Annalog

Time is strange, very fast and very slow, a perfect example of the law of paradox.
Time flies when you are having fun, drags when you are bored or scared, where you have entered another’s time scale and lost the minute’s metronome.
There’s a card that says “If you want to be happy for an hour, get drunk.
For a while longer, fall in love.
But if you want to be happy forever, plant a garden.”

As the holder of the International Award of the Purple (as opposed to Green) Fingers, I am not a born or even born again gardener.
But housewifery extends to gardens – care for living things to see if they will flourish.
Like the shrub I stole from dying outside a neighbour’s five years ago, outraged that they didn’t think to water it.
Why would you torture a plant like that, any more than any other living being?

I brought it home under cover of dark and nursed it first in its pot, then in the garden, cutting off with the care of a child’s first hair cut every bit of brown and dead I could see.  I threw plant food at it, watered it and without knowing waited. (Learning to wait and when to stop waiting is one of life’s greatest lessons.)   Earlier this year I moved it into a big pot where it thrived and this morning, as I pruned it, I heard myself say “You’re beautiful” as I used to say to the white rose that contained the ashes of my beloved big white bullterrier Spike.   Stroking those leaves was the nearest I could get to his long remembered ears.

At the other end of the garden – at the other end of the garden, don’t get excited, all of 20 feet – is Honorine Joubert, a Japanese anemone that I had also moved, this time from a pot into the garden where I hovered over her like an anxious mother.
Honorine is the only plant variety whose name has stuck with me, probably because it’s French instead of Latin, and wonderfully apt for a feathery white bloom with a great sense of drama.
And I talk to Honorine too who had a prolonged Gallic sulk when I moved her and I had to go through that phase that sentimental gardeners will recognise where she might live but then again she might die and it was out my hands and I had to be patient.
I count her belated but honoured blossoms like a miser (eleven this morning, after the rain).

This morning time is on hold.
Today I shall be on a stage in front of somebody for the first time in ages, and like lots of other things, when you are in the habit, you worry but then you get on.   When you break the habit or it is broken for you, the worry increases exponentially.  I have sympathy all over again for experienced actors who find stage fright growing not shrinking as they get older.
It isn’t that you haven’t got a skill set, it is that your access to it is blurred by pauses.
In my case, long pauses.

Radio is fine because nobody can see me sweat and as long as the voice holds up
(so far so good) nobody knows how fear crawls into my hair and trickles down my back.
Public appearance is always tricky – look at the number of clangers dropped at any awards show and those people have every kind of assistance at their disposal.

So you are dependent on time, on how to spend it while you wait and when to stop waiting: how to fill the time while you do wait, keeping focus without over rehearsing and all of that.

And I shall be going through it all over again in two weeks’ time, no easier but just as joyfully, when the photographer Sukey Parnell shows a film she made about women and age at the London College of Fashion, sponsored by The Forum for Fashion Design and Visual Art Practice.   Apart from seeing my face however briefly on a big screen, I may find somebody to explain to me what a “hub” is?   I can only think of wheels.

So dear screen, for once you have rescued me from the drag of time on my nervous hands.
This too shall pass.

Years ago I had a boyfriend who was a medical student (the charm of the devil and a major alcohol problem ) who used to refer to letting things happen as “sponting” as in spontaneous.
As I watched my German neighbour hit his bike before seven and said hello to the marine engineer (female) whose accent I still haven’t enquired into, I reflected that sponting is well on the way to being a casualty of modern life.
Unless you mark out time for it and the conditions are right, we live extraordinarily prescriptive lives – this then, that there, no much time to let things be.
Regular bulletins bemoan how children’s lives are being overly organised – distinct lack of spont.
And a friend with a beloved very elderly mother whose deafness limits every interaction remarked sadly “It’s the end of any kind of spontaneity”.
Saying things five times to someone whose wit and incision was a benchmark for your life is so sad.
We may be near manned space flight to Mars but have still not come up with a hearing aid that doesn’t just replace 65 layers of muffling membranes with 65 layers of the same membranes rustling loudly.
Try asking hearing aid users why they don’t use them.

