made up, flanked by security, ushered to police and fire service: give her the benefit of the doubt, she knows this is going to take money and money has to be arranged.

But televisually, her visit doesn’t play.

Spilt milk can be mopped up. Spilt blood sticks.

And she starts on the Brexit on Monday 19 June.

Do you remember May’s first speech

after she became Prime Minister ?   There was a change of tone, a different speechwriter, a newer warmer May.   A photograph appeared of her in her constituency with some Wolfcubs – jeans, jacket, windswept hair, big grin.   Didn’t last long.   What fool didn’t say to her “If you are not going to appear in the political debates, explain why not.”   Not everybody is good at everything. But never apologise, never explain is a motto for princes, not politicians.   Live television can cause the most confident to freeze or fluster.  This is unlikely to change without skilled assistance and much work – not everybody’s choice.   But don’t hide, don’t ignore. It is appalling that decisions are made on the basis of personality not party, party not policy – like the woman at the bus stop who told me she’d be voting for May “because she looks like a Prime Minister.”   But that’s where we are.

You can understand why Corbyn swayed the young, huge swathes of the forgotten, the disenfranchised, the marginalised: nobody else was speaking to or for them and every new outfit told them that the PM was on another tack, as a brisk, bossy, head girl.   There must be at least two ways to run a campaign – the old way and the new way. Inevitably the business of government has to continue and money is not illimitable – so campaigns become a bit of the old and a bit of the new. And then it becomes a question of trust, tone, finger on the pulse, this not that, risky choices: one chance to get it right, disaster if you get it wrong.

When we have all finished scrapping like desperate puppies for the teat, the post European challenge is sitting there, waiting for us.   We are leaving Europe and our famously free press has stoked the fires of disagreeableness so that we need a good negotiator who – hard or soft, blah-de-blah – above anything else is somebody who can use his or her brain to be courteous and practical.     The year we have spent in mindnumbing neutral, our European colleagues have spent getting ready.   9.30 next Monday morning would suit the rest of Europe. We go to it on 19 June and heaven knows who will be the frontrunner. May herself, undermined, tired out and never keen on the task ? Boris the barracuda blond ?   Amber Rudd or David Davis – because they are there ?   The terrible thing is that, given the players in the major political parties, is there anybody you’d want to do the job ?

I confess I gave up on the British election.   You can’t help what you feel and Paul Nuttall in my living room is a strain on my patriotism as well as my blood pressure. I watched instead the former director of the FBI James Comey giving evidence to a Senate committee (15 Democrats and Republicans and one independent).   Relayed in real time, it was serious, thoughtful, time was given for replies, slips were made and questioned. If not conclusive, it was a long long way from The White House of the Donald.   Trump’s supporters including his lawyer, heard what they wanted to hear.   If President Trump says James Comey is an unreliable show off, so be it.   The rest of us were just fascinated by the process, by its seriousness and how those involved knew that it was, that the great unspoken was not whether Comey lied or Trump lied, but how much the Russians had infiltrated the system of prized American democracy

– which has serious implications for the rest of us. What was said that rang in my ears was that this was about the country, not the parties or their participants It was about Americans, not Republicans or Democrats – and while this may be a pious hope, it raised the game for the watchers.

When is one of our leaders going to talk about Great Britain, the United Kingdom, the country, the people and not the party ? Is there the legal possibility to appoint an independent negotiator ?     What now ?  

“No point in worrying, you can’t do anything about it” says my friend Dan, reasonable, grown up and low key.   As said an elderly taxi driver years ago when I had asked him to take me an iffy journey in a hurry and he didn’t go as fast as I hoped.   He looked at me in the mirror, shifting about and leaning forward, and said kindly “ Worrying about it won’t get you there any quicker. Sit back and let me get on with it.”   O dear and sane and wonderful people.   You could rephrase “neither a borrower nor a lender be” into “neither a fretter nor a worrier be” because it is as much in the nature of the beast and not likely to be changed.

I am sure it could be changed, if you set your mind to it, but we tend to have two reactions to our basic personal nature, acceptance or denial, and large numbers of people have no insight at all. They might be quite shrewd about all sorts of other aspects of work, life and the human condition but they do not see themselves. Perhaps they don’t want to.

