Annalog

There was a Christmas Fair at the Town Hall. Sponsored by a magazine called Selvedge, it filled the old rooms with colour and light, pleasant people selling better than pretty things. And there was a tall and wonderful looking man, never going to see 27 again, with a head of grey curls and a big grin who sells Indian handicrafts and antiques. Across the top of the stall was a long length of fine black cotton embroidered with ribs of red and marmalade, orange and crimson, a woven sunset. “What is it?” I said in awe…   “Either a turban or a sash, 1880s, North West Frontier” he told me.  I looked at him. “Nowadays called Afghanistan, as Mesopotamia is called Iraq – suggesting nothing changed in British foreign policy in the region for a century or more.”  He nodded.  “But then “ he said “ we knew we were fighting for an empire. Right or wrong, we knew what we were fighting for. Now we don’t.   We have run down the services. Do you know how many planes we have ?   We could just about defend Hull.”

Twenty four hours later a man walked down the aisle of a bus, the shape of a man that makes you catch your breath across a room at a party – thick springy hair touched with grey, becoming clothes , long legs, lovely hands and one side of his face looked as if it had been smeared against glass.  He sat down beside me and we exchanged a couple of remarks about the traffic till I said very gently “What happened to your face ?”                                                                                                       “Cancer” he said.                                                                                                                                “I’m so sorry.”                                                                                                                              “Nothing to do “ he said. “It was big, they had to operate. They cut all sorts of stuff and – “ he gestured.   He told me the doctors missed some cells so he had a secondary in his back.   That time he was in hospital and couldn’t walk for two years. I asked him what he did before all this. He was an antiquarian, Egyptian, Roman and Greek art.  I told him about Mr.Chu who taught me the way to buy things was to fall in love, saying “Don’t fall in love ? Don’t buy.”                                   “I ‘m glad I had to sell things to live” he said” otherwise I would never have sold anything.”  “But you haven’t given up.”                                                                         “Never” he said.

And a day after that, in a different part of town a short thickset man with a heavy pack was almost thrown into me as the bus braked and he apologised in an accent I couldn’t recognise, explaining when I asked he came from a small town in Northern Ireland.   Had I been there ?   I said I would never forget going to do some programme for the BBC and the receptionist in Belfast coming round the desk to embrace me. So I hugged her back and then said “What was that for ?”

“For coming to visit us,” she said. “So many people won’t come, we think you have forgotten us.”  He nodded.   “There are things going on in Ireland now that nobody wants to know about.”  I said he must know that there are fashions in everything, medicine as well as hemlines, food as well as media, and right now we’re not thinking about Northern Ireland. He nodded. He was, he told me a Roman Catholic who had been 22 years in the British Army , come out and worked in media, now as a freelance.   “There are still questions to be asked” he said “ and the problem is how to ask them.”

It takes about 60 years before there is a perspective on political and social decisions, how they pan out, the good and bad of them and how they affect us.   Nothing comes out of the ground fully formed. It starts from something much smaller, even if it grows to something very big and very ugly.  So – as these three men taught me – you call it as you see it, you hang on to yourself and you go on asking the questions – and reforming them and asking them again – till you begin to understand.

The backwash of Black Friday (apparently a week’s plasticfest, not a day) – plus roads up everywhere while the Mayor throws his weight into building cycle super highways that cyclists don’t even have to use – means getting anywhere in London after 5.00 am takes hours.   I set out to redeem a lamp from a specialist shop, going against the traffic but it didn’t seem to make any difference, the journey just went on and on. Never mind road rage, I should think bus drivers need tranquillisers.

Coming back, there were two voices behind me in the bus, one younger, one older, both women. And the younger one suddenly said “I can dress a tree perfectly well, thank you !” (It’s a funny phrase, isn’t it – “dress a tree” ? You imagine coaxing branches into sleeves )   Then the older woman said something to which the younger replied “I see, but do you usually take tree decorations with you to somebody else’ s house ? “ Murmur,murmur.   “The decorations in the kitchen will already be up.” Pause. “ No, not the ones you brought last year.”   Murmur.  “Mother, you’re impossible.”

