Annalog

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.

What I liked best about my father’s funeral was the double line of his comrades from the Great War, lined up at the top of the churchyard. Kind and nice things must have been said but I was so deep in rage and pain that I remember only that the vicar seemed to suggest that if he was a very good boy, could he get into the kingdom of heaven. The tone and the inference infuriated me.

When my mother died 20 years later, I rode in the car with her youngest sister and my sister while they told me what a pain in the neck I was. It clarified for me that I would infinitely rather be me than either one of them so when the presiding priest, who didn’t know any of us, asked my sister if she’d like to speak and she did that “Oh I couldn’t possibly” thing, I stepped forward, Biblical quote in my handbag, determined to thank my mother and her neighbours who had made her last years so enjoyable. A retired RN type said he couldn’t imagine why we played a black communist (Paul Robeson) at her passing so I said “Because he was her favourite singer. Thank you so much for coming” and walked away.

I am never sure whether the service is for the departed or those left behind but few are as honestly emotional as the one in Four Weddings and a Funeral, where love and loss stand shoulder to shoulder.   The form bothers me but so does the lack of form. The last one I committed myself to was for my friend Jiz (see annalog 18 October 2016) and typically she had left instructions as to how she wanted it done.

In ringing a friend recently to enquire about his health, I mentioned I had seen the obituary for Pam Powell: she was a great age and I hoped her end was peaceful.   “I’m going to the funeral” he said (he was her hairdresser). “Why don’t you come with me ? It’s at St. Margaret’s Westminster, where she went every Sunday.” So I did. I met Pam Powell once and Enoch Powell twice and I cherish the memories. But nothing could have prepared me for how this felt.

The church is not big, simple and rather beautiful and if you look it up, you’ll see it is very old. The presiding clergy made everything sound as if they meant it. The gathering was not enormous but it was my sense that those who were there, went because they wanted to.

“rosemary for remembrance”

For one reason or another, they liked Pam Powell and they wanted to wish her well at her passing. Family members contributed while the eulogy was offered by Enoch Powell’s archivist, a barrister. And we should all have somebody like that speak at our ending.   He was informative and amusing. Early on he said (I paraphrase obviously) “Don’t think of Pam as just a political wife. She was politically committed in her own right and she wanted to be of service to her country.” Oh yes please.

Along the way there were hymns we all knew well, and the choir sang a setting of the 23^rd Psalm we used to sing in the school choir.   The language of the invocations and prayers were those of the old church and the King James Bible and I had a quiet eye fill over my parents who would have loved the sweet gravity of it all.     The last of the three hymns was I Vow to Thee My Country which has all sorts of meanings as we change and the world changes and anyway the cadence of the opening catches the throat and the heart.   And then it was done, the flower decked coffin was born away to private interment, so we filed out, spoke to each other and I left to come home in the cold.

But it stayed with me.   I felt privileged to have been there, and oddly comforted. The form was not rigid but held you, making room for what you believed and where you stood, and yet inclusive.   There was no over egging of any part of the pudding.   And I realised I had dressed for the rite as seriously as if it invited some kind of future.   And maybe it did.    

Last week, one friend had a cancer scare (clear), another’s husband collapsed with what turned out to be pneumonia, a third’s husband was having a back operation, Wal’s beloved dog died and Lydia had migraine. Misery loves company indeed.

Television was terrible, I couldn’t concentrate on a new book that might be disappointing (I’ve had a couple of those recently) so I re read Hilary Mantel’s two Cromwells, which have for me a unique appeal. There are passages of that lovely writing that sound just like my parents talking. It’s not that they were hardworking Tudor fixers but that the cadence, the music if you like of the language, is wholly familiar and thus very comforting.

My artist friend now renamed Salad because that is how she rendered her name when sending her first email had a birthday and typically, when you go to give her something, she effortlessly returns the compliment. So, upon hearing my son was coming to supper, she gave me organic Jerusalem artichokes which I learned to cook differently, hooray for Nigel Slater. We cleared out the fridge – venison sausages and black pudding panfried with the aforementioned artichokes, an enormous green salad, a reduced bag of banana shallots simmered whole in a mean mixture of oil and butter.   It was cold, we were tired, it was heavenly.

