Annalog

I went to meet a friend on Sunday and I was early – we laugh at each other about being early, we are always early – but this was time and to spare.
And there was Waterstones, its doors welcomingly open, so I went in reaching for my booklist.  

There is always a booklist, but I have learned that wishing to read something is not the same as reading it so I no longer rush in and purchase.  I go to look for something I think I might be interested in and then I try to read a bit of it.  You can still get a book wrong this way but not as often as deciding that you really do want to read the latest Chinese novel only to get it home and find that it is Kafka for our times and either isn’t so well written or has suffered in translation.

You can be quite sensitive to translation even if you don’t speak the native language.

So I found The Unexpected Professor by John Carey (8/10) and fished for my wallet, only to be stopped firmly but gently by a personable assistant who explained that Sunday trading didn’t permit sales in shops over a certain footage before 12.00 noon and the doors were open in case we wanted coffee.
“I can’t help you” she said “ I am sorry but the fines are punitive.”
So I waited and at 11.58, she took down the notice I hadn’t noticed and let me pay for the book.

The Mayor of London is Boris Johnson.
And in the course of the last week or so he has expressed a wish to see London shops open longer hours, claiming this would generate 2000 jobs.

Naturally those who believe that there should be a day a week for the worship of  God and time to catch your breath are not best pleased.

Until the book shop, I had not come up against any restriction of trade on a Sunday because everybody I know either works shifts or all the hours heaven sends and that includes Sundays.

Many shops seem to spend long days gaping.  And the assistants must be really exhausted doing nothing because nobody much goes in.
Nothing makes for a slower day than having to be there when nothing is happening.

It seems to me that far from opening shops for longer hours, they need to become a little less accessible which would teach customers to value them more and incidentally give the staff a bit of a break.
There is a lot of research – psychological, social and medical – into the value of time off, a change (I can vouch for it) being as good as a rest especially when you spend your working life dealing with other people and the other people all to frequently take out the professional frustrations of the long hours they work in other occupations on captive retail staff.
One of the major confusions of modern life is confusing “ more “with “better”.
More hours doesn’t mean better service.
Bigger isn’t always better, it’s just bigger.
True, the Victoria and Albert Museum says that the Alexander McQueen exhibit is its most successful ever and the other night they kept the doors open all through the night so that people who hadn’t a chance to see it, had the opportunity.
But that is a targeted convenience – one night, not seven.
And because it was special, it worked.

The plan for much retail seems to be to be open all hours so that if you want to buy a sofa at 2.00 am, you may – but what is missing from this “shop whenever you want to” equation is how much it costs to keep the premises lit, staffed and  warmer or cooler depending on the time of year, on the off chance that you will make use of the facility.
What about all those years and years when we managed perfectly well with restricted shop hours, there wasn’t a constant excuse for a price hike, and when the store had a “special” and stayed open, we relished it and spent our money happily?

Long ago my former husband who could tell a great story and had a natural narrative gift was persuaded to try and write it all down.
Off we went on holiday with a computer, he to chill (as they say) and write on the terrace .
And write he did. For two or three days.
And then he pressed the wrong button and the computer blanked 12,000 words.I was appalled.
He was furious.
And the whole matter fell into one of those bottomless marital black holes where the less said the better.
He never tried again which was a pity.

Yesterday, trying to haul myself together in the aftermath of a holiday and what time to think does for you – for and against – I wrote an appreciation of the holiday, of Rhodes and a delighted piece about the state of Colorado about which more follows.

Colorado State Flag

I don’t know what I did but it vanished.
The computer man did everything he could but we had to agree that
it was gone forever and it was my fault.
The computer man thought I took it very calmly.
I was furious with myself.
Ignorance is not bliss around technology.
It’s just ignorance.

I wrote a fill in, had terrible trouble avoiding banal pictures and it was posted.

Now let me tell you about Colorado.
The state posed a question:  If teenagers and poor women were offered free intrauterine devices and implants to prevent pregnancy for years, would the women choose them?
And they did.
The birth rate among teenagers plunged 40 per cent in the years 2009 through 13
Abortion dropped by 42 per cent over the same time.