Oh, Happy Christmas.

Leaving aside the endless dream machine of the Christmas advertisements (no thank you M&S, no thank you John Lewis), all sweetness and light, hideous clothes and bottomless piles of unnecessary food, I shall be sending a fan letter to House of Fraser which seems to have had the nice idea of sending itself up with the result that, even though the ad runs repeatedly, you can giggle. It is also shrewdly stylised into unrealism, built round an old rock tune instead of “inspirational music”.

But the gap between the have’s and the have nots – what David Shepherd as Bishop of Liverpool long ago called “two nations” – is very unsettling..   Those who have, have to have more and more and more, while those who have not must just get on with it.   The bridges between the two have been dented by endless marketing and the shame of being poor.    All reason is lost.   Never mind whether you are bright or beautiful – have you got money ?                                                 Because if you have, there are endless ways to spend it.

Money or no money , I have escaped much of this.   I amass various kinds of candles and fir cones but I don’t buy a tree.                                                                               I acquire gifts as I find them through the year, there aren’t many and finding them is a joy: I’ve got several, there is time.  I don’t like Christmas pudding, Christmas cake, stollen (tastes of scented cement) or mince pies but I am a sucker for pannetone.  I am already stockpiling boxes of apricots, dates and figs dipped in plain chocolate – one for me, one for my son and one for everybody else.        By the standards of the day, my greed is quite restrained and I aim to keep it that way.  This year I have been introduced to an easy rose, a quaffable white and a magnum of Prosecco but I have drunk less than for years:   I love it but it doesn’t love me and I tire of not sleeping.

In an expensive Scandinavian shop I found delightful tree decorations made of thick felt in primary colours (for my grand daughter), a silver owl with a small rattle in it (I can’t part with it) and other joys – all under £5. I’ve collected Christmas cards and was given my calendar with a staff discount – how handsome is that !

Now, all I need is stamps and to know that the Post Office will deliver for another year ….

Most of us have two homes, the one we came from and the one we make.

“Squirrel’s drey”

I have a friend whose parents parted shortly after her birth, whose mother felt her father’s family could do better for the child. This displaced her utterly and she says quite matter of factly that not until she came to her present delightfully ramshackle flat in her fifties, did she ever feel at home.  And most of us – apart from long ago memories – have had one place or another we really felt at home.  Of course if you had one that you then lost, you may remember that fondly, or refuse ever to think about it again or, by the time you can contemplate it without getting furious or choked up, discover large bits of it have gone missing, like torn photographs in the brain.  And then you have to start again.  It’s not the roses round the door that matter. It’s what they represent.

I had a broken sash cord and a door that wouldn’t shut so this morning I was visited by Adam who moved the hinges of the door slightly, explaining that with a new door, you don’t want to be taking lumps off it till it settles in through the damp of the first year. And then he restrung the sash window, lifting it out and neatly fixing it anew, while explaining that there is no longer anywhere in London that has handmade finials (the carved bit on the end of the cord, generally an ornament on the end of something) any more.   They are all mass produced and he is thinking of investing in a lathe to start up a small business, cornering the market.

And I thought all over again how deeply I appreciate my flat, quite viscerally.  I have rarely allowed the press into where I live but, some years ago, offered a fee, I admitted a photographer and his assistant (they were fine) and another young woman (perfectly civil) and the deputy editor of a television magazine who asked me, as she collected her coat, ready to go “Do you like to live like this?”  I knew what was coming. “What do you mean?” I said.  “Well, it’s very poor isn’t it?”  she explained.  So I explained that I grew up through the 1950s in what is now called austerity, in the north east of England and that my aesthetic is personal: I like wooden floors, uncurtained windows (I have heavy wooden shutters at the front and am not overlooked at the back), everything useful and comfortable, decorated in the main by treasured ornaments and many books.  And when she was gone, I went round stroking the walls and begging the house not to be offended by the silly woman.

