Annalog

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.

I am developing a full scale phobia about the term “anti aging”.    First of all, it brings to mind not dewy skinned eternal youth but the cold glance of so many women, from babes to grannies, who are in The Race – a race against any other who looks better. Listen, I am just as frightened of my always blurry jaw slumping into soft furnishing as anybody else but I am damned if it is the most important thing in my life.

As I walk past very young women in heavy makeup (in this heat ?), I know they are ready for their closeup, the one promised in the virtual reality of their rehearsed existence.   At that age, we all have rehearsed existence but mine depended upon a closeup that didn’t come off on the lapels.   Which takes us to the Palace of Anxiety to which I paid a visit last week.

The trouble with thick dark hair is it isn’t limited to your head and as the hair on my head has gone grey (quite becomingly, I am eternally grateful to say) the hair on the upper lip has stayed dark.   (The last time I read an article on hair removal, I was struck by the desperation and the expenditure).   On the first evening of my arrival in London, staying with a lovely actress, she melted facial wax, draped it over my upper lip, let it set and ripped it neatly away.   Welcome to the world of suffering to be beautiful, relatively speaking.   For the next I don’t know how many years, I bought the wax, locked myself in the bathroom and whimpered.   Then I had a visit to a salon to have it done for me (I thought it might hurt less) where something was grubby and I broke out after depilation.   Horrible.

I used an American cream depilatory till it was made no more. I have had three sessions of excruciating and depressing electrolysis at the hands of a practitioner who was equally obsessed about hair except on the head – yes, anywhere – and money.   She claimed to have treated the Royal Family, heaven help them.   And I tried threading before I went to Paris with two gay friends who fortunately rarely looked at me. I think a tweed upper lip lacks a certain charm.   In between, I found another cream depilatory and stuck to it.   Only I was tempted and so I went to investigate a patch test (to see if you abreact) with laser.

The practitioner was equally likeable and straight forward on the phone and in life. And as in all hired waiting rooms, there were elderly prints and new magazines. And a large television on which played an endless loop of mostly women who had had one thing or the other “done” – the face, the boobs, the whiskers, the neck, the wrinkles here or there – and they all looked exactly the same, clone city.   All the hair was predictably coloured. They wore the same clothes, the same colours, the same makeup, the same jewellery.   The practice asks you to come 15 minutes early to do paper work.   I read the forms and signed nothing because my method of hair removal wasn’t mentioned. I watched the tape and began to laugh.   One does not laugh in the precincts of the clinic, the gaze of the other six women told me.   Thank God I am too old to care. The practitioner came to collect me, we deal well with each other and I went away to think.   The first thing she would do, she told me, is shave my upper lip.   I was so taken aback I didn’t ask how – Wilkinson, electric, cutthroat ? I don’t think my skin would like that.   Staying out of the sunlight ?   At least a fortnight since last use of the cream ? I have not, as they say, gone ahead.   I may on a cold winter’s day when I have found a nice line in nun’s veiling.   But the tape reinforced my wish to grow old with the face God gave me, as gracefully as I can, with a mixture of arrogance, confidence, good genes and a grin.    

This morning I stole up on the day.  Usually I look at the clock but this morning, after the first peaceful sleep for two weeks in spite of the mouse (who is here for a lap of honour), I ignored it.   Habits of work and family die hard.   So you find yourself checking in with the clock – you wish you didn’t but you do – and it signifies something, if only “I shall be late going down the road …”   Nobody else notices of course but you do.

This morning, I did not look at the clock.  I was busy looking for the socks I had mislaid, which led to frantically ruffling through the mental day diary in an attempt to retrace my steps and wondering if this is the beginning of falling apart.  Not so.  I found the socks in what we used to call “a safe place”, tidied away (!) against the arrival of a visitor.   Visitors bring out my latent sense of black marks.   I worry that I am to be found wanting, must try harder.   And I am not alone in this.