“If we want to reduce poverty, one of the simplest, fastest and cheapest things we could do would be to make sure that as few people as possible become parents before they actually want to” to quote Isabel Sawhill, a Brookings Institute economist.
In her 2014 book “Generation Unbound: Drifting Into Sex and Parenthood Without Marriage” she posits that “single parenthood is a principal driver of inequality and long acting birth control is a powerful tool to prevent it.”

I am not an apologist for marriage but you can catch her drift.
It’s choice, our old friend choice.
There are risks, there are always risks but no more than in the longtime aftermath of facial fillers, extended wear anything and tight jeans.
The only aspect of going away that bothered me was the anthill of scurrying bodies airports have become.  People who travel much more frequently than I have adapted to this. They don’t see it or if they do see it, they ignore it.
It’s there to get through so they do.
I kept thinking that this was rubbing my nose in the great ecological problem of over population which nobody likes to discuss because it touches on so many other issues (race, class, expectation, gender, “human rights” for starters) but in a world full of horror and pain and misery (which was how history was always made) – a world of destabilisation, refugees and war – the figures from Colorado shone like a small steady bright light because it wasn’t a project in the Third World but in the developed First.  And more it was partly financed from public money (state certainly, maybe federal) and partly from the memorial trust set up in his wife’s name by the billionaire Warren Buffet.

You have to look for it but there is good news.

The proverb says “It is a poor workman who blames his tools”
so here’s the truth:
we are running late because I am a klutz
Look it up

When you say such a thing about yourself
kindly souls demur – as in
“Oh surely not …”
Yes.
“You can’t be that bad …”
I am

So, soon, annalog will be past the log jam
but for now

this is an update

I am tidy.
I bet I am the only person you know who used to enter her place of work (radio newsroom) and clear up before she began to work – taking the dirty dishes back to the canteen, wrapping to discard leftover food, stacking old newspapers, press releases and other written material for which there was a pile – excuse me, a mountain.  I can’t think in a mess.
So if you saw my flat now you’d know, something is up …

There are clean clothes everywhere, an open suitcase in the office and a bag beside it I am trying not to fill.  And the shirt I bought when I was channelling Michelle Obama doesn’t iron well and the air is full of muttered curses and starch …
Listen, I am going on holiday for the first time in some years, to a Greek island I haven’t been to.  With a friend.  A gay friend.

I can’t write in advance, though I may well tell stories afterwards.
It is, as they say, an interesting time to be going to Greece.
I have invested in makeup I have never heard of.  Two lots of samples later I was sufficiently impressed to invest in a travel kit.  Watch this space. Last time I went away with Wal I had my upper lip threaded and looked like a Dalmation with hives i.e pink and lumpy.

Wal is spoken for and I am out of circulation.  So, thank heaven, he won’t care about me in a swimsuit.   Perhaps you remember Suddenly Last Summer in which the lovely young woman (E Taylor) encourages the young men of the resort so that her cousin (M Clift at his most tormented and sexually convoluted) can drool and pick?

This is exactly the opposite.

My problem with holidays is that I have in the past idealised them.

In my mind’s eye I see myself drifting down the terrace …who am I kidding?
Drifting is for less earthbound creatures than I.
In my mind’s eye and aided by a lifetime’s exposure to the camera, I see myself posed, hair just so, clothes just so – it all comes of a lifetime of believing that if you could think like a model, you could look like one and I now know I cannot.

I laughed aloud when I looked for a picture of dugong, a weirdly appealing sea mammal widely supposed to have inspired the legend of the mermaid.  The first one I found had the same name as a long ago much loved Israeli boyfriend.

So this little effort is larded with every kind of swimwear (except me in mine or Wal in his) and the hope that you will come back and see me next week, telling me and showing me stories of you and holidays, silly happy memories from buckets and spades on up.