It was several weeks ago that I became aware that some part of not sleeping/ feeling unable to settle/ a vaguely uneasy stomach – all of which I tend to rationalise as spring/who can advise me about the lease or shall I pursue the podiatrist – was more than being on the twitch which afflicts the elderly and those in cities more than many others. It was actually anxiety.   And what was I anxious about ?

Bombs in the street aren’t new. Knife attacks one on one have never been away – their incidence goes up and down – but multiple knife attacks arrived back on the front page this weekend.   Large numbers of people attending a concert or its aftermath or members of the public being mown down on bridges, sightseeing or on a night out, only vary in awfulness by multiples – whether it’s six or sixty, it’s horrid.   Peace is a relative term. There was always a war somewhere and right now, it’s next door.

We thought the Good Life could be delivered through the realisation of the dreams of the West – health care, education, reliable water and heat, order and prosperity.   And then we found that among those locked out from the ease of acquisition and what that meant, to themselves and others, were some who were resentful, angry, self righteous and whose dreams transmuted into death to anybody who didn’t side with them.   What they can’t have, nobody else should want.

And I can’t help but see a connection between how the violent see the rest of us – as rubbish, human waste – and the waste in the street, the mess, the carelessness, the unwillingness to take any kind of social responsibility without it being pushed back at you, to compel you to do something about it.   All my neighbours have work or an income from somewhere but I could teach a GCSE in rubbish wrapping, the importance of putting the lid on the bin and do tell me, what kind of idiot doesn’t know that standing water, even if it’s rainwater, stinks ? I think I would feel much better about the concert in Manchester if those attending took bin bags and cleared up after themselves, neither expecting somebody else to do it nor leaving the rubbish behind them.

The morning after six more people died and entirely too many were injured, wrong place wrong time on a summer Saturday, the election campaign will almost certainly be suspended again. Though possibly not for UKIP.   And the vote is on Thursday unless you have already posted yours.   It is an important election, most of them are, and it has been clouded by insubstantiality, confusion and gutlessness.   However you would have gone with the referendum, we face a challenge, the working through of which will be long and hard.   It’s enough to make anybody anxious.

They were standing, eight young men, talking at the tops of their voice, spilling all over the centre of the carriage of the tube so you couldn’t not notice them. Nobody had ever told them about noise as a form of pollution. They were where they were, taking up space, reinforced by each other.   The more thoughtful part of my mind wanted to go up and say quietly “If you were the kind of men you want to be, you wouldn’t have to make this noise.”   The less reasonable part of my mind said “Croydon” where a young Kurd was beaten into a skull fracture and cranial blood clot by a group of roughly the same age, who took against him.   Grossly unfair of me.   It was the quality of the voices, the power of the group. You could say that banding together and shooting their mouths off is their form of armour.

Although I am ashamed to say that I nodded off towards the end of the thin documentary on the giant armadillo (BBC2), it is good to know of a creature who can manage its armour. Because man can’t.

However decorative and imbued with dramatic chivalry, once metal armour extended beyond the targeted areas of protection, it was essentially a tin can. And if you fell, it was difficult if not impossible to get up again.   The tension between covering everything to make you “safe” and which bits you covered, leaving other bits uncovered, so you were at risk but could move, led to the stories of the wound that slays, from Achilles’ legendary heel onwards. Modern warfare is more remote but there is that little thing called “fallout”.   It’s the same principal.   You can only “cover” so much.   And if you want to read about that kind of armour, read Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control, chillingly pre Trump.

Women use the word armour in rather a different way.   The first time it was mentioned to me was in the context of a large neighbour when I was very young.   “Don’t brush against her” said ma drily. “ it’s like knocking up against an oil can – less corsetry than armour.”     I didn’t understand for years.

And as for the most part women are smaller and lighter and less strong, they use different weapons in a battle just as serious for them.   The form fitting black, the high heels, the conventions of hair and makeup and package, are all designed to defend them in the corporate battle.   It defends them by making all look eerily similar.   But then that is a feature of modern life which I keep expecting somebody to interpret. We’re back to the young men in the tube.   People only feel safe in tribes and tribal members recognise each other by accoutrements, the bits that show. The similarity of the exterior is meant to deflect your attention from the initiative and originality of the interior.   That’s a fight. You need armour for that.   Though occasionally there’s an exception.   Like Marilyn Monroe because, with all her flaws and shortcomings, imagine having that intelligence, preserved through childhood suffering while looking like a sexual ice cream sundae.