In my ongoing celebration of London as a geography lesson with real people, I met an attractive Albanian manicurist, a tall but tiny wand of a self-described Malay Chinese/English girl, a splendid lady from Singapore who explained the validity of that description (Malay is a nationality, not an identity, thank you ma’am): John from Ghana who got out of the cab to stand in front of me saying “In my culture, you only shake hands with a woman if you are on the same level”. I met a translator (of Chinese among other languages) who has spent years in Spain, now relocating here because her daughter is at university. And an apparently talented barrister, and noted the discrepancy between his eyes and his mouth.

When I was about 12, I found two 1930s film annuals in David Smith’s garage and asked his mother if I could have them. “Yes, love” she said absently. “Are they clean ?”   I was half out of the door and home to a duster and it was years before I realised what she might have meant.   They were full of names I had never heard of and one image that has never gone away – Joan Crawford without jewellery in a full length gold lame trench coat. My mother looked over my shoulder at another face on the page and recognised Miriam Hopkins, whom she described as “the woman who acted with her mouth.” I asked her to explain and she said “People say eyes are the window of the soul – but eyes can lie, or just not tell you very much, or tell you something that the person is at pains to hide.  Or the eyes have a concealed message and the mouth sends what message is appropriate.” I began to look at faces very carefully.

The BB (beautiful barrister) had a smile that reached his cheekbones and above them, eyes of cold dark pain and fury.   The discrepancy between the two was quite shocking.   I’ve seen it before.   It’s a disconnect. I mistrust disconnect, it means unresolved difficulties, no peace.   And people with no peace of mind lash out.

Nowadays, outside a psychiatrist’s office, we talk of integration as something socially desirable but the first integration is to put the bits of personality together. We may need help for that and recognition before we seek help. Some of us are unwilling to even contemplate the process, too difficult and too uncomfortable.   But if you don’t face yourself, you carry your emotional difficulties around and play them over and over, learning nothing about yourself except painfully that you have a pattern and you don’t seem to be able to change it. And you visit them on everybody else.

To be sure, therapy doesn’t work for everybody, especially not the six weeks-to-a-breakthrough kind, but I can never forget the relief of realising that the load was lighter.    

Michael Raeburn gave me his name and I kept it. Best thing he ever did for me. He was born in Cairo, his father a British colonel, his mother an Italian Jewish family born there.   Displacement and colonialization from the first. Brief sortees into Britain and Kenya yielded to settling in what was then Salisbury, now Harare. Michael grew up there and when Mugabe’s policies pushed what is now Zimbabwe into unnecessary hardship, I remember him telling me how he used to trot down the garden with Micheki the cook to plant an avocado stone in the rich land where it would settle in and bloom in short order, the earth was so rich.

I would not have put Michael’s parents side by side at supper so how they conducted a marriage is a mystery to me.   Still you know people do. They do and they do, and they make it up as they go along and we, watching, either don’t see the cracks or we connive at not seeing them, the oddities are just that marriage which is always a mystery to everyone who isn’t in it.

Michael talked about the Alsatians his mother kept, that she went through half the population because she couldn’t keep staff (except for Micheki to whom Michael promised a bicycle – and showed me the photograph of it and him).   His mother was always angry, there was not enough of anything, not enough clothes, not enough music, not enough society, I suspect not enough love and she alternated between telling Michael how she nearly died having him and taking him to the best hotel for an expensive tea with cream cakes. His headmaster father retreated into the bottle. Michael lay in bed, curled up, hands over his ears to hide from the screaming rows. When he was off to Europe, the University of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was then part of London University, he said to his father – one of the few people he ever loved – “Divorce.”   And Daddy Bill did.

I call this “lace curtain Africa” when the standard of living, the wide open spaces, the fruits and food generally, the animals, the land is beyond the pretensions you can only aspire to if you are the settler.   I remember nearly falling over laughing when Michael launched into a diatribe in Chilapalapa – what was called “kitchen kaffir”- how you spoke to servants and even as I was laughing, wondering at the divisions between what he knew, what he saw, what he suspected, what he felt.