Being spontaneous doesn’t mean you have to be a fool and wade in the fountain.
It might just mean that you do things in a different order, that you commit to time
in a different way.
After the new doors had been fitted to my flat and the painting was done, the heavy furniture was all moved so I spent the better part of two days happily vacuuming and sweeping and washing and drying (the sun was still reliably with us).  
Getting things clean was lovely but doing it because it was there to be done – being spontaneous about it – was even more of a delight.

Beyond discovering spontaneity, it has to be admitted and sustained.
You make a change.  It may have been coming for a long time but you acknowledge it.   And then (as it were) you have to flesh out the new direction.
Or the change is forced on you and you have to face it, which takes you elsewhere than you have been before, psychologically or geographically, in time, in view.

Taking contraception as a given – though funding to Planned Parenthood is under major threat in the US – being attracted to somebody was a matter of spontaneity.
But the weekend paper was stuffed  (you should pardon the expression) with pages of women writing about orgasm and more pages in the colour magazine about the Old Sexy and the New Sexy – how you play it.  But I didn’t.   I never set out to be sexy, old or new in my life – I lie – once – and the basque may have excited him but it reminded me of being girt in hedgehog.
At completely the other end of the sartorial spectrum, I have a fond memory of sitting opposite the great love of my life in boots, wool tights, tweed skirt and heavy sweater a la Elle (then only in French) melting with lust and he reciprocated.  
Do you really think that sexual spontaneity has much to do with clothes except as a kind of private joke?

Doesn’t that kind of self-consciousness threaten so many important intangibles – beauty, attraction, the moment (otherwise characterised as the encounter)  – which enrich life even if only in passing ?

I only met James Gleick once but I feel proprietorial when I see a pile of his books, now deservedly better known about than when I had a radio programme.
I feel the same about the success of Vincent Deary’s “How We Are” (Penguin £9.99) – |I haven’t read it yet but he was my guest more than once on a radio station that no longer exists.
And on Thursday of this week I shall be sitting on a platform with two professional actors reading poems by Di Sherlock, from the self published cycle Come into the Garden with which she made sense of the end of her parents and her home (link to http://omnibus-clapham.org/event/come-into-the-garden), Di whom I met on  St. Pancras station when I walked over and complimented her on garnet earrings, old gold sweater, grey trouser suit and Titian hair.
Spontaneously.

I really began to grow up (late but seriously) at the hands of the retired health visitor who took care of my son when I was working.  She was salaried but she was in effect chief cook and bottle washer, fallback position and my son’s first and most effective granny – my mother was too old to be actively interested and my ex husband’s mother and he were estranged.
God bless Dot.

Dot taught me to shop, built on my domestic skills and though her style was a million miles from mine, managed that eloquent balancing trick where the child was never confused between her version of things and that of his parents. (She had unique gifts with children.)
And Dot put the John Lewis Partnership up there, with the Trinity (she was a Baptist), Wales and homeopathy.
Sadly though, times change.  

Walking up Kings Road the other day, somebody drove past making a testosterone enhancing row in a fast car and the Chelsea Pensioner beside me and I exchanged speaking glances.
“Horrible noise” I said and he agreed, going on to tell me that you could have engines tuned to make noise like that and he had to suffer one which went up and down the road outside his window in the small hours.
I mentioned a man I had heard giving a guided tour with such an ugly voice that I wanted to stop him.  We agreed the ears become more sensitive as you get older.  And changes are not always for the better.
He then indicated, with his elbow – “Like them!”  He could only mean Waitrose, that’s where we were both going.
“Sharp marketing?” I suggested.  “Not ‘arf” he agreed.
Did I ever think to say or hear this said of JLs, said by a Chelsea Pensioner?
No I didn’t.   Times change.
In the cupboard under the stairs at home were stacked the magazines my parents and I couldn’t bear to throw away.  I could pass on comics but not Hollywood and Pa hung on to World Wild Life and the National Geographic, the first publications to tell me about “out there”.
And only last year I bought a print by Thomas J. Abercrombie from the National Geographic shop (now closed), who endorsed and commissioned his work.
Now I learn that the bulk (73 per cent) of the National Geographic is to be sold to Fox News, their partners since 1996 in the cable tv station bearing their name.   So the suits will tell us that this is the logical next step, nothing to worry about – but the rest of us will feel a familiar sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach.
It is formally offered that “Murdoch will invest enormously in the research and scientific commitment of the National Geographic. “
There will be some complicated tax advantages no doubt.  You don’t get to be a billionaire if you’re not good at money.
But how long before the controlling interest and the content clash?