When I visit my painter friend – she who spent her girlhood being sneered at in punitive boarding schools for one reason or another, including her unwillingness to conform and her weight – even she will mutter supplicatingly “Sorry it’s such a mess !”  though it always is, as well as clean and kind and interesting and hers.   Why change now ?   She won’t , she can’t – but there is still a residual whisper in the back of her mind which indicates she ought to want to…

And Nola Dogwalker (not her real name) readies herself for her mother’s visits by “throwing the vacuum round” (lovely vision) though she was appalled when I said I had strained something in my back.   “How did you do that ?” she demanded.  “Oh I moved something” I said, “you know, the bed and it was at the wrong angle …”   “You moved the bed ? “  she said incredulously.   I explained, to clean under it and why was she, queen of the thrown hoover, sounding so taken aback ?  “Now listen” she said “I put the hoover round, round (she emphasised) – I don’t move the bed … !”   I explained that I had lost an earring, and when I saw the dust, I was embarrassed and cleaned it up.

“Who is going to see under your bed ?” she demanded.  “I am” I said “and it was horrid.”

But gone, gone are the days when I did everything full tilt and honestly most of the time, I don’t miss them.   I have learned that I can still do most things, albeit somewhat slower.  Number One Son put it unarguably when he said there was no point in my manhandling my way through chores which then disturbed my ageing frame so I had to have recourse to the physio and the painkiller.  Better to do it slower and enjoy it more.   From time to time I even knowingly walk slower.

As you get older, you are of course supposed to take time to smell the roses or the coffee or whatever it is, which isn’t just about slowing down but living in the time you are in instead of ripping through it in psychic blinkers.   However that kind of leisure is usually as recompense for something less mundane than domestic tasks.  Though if asked, I would say that I don’t want a rest from reading and writing and programme making as much as I want it from scrubbing and laundry and ironing.  And I could even make the best of those if I had to do them, so did them as quickly and efficiently as I could, speed being of the essence in putting up with them – though I can’t bear the ironing fast or slow.  I am no good at it.

So this morning I mooched through golden light down the street for green pears and the Sunday paper.   I read and thought and drank coffee, considering whether I might try and write something about the day that I had crept up on , as if it were a big cat and I were a hunter – which I began and the ink in the computer began to pale.   And with a modern gadget, there are endless announcements which again make me fear for housepoints.   It’s just as well I don’t drive.   The peremptory voice of the car telling me to buckle my belt would threaten my stability.

So having bought the cartridge and fitted it,  I’d like a silver star or a mention in despatches please.  The day is still out there, though the light is fading now and I still haven’t looked at the clock.   I don’t think I caught the day, I think it caught me in a comfortable net of happy do nothing.

“Even in dreams – Fair Trade!”

You know where it comes from ie the doctor hits just below your knee with a surgical tool and the reflex jerks the leg out below in a kind of kick. (Please don’t try this at home with a sledge hammer.)   It has come to mean when something plays into what I might call the top of the mind and we respond too fast and often, ill advisedly.   The actor Matt Damon

was quoted as saying he stays away from twitter because he is the sort of person who would respond one way and communicate that, then reflect and regret it – by which time (twitch time?) whatever it is has gone half way round the world.

One day this week I went up the road in the windy dark and as I rounded the corner, I felt I had stepped into a terrifying silent film. I could hardly see the soundless figure, black on black, there were distended eyes in a wrecked face. There was shock – the man didn’t expect me anymore than I expected him – and my feet kept on walking, good old feet. Later that day, residents were leafletted with information about a Proposed Public Space Protection Order in reference to street drinking which is becoming a problem to people living and working in the area. The order gives police the right to confiscate alcohol in the street within the designated area, under the heading of our old friend antisocial behaviour.

I went to respond to the email address to endorse the idea.   And then as I walked back to the kitchen, I thought “ – And then what ? What do the police do with the offenders when they have arrested them ?”   Alcohol services in London and everywhere else are staggering, public money is cut, police services are strained and recalcitrant drinkers will find a way.   But the email address on the printed form was one of two errors and my email was returned.    Arrested kneejerk.   Chastening.

And then I thought further, struck by Mary Dejevsky writing in the Inde about how she had heard Justin Forsyth, head of Save the Children arguing for the UK to admit a further 3,000 unaccompanied refugee children. The plea was cogent and generous, she said but far from persuading her, it made her unsure that anybody could resist. And that was what bothered her.