Recently I had a friend to supper and we sat over coffee in the living room, and she said  “I love this room.” And I can’t pretend. “I love it too” I said. I remember coming here, the first place I ever bought alone, finding my feet, making friends with the proportions, knowing that it was better to assemble my home slowly because I had no spare cash to make mistakes with.   How excited I was to get a hearth rug. I remember my son (then living with me ) opening his eyes to the big Edwardian club chair – “That looks as if it’s been there all the time “ he said.

A friend from long ago can’t stay away from Africa.   He was born in Cairo and brought up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and he will be drawn back, to the light and the sun, the space and the smell of the dried grass. He complains about what has become of it but he will always want to go back. The Kandinsky Kid (she’s a painter) wants to go to St. Petersburg and see the art in the Hermitage.   People list the places they have been to that you have not visited – Vienna, Rome – and suggest that you’ve missed something.   But I am no longer sure.

The other day I turned up the name of an Indian city which handles more cut diamonds than anywhere else in the world – and other jewels.   “A very Indian city” – and I thought I might – And then I looked round at what I have, to my taste, valued and cherished and easy on my eye.  And I felt very lucky, fortunate indeed.   I have a home and though I will have to go away from it again in order to appreciate it, for the time being I can admit “old rocking chair got me”.

And the trap is comfortable.

On Saturday I received an email from my local policeman, the second paragraph of which reads

“The Metropolitan Police Service has put in place a coordinated response to the shocking events in Paris overnight.  We are doing all we can to reassure the public and to keep our local communities safe from harm.  Please assist us in reporting anything you feel may be suspicious.  London remains one of the world’s safest cities and we will stand together with you to keep it that way.”

 Was it a gesture ?   Yes.   But an important one because it’s about contact and about the fact that being taken care of isn’t a one way street.

 I feel a great and terrible recognition about the violence in Paris, along the lines of “here we go again.”  I mean no disrespect, only that as you get older, you learn that “peace” is a relative term.  I kept a world map from an article I read in the last six months which listed here a war, there a war – but unless you or yours are affected by it, you push thinking about it away.  It’s horrible and you regret it, add your name to the petition, sign over some money.  It is just not real to us.

 But Paris is just over there, inescapably real, only a few hours away by train.  It has streets and shops and bars and concert venues, all recognisable to us.  We can relate to it and if this horror can happen to them it can happen to us.The Daesh has pushed the idea of universal danger back under our noses.Sudden unreasonable violent death disturbs us all.

 There will always be those who think about things and those who’d rather not.There will always be people who prefer to have ideas reduced to “Jack and Jill went up the hill” rather than have to assess the real complexities and painful build up necessary to produce a situation in which planning, positioning, transport, papers and weapons are focussed on several civilian targets simultaneously.    In round figures nearly 150 people died and nearly 100 are in hospital, media repeatedly stressing that many are seriously injured.  Any totalitarianism stipulates that you are with us or against us and if you are against us, you are dispensable.  The Paris attacks did not come out of a clear blue sky.

 The British Prime Minister has waved through a sizeable increase in training personnel, divided between GCHQ (the listening station), MI5 and MI6.  But the police have just been landed with enormous cuts.  There is no point in running those resources down beyond a certain point because they relate to the rest of us.   And they advertise weak links in the chain, very convenient to the “have bombs, will travel” attitude that defines the jihadists.  Have you noticed how often the young who have names in the frame already have minor criminal records ?

 Of course as soon as the police ask for help, they will have to deal with a lot of fear.   For every person who picks up on something useful, there will be six who want to be reassured they haven’t seen anything really.   It’s like mentioning cancer on the radio when most of the people who ring in haven’t got it, they just worry that they might have it and fear is very time consuming.  But I still rate my local policeman for sending it and his sergeant who 24 hours later sent a longer message including links to the texts of presentations by the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner responsible for Counter Terrorism.    Sure, it’s public relations. I am all for relating to the public.