I know it is said that “a week is a long time in politics” but you and I both know that time is elastic.
If you are unhappy, it may be fast and sharp like the cut of a knife, or it may drag on forever till you think that the tunnel you’re trapped in has no end.
Or you may be so happy that the golden days string out like bubbles light and multicoloured into a future you can’t imagine.  Or you may have just a moment of
pure and beautiful joy.

A week may be a long time and it may be the blink of an eye.

I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.
See you soon.  

Nobody walks around with a notice saying “Help!” though most of us have felt like that at some time or another.  And often, human nature being the unpredictable thing it is, the person you thought would rally to you, doesn’t, and the person you never imagined reaching out, does.
The world is half people who ask “Are you all right?” formulaically (subtitled “Please don’t tell me if you’re not”) and the rest who see you clearly, are ready to take the responsibility for reading you wrong if necessary, and they reach out.

Reach out was a term used to define work in the immediate community of a drug rehabilitation project I chaired years ago.  Outreach workers didn’t just try to help people with drug problems, as and when they found them, but also made contact with and tried to connect with the others who were involved like teachers, parents, employers, children.
I watched the staff with admiration and respect and took the idea to heart.

There are various ways to be an agony aunt, not just in how you get into the thing but how you work in it.   I am not sure what the collective noun for agony aunts is (a writhe of agony aunts perhaps?) and it sounds bigheaded but I was never very interested in how anybody else did it. The need was there.  I concentrated on how I did it, how it evolved and what I learned, where I fell down.  There was plenty of room for variation and other people’s take on things.

I thought about all this recently because death brings the oddest collection of people together, not for very long, and the funeral is neutral territory where everything else is put aside in the interests of respect for the dead, whether or not you respected him or her in life.

Sometimes a person comes along with an unexpected contribution to make, whether it is a bouquet of wild flowers or a different take on the person who has gone.   My sister’s stepdaughter made moving testimony at the funeral, while my personal hero was the funeral director.

I have written before about tone, that tone in the spoken word is as precise and important as it is in music.  And Mr. M was a beaut.
He was a man of care and consideration, for ten years (he told me) the director of a tactfully put together business with its own chapel, cars, florists and a digitalised music system –“There isn’t much we can’t get for you” he offered.
So we played my sister in to Count Basie’s “Mood Indigo, out to Nat “King” Cole’s “Unforgettable” with an eye watering choral version of “I Vow To Thee My Country” in the middle.

But before we got that far, I had to “declare” my sister’s death at the local register of births, deaths and marriages – it sounds more complicated than it is – and to do that, I made an appointment with Mrs. J, one of those unsung, kindly, meticulous people you are sometimes lucky enough to meet in an official capacity.   And to quote Una Kroll who campaigned for the ordination of women, she ministered to me.
She didn’t bother saying “don’t worry” (I would have anyway, nature of the beast).
She just took quiet control, put everything in order, and as she was shaking my hand goodbye, she reached over quite naturally and kissed my cheek.

This was not my first funeral.   In my experience the people who are professionally involved have been better than OK but I was particularly vulnerable in this context.
Wishing to love is not the same as loving and I was afraid of being found wanting.
Two people I don’t know walked me through a day I had agonised about.
The agonising is selfish.  It is part of the introspection that comes with loss.
When death comes, you are out of chances to try again or do things differently.
You have to make peace with memory, not only the memories of wrongs done to you but wrongs you did, or at least consider that what you thought was so right may have played out quite differently at the receiving end.
And then you have to let it go, whatever your belief system is.
That’s what we mean by getting through it.

“All the news that’s fit to print” is a brave sentiment.
But who decides what’s fit to print?   Does that include images or just words?  News readers on television say “We can’t show you this, it is too awful” (rarely their decision, it’s made by the editor of the programme or higher up the hierarchy) and I don’t know whether that is a morbid kind of consideration (ie now that you’re dead and mutilated, we won’t show you) or a sop to the sensitivities of the west where we increasingly removed from how the rest of the world lives – in smells and hygiene let alone war and deprivation.
I confess an overactive imagination will supply me with details without much help…   But my “OK, show me” might be upsetting for you and the other way around.  Whether killed in war or disease or natural cataclysm, a dead body is just that – a sack of skin and bones from which the spirit is fled.  I understand why people are repelled, why death remains a mystery but context is all and context is made up of the societal, the personal, time and big emotions like fear and dread.