Because the lasting love of Michael’s life was Africa. Of course he became politically involved.   Of course we knew people who … Of course it rarely worked out well because the journey to political consciousness is never straight forward, there is always a price tag and it is heavy, often unpayable.   Michael was every bit as displaced as his mother had ever been.   His mother’s mother (called Anna) had lived with them in her final illness. These families spoke English, Italian, French and Arabic so, while at university in France, he advertised to teach English and met Hugues from Martinique, who spoke French every bit as well as he did and was a child psychologist. And was black.   And described how taken aback he was.

I did not see Michael after we split up for over thirty years. I have known two men who were marked by their tortured love for Africa and tortured is not a word I throw around. Any human mistress I will face – but not Africa because it refers to their childhood, their dreams, their guilt and their joy.

Somebody died in Zim and Michael went back to sell a house.   (That his mother had kept all her treasured carpets rolled up and they had rotted seemed appropriate.)   At that stage he would not condemn Mugabe as many of his people won’t, because he was part of the liberation struggle, to wave goodbye to Blighty and run their own show.   No fool Michael, he knew that the financial underpinning was the next great colonialization in Africa: by China. But he didn’t want to think about that – until another journey some years later.   And then he talked about devaluation and money and hunger and finally, finally the raped earth which no longer would grow the seeds that Micheki taught him to plant.

Words and terms get lost in the relentless twee of modern parlance.   Less dumbing down than dumbed.   We can’t all know everything, we don’t all have flexible vocabularies.   But my teachers used to rule against “nice “ as a description for anything.   I still use it very carefully, even precisely. It’s too big a fuzzy blanket to do more than obscure.   So I saw the John Lewis Christmas ad last night and went in search of lemons.   Mary Poppins would never forgive them, it isn’t “a spoonful of sugar”,

more like a bag.  And I think I saw the M&S which faded instantly into overloaded short term memory. We used to say that if you didn’t remember the name of the brand, the ad failed. What can it mean if I remember the brand but not the ad ? Debenhams was slight but fresher faced – it was so last year too – and as we reach six weeks and counting, everything is draped in red ribbon and it’s hard to find cards that aren’t for Christmas.   Makes me growl.

“Bored of” makes me growl. It’s tired of and bored with but tired of is in narrower use, out of fashion, now usually referring to bags under your eyes, so the constructions have elided and become as you see – I so dislike it, I can feel myself turning into Lady Bracknell as I write.

Hard fruit makes me growl.

“a snow leopard to make up for the one some idiot shot this week”

You either shop around – I have time and buy in small quantities, you wouldn’t if you were working or had a family or both – or you are in the land of Take What They Give You.   I paused 48 hours ago and exchanged sympathetic glances with a small woman as we confronted “perfectly ripe “avocados.   “Stones” she said clearly.   “And that notice is such a lie.” We commenced to feel our way through the crate.   “You buy it hard – it’s all chilled – and it doesn’t ripen – it saddens and withers …” I agreed.   I buy eating apples in two different places, cooking apples in another, oranges in a third. We used to call that shopping, when one stop shopping was experimental.

I never thought I would say this but I bemoan the loss of the queue so that I go and stand and wait for a bus, and some chippy thing steps in front of me without so much as a smile or “Excuse me” – worse still, children seated or bags seated while humans stand promote a whole series of bloodcurdling noises emanating from the bottom of my diaphragm.

Noise makes me growl – like wandering into Fenwicks (I was looking for a special present) and getting caught up in its pre Christmas “shopping event” – how twee is that ? – the building shaking to formless music, screaming young women (you’d have to scream to be heard) spending somebody’s money like water, under lights where you can’t see the colours.   I went round the corner to the quiet Asian owned pharmacy which has done good business for years, where it is clean and not overpriced, thus not getting a present but avoiding a headache and the dyspepsia of disapproving old age

My mother used to threaten I’d turn into Vinegar Nell and it seems she has wished it on me, though I strive for the same kind of balance as I tried to maintain between hope and experience.   I used to say I was 49 per cent cynic and 51 per cent child and as long it stayed that way, I’d be all right.   I count my blessings, I tell of nice moments and pleasant exchanges but sometimes something just pulls you into growling mode. And I would rather growl from time to time and admit to it, than become the sycophant of those trilling voices trying to sell us everything from a moorland view to the next winners in some ghastly game show.