Rather than taking what we have for granted,  we need to value it anew – all those people who signed up to “Not In My Name”,  the people in Paris who opened their doors to strangers stuck for a place to stay in the chaos,  those who said “We are young, educated and we don’t agree – that’s why they can’t stand us”, our choices, our freedoms.   When terrible things happen, it is little things that take us back into the world of our fellows – not that we agree with them about everything but we have more in common with them than with those who just want to shoot us like fish in a barrel.  And in mid November, a white anemone bloomed in my garden – the right colour for both mourning and peace.

Little things mean a lot.

Shall I start to try and write before I get the papers ?

I woke at 6.00 and thought – don’t read, it will only clutter whatever passes for your mind. The research demonstrating that children are slowed in their first lesson s if they have been watching tv before they go to school didn’t surprise me – I wonder if their brains are in the process of adaptation to the omnipresence of the phone   … my brain has normal brakes, – whoops, normal ?   A word to be used with extraordinary care.   Normal tissue, yes. Normal disease path, yes. Normal behaviour – what is normal for you .   Normal for me is if I start to think about something else before I think about this, I feel as if I have to clear a muzzy screen.   A week without the computer … let’s do this very quietly, less for it than for me. The most sophisticated thing produces very primitive response.

When I switched on the computer at 7.30 on the morning of Monday 2 November, I sent some emails and it switched itself off. It hadn’t done that before. I switched it on again and smoke billowed from the machine.   I switched everything off, noticed the acrid smell and opened the window – hardly a hardship, it’s clammily mild.   And then I call the computer wrangler (CW).

I had written the copy but I couldn’t send pictures.   I love pictures and clearly so do you because the pickup this week was much lower, like a slap in the face with a wet sock.   Oh well.

And what was it like, a week without a computer ? Suspended. I don’t get off on spending money if I don’t have to – but I had no option. The CW and I had discussed replacing the tired old computer before and delayed it a bit longer with a new keyboard and screen but this was unarguable. Then there was the small question of what could be saved.   I tried not to think about it.

I cleaned the silver which means I cleaned the three things that are silver (jam spoon, teaspoons, small container) and washed the rest of the cutlery box.   I engaged with the beeswax the master carpenter who fitted the wood top in my kitchen assured me was the best – it may yet be. I read when I could, that is to say, in sections because the book I was reading was formidable.

CW and I bought the machine and the essentials. Then the printer wasn’t compatible.   We located that and I went back to buy it.   And yesterday he installed that, Windows 10 and showed me the basics.

I read history at 4.00 am when I can’t sleep. History is always best for my unquiet mind.   I can’t do anything about it, it’s done. Though I am still not convinced by the notion that the medieval Thames was less conducive to trade than the Seine.

I kept looking at the papers and the tv news and searching for something to strike a spark to the dry wood of my mind.   Russia ? Athletics ? Olympics ? Coe?? The PM doing a buck and wing over the EU ?   I was interested that Centre Parks had commissioned a small survey which showed that mobile phones and other devices lower happiness and lead to fewer happy memories of shared time with families and friends.   I was delighted that Oklahoma City, one of America’s most overweight, had declared war on fat, involved the fast food companies (with some success), built new exercise and fresh air type facilities including a white water course to Olympic standard (and imported a Scottish Olympian to run it).   These are not vain promises, they’ve been working at this for five or six years and have made some headway, everybody from the mayor on down.

However it does seem that during a week in suspension, the world goes on spinning and unless there is something that grabs your attention, the impression you form is that everybody else feels much the same.

I am immensely grateful to the friends who cheered me on (only they know what a terrible state I get into): to the CW, a man of practical help and admirable manner: for having had enough money to pay for this instead of just put it on a card and pray – though I would have done if I had had to: but really my thoughts this week are with a book I never expected to read but I was given and was transfixed by, by a story I didn’t know, written in a way I couldn’t imagine. I may never make it to see this that or the other work of art which suggests they have not spoken to me as viscerally as this book did. God bless the paperback, I have a work of art in my home : The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan.

Shhhh … I don’t want to offend the computer.

