Annalog

When I was at junior school, we had a double art lesson all of Wednesday afternoon with the dashing Mr. Elson.   I can still see vast sheets of paper, powder paints and jam jars and remember sitting with Lesley Gill, Sue Sanderson and Jean Dunn while we kept up a running soap opera which required the endless description of medieval clothes. I’ve liked Wednesday ever since.

Now I like Wednesday because the dustbin men come.   I’ve been very lucky with waste disposal. For years at the other side of London when my son was a child, we had a crew who always spoke to him, spoke to me, waved, took everything – I remember one of our two favourites leaving to go and work in his brother’s carpet shop and we were all in tears.   I had nicknamed him The Saxon though he was probably nearer a Viking

“Is that a bin lid in his hand?”

– tall and robust with a high reddish complexion and red gold hair – while the gaffer looked like Robert Duvall.

But as this morning began with a sulky percolator and the pouring rain, I realised I am in grave danger of defining the week by Wednesday mornings when the next nicest crew in London take away everything I’ve wrapped for them.   It is however only Monday and my mother would say I am wishing my life away.

Monday to me is like a weekly version of January.   January lasts psychologically twice as long as it does in time terms. The weather is usually unfriendly – no news there then – everybody is laden with bills and colds and anti-climax.   Not surprising that this is one of the two times in the year when counselling services of every variety spike – the other is when people come back from the summer holiday that hasn’t worked the hoped for miracle.

I quite like Tuesday, because it proves I have got through Monday. If I can do some task with a beginning, a middle and an end – catch up on letters, tidy the under the stairs cupboard, wash the kitchen floor – Monday feels better and the nicest thing I can say about Tuesday is that I often don’t register getting there until later in the day – rather like a dog discovering a bone it has buried – you know – “Oh Good Lord, it’s Tuesday !”   Of course I have felt guilty about not cherishing time, noticing time, not noticing time and so on but then as my father taught me, time is man’s measurement for something ineffable. He thought time was the face of God. Humans could measure it but they couldn’t control it.   I think of that when I see those extraordinary photos of Detroit’s great factories and workshops now decayed and overgrown with plants.   To see how temporary the bricking up of life is, you don’t need to go to the ancient remains in South America, just look at the speed with which weeds take hold in the street, poking determinedly through the paving stones and walls. I am torn between pulling them out and giving them a medal.

There is another reason I like Wednesday – it’s the middle of the week. If you are depressed and time hangs like cannonballs on your hands, getting to midweek makes the management of the time remaining seem possible. So Thursday is a to do day – the day you go the exhibition, take the shoes back, something outside the house, outside general domestic order, probably a kind of internalised version of the old rhyme “Thursday’s child has far to go.”

Friday has become a different shape for me lately because I have to shop in two halves. I don’t want everything delivered to the door. I want to go out, select, carry and talk – and the only time I get marginally fed up with it is hiking home my preferred kitchen towel. And then Saturday brings me the market, a long walk, postcards, shop gazing, wandering, only ever curtailed by rain.   Cold not a problem, wrap up and get on with it.

I have to be careful with Sunday. It can be like wading through treacle though I can usually beat it with books. There is of course television, the older person’s friend, if badly programmed. Thank heaven there are occasional pearls in the dross, though sadly more by accident than intention. People think that since I worked in radio, I must like to listen to it and I confess I don’t, much.

And then in the immortal words of Flanders and Swann, it’s “back to bloody January again” – or Monday in this case and you know how I feel about Monday.

When I first had a job with a salary I couldn’t spend no matter how many books, Tshirts, trips to the cinema and gifts I bought, I worked for a women’s magazine.   There were always people who thought that you shouldn’t admit to that, it was a lower form of journalistic life – and being an agony aunt was lower still. (What’s that lovely quote about “I may not agree with you but I defend to the death your right to an opinion” ?). Off the back of a salary I couldn’t spend (it was only ever enormous for three months, when I worked three jobs, the most remunerative for a woman and a newspaper I disliked – so I quit, to find that my adored husband had boasted to his clients about how much I earned: regrettable) I instituted the purchase of good gloves, good shoes, good soap and every publication that interested me. As I handed over chunks of money and held out my arms for the pile of stuff, the newsagent used to twinkle at me “Singlehandedly keeping the print alive?”

I would be honoured. One of the best things I heard just before Christmas was that book sales were up.   Specialist magazines are thriving too – I have a quarterly on Illustration which I gave myself as a present last year (see below).

Apparently men of over 50 dressed better (Antonio Pappano certainly does.)

“Better in movement, like most interesting people!”

It’s been a long time since Matt Frei who was the last tv frontsman to find a style which didn’t look poor, poseur or odd. I’ve never got over Dan Snow flapping about in cheesecloth or the beautiful R Everett in black pseudo sports gear, looking as if he were taking a day off from a cure.

Watching Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara and Todd Haynes talking about the film they made together (“Carol”) beat the film into the ground, as did Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and Mark Rylance discussing each other in “Bridge of Spies” – about which Camilla Long’s review (“is this a film about Tom Hanks having a cold ?”) made me laugh out loud.

Downton was down before it was out. “Call the Midwife” escaped twee by the narrowest of margins – oh the pitfalls of the Christmas special.   But Daniel Craig is the best actor ever to play Bond, and even if I hate his (unchecked) tailor’s suits, at least I now understand their purpose. While Judi Dench’s M made a strangely prescient speech in which she said in part “We don’t know who our enemies are any more: they have no nationalities, no boundaries… we talk about transparency but we function in opaqueness.” Yes.   So unexpected honours to Bond, a franchise that meant nothing to me until I had nothing else to watch and was so disappointed in a new book on the Joan of Arc myth, that I couldn’t read any more. It was how not to write a book – pedantic, predictable, over-extended – you only have to look at the pages of acknowledgements to know that this was conceived and managed as a beach best seller, too many cooks, utterly predictable and a waste of a provocative idea.

I waved to a bus driver on New Year’s Day and he waved, hooted and kissed his hand.   Honours. And I met an elderly Irishwoman, older than me, wearing a holly berry red coat which we discussed (“They said I should put on a warmer coat, I’m so glad I did” she told me in that soft sibilant accent, before we hugged each other and went our ways home on the first day of the New Year.)    And the young Australian makeup artist at the BBC on Boxing Day greeted me saying over her shoulder to her colleague – “I told you she’d be made up, she’s a pro !”   And she didn’t know who I was from a hole in the ground.

I don’t think a list of the big things that I find shameful or dishonourable is useful- you have your own and some of them will be in common to many of us. Worse still, some of them will be the same or worse than last year.   (I think of a frowning angel with a big ledger, looking down at us and writing “Must try harder !” And we must.) Never mind about New Year’s Resolutions, just make a list of ten or fewer things and try to work through them.   And remind yourself that if the BBC had learned the lessons of Warner Brothers in their heyday, they’d have shot “Dickensian” and “War and Peace” back to back: it would have been cheaper.

“See Tom Sizemore’s programme on Rachmaninov for comment”

Illustration: contact cellomail@cellopress.co.uk

Christmas was lovely.

“as pretty as my grand daughter”

I had it on Christmas Eve when my son , his wife and their daughter came to see me. We spoiled each other and shouted with laughter and had a wonderful time with surprises, real surprises. I bought my granddaughter her first book , a picture book by a Japanese artist in which five flowers fold down into five animals, laminated, deliciously coloured. Just the job.   And the couple I call the kids were more excited to have bought me a wine I have only drunk twice and never owned a bottle of, than anything else.

Christmas Day I spent coughing and sweating in bed, Boxing Day more of the same and what became of the ancient and respected art of television programming?

So now we arrive at crossover time, the few days in between the allegedly Christian festival and the pagan one of New Year.   These are the days you fill with buying things you never thought you’d rush out to buy (like laundry fluid) or sale shopping.   How revealing that the independent Office for Budget Responsibility published a report warning that the recovery is the thickness of tissue paper and unsecured personal debt will be the undoing of many of us.   That was on Tuesday 22 December while on Saturday 26 December, money was being spent as if it was going out of style and very few people did what one young man did and saved for the splurge. Most of them flashed the card in a bad attack of Scarlett O’Hara-itis, ie “I’ll think about that tomorrow.”