She went on to spell out how such good intentions could be abused, that parents might abandon their children to save them, and then reappear to claim them later – a legal nightmare and painful for everybody concerned. That the children we imagine would be young , vulnerable and as such, appealing – might not be so amenable. They might already have ideas very far from what we attribute to them. They will be displaced and there will be language problems, the root of more troubles that I can list. She pointed out that when the US made the admittance of unaccompanied minors mandatory, the numbers of those abused, exploited and killed on the way went up too.

And then there is the care these children will need – extra help, extra time, extra support, all of which will cost extra money – from a system staggering under current domestic demand. We don’t do well by many children in need in our own population. And, no matter whose children we are talking about – yours, mine, theirs, refugees – they need homes, care, sometimes special care, education and places to live, time and hope, all on a continuum. And policing in the best sense because the movement of a number of vulnerable children will bring the paedophiles and the abusers, sniffing about and employing all their considerable malign skills to accomplish what they want – a child without attachment, a child who can’t be heard.

It isn’t as simple as yes or no.   It’s a question how can we do it with the least negative impact – the very opposite of a kneejerk.

Ginny (not her real name) left her job and wrote to me “Am I worried about not being employed ? Yes. Am I worried about money ?   Yes.   Am I glad I am out of there ? Hell, yes…” in spite of being fully aware that the accepted wisdom is that you don’t leave a job except to go to another one.

But sometimes travel, mismanagement (usually but not exclusively) above you, the day to day erosion of your digestion, your sleep, your temper, even your skin shows you that this is more than just a warning amber light – it is a stop sign, it’s RED – and while those you live with may need your monetary input, sometimes the money comes too high.

Family budgets, whether for two or more, are rarely based on saving. They are based on earning. And I have real sympathy with this because I can remember having to face that I couldn’t earn any more.   Ever hear of the Beating Friars, men who wandered the country in the Dark Ages, chained to each other and beating themselves often to excess while bemoaning their sin ? Don’t enrol.

Yes, it would be wonderful if we were all practical about money. But money and family, money and feelings, money and self image and learned patterns of behaviour don’t always lead us anywhere we think very much about till we are there.

In the first couple of months of any new year, we long for something to reinvent us, to lift us up, up and away – from the bills, the aftermath of Christmas and New Year, the dark days, the pounds gained, the pounds spent …

The first couple of months of any new year are what the drivers of black ie licensed cabs call “kipper season” – there is not much work about hence modest suppers.   The first couple of months of any new year are the thinnest time for the fashion pages. Clutching the 21st century edition of a crystal ball, fashion writers try to predict trends.   Don’t sneer. From crops grown to material processed, to garments made to garments sold to garments deconstructed for recycling, fashion is one of the biggest industries in the world.   And I look with weary affection (rather them than me) at what experience tells me is nearly always a throwaway – handbags I wouldn’t play with as a six year old, ditsy blouses, colour blocks (come back Piet Mondrian and Yves St.Laurent and show us how to do it, not forgetting that neither of these men had to contend with mass production as it is now), tartan, the Wild West (mock skin, mock fur and fringes, mock turquoise, mock First Nation – nothing new there then) and the Deathless Duel of the Drainpipes ie are skinny jeans over ?

Last week, cynical old cat that I am, I visited more for exercise than purchase a venerable London emporium which has closed or rationalised the departments dealing with kitchen goods and carpets and hiked the price of everything else through the roof where I had the following experience in applied capitalism : a pair of gold earrings, made by a named jeweller for the store nearly 50 years ago – hence three lots of inflation – the store, the brand (ie two lots of brand) and vintage = £5,700.   If the earrings are still there at the end of the sale, I could get them for -gosh – £4,500.

“Money thrown away”

I didn’t make this up. It’s written down. Thank you George Vargas, for teaching me all those years ago that jewellery is only worth what it’s worth to you.

There is a photo feature in one of the colour supplements on the new jeans – all on suspiciously slender Oriental models with an average hip measurement of 32 inches – the most “wow “ of which retails for £430 – that’s right, denim in a different shape, probably harder to pattern in mass production.