Tobacco is a killer
If it were grown and cured organically, used occasionally, it might be ok.
But (like meat) once it was produced industrially, marketed and targeted on to the neuroses that blossomed and thrived as the modern world developed (say, for the last five hundred years) its effects grew ever more toxic.
Somewhere I turned up the grim statistic that tobacco in all its variants had killed
more people in the US than everything else put together.
Remember The Insider (1999, directed by Michael Mann) about a tobacco company whistleblower, Russell Crowe and fellow actors at their best?
A very good film but not a pretty story.

My father smoked all his life.   He probably began before he joined the army but once there, he smoked.   And so did almost everybody else.  When he had his first heart attack forty years later, he was told to stop and he couldn’t.  He controlled it to never more than one cigarette an hour, he smoked the mildest brand he could tolerate and those with what he called “spats” on – but he couldn’t stop.

My mother however was quite different.
There was a silver cigarette box, lined with cedar or sandalwood, perhaps a long ago wedding present.   And once or twice a year, my father brought my mother (whether on the off chance or as a result of some discussion, I don’t know) either Passing Cloud – Turkish cigarettes first available in the 1870s, oval in a pink trimmed box – or Balkan Sobranie, black with gold tips.   They were decanted into the cigarette box and one quiet evening, often towards Christmas though I do remember one late summer evening –  my mother would smoke most of a cigarette.
I don’t remember her ever having more than most of one.
And enjoying it.

Through the rest of the year, Pop would smoke some of them and the remainder would be ditched when they staled.
You could say this was a waste of money but it had the air of a private ceremony and here we are 50 or 60 years later and I remember all the details.

Leaving aside the addictive nature of nicotine and the heaven knows what with which tobacco is now doctored (one of the nastiest chapters of the tobacco trade is the cold blooded doping of tobacco to create new addicts and thus new markets – get ‘em at seven, keep ‘em till heaven), there is a big psychological piece to smoking.
Is it reward or coping strategy?  Oral gratification or a pacifier for adults?

I was never a convinced smoker.  I tried but then I tried everything to look sophisticated.  I only liked two or three brands and I didn’t inhale much.  So when I shared a studio with a man who knew a lot about radio (Brian Hayes) but hated smoking, I stopped.   I think I have smoked half a dozen cigarettes in the last 40 years.

I have one great friend who smokes.  She always has and she always will.  So does her husband.   But she works at life with few days off.
She is unstintingly generous of herself, takes care of all sorts of friends and family, much of it over distance, whether in matters of health, the law or bathroom fittings.
She is if you will the “go to” person for many, including me.   She once lit up and asked rhetorically “I really should stop shouldn’t I?” to which I replied that if she could do what she does on cigarettes and tea, I thought she was doing remarkably well.

And several years ago it was with her I shared a cigarette.  Which was my last until I mentioned a certain longing for a Gauloise to a girlfriend who arrived for supper, unpacked her handbag and explained she couldn’t get French cigarettes, this was the best she could do and handed me Balkan Sobranie and a trip down memory lane.
We had one each last week.   My chest held up, the sky didn’t fall and I loved it.
Just the one.

Sorry there are no pictures this week because Anna’s computer decided to have a smoke itself!

The ties of friendship between Pam and me are reinforced by worldclass worriting.
She whose domain is dominated by possession – she never stays anywhere else if she can avoid it – has rented the house to a film company and is currently both appalled and impressed by the amount of work the location team are putting in, and the number of things that have had to be moved or changed.
She hasn’t slept for weeks.   
Before this, she worried it wasn’t going to happen, that there was no work, that the lighting in the street had been changed and that BT really did stand for Big Tit (meaning foolish and ineffectual  – check historical slang) and the computer was going to die.
You will be pleased to know that we laugh at how much we worry – I am up there with her with a slightly different list of worries – but last night we both laughed out loud when she remarked “Do you know, I think I have worried myself into serenity?”

Hah!
Whatever else I am losing with age, nervous anticipation is increasing.