So while we’re on the subject of what you want and what you don’t want in the immediate future ie the next twelve months, here’s what I really don’t want:

I don’t want this Government to slip through legislation which directs local councils in what they may or may not invest in – more to the point it will tell them what they must invest in, thus denting the idea of democracy (always a relative term) still further.   A bunch of committees in London cannot run affairs for 70 million vastly different people across the UK.   Worse still, this unprecedented curb may be pushed through Parliament without proper consultation. That isn’t Tories for Britain, that’s Tories for Tories, ruthless self-interest. (see Page 4, the Independent on Sunday and the writer is Donald MacIntyre.)

I don’t want – thought mostly I shall be too late – to have George Osborne thinking he’s going to get some kind of award for being the Chancellor with the Highest Level of Privatisation. Mr.Osborne’s sympathisers feel he’s doing a grand job of making banking pay for itself, and that may be true but selling off concerns like the Post Office (at what is generally agreed as a loss) and the Land Registry raises question about his plans other than amassing some money and never mind whence it comes.

I don’t want to hear about men – or women – in space when we need money spent on anticipating the possible effects of changes to our weather systems in this world, so that if we don’t need to activate emergency plans, that’s fine, they can wait – but if we need them, the resources are there.   We can’t carry on hoping everything will be all right. This sweaty winter has shown we won’t.

And I don’t want to see White Christmas with Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney, Danny Kaye and Vera-Ellen ever again. It wasn’t a good movie when it was made and the years have not been kind to it. It’s been on a loop, played about six times in the last two weeks and I want it mothballed.

Permanently. Please.

And here’s what I really do want. I want less non ticket paying children taking up seats on buses while others stand.   What happened to sitting on your mother’s knee?   Or being a big person and offering your seat?

I want people to understand that appreciation is vital.

  Going back into a shop 24 hours later to express satisfaction took three minutes and it was win win win. I was pleased, the assistant was pleased, the manager was pleased and other customers were pleased to hear our pleasure.   Saying please and thank you is going out of style. It seems a lot of people think that makes you look weak. I was taught “if you don’t put in, you can’t take out” and it’s got me this far.

I want us to understand that in a materialistic society, all those things aren’t worth a damn if you don’t have some kind of interior life, some interest in art or science, people or ideas.   I want us to understand that our world is cruel as it ever was, sometimes in the same ways, sometimes in awful new ones and start looking at how we can contribute to its betterment, you in your small corner, I in mine.

I want us to understand that the smile and the truth are as much weapons as frowns and evasions and use them.

And every good wish for 2016.

There were two kinds of Christmas presents when I was growing up, one was the big thing you had to have like a coat or new spectacle frames and then there were what my mother called “sillies”, small presents which initially filled the stocking I was sad to say goodbye to, at the age of nine.

I was also aware from an early age that Christmas wasn’t always unalloyed pleasure and joy. Bad things often happened to people around Christmas time, a sort of way of reminding us that you can’t have it all and even when you think you might have, you haven’t.

The other day in a shop where I only ever seem to look, never having seen the clothes I seek in it, a woman who works there made it clear that not only did she know who I was (as you get older, this is rare and if you any sense of self preservation, like me, you cease to expect it) but told me the most delightful story of her parents, both in the throws of divorce from their respective first marriages when they met, and both listeners to a radio show on people’s lives that I fronted for 14 years. “Are they still happy ?” I asked hopefully.   “Oh yes” she said. “Never looked back – and they’ll be thrilled to think I met you.” I sent them my very best wishes.

That is a Christmas present.   It would be hard to define, it wouldn’t fit in a stocking, it may be silly to anybody else but it’s wonderful to me.

And on a bus I sat next to a startlingly youthful woman in her fifties, now alone with grown up sons (“I’m taking care of my grandchildren this week”), highly qualified in nursing, who put herself forward for special training in dealing with MRSA – one of those bugs that frighten the life out of us all when we or those we love have to go into hospital.   “I’ve made mistakes in my life” she said “ especially in relationships but that’s all gone now. I’ve just let it all go. I live in one room and I study – it‘s wonderful.”   And again I was reminded that Christmas is more than a day or a dream, it’s the marker of another stage of your life and going forward is always preferable – even if it’s tough – to looking back.