“…and very few of us have those proportions!”

And she did the opposite with it.   She wore as little as possible. That was her armour.   Without layers of clothing, you can feel yourself and locate your courage, intelligence or whatever power it is.   A perfectly dreadful documentary last week (C4) threw away any ideas of her originality or perception to talk about how much her possessions achieved in auction.   It was left to actress Ellen Burstyn and two academics to explain what she was at.

After three weeks of not sleeping (yes I know why but that doesn’t help me sleep) I got up one morning and looked at myself, hearing in my ear ma’s voice “Don’t go out in the street like that, you’ll frighten the horses !” (she was born in 1900) So I set to work with pots and shadows, blusher and brush to render myself “fit for human consumption.” Men don’t generally wear makeup any more though I know two who wouldn’t be seen dead without what they think of as essential – one with eye liner, one with concealer. You choose your armour and I’ll choose mine.   You fight the best way you can but have no doubt, it’s a war out there.

Even if I think about it very hard, I don’t remember the specifics of birthdays as much as the emotions – clutching excitement, a great feeling of being important and cherished, candles yes, cake yes – but overwhelmingly special.   I have friends older than me now who cannot enjoy birthdays any more. They are just evidence of time passing. Funny cards don’t make them smile and they decry presents as “unnecessary.”   And as you get older, especially if you live alone, and for very often for good reasons – getting enough exercise, eating properly, seeing somebody with whom you can exchange at least greetings and probably chat – life becomes ritualised, even as in this case the ritual of denial.

It took me ages to accept that I was so used to shopping for hordes, that I bought too much and it was a frightful waste.   And then I noticed that I was in danger of “it’s Monday, I must do …” whatever it was.   Why should every Monday be the same?   So I began to consciously welcome changes to routine.   A warm memory of my mother is when I welcomed her to the flat in which I was living with my first husband, deprecating my efforts to make her comfortable and she hugged me “Forget it. I don’t need all that.” As she got older, her needs became simpler. It was a good lesson.   And some of my friends live a distance away and some have schedules that are very demanding. So what we have come to is rather wonderfully that any day could be your birthday, any settled pattern can be thrown to the four winds.

I don’t see as much of LM who has been my representative and my friend for 20 years as I would like (she should be paid for living) but to her among other things I owe my introduction to Lord Dodo’s loose leaf cookery book, an enormous white hydrangea in a matching basket, the most beautiful flowers for Christmas/New Year/or any other excuse: care packages of salads, soup, bread and anything else that caught her eye, and the steps, the solid platform short ladders you need when you can’t stretch easily any more.   Definition of a friendship – when your friend arrives with something useful out of the blue.      You get all those feelings I described of myself as a child.

Pam the Painter came to lunch on Friday and handed me a small china mug with an English bullterrier on it (and it is, as my father would say “a good one” ie the right shape) and a witty comment and I got all wet eyed.   She found it in her parents’ house during monumental clearing out and thought I might like it. I do.

“meet Jimmy Choo”

On Saturday Percy Snowdrop (a film academic who teaches in the north) came through and I went him to meet him near the British Museum. He has a small carefully chosen collection of drawings and pictures (he started at art school) and he showed me on his tablet his latest acquisition – a signed drawing, a wonderful drawing by Jean Cocteau.   As he is the only person I know who would want such a thing, I don’t know who was more excited.   And I know that he got ploughed over by his editor this year and consigned a book into limbo he had deeply believed in.   Part of my admiration for him is that he loves to teach and I cheer for the self belief that drawing embodied.

I go to the market most Saturdays, I pick up this and that in independent chemists, I do the laundry.   Not this week. I bought a book and a card and I sat and drank tea and ate apricot tart and told stories and heard stories and saw him off to Kings Cross.

When I was a kid, there was a song which began “A very merry unbirthday to you,” which became a family sentiment, if you forgot, were late or away for a birthday.   But I like this version even better.   I don’t give a damn about the years, they are going to come anyway.   I care about contact and thought and pleasure and joy, mine and everybody else’s.   The world is hard, it always was. Welcome to better than birthdays.