Sometimes as I lope through the darkened streets – before taking my life in my hands to cross the road already glutted with cars and killers on wheels (my experience of bikes is not good) I wonder why I do this every morning?
And I know – it’s to move my back.
And because I still enjoy newspapers – until there is a run of stuff so ugly and unkind that I wonder – do I need to spend this money?
Yes.  Yes.  For the exercise, for the crosswords and this week (23.10.15) for Peter Brookes’ cartoon in The Times (Page 31) which shows the PM, the Chancellor, Prince Phillip and HM all bending to form the steps into the aircraft, up which mount the grinning Chinese premier and his wife.
Cartoonists are clever and Mr. Brookes is among the finest.

So why, why a package of deals (including a nuclear plant) worth an estimated $40 billion to get into bed with China – when better heads than mine have been talking about the manufacturing slowdown in China, the dissident movement, the lack of accountability, the instability?   A country which is singularly unpleasant to its own.
But the deals are done.  Not a darned thing I can do about it.   And what that highlights is neurotic anticipation – mine.

Anticipation as in looking forward, say, to Christmas, is one thing.
What we look forward to in that context is reinforced by what went before.  But reading the future is not given to humans except the clairvoyant few.

Maybe this is the Chancellor at his most farsighted, ushering in improved if not full employment – bearing in mind that the impossible takes a bit longer.
Or maybe this is a gamble, a gamble with lives that don’t matter a damn to a man with private money.   He can leave if he doesn’t like what happens.   The rest of us will be stuck with it, unexplained.

As I have got older, anticipation has become less about what might be good and more about what might go wrong.    I can worry myself into a black hole over a train journey I have never taken, over being too much of this and too little of that, on whether I can make that dish I have never made, and over what I will do if it doesn’t work.

There are still two or three memories which cause me to grimace with pain as I lie there not sleeping.   But I don’t do a lot of repining.
Done’s done and the milk is spilt.  Let’s hope there is a cat around to lick it up.
I worry about what might be.
I did this before to a degree but as I have become older and more powerless,
I have learned only one thing about what might be: it might, and we shall just have to get on with it.
Whatever is coming will come, I will deal with it as Pam is dealing with the location disruption – you gotta? you gotta.  Get on with it.
Dealing with it – cooking the dish, making the train journey, surviving a future you can not imagine is easier than worrying about what might be.
I say “Into Thy Hands”, imagine the light on the sea in Crete and fall asleep.  Eventually.

…  as in “the elephant in the room”.

We used to ask “And how do you know there is an elephant in the room ?” to which the answer was “Because you can smell the peanuts on his breath.”
(Are elephants ever allergic to peanuts ?)
Leaving aside the issue of peanuts, there are several elephants taking up psychic space at the moment.

84 British bishops signed a letter to the government suggesting that the number of refugees offered a place in Britain should be increased from 20 to 50 thousand.
And yes, I am just a viewer watching what will be necessarily abbreviated news coverage but not once did I hear a word of sympathy for the number of people
(and it’s about the same number) who are going to lose everything, whether directly or by extension, when Redcar and Scunthorpe respectively close or reduce their steelmaking.

You can’t make a market where there isn’t one, I know that.  For years, cheaper imports have undermined the British steel industry, even in its reduced state, and this is the crunch.  So we may well see a whole chunk of the north east displaced by political apathy.  Millions of pounds of public money won’t answer.  When did forethought go out of fashion ?  What are MPs paid for if not to think ?

The north east was a wild place under Henry VIII and several hundred years later, it is still dominated by its own intransigence and introspection, rarely visited by major political figures, occasionally producing remarkable athletes or musicians or film makers – the ones that got away and so were entitled to a ticket to bring them home for a visit.  But as the musician Alan Price told me years ago “If you stay, they say you didn’t really make it and if you leave, they say you betrayed them.”

They are not easy people to help but they deserve at least public consideration alongside of every other needy person.  Suffering know no boundaries, weights or  measures – it just is –  it isn’t less because it is on the doorstep.