A few hundred meters from where I live is a Grade II* Listed park intended for the peace and enjoyment of those who do not have a garden of their own.  People jog there, walk dogs, take the children to look at the little zoo and have a picnic.
As I thought the National Geographic would go on forever, so did the people who use the park: we thought Grade II* Listed would protect you from anything.

Until along came a man with money who wanted to put on a racing event in the park and as the cars are electric, this could be promoted as a “green” event.
The council was pressed by City Hall.
But to convert the park, it had to be closed, the residents couldn’t use it for weeks.
A racing circuit had to be built (and it will have to be taken down again).  There were  hundreds of lorry trips with attendant diesel and dust.
The current council magazine boasts of the Green flag for the park, a “cherished” marker awarded by Keep Britain Tidy, but last night the council were considering the matter.
I wish they’d done that before.
Sometimes a change is not as good as a rest.*

A story is offered to you one way, for example: Her Majesty’s long reign and sense of duty featured in a story about how every penny spent on her reign has been a good investment.
But within 24 hours, there is a cartoon in the same paper showing Jeremy Corbyn waving refugees into the many rooms of Buckingham Palace while the onlooking monarch comments (like Queen Victoria) that she is “not amused.”

Well did she do a good job or didn’t she and if she did, can’t we let her get on with it, the way she has for 60 odd years, with remarkable clarity of thought and consistency of action?

Recently the British Prime Minister – perhaps conscious of his government’s failure to deliver on its own policy of restricting immigration – referred to would be incomers unfavourably.
A week later, all change, refugees welcome.
Heaven knows they need all the help they can get but may I respectfully ask who are we taking in and why?

It is spurious to choose one “worst” above another.
But being a refugee is the destruction of home.
War is a horribly messy business and the fallout affects more people and takes longer to play out, resolve and clear up than is imagined.
Peace is always a relative term and as long as the fight was “over there” and out of your corner of the world, you might read about it but distance yourself from it.
Now we have wars ongoing simultaneously and all over the place.
So not surprisingly there are many people who can’t stay where they were born, they can’t eat or get clean water.   Sewage systems are bombed to destruction, disease follows.   There is a climate change implication.
And it is unsafe – is it ever!

You and yours leave.  Primarily you want to be able to catch your breath, for your children to play in the street and not die or be maimed, to be able to fill your dad’s prescription.
Ultimately wherever you settle has to debate where you will live, what you will live on, school places for your children, medical treatment for your sick.

As that exodus grows, it may sweep along with it anybody with enough energy to make the journey.
In a time when people are running for their lives it is spurious to theorise
about reasons for migration.   But there is no discussion of the system by which people are admitted to other countries, under what circumstances they are allowed to stay, what they will do for income while they are here.
Those who tell the truth will tell the truth and the rest will tell us what we want to hear.

So thank heaven at last we begin to discuss the nuts and bolts of the taking in large numbers of anybody, how it is to be paid for – alongside two stories which flag up immediate areas of concern, one about not enough doctors to work the hours the NHS has decided it requires (two doctors working in a panel that merits six and so far, unable to recruit) and another about class size (with a thoughtful headmaster setting the limit at 30 pupils per class and refusing to go above it).
But he is in a borough that will be taking in refugees.

Unlike Emma Stone, Bono or Bob Geldof, I don’t have a spare bedroom let alone a  spare west wing.
I didn’t need to see that poor scrap dead in the water to know what a gut-tearing miserable business mass exodus is.
But I don’t like the knee jerk reaction

“picture of a knee jerk”

in press or politics and I am waiting for coverage to discuss the process of settlement of those we are taking in because we couldn’t think of a way to keep them out (without losing votes).
There is public money for a year.
And then what?

The curse of the four letter word rides again!

The word is “full” and when rock star Chrissie Hynde gave an interview to promote her book, she spoke about being sexually attacked years earlier by a biker gang and said she took “full” responsibility.
But you can’t take “full” responsibility because – however short your skirt, however off your face on drink and/or drugs, however plain old-fashioned card-carryingly stupid the risk you take – you are only one side of the transaction.

At 63, is she so young at heart that she thinks she can say such a thing and it won’t
create an outcry?
Or did she know that it would, and that guarantees her publication the oxygen of publicity?
Doesn’t she know that after thousands of years being blamed socially, culturally and religiously for anything and everything, many Western women have decided  – no matter what – they are blameless?
If she is quoted accurately in what I have read, she has said what a lot of us think.
(You will notice I left the word “only” out between has and said: it’s another four letter incendiary device).
But many of us have tacitly agreed that discussing this is too difficult.
This discussion has always been difficult.

What some see as risk taking, others see as entitled freedom.
If it is argued that one of the tenets of freedom is responsibility, it may be unarguably countered that there is no behaviour/manner/appearance which guarantees that, as a woman, you may avoid being harassed, insulted, felt up or assaulted by certain men.
And they are worse in groups where (a) they can hide from themselves and (b)
they feel they must prove themselves to all the others.

Look at the recent findings about women sexually preyed upon on the way to work.
These are not women out of control.   They are respectably, even modestly, dressed.
They are about their business.
But in the rush hour all sorts of men may cop a feel and in the great press of bodies, there is very little that can be done about it – though I did have a friend who lambasted such a one till the press of people pulled away and the foul fingered fiend
beat a retreat.   Most of us aren’t made of such stern stuff.
However, importantly, this is not rape.
It may feel the same but it isn’t the same.
As my mother remarked drily, “You can always wash.”
But you have only to look at the news coverage to recognise how ambivalent we are about the subject matter.
One story headlines Hynde as raped: not in British law.
Another says she was subjected to “predatory sexual acts” which is more accurate but takes more space and isn’t so emotive or punchy.
The lines are blurred over and over again between men behaving badly and the act of rape.   So it is easy to see how large numbers of women have come to believe that whatever they do won’t help them – not how they speak, or what they wear or do – so they are all innocent.
It is unfashionable to say that as a woman you have a responsibility in the matter when the responsibility only seems to be respected when it works for you.

That is why street rape, whether on a man or a woman, is easier to understand and sympathise with.   It is an assault.  It is wrong. And sexually attacking somebody you don’t know is (and always was) a feature of war, drawn to our fleeting attention every day.

But once we start talking about what one of you thought the other meant, what you hoped he/she/they meant, expectations and understanding, we are in physical and psychological territory of the deepest grey.  The clarity of black and white goes out of the window.
Then it becomes a matter of opinion and opinion may alter in hindsight.

So Chrissie Hynde looks back at her young self as overly hopeful, a bit of a fool and takes responsibility for that.
And the vociferous rape campaigners blame her for muddying the water.
You can’t blame either of them.
This is not a battle won and change is often so much slower than you think.

“slow loris”

… except very little is.

How depressing is the uniformity of today’s clothes, shoes, habits, appearance (though I cherish the man who remarked on looking a row of upcoming actresses “Good Lord, they have the same breasts !” Same clinic, no doubt).