But “all the news that’s fit to print” involves more than tragedy and destruction, whether natural or manmade or a bit of both.
ALL the news means every bit of information that is available at the time of going to air or print.  This may change as   witnesses come forward and investigations get under way.
I always want to shout “hooray!” when a presenter or writer says “this is what we know up till now” because it is honest. It says “we don’t know it all and we are not going to pretend that we do”.

For we rarely hear all the story.  We hear the bit that makes headlines, what is expedient for the security of the nation, to maintain peace of mind,
what makes a “good” story  – though increasing numbers of us ask drily “good for whom?”

The application and interpretation of the law makes for “good “ stories, whether siding with those who need its might to back them up or to oppose them.   But law is complex.   There are expectations of law which are completely misguided.
An imprint called Lawpack issued a pocket guide to “Unmarried couples and the law” and the woman we had into the radio station where I worked to discuss it was at pains to tell us how many people thought this or that constituted “common law” and that their understanding of “common law” didn’t exist.

Law is updated, moved around and changed.  Unless it is of specific interest to you, you may not know its current application.   But the purveyors of popular media  – and remember that most newspapers are fighting for their lives – don’t worry about that if it’s a good story.   A good story needs an “aaah!” factor – at least one, multiples of “aaah!” even better.

So I find myself wondering about Rebecca Minnock, three year old Ethan and Roger Williams.   (It is a corking story of three “aahs! “ – lone mother, small boy and devoted father).  But the most devoted fathers have a hard time getting custody, especially so early and when the boy has been living with his mother alone for two years.   I don’t know enough to be for or against anybody in this except the child.  Children of any age find breakup between their parents, married or not, hard to deal with.  How hard depends on the child but few benefit from a grown up and agreeable end.   Too many become the arena in which the end of the affair is fought out.

Here is a fine example of “half the story” which asks more questions that it answers. Why did the relationship break down?
What was the child’s role in the relationship?
Why did Minnock run away?
Why did her mother and a friend believe in her so strongly that they risked legal disapprobation to the point of prison to support her?

Apart from Ethan, I feel most sorry for the family court in all this who may be trying to do everything right while the public looks on at what they know and deems it wrong.
Half a loaf may be better than no bread.
But half a story helps few.

“please note:
justice is blind”

When Michelangelo was trying to persuade Pope Julius II to let him have the Sistine Chapel to decorate (against considerable competition), it is said that everybody else sent examples of their finest work.

Michelangelo took a sheet of paper and drew upon it a perfect circle.

It is said that God is a circle whose centre is everywhere (Hermes Trismegistus) and that a circle is a protective agent.

There is a hymn (written 1907) whose popularity is partly to do with an appealing melody but also to do with the image of its title “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”

It has been recorded by all sorts of people from Mother Maybelle Carter to Susan Boyle, because of its idea of being happily reunited with those who have gone before.

Ada Haershon, Lyricist

My sister was born 13 years before me. We were known in the family as the first attempt (her) and the final fling(me).   She had the best hands and eyebrows of the lot of us (courtesy of a Spanish grandmother) and when she wore Chanel #5, it lived up to the hype. But she didn’t need it, her skin smelling indefinably of woodsmoke. And when she returned from leave to Prestwick, where she was training to be a meteorologist, I used to ask my mother if I could sleep in her bed before the sheets were changed.

I lived in her shadow and setting aside the young years of looking up to her as my big sister, the good times were few. I preferred my parents and then my own friends and if I am honest, I don’t know who she preferred. She had major unhappiness to which she made adaptation but it always seemed to me that her troubles had been shoved into a mental cupboard from which they threatened to overflow.