There is a knowing cadence to all kinds of speech that I can screen out when it’s in something I have choice over but when it inhabits the throat of the newscaster or the weather girl, I feel the growl working up my throat to a bloodcurdling yelp.   “Goddamit !” I say – and channel a grizzly.

It doesn’t happen so often now – old age is very rewarding in that – but every once in a while I feel that I can’t keep up or I don’t fit in and I can taste being lost like old metal in my mouth.   I was trying to explain to a girl of 12 why I went to church and why I gave up.   (There is a background to this: she adores her father, the family were initially Roman Catholic communicants and then “my father read a lot of books” and renounced it all, taking his very young family with him.   Mother’s comments are unknown.)

I was brought up to go to any place of worship, be respectful, pay attention and see.   Discovering that my playmate Derek went to the local Methodist Chapel, I went to Sunday school with him for a long time: my most vivid memory is of hearing an elderly missionary explain the Chinese ideogram for “faithfulness”, showing us the drawing of a man standing by his word. I went briefly to the Congregational Church, and then to two different Anglican congregations, the second of which I gave up on when my sister’s fiance was killed in a plane crash.That embodied my first crisis of faith, when I knew I needed something but I didn’t know what. There were two other occasions when I lost touch with the Master, wide apart, but that’s it: my God may not be your God, but He’s very real to me.

At school I didn’t fit in because of my accent. Both parents were from the South and this was the industrial North East, another country.   And then I discovered that the mixture of vocabulary and voice made schoolmates laugh and even defer to me, and used it all shamelessly. I practised to be an eminence grise long before I had grey hair.

Often I didn’t fit in at work. (I was a secretary for ten years).   I read too much, my mother said I thought too much.   But I hadn’t been to university so I wasn’t quite one of “them” and it was doubtful if I was one of anybody else.   A passing man gave me good advice: accept you don’t fit in, and work out of it instead of against it.

Looking recently at a 40 year old piece of film of me working on air at the first incarnation of Capital Radio (it’s now on its second), I hear myself learning to say what other people in a similar situation might think. “That’s what stopped me from ringing in” exclaimed the man who rescues me when the computer shows its teeth. “Where did that ability to confront come from ?”   Out of fear, I said.   “Well, Anna, it’s the most extraordinary volte face” he said. “Nobody would ever think you were ever afraid of anything.”

“nightjar”

Protective colouring, my friend: always sound as if you know what you’re doing and try to make sure you do.

Parties are not for me. I can’t find my feet. I think I have enjoyed three or four in my whole life. Oh, the headaches I have pleaded, the glasses I have washed!

And then, years ago I was being interviewed by a woman who left me briefly to do something else so, of course, I looked at her bookshelves where I found this quote from China’s Great Helmsman, Mao: “war is politics with blood and politics is war without blood.”   That I have remembered it and how I found it says something and I thought of it again as I watched a magnificent documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick on The Vietnam War.   And for the hours that it ran, I belonged – because so so many of those young men thought they knew and discovered they knew nothing.   They were all lost and picking up the pieces that worked for them too.   And I watched and I paid attention (it is a paean to the art of documentary). I wept and I watched. I realised that I have seen the world – even in my small experience – as deeply about the nature of war and politics at a viscerally simple, personal level.    You know we say “It’s a war out there” ?

No kidding.    

I don’t want to write about the abuse of women. Any abuse especially sexual abuse is both simpler and more complex than it appears to be, hard hard hard to make rules about, because so many aspects of it are about individual perception, because of the many reasons for it, both in the case of the subject and the object, and because of the bandwagon syndrome as in “Oh, that happened to me too.”

I don’t want to write about Facebook or its clones WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram which I regard as the technological equivalent of bubonic plague, carbuncles on the soul.

I don’t want to write about the price of a cashmere sweater (Times 30.10.2017) because most of the cashmere I come across is a poor shadow of the lovely thing it once was.   Perhaps this is a perfect example of why everybody can’t have everything for the mass production of it has impoverished its quality, feel, line, endurance and value in every sense including warmth… but of course we don’t need warmth now because everywhere is centrally heated – so what we need is cashmere because its name means money, but it’s no good if it’s too warm because we can’t wear it. Last days of the Roman Empire, anyone ?