Welcome to the new snobbery.   The new snobbery is not whether it suits you, is the latest thing, will give you credit among your peers, will reflect glowingly on the family fortune, is beautiful or even becoming: the new snobbery is this is what you can afford to waste.  Like £20 million allocated to teach Muslim women the language of the country in which they reside. I’d rather save the Margaret Pike Centre : it does quantifiable good and costs less.  

Unless you know somebody personally, their death is in some way symbolic.   You like what they did or the sound of them.  Even if you meet them, you have only an impression to go on.   You like the idea of the world better with them in it and the demise of somebody you admire makes you accept all over again that nobody lives forever.  You have of course an extended not to say second life now, with  all the electric gadgetry, after your death.  Stills of the talented and the beautiful are moved around for ads.  The rest of us just remember.  And whom do we remember and why ?    It’s been quite a year for shedding the specially marked out.

As we bumble around with the current edition of War and Peace, I remember seeing the US version directed by King Vidor, better cast in the minor roles though of course I didn’t understand it, but I think it was one of the best things the actress Anita Ekberg (died 11 January 2015) ever did.  It allowed her to be more than a magnificent bosom.

I bless Carl Djerassi (died 30 January 2015), a brilliant chemist who changed contraception forever, a women’s liberationist in a white coat, the self proclaimed mother of the birth control pill…

I think I probably cheered out loud when I read that Geraldine McEwan (died 30 January 2015) had described acting as “a way in which I could manage the world.”  I met her in a tiny studio in which you could feel her sensitivities, as fine as hairlike antennae, occupying the space between us.

Terry Pratchett (Sir or not) enhanced the world as a writer and stood up for Alzheimers – he passed (as the Americans say) on March 12 2015 and leaves us poorer.

Talking to a woman on a bus introduced me to the wife of Errol Brown, vocal embodiment of Hot Chocolate (died 6 May 2015).  It didn’t matter who we were, we just liked each other and she came to tea bearing champagne !  No wonder he loved her.

There’s a soft spot in my heart forever for Charles Kennedy (died 2 June 2015), former leader of the Liberal Democrats, because he asked and let me answer serious questions in a Radio 4 programme long ago.  And why was that special?  Oh, don’t you know?  Agony aunts don’t think and can’t make sentences so not only did he enhance me, he made an important point: most of us who aren’t asked, do think.

The background of Omar Sharif (died 10 July 2015) is so much more interesting than most of the films he made though he was outstanding in Behold A Pale Horse, where director Fred Zinnemann just let him get on with acting.

Art critic Brian Sewell (died 19 September 2015) presented a film about the pilgrimage of St. James of Compostella which ends traditionally with the pilgrims stripping and going into the sea.  So he did.  Very unhysterical, nicely done.  Several weeks later he was downstairs a flight from me so I called “Mr. Sewell ?”   And we spoke for a few moments in which I told him how I liked this.  Pulled into a BBC pilot a couple of years later with Phil Jupitus, Sewell and another man (token woman again),  I made a successful joke.  Sewell murmured into the microphone “I told you, she’s bright …”  I hope his beloved dogs met him at the Pearly Gates.

I remember Jackie Collins (died 19 September 2015) on the cover of Picturegoer and I was almost unreasonably pleased that she went on to be personally and professionally happy, successful and fulfilled, a happy woman and a happy writer.   Just goes to show that misery isn’t always the spur to creativity.

There was an “aaah !” factor surrounding madam Cynthia Payne (died 15 November 2015).  I never got it.  The only time I met her she talked about an abortion secured a public lavatory with scouring powder.  I must have looked as if I could take it.

But my eyes filled at the death of rugby international Jonah Lomu (died 18 November 2015) whom I met with his manager at BBC Breakfast for all of five minutes and he was splendid.  I am used to big men, father a whopper, both husbands reasonable size and a son to beat the band but there was a benign quality, a gentleness which was very moving.   I didn’t stroke him but I wanted to.   He was only 40, had had trouble with diabetes .  My world is poorer without that presence. 

It’s probably a sign of age to be interested in obituaries. But they are often very well written and you learn about people you have never heard of so death can make life richer, like cosmic compost.