You know as well or better than I do, that if you are stuck in a situation that repeats itself, you either get on with it, or change it.  Waiting for it to change (which essentially means waiting for somebody else to alter things) is a longer term strategy but still hitched to change.

I was not brought up to try to look like a model or a film star.  I tried inevitably –
youth fuelling inspiration, aspiration, perspiration – but was saved by my mother’s asperity and the inherent message of my belated success: they didn’t want me to be anybody else but me.

This is no longer a fashionable message now, we’re into derivation.  This designer is like that one, those songs came from this musical line of descent.  Nobody has yet likened Benedict Cumberbatch to Alec Guiness –  though taller, more graceful, more hetero – but they will.  They will.
I mourn the days of individuality.   I am not alone.

So the latest political sensation (you have heard of Jeremy Corbyn?) endorses
“we are all the same.”
But we are not.
We may rightly want the same chances, the same standing under law, a more equitable tax arrangement but we are not the same.   We are of the same kind (human) but we are not the same.   We won’t get the same chances and if we do, we will handle them differently.

So – sorry, Corbers – I was delighted to read that the number of pupils at grammar school is the highest for 35 years.  There are onl 163 grammar school in the country.
They have done all sorts of creative manoeuvring to keep themselves afloat but they are liked and popular and I bet any money that is based on curriculum, class size and reputation more than snobbery, pretension and entrée.

Laws passed under Tony Blair (otherwise known as Dorian Grey) make it illegal to open a new selective school.   I know very little about the law but it does make you wonder how all those other minority schools – which are selective in the extreme – got round that.   Don’t say multiracialism to me.  Sir Roy Strong recently remarked (I paraphrase) that multiracialism muddied the water of the lines of artistic, aesthetic and cultural heritage in the name of everybody being the same.   Which is where we came in.

I went to a grammar school.  Did you know they were established to promote the study of Latin?   I did Latin at school.  It’s not terrible, it is a key to some aspects of English (that universally known language, our greatest export) and enables you to sing some wonderful hymns and carols.

Of course you discard chunks of your education, whatever it was, as you go along, like a space ship, outstripping the burnt out bits.
But when years later the Times Education Supplement asked me to do an interview on my favourite teacher, I said I couldn’t and explained that I had fabulous teachers, and I would like to remember them all.  The interviewer said that was a first, and that’s what we did.  My grammar school helped to form my life, along with parents so good I could shopped for them.

I am not blind to the abuses of the triple system (grammar, technical, secondary
modern – I scaled those results as a temporary job at 19).

And while technical never came into it – I hadn’t the hands or the maths – if you had sent me to a secondary modern I would have been bored and for sure Satan finds work for idle hands.   I was too busy filling my pen and doing my homework to be mischievous.

With education as with shoes (thank you Alexander Fury Independent 25.08.2015), we aren’t going back, we’re going forward  – to a better choice and a better choice means a better chance.

Years ago a woman told me on air how embarrassed she found seeing advertisements for sanitary products on television.  “I can’t look my son in the eye when they are going on” she said.
I said I thought that was a pity.
She didn’t understand.
“Because” I explained” it is likely your son is going to go out with a young woman who uses these things and you have a chance to establish straightforwardness, which is invaluable.  Even if he doesn’t go out with girls, there will be women in his circle of acquaintance and acting as if this is something shameful just makes the already charged relationships between men and women more difficult.”I also remember being brought in to contribute to a programme to discuss some sexual research featured in a now defunct publication of irreproachable thoughtfulness called New Society.  Once the programme was over, the presenter – a BBC radio “name” and am I glad I was never such a prune!) turned on me with
“Well, Anna, I hardly think that is what the Great British Public wants with its toast and marmalade !”
I said I had not chosen the material, I had been asked to comment on it and I had used the correct words in context.
So here we are, more than twenty years later, awash with every kind of sexual boast and detail, sending pictures of our parts to strangers, discussions on the art of sexting, fashion that leaves nothing to the imagination, everybody starring in their own movie and glued to the screen to see who will go furthest – and a significant number of young women can’t discuss anything “down there”  with a doctor, still less use the word “vagina”.
They won’t initiate the subject for fear of having to have an examination.
Don’t like the doctor?
Don’t trust him or her as a profession?
Why?
What is going on?
If you thought you had been done on your phone deal or sold the wrong dress, you would stand up for yourself.
Why can’t you stand up for your body?   It’s the only one you’ve got.