I don’t want to write about HMRC exporting function involving the tax matters of British nationals to a US company (madness) or a former Whitehall IT chief breaking rules designed to keep senior civil servants from benefitting other commerce with insider knowledge (revealing).   Both are horrid examples of “what the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over” – only this ignorant heart does.

I don’t know enough about Spain and the Catalan secession to write about it, though this seems to indicate further fractionalisation of the European dream.

I don’t give a damn about football and thoroughly resent its intrusion into national news.

In the last couple of weeks I have seen longer stays in prison invoked for people who are cruel to animals, people who throw acid, and returning jihadists or Isis sympathisers.   Will somebody please tell me where these elastic walled facilities are, because the prison system is full to overflowing, its staff demoralized and inadequate in number, while taking offenders off the street and into a lockup environment was never more than a short term answer to much ?

I don’t want to read another article about the shortage of housing and the ever extending numbers for the new build.   I do want somebody to explain – certainly in London – why existing property is allowed to stand vacant for years while the young and the poor struggle in B&B or worse ?   Surely – even as an interim measure, because building on any helpful scale will take time – the law could be changed so that a building, commercial or domestic, may only stand for one year and then it reverts at the lowest market price to the local authority, where it is mandatory that it is used for housing, this law having to be reviewed annually so that abuse is minimised ?

I fear platoons of hastily built ugly housing on green belt when it is widely agreed that space and light are increasingly essential to mental wellbeing.

I don’t want the weather forecast sold to me – gloss over today, sell you a better tomorrow, urge you into looking at the week ahead – when we all know the weather systems are less perceptible than they used to be. Are these meteorologists or sellers of snake oil ? I cheered when one of the better practitioners said last week that he could only tell you tomorrow and urged watchers to keep their eyes open because it wasn’t clear, even to him, how things might go from then on. It has come to something when you find the relative honesty in a weather forecast uplifting.

The idea of the contrary* comes from Arthur Penn’s film “Little Big Man”, when certain braves did everything back to front in a First Nations version of examination of the nature of paradox, when films were something to see, enjoy and think about. Old looks more and more inviting.

Linda used to wear, among other scents, Caleche (Hermes) and Mitsouko (Guerlain).

“A perfume organ in Grasse”

The trouble with modern perfumery is that it has discovered that synthetic fixatives – the thing that make the perfume endure – are cheaper than natural substances.   But they have changed the smell of the smells as we remember them.   Mitsouko wafted very faintly of chrysanthemum and I was reminded of it because I have ten great big bronze blooms in the living room. I buy them every year I can afford them (some years I couldn’t), they last and the centre, where the petals grow tightly, is exactly the way the hair grew on the head of the son of a friend. Seth’s hair was a celestial fingerprint.   I cherish my sense of beauty but more than ever recently, because the world’s horrors come unendingly, funnelled through the news coverage, and there is only so much misery a person can digest before it leads to torpor and depression.

Which leads us to an initiative from HM government petitioning the United Nations to refer to “pregnant people” rather than pregnant women in case we offend the truly tiny number of transgendered who can reproduce.   So, let’s get this straight, at a time when women globally are still fighting for the right to choose to have a child or not, equal pay, parity in law, freedom from workplace abuse (dream on baby, dream on – as Tammy Wynette would have said), sexual slavery and domestic violence, and are beaten to death, scarred with acid, broken, (in Vivian Merchant’s life haunting phrase) “just flesh” – we are going to give up being called women.   I always thought woman was a fine thing to want to be and I still do. I have known some splendid women, starting with my mother. I have also known some deeply unpleasant people who happened to be female and no, I wouldn’t want to eat with them. Nobody’s perfect.

The title* derives from a speech given by a former slave, Sojourner Truth, at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851.   I first came across it rather later in my life, my feminist reading being less than complete, and it moved me. In slavery, there may have been gender inspired division of labour among house slaves (women in the kitchen and the dressing room, men in the garden and the drawing room) but beyond that, work was work.   I remember my friend George Vargas speaking proudly about his aunt, “as good as any man” in the olive harvest.   As a cash crop, you wouldn’t risk less than the best in the hard work of collection. I loved his aunt, taller than me, she and her husband watching me talk and asking George something in Greek. “They say you are like no English person they ever met” he explained. I asked him the Greek word for gipsy – tzigane – and said it to them. Shouts of laughter – their side of the family !