There are lots of real elephants in jumbo corner who are being shot and poisoned at some ungodly rate a day because of the buying power of the shooter and probably because of the increasing hold the Chinese have on Africa – China being the greatest consumer of animal parts for traditional medicine and ivory for carving – but as they are our trading partners, this has joined the list of what is not to be mentioned – human rights, animal rights, environmental pollution to name but three.

We once expanded our empire and now it’s their turn and as we once did, so they are now doing, wading through the bodies of the beautiful great mammals, leaving behind wreckage, trauma (to the young) and horribly frequent death.
Once Africa could recover from this. Can it again ?
More peanut breath re the National Health Service.   However naïve I am, I can’t see the BMA “stirring up its members” against the new contract proposed to junior doctors.   The junior doctors got all fired up without any help.  Would you buy a used car from Health Minister Jeremy Hunt ?  And nobody  – left right or centre – has been prepared to deal with the incredible cost of agency nursing on which it appears the safety of many wards depends.

While sugar coated peanuts have the German Chancellor – hitherto Europe’s reliable sensible clergyman’s daughter – shaking hands with the Turkish  President, offering to enable a pass into the European Community, just as stability in his country begins to slip – beating up on the Kurds again while they have offered rare coherent military opposition to the Daesh (Isis is the name of a British river – I’d like to reclaim it.)
Oh peanuts peanuts peanuts.

These are the big issues we can’t keep sliding past and hoping they won’t come.
They have come, they are upon us  and now we have to deal with them.
I wonder who is going to do that ?

Not the tea cup  – I mean bra size.
The bra is a sort of temporary restructuring agent which appears, much further back in history than I had expected, when a society begins to make money and projects some of its images of perfectibility on to its women.

I remember longing for my first bra a sign of growing up.  Then, as I recall, cup sizes were Bs and Cs: anything bigger was the subject of bated breath or nursing mothers.
Today bra cup sizes are increasing like giant vegetables.
This is not to be insensitive to women with heavy bosoms, a difficult figure to dress since the declining fashion for stays or corsets in the period following WWI.
There were bras before that – wonderful moody stories about pretty showgirls with two silk handkerchiefs (!) and indeed, however unreliable Wikipedia might be, the entry on bras is provoking in terms of time line and geography.

And there will always be women who don’t wear bras either because of the beauty of their bosom or sheer disinterest because increasingly the bra is marketed, either to fit what size you think you are, or what size they say you are – and they want to sell more bras.

“does this mean double breasted?”

I have only been fitted for bras twice, once in my forties and again, last week.
Marks and Spencer claims to sell a bra every few minutes but I confess I am not an M&S girl.   An unapologetic snob in this (as in gloves and soap), the first  French underwear I had came from a shop called Elegante, was made of flower printed black cotton.  The bra was built into a minislip which fitted like a dream and there were matching pants.
It wore well and was worth every penny I paid for it.
Then, there were several big shops specialising what we might call “underpinnings.”
Now, almost all of them have gone.

I was earning when I was first fitted for a bra so I went to Rigby and Peller, reasoning that if it’s good enough for Her Majesty, it’s good enough for me.   The wonderful Marie watched me climb into what I thought I wanted, regarded me frowningly in the mirror, muttered “Just a minute” and whisked away.
She returned with two other bras which didn’t look terribly different and suggested I tried one.  I did.   The improvement was visible.   “What have you done?” I asked.
“Two cup sizes bigger, one size down in circumference.”
I went in an undistinguished 36B and emerged a glowing 34 DD.

“Marilyn Monroe’s bra”

That afternoon I told a very elegant Iranian acquaintance – she said I looked radiant, what had happened? – all about it and she was thrilled.
“My mother is sending me 32 FF from Paris “ she said, “ do you think they can help me?”
I did.  They did.  She told me so next time we met.

But times change, bodies change and the industrialisation of manufacture involving thousands of units makes sales imperative.