You know that old saying about “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me”?
If you can use words properly or use the proper words to convey what is happening to you, the doctor can do his or her best to help you.
This is not a public relations exercise for the general practitioner.   They are good and bad, like everybody else in the world, some more sympathetic than others.  I particularly respected a woman many years ago who stopped me as I started to speak to ask if she might refer me to a colleague “because I am much better with broken bones than contraception”.   Fair enough.
Where is it written that “everybody must know everything”.  They can’t.   And they don’t.
The problem with self diagnosis is you often don’t know what you are looking for or how to interpret it.
So the mass of information offered by the ever helpful search engines may be barking up the wrong tree.   You won’t know if somebody doesn’t take a look – at you not the screen.
The consultant I saw about my troubles as couple of years ago told me that he had to break it to a young woman of 25 that nothing more could be done for her.  Her cancer was inoperable.  Because although ovarian cancer is known as a disease of older women, young women get it too but they would rather turn to the screen and the search engines than get up close and personal with a physician.

I had a lot of childhood illness and a gynaecological history like the Hundred Years’ War.  I learned directly that not every doctor was as bright or caring as others.
I spent a lifetime on air encouraging people to go and see somebody – a real somebody, face to face, even the wrong somebody (it’s a start) – because nobody can prescribe or help you till they have seen you and yes, that may involve an examination and you may be embarrassed.
There is no substitute.
Unlike cancer, embarrassment doesn’t kill you.
Be embarrassed.
Use the words and live

The other day I looked through the papers and wondered where was “the silly season” – that period of the year when most people have holidays, news slows down (24 hour news gathering means you are dependent on new stories breaking for excitement so a lack of stories = lack of interest = bad for business) and news media are kept afloat with “Calf Befriends Frog” or “Tom Cruise Wears Bifocals”.

But no.  The silly season is upon us.
Awards will be made to Jeremy Corbyn (Labour leader hopeful) who has put the fear of God into all sorts of people by daring to have a personality as well as a policy.    You may not like the personality, you may dread the policy but it is a great deal easier to write a story about something  you really disapprove of rather than trying to work your way through the petroleum jelly of the current government.

Winner of this summer’s award for a parent we hear about who treats his kids as appendages is Bear Grylls.
Apologies to all bears especially my favourite sun and sloth bears for having to share their name with such a twerp.
He decided to have his 11 year old son  “marooned” and rescued by the local lifeboat – without telling the lifeboat crew.   You can hear him thinking “win, win” – toughen the boy up, get pa’s name and the lifeboat’s noticed.  Only the lifeboat crew – who know rather more of what causes problems than Mr. Grylls – were aware that the danger lies in somebody imitating less successfully what he pulled off.
But then, what would a bear know about copycatting?

One of the cheapest ways to make a story is to look for what has been researched recently.  You can make the information contained in a survey into all sorts of things, rather like a written version of those balloons entertainers make shapes out of at a children’s party.

So – out of the 16 countries surveyed – Britain only came seventh in allowing their children the freedom to play, the biggest fears being traffic and strangers.   Honourable exceptions aside, the model for both parents working flat out means that there is little room for walking to school, learning to tell who to avoid, remembering who you can turn to if you’re in trouble – because it all takes time and time and the Smartphone have impinged greatly on the relationships parents do or don’t have with their children.   And the police aren’t around to patrol the traffic.