Sent to a fever hospital as a child, she and another girl were shut in a bathroom with a hairdryer for their hair. The appliance shorted and exploded. She was terrified of electricity.   She was nervously ill as a result of the World War II bombing and once, years later, when she and I were painting the kitchen as a surprise for our parents, the sound of an air raid siren on the radio made her skin shrink.

She did applied maths at 15, was shy and loved aircraft. She had a child on her own and gave him up for adoption.   When it was all sorted out (that was the phrase my mother used) and she was to marry a man who made her so happy she shone, he was killed in a plane crash on Christmas Day.

She began the long slide into dementia ten years ago with a small stroke and a case of shingles she denied every having when it reprised a year later. I was appalling slow on the uptake because I was used to finding her hard to reach. The hospital insisted she stop smoking and she did but I regret it for her.  She was of her time and the answer to most things was a cigarette and a cup of tea. She was registered blind.

Although her friends made various efforts and so did the local Age Concern and eventually a caring social worker, it became impossible to keep her in her flat.

OK if you forget to turn off the gas and blow yourself up, less good if you do it to the neighbours. And if the first care home was “all right”, the second found with the aid of a small local agency started by a retired social worker of 30 years’ experience provided her with the best of care as she travelled the one way journey to her end.

She died on Tuesday, 2 June – the anniversary of the coronation – she would have liked that. We saw yellowhammers in a tree in the dew meadow behind her flat. And when I went to America aged 19, I told her I was afraid of crossing water – the Atlantic. She kept candles alight for me until I had arrived safely. I rarely light a candle without thinking of that.

And I found her UA Fanthorpe’s poem about a sheepdog on the night of the first Christmas: she liked that.

The last verse of the hymn we began with says

“One by one their seats are emptied

One by one they went away

Now the family is parted

Will it be complete one day?”

Oh,yes – father, mother and firstborn.

And I hope the dogs she loved will be waiting to greet her at the gates of heaven.

The circle is unbroken.

Unbroken circle – quilt

Don’t be put off by the title: my common sense is your hardheartedness: your commonsense is my incredulity.
It varies a lot.
When we lived lives of greater social definition, before all that progress speeded up through the last couple of centuries, we could probably agree on common sense.
Now I am not so sure.   It is a term I would only share with an intimate.   You can never tell how people are going to jump.

So the first award for Woman of the Week goes to Professor Geeta Nargund, at St. George’s Hospital Tooting in London where she is a fertility doctor, for pointing out that the body will only do what it can do and detailing “the costly and largely unnecessary burden on the NHS” of older women wanting IVF.
I saw her on TV and she was calm, kind and clear about the parameters within which she spoke.
And the second Woman of the Week is the Times columnist Libby Purves who wrote “It Takes A Brave Career Woman to Have a Baby” (Times 1.6.2015) – a nicely ironic title under which she sympathised and explained, outlining what she call “a strange transitional time”.

We have been in transition of one kind or another – men, women, children, society, nations, medical science and the weather to name a few – for the last thirty years.   Maybe what we used to call “life” is transitionave  – movement, change … and we accept less and less of it as it is unless we are under the gun, the real gun, which narrows the choices.   And choices have consequences and consequences are not always kind.

That’s life too.

Recently having supper with two women, one I have met once before (tall, droll, tormented and kind) and the other I had never met (dark, innately glamorous, who told me among other things a first person story of hunger – she had come originally from Croatia). During our conversation, the former remarked “Anna, you are positively fatalistic.”  I agreed.  God knows and He may not let you in on the secret.

I have done programmes with women who couldn’t have children and tried to explain that I feel very lucky but that I believe in what is meant.  Apparently that makes me a primitive.

Oh, good.

Nothing could underline Professor’s Nargund’s wish to have fertility taught as a concept better that the US reality performer Kim Kardashian (mother of one trying for a second) proclaiming “We have sex 500 times a day – nobody could try harder”.   Of course this may be a slight overstatement … but even on the distant shores of the common sense of agony aunts, informed by Those Who Really Did Know, we knew that the pressure to perform didn’t help the couple or the conception.