The woman who fitted me in Peter Jones last week was tactful and patient.   And as I have said before, I have been conditioned into trusting the John Lewis Partnership over many years.
However I know that as the years have gone forward, my muscles are the same age as me or older and a few pounds have gone on. (And JL isn’t the same either.)
The evidence of my eyes suggested that the shape was good though
“c‘est un vrai balcon” (veritably, a balcony) – or as my father would have said mischievously “With all that before you, you’ll never drown!”
But 32 FF!

This is based, explained the saleswoman helpfully, on using the closest set of hooks for 4 months, second set for 4 months, last set for 4 months.   We did not discuss what I call the fried egg syndrome (ie spread) that had clearly taken place to get me from DD to FF – and who cares what size the labels say if it looks all right – but I did wonder how we went from a more comfortable (say) 35 inches round me to 32?
I was tempted to say “in your dreams” but apparently it’s to do with the elastic, and a sense of constraint that made me want to giggle.
They do say that when a woman is dressed to kill, her first victims are always her feet. I am consoled by the thought that a tight bra is less miserable than tight shoes and less compulsory in the wearing.

Thirty five years ago, I sat in a Salvation Army Citadel to shoot the last of a series of six programmes about programmes about faith and belief and how those ideas applied to the agony column.   And an old man taught me a wonderful lesson.
“Faith is a bridge of glass” he said.  “You don’t know it’s there till you put your foot on it.”
Never mind what you call him, for me, the Presence is there.
An American friend used to refer to him as The Man Upstairs.
The gender of the address is less important than the respect – I know radical
feminists who refer to the Goddess.  It is another face of the same thing.
Atheists, leave now.

From time to time, any of us may have a bad day. It used to be called being blue but the blue has darkened.
For some, depression is a major part of a personality, a condition or an illness.
But I am talking about the days when, for any of a variety of reasons, any or all of us might feel pulled down.
Sometimes we have an explanation for this, sometimes we don’t.  The air of our troubled world is fraught with conflict, smoke, illegal emissions, the endless hum of electricity and duplicity.   The one you love doesn’t call back.   Your child is in trouble, someone is unwell, things you thought would run smoothly don’t…
Happy (or at least happier) are those who can ignore what’s going on, work their way round the impediment.
I am not one of them.  “Don’t think about it” doesn’t work for me.

Is the glass half empty or half full?   It doesn’t matter. It’s the same glass.
Life is awful and wonderful usually within seconds of each other and often puzzlingly.
There must be a logic but it isn’t a human one.

“I never thought of you as a Christian” somebody remarked in affronted tones.
I am not.
“But are you Jewish?”  Through my antecedents.  Reading yiddishkeit (of Jewish matters) has consoled me for the sense of dislocation I often felt.
I think God is a good and powerful monosyllable, even if it’s unfashionable.

At my secondary school, we sang a hymn at morning assembly.  (TV
programmes on singing together reiterate the sense of community it offers).  Somebody read aloud a short extract from a thoughtful book (including the Bible), the headmistress made her announcements, different prayers were offered from time to time, concluding with the Lord’s Prayer.   But there were only three Jewish girls in that white generally Christian school.
Nowadays in major cities we have children of umpteen nationalities all piled in together, learning some form of English as the common language but with the constant presence of other tongues, other ways, other beliefs.

If there was ever a time for respectful inclusion, it’s now.  You believe what you believe, I believe what I believe – the form of belief is a human invention.
The Presence is what unites us.
But we have sectionalised and broken away into a kind of stamped foot specialism, ie “my belief is better than yours” and with such good intentions.
We intended to honour and to make allowances for difference, but the difference has splintered into something much more sinister, encouraged by all those languages, many or most of which are only spoken by their natives and their children.

I had a really bad morning recently and looking awful, feeling awful, I was cheered to find something I really wanted in the charity book shop where I heard a young woman’s voice bemoaning the facial work in which the singer Cher had invested.
(What follows isn’t as far fetched as it sounds, Cher and I are of an age.)   And she
segued out of that into examining my skin – which was right next to her, saying kind enthusiastic things about that grey skin I had brought down the road, trying not to think about, bemoaning the lack of a corduroy veil.
God she was good.
And so is God.