A friend I will call Ginny (it’s not her name) has spent years being the fall guy for her family. She picked up for them all emotionally and financially, one after another over the years. In time, the habit of making do spread out into her emotional relationships with other people and finally into her work. She took a job which sounded fine except that the travelling alone was exhausting and precluded the improvement of any one of the other things she might want to address or looking for another job – she was tired out and even if she wasn’t – there weren’t hours in the day.

She decided against the extension to her contract.   Yes, her partner was all for it but she did it. And for the first time is ready to look for what she wants, to use that pile driving energy for herself rather than anybody else or any other situation.   It’s my best Christmas present so far.   I’ve known her for 20 years and it’s grow up time.

And then I received this via annalog:

“ Hi Anna, I was listening to the radio while travelling in the car and caught an appearance of yours on Off the Page on R4 Extra …a repeat from some years ago on the subject of money. I just wanted to tell you I thought you spoke very entertainingly, intelligently and movingly” … “and I sincerely hope life is a little easier for you now.”   So I wrote in appreciation.

You couldn’t wrap it, it doesn’t need tissue or gilded ribbon.

Who wouldn’t want to be described with those words ?   What Pam the Painter calls “bucket time” as in “put that in your bucket” – a Christmas bucket – thank you Mike.

“sung every Anzac Day”

We’d been talking about the world in general and our small bit of it in particular, when my friend said thoughtfully “Change and decay in all around I see…”   “Where did that come from?” I asked.                                                                    Notoriously uneven in her recall (all the words of all the Frank Sinatra songs, but not the name of “that actress who played the Queen – you know, the blonde …”) Slad said “Oh, the Bible I think ..” so I came home and looked it up.

It’s from the hymn “Abide with me” and I had never read it all before – lyrics by Henry Francis Lyte, to the music of William Henry Monk.                                              And I wonder what does abide – stay – with us, when so much is changing?              I have been “off” the David Attenborough voiced over nature films for some time because they are saturated with music.   The filming is often wonderful but I object to having my responses half-cued, half directed as though by an invisible traffic cop.   And I know animals kill each other so I wasn’t open to programmes devoted to The Hunt – until the last in the series which was about conservation when I watched three teams – two in Africa working respectively with African wild dogs and cheetah and one in somewhere darned cold working with polar bear – and was moved by the real tenderness expressed to these animals in this unremitting work.

The range of the dogs is so extensive that the teams travel with them all the time, occasionally sedating one to check for health, growth, blood and parasites and then watching as the dog staggers to its feet and rejoins its group. “Best thing in the day” said the beaming group leader “ when you see the dog get up and recover.”

The group working with cheetah actually move the animals around to new ranges, for their own wellbeing.   I was struck by the contrast between the interference to the animals to save them and the way they were handled, visibly gently – as if the humans knew the animals would sense something of the positive from the way they were handled.

Polar bear are 20 per cent smaller than they were some years ago, which means in turn smaller cubs which would stand up less well to the rigours of the climate – and if they failed to survive, it would mean the end of the polar bear – while we saw skilled hands measure, weigh and log data on a sedated polar bear (which even out for the count looks menacing large) and then, as the harness was stripped away and the team made to withdraw, a man rubbed the ear of the beast affectionately.

Appalled by cruelty, misuse and abuse, we forget to celebrate the positives which are often difficult to quantify, subtle and open to interpretation.   Sometimes there isn’t even touch.

In a French film about a small country school and its school master (acted but based on a true and best selling story) there is a scene in which the teacher talks to a boy who has been away from school because his mother died of cancer. What struck me was that the words had to cross the space, there was no touch.   Touch however kindly meant might have confused things, when it was imperative they were clear or touch might have made the exchange unbearable.   The boy had to be left to be alone, he had to learn to bear it, the teacher witnessed what the boy had been through, the words were acknowledgment of suffering and endurance.What stays with us is the effort, the offering somebody else made at a time when we were alone, in great pain, unhappy or ill.   What struck me last night was the same kind of offering in a highly scientific – you could say artificial – context.   All the people involved were specialists – this was training, life’s work which has to be evidenced to be funded – and yet still there was joy and sweetness.

Never mind the toys and the food and the shining things for a minute.                       I want the best of humankind – those small often wordless kindnesses – I want them to “abide with me.”

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.