I don’t know what men say because I am not a man but among themselves, women may be heard to say “Oh, I sound just like my mother !”   And this can be the cause of anything from mirth to consternation.

At 7.00 or so the other morning, a man came down the road towards me, fine eyes and a bad suit, picking and flicking the contents of his nose into the street. For a moment I was lost for words but when I spoke, I was my mother, down to the inflection. “What do you think you’re doing ?” I demanded. “Your mother would be ashamed of you.” And I continued to stare at him which discomforted him more than anything I might have said. Just for the record – I don’t call this a man. Rather, a tall unpleasant child, thoughtless, uncaring.  And before you say “Oh, well, London … “ It’s a great city, London: it has, as it always had, problems with bacteria.

We used to have discussions about the difference between being female and being feminine and everybody has a personal view which is coloured by home, hormones, life experience, social mores, expectation, function and usage.   On the basis of the foregoing seven pointers, no question: I qualify.

I came home to two envelopes containing identical letters (yes yes -I know, the computer) from my energy company, who have booked an employee to come and read the meter between 12.00 and 4.00 on Friday.   It says “If this time is not convenient, please call us at least 48 hours beforehand on (telephone number) to re-arrange our visit.”   So I rang. We’ll set aside how you work your way through to the alternative that seems to be for you and then – because there is a wait – how to endure the kind of music that makes an MRA scan sound like a delightful option.   And I wait.   Well, it’s Saturday. I can wait.   And wait I do, eventually answered by Keith (not his real name).

Keith was great.   He asked for my account number. I gave it. He asked for my name and address and my date of birth. “Why ?” I said.   Instead of mumbling defensively, he giggled.   “Let me see if I can ask you something else …” he said, and the penny dropped.   “Sorry “ I said “security ?”   He said yes, I told him and he asked ”How can I help you today ?”

“You could change the music for a start” I said. He agreed it was awful.   I told him about the meter reading and said I would like to alter it, I couldn’t be available for when it was booked. I offered the 23,25, 26 October. He said “Can’t you read the meter ?”   I said “Young man, I am an old woman, and we have arranged that my meter, recently replaced, should be read.”     He began to ask about the meter being replaced, found the entry on the screen and countered “But you don’t need to do this.”   I said “The letter, both copies of it, says –“ and I quoted.   “So “I said” I am calling, with lots of time in hand, to rearrange.”   He said again ” But you don’t need to do this.”   I asked why, if that is what the letter tells me to do ?

“Well” he said “it depends on the meter reader.   Usually what happens is, the meter reader arrives and if you’re not there, he puts a card through the door and tries to come back within 24 hours.” “Then” I said “why does the letter ask me to ring this number ?” He said he didn’t know. “Normally (!) what happens” he reiterated “is that the meter reader tries to come back as soon after the missed call as possible, and he leaves a card so you can read your own meter – “   I said I wanted the meter read, particularly after it had just been replaced and if the meter reader usually came back, then this call therefore is a complete waste of time ?   “Well, no” he said, the laugh warming his voice.   “But that’s generally what happen, if he’s a good meter reader.”   I said “Keith, give me a break: can you see me walking up to a man I have never met and asking – are you a good meter reader? “   He said he could see my point. “So what you are advising me to do is to leave it till the meter reader comes, and work it out from there ?” He agreed. I told him that if I had to listen to that ruddy awful music again, I would invoke the protection of my civil rights (he laughed aloud) and when he finished the script with “have a lovely day” he sounded as if he meant it.

I tell you this because it made me laugh and a laugh is good thing in a week of starvation, natural disaster and not one single person who knows the film industry thought to explain to civilians (the rest of us) why women put themselves through the Weinstein mangle. Gifted producers are rare, and often when somebody in the industry says “I’d do anything” they mean just that.    I don’t endorse the way the power structure works but my biggest single insight was that all sorts of companies function the same way as the movies do without as much reward for the unspeakable.