Annalog

The GP who took early retirement was a large creamy Irishwoman for whom nothing was too much trouble, kind, sensible – in my few dealings with her, truly a fairy godmother (TFG).   All my grandparents were gone before I arrived.   So I think I am susceptible to a mixture of common sense and concern in one I have to rely on, the feeling that no matter what it is I need or feel, it can be taken care of benignly.   In the past I can remember all sorts of friends and mentors but only one briefly known landlady in York who would qualify. She ran an immaculate boarding house for male boarders only (“easier to organise”). But she took me without demur for the three months I was there and God knows, I wouldn’t have presumed to persuade her. There were five cats, three dogs and several rabbits, the house shone, there was always something to eat or drink and Mrs. Berg was the first person I ever saw cry with joy over music.   Anything could be fixed in the flip of one of those capable hands.   And I was not a trouble – don’t be silly ! I was a joy.

Recently I bought a handbag.   (Lord, I hear you say, the excitement !)   Well, it was for me because I last bought a leather handbag ten years ago.   I have done very well with Longchamps pliage – weighs less, costs less – and large leather handbags are not a good idea for anyone who has ever had back trouble, let alone the insulting cost.   If they are heavy empty, once loaded, you need a donkey. This was a small handbag, rectangular, particular, plain and it was sold to me by two grown up women in Peter Jones. They were kind, professional, thoughtful, willing without pressing, and when I left – having practised the Shoppers’ Code (does it go with your wardrobe? is it practical? is it a good deal ?) – I reflected on what a major part of purchase are the people who sell to you.

A couple of days later, I decided to call Lakeland from whom I had had quite an order but two of the products were let down by the distributing nozzle ie no squirt.   I have never done this before – I could count on the fingers on one hand the number of times I have remonstrated let alone complained – but I thought I would tell them because their customer service is exemplary. It couldn’t hurt.   Elissa’s first words were “Oh I ‘m sorry, how disappointing !”   Give the girl a medal. She looked up my details, she checked my order.   “I’m going to credit you for those things “she said “and would you let me send you something else in their place ?”     I said I didn’t expect her to do both, but she said “I’m going to.” “Why ?” I asked. “Because I want you to be happy.”   “Do you all do an intermediate qualification for Fairy Godmother ?” I asked “ Because you are always so agreeable.” She laughed, she liked that, she said she would tell her supervisor and I said it should be part of the Christmas promotion – “Our customer sales staff are all qualified to Truly Fairy Godmother (TFG)– intermediate standard.” When the consolation products arrived, the sales note was signed “Elissa (Fairy Godmother) Customer Services.”

So, when I met one of the two Peter Jones saleswomen on the bus this morning, I told her about Lakeland and wondered if she and her colleague were graduates of the same course ? “Well” she said “if you want to spend your time being miserable, don’t go into retail.”   Couldn’t agree more.   “And anyway” she added “there is enough I life to worry about and be miserable about without looking for more to add to the pile.”

The expectation of fixing things is one with which I am wholly familiar. And in life there are big bad things that can’t be fixed and even those of us who are willing to try and help have neither magic words or wands and we know it.   But there is something wonderful about somebody who wants to help: the wanting to is as important as the doing.   TFG.  

The garden at home wasn’t one really. It was just a sort of space at the back of the house with a privet hedge, a primitive garage where my father taught himself woodturning, raspberry canes (imagine a large English bull terrier sucking ripe fruit off the core),

“I know, it’s an apple, she ate those too!”

the remains of an air raid shelter and a mint patch.   The front was a bit more respectable with a hatefully persistent elderberry, equally determined roses, a big nasturtium bed and my father’s gladioli. And this was the beginning of me as a caretaker gardener (motto: plant, weed, water and feed).

So I was thrilled when a friend walked out into my paved pocket handkerchief this weekend and exclaimed with pleasure “How pretty!” At this juncture in the world’s history, nationally and globally, my garden is a source of sanity in a mad world. I can’t not watch the news but I freely admit it unsettles me to frequent sleepless anxiety.   Going out to prink in the garden helps a lot.

And there is only one thing in this garden that remains from when I arrived – a viburnum. Everything else is the result of trial and error.   I lost three plants this summer in the heatwave, probably because I didn’t water them enough. (Pam the Painter, herself a passionate gardener, advises that you can overwater a pot but not anything in the earth, which wisdom I have stored away for next season.) But otherwise everything has bloomed and I am so grateful.

When I arrived half the garden was subsumed to a ravenous mallow. I should have called her Melusine! She had to go.   Later I grew a ceanothus with a similar appetite and in letting that go, I did a bit of horticultural maturation.   The soil was full of discarded cement and brick bits, muddled by houseplants dumped there on the off chance.   I kept on discovering yet another pile of submerged detritus, swearing as I dragged it out, to scatter plant food of every variety far and wide.

I was such a gardening greenhorn that it took ages to understand that the sunlight in my garden is limited to the semi circular bed on the left outside the back door – currently pushing forth roses, daisies, several varieties of geranium, new leaves on the bergamot and – hooray – a bumper crop of Japanese anemones, Honorine Jobert, in papery splendour. I kept buying things, putting them in where there was no sunlight and of course they didn’t make it.

I do realise I sound like a clot because the world is full of people who just garden, often because they grew up on a farm or around someone who did. Or else they watch endless programmes and read learned books. But I need a voice, a friend who says “It may not have liked being moved” when I am beating myself up because something died. Or who says “ Dig it in deep enough” and I gratefully do. I know a superb gardener but she cannot communicate about gardening and really she doesn’t care about your garden because it isn’t hers.   I admire what she does but I have ceased to seek her considerable advice.   She doesn’t know how to share it.

The joy of the garden this summer is a rowan I found in Norfolk for literally a quarter of the price I had been asked for in London. I wondered how to get it home. Generous Gina put it in the car boot and brought it back for me.   I discovered it was a variety named for a plant explorer called Joseph Rock so of course it’s called Joe. Joe’s purpose is manifold. The rowan is benign in the sun signs of the Celtic religion and the birds like the berries.   You don’t get a lot of birds in London nowadays, what with pollution and pussy cats, but I’d like to do my best.   I spent 15 happy minutes watching three young sparrows playing tag in and out of everything the shrubs and creepers last week and when they had gone I went out and patted the rowan good morning.

“meet Joe”

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.