We want the police to give priority to terrorism, immigration and paedophilia, all of which are labour intensive.   We also want them to do all the things they used to do AND cut their budgets by millions of pounds.
But you can’t have it all.
We had a massive bike race through Central London recently and when I approached a young officer and asked him when my local bridge would be re-opened, he said he was afraid he didn’t know.  He and his partner were doing their best but the police had not been adequately informed.
Worship of the bike in London is approaching Golden Calf status.

Dairy farmers have taken cows into supermarkets and got their names (the farmers, not the cows) in the news with a threat which has long bothered me: “ We are putting in jeopardy the security of our (national) supply of food” said Meurig Raymond, president of the National Farmers’ Union of England and Wales.
I hate to say this to you but if dairy farming goes down the plughole, it will take a lot longer to repair that re-establishing Kids Company (cheques to the Addington Fund, a farming charity – thank you Clive Aslet, editor of Country Life.)

While the Prime Minister must regard as a PR disaster the daily re-iteration of how he was “mesmerised” by Camilla Bhatmanghelidjh, founder of Kids’ Company, to the detriment of the allocation of major public money.   Mesmerised by what?    The scope of the problem  – abused children and chaotic families with every kind of difficulty and lack, who congregate in big cities?   Or what she said she could do about it?   Solutions to such problems are seductive indeed.  Cameron was not the first and he won’t be the last.
So, not such a silly season.

*first recorded by John Fornset, a monk at Reading Abbey around 1250.

I have never liked gulls.
They have that cold eye and they are always bigger than we expect and while every second journo is doing that “how could they attack that poor little dog? there is no explanation for their numbers trebling”   – why do people love to be scared ? – there is a reason and it’s down to us.
Waste.

A couple of years ago one of the Sunday colour magazine featured a terrific piece about the Rise of the Gull, only one person salaried to study them, protected, powerful, aggressive and nourished on landfill which – though expensive – is still where waste goes and most of our waste is now full of singularly nourishing things  – throw away take away, for a start.

Gulls are smart. They aren’t going to spend all that time being buffeted by cold winds, chasing falling sea stocks (fish to you).   Just come inland a bit and feast like a king.
I am so sorry for the small dog killed in front of her young owner but this will go on till a gull attacks a child or an old person and then we shall have screams of “Hitchcock  – The Birds!”

“Wrong colour but you get the drift!”

It is always somebody else’s fault, never our own.

Some time ago, Britain was described as “the dirty man of Europe” for its waste disposal – not a sexy subject so not given the coverage it deserves in any branch of the media, ill served by well intentioned tv documentary because it is so depressing.

Living in London is like living in a rotten tooth.
And I live in a borough which has made strenuous efforts to face up to waste disposal for the 15 years I have lived here, up to and including staff who answer emails, and a delightful man who introduced himself at a public meetings with his name and “I’m waste!”

Walking through allegedly posh Knightsbridge (Harrods and that), every window ledge had a can or packaging on it.   There were discarded bottles (plastic and glass) on the top of every telephone terminal, fire hydrant, every available surface.
Given that this is the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and rates and charges make your eyes water, if I were running a business there, I’d be steaming.

We did away with street rubbish containers because of the IRA allegedly putting bombs in them and more recently because every such site becomes a collecting point for the rubbish people don’t want.
In my own street, the council operatives collect loose rubbish in distinctive green bags which are often tied to a lamp post for collection a bit later – by which time the pile up of discarded doormats, old curtains, general rubbish, unwanted wood and plastic, cigarette packets, sweet wrappers and dog muck (wrapped of course) has been assembled round it.  I am happy to report that it is nowadays standard to wear heavy duty gloves for waste disposal.   I wonder where they go when they are done?

This was for me a weekend of not liking the world I live in very much.   In the 1950s part of the function of my mother’s enormous handbag was to contain a spare paper bag and rubbish went into it to go home into our bin. Packaging then could be crumpled up.  Now it is often rigid and thus much harder to dispose of, even if there were somewhere to put it and we had enrolled footballers, pop stars, gangsters and saints to drive forward a campaign to deal with it.

I think Cilla Black is well off out of it.  Of course we still don’t know the cause of
her death – half a story being another one of those things maddening things about modern life and 72 is considered a very young age to be dying.
But a woman only a few years older (Gill Pharaoh, 75) enlisted all her family and her partner to her own powerful will to say goodbye to her by lethal injection because she could not face an incapacitated future. She was a nurse who had spent years in palliative care and she wasn’t going to risk it.

“Woman of the week”

Cilla famously missed her husband who managed her career until his death and growing older alone is tough for all of us.
She has gone out remembered among other things for the grin, the legs and the grooming in paragraphs of guff.
There’s no business like show business.

Years ago my skin broke out.
There’s nothing particular about my skin, but the occasional spot is one thing and a rash is something else.
Of course I did all the usual things  –  I heard my mother whispering in my ear “Leave it alone !” – kept it clean, kept it dry, applied my favourite and trusted remedies.
Nothing helped.
I went to a skin specialist.   Perhaps we should pause there.

Nowadays the gap between beauty therapy and medicine is more blurred than it used to be and it was pretty blurred then.

“You can see where the spots came from!”

I have come to know that there are almost as many shades of medical opinion there as there are in the beauty world and let’s face it, the enormous business of private medicine and the even more enormous industry which incorporates skin care – leaving cosmetics and hair colour aside – is personal. You don’t care if it works for another living soul as long as whatever it is works for you.

He was a pleasant man, and he asked if I used cosmetics.  I explained.
He asked what I had done to my skin that morning.  I had washed it with an olive oil soap and sprayed it with a fine spray of spring water.
He pulled a pad towards him and wrote a prescription for an enormous dose of antibiotics, three times a day for several months.
I said I couldn’t take antibiotics like that, I didn’t say that even in those far off days I was wary about their over prescription.
He hesitated before saying “Well, there is one other thing you can do but it’s very old fashioned.”  Nothing wrong with old fashioned, I murmured.
He said “Milk.”    According to him, a little bit of any kind of milk, put on with clean cotton wool and left overnight.  It contains lactic acid which would rebalance the skin.
I left the prescription on his desk, went home and tried it.
My skin settled in 36 hours.
And it’s as good a place as any to start.  It’s cheap, prepared under clean conditions and if it doesn’t work, at least you have tried it.

I am not going to say that this made me afraid of the modern world, that I never tried another dream cream, life changing detergent or another convenience meal.
Until something occurs to us, we don’t worry about it.
We don’t think about what is in food, or washing products (whether domestic or personal), what is on the towel or the pillowcase, until it causes an abreaction.
Most of us have at least one friend who has used the same stuff o n her face and on her hair for years and it works so why should she change?

The beauty business exists on improvement, miracles, promises and anxiety.
Of course I have subscribed to it over the years and I have had one or two great successes and a lot of disappointments.
I was taught to take care of my skin because when it begins to be affected by age, weather and work conditions – which happens to us all, men and women, regardless of individual biochemistry and past history – what you put into your body and what you put on to your body will matter cumulatively.   The young always think they are invulnerable and the rest of us know nobody is.

I don’t read every label in the supermarket.  I don’t trust them anyway.
It doesn’t take much sense you’d have thought to know that the simpler food is, the harder it is to muck about with it and the better it will be for you.  But then we come up against numbers which mean that food is prepared to look as if it is healthy – like bagged salads – and it is not necessarily so. Because of what the vegetables are rinsed in, shelf life, profit and sale through the supermarket.

Whereas in the matter of making the best of ourselves, we are endlessly hopeful and better minds than mine know how to manipulate that.  Elizabeth the First, who was one of the best educated women of her day didn’t know that the lead in the face paint she relied on was destroying her face and most of us aren’t much further on that that.   And we have to contend with much wider levels of suggestion, advertising, promotion, half knowledge, competition and anxiety.
And if there is a growth industry, it is in the latter.