While common sense and fashion are not words that often appear together, but I laughed at a headline asking how big pants (ie anything bigger than a G string) had come back into use  ?  Have thongs had their moment?   (I know, you’re just gripped)  A thong is nearly as spectacularly uncomfortable as a corset – and worse – unless cut and worn with extreme care, they show through clothes in ways that old fashioned loose underwear does not.   In the seven veils of modern fashion which, requires just about everything to be revealed including lingerie and bunions, you may not mind showing off your bra straps and your knickers.  It’s not for me.

And finally – after babies, bras and belief – completely separately, here is some
Good News:

A young man of 18 and due to graduate is waiting for his parents who are coming across country on their Harley-Davidson. They are killed by a drunk driver.  The policeman first on the scene has to break the news to the graduate to be.  “I don’t think I can do the ceremony” said the understandably distressed youngster.
“Oh you will” rejoined the cop. “ Your parents will be looking down and I shall be in their seats.”
He was.  And then he waited for the young man at the side of the stage where he had received his diploma and embraced him.
The family pulled together, blessed the boy and thanked his benefactor.
“You are” wrote his half brother” the definition of a great law enforcement officer.”

My mother and father had a running battle over how much you should tell me about a book or a film.
My mother would cry “Oh don’t tell her all that, you’ll spoil it” while my father’s descriptions and memory for detail lodged deep in my enthusiastic brain.   If I want to read or see it, you can tell me chapter and verse.  Nothing will detract from my wanting to see the film or read the book for myself.
My parents were impressive on a number of levels and they made a deep impression on me.

You could read to my father – well, I could read to him because for some reason we shall never know now, the timbre of my voice hit his chancy deaf ear right nine times out of ten.  He couldn’t always hear my mother or my sister.  He lead everybody a dance about what he could and couldn’t hear – absolutely guaranteed to hear what you wanted to keep from him  – but he could hear me more often than not.
My mother disliked being read to.   She said in her straightforward way that it sent her to sleep.  This was different (work this out!) from listening to the radio and when she went blind, for starters I read her a volume of Dirk Bogarde’s autobiography and one of his novels, a chapter a day over the telephone, because she had to learn to listen.
And she did, out of necessity.

I thought of her on Bank Holiday weekend.

Many of my friends who live alone don’t like Christmas.  I can handle Christmas because it’s such a five star fandango that you have time to get used to it and work through or round it for your own peace of mind.  You may have a weepy moment but if you face it, you can handle it.   At least, I think you can.

But Bank Holidays sneak up on you.  Suddenly this shop is shut and that one is open.
Half the population seems to want to spend its time in the car or at the airport and the BBC and ITV are currently running an informal competition to see who can programme worse for an extended weekend.   If everybody is away and you are left behind, you can get a bit blue.  But not this last Bank Holiday.

I have a friend who has just got herself an agent and a book contract.   She is not a young woman and I had known from an earlier literary outing that she could write.
Press pause.
Writing is very personal.   There are millions of books sold that I don’t like or would like to like but can’t read.   Writing is like food.  It either tastes right or it doesn’t.   You may try again later – that sometimes works – but there are things that just don’t taste right.
And Parthenope (not her real name, the name of Florence Nightingale’s sister) can write.

Because the book is about people – and what people do and how and why has been central to my life, professionally and personally -she rang me when she started to write and asked me to read the first five chapters.
I asked why me?
“Because” she said” you can’t dissemble – you won’t say you like it if you don’t – and because you have a good ear for the wrong word or a false note.”
I read and really liked her first chapters, wrote back with my few suggested amendments and asked for the next five chapters – it was a terrific read.

And this weekend she asked me to read the whole book aloud – 12 chapters on Friday and 8 on Monday.  And I watched out of the corner of my eye as the pen flew in her hand, to amend, to correct, to note – I who so love the sound of my own voice (as my mother would say), I felt useful and I was honoured.  I can’t tell you much more about the book yet, it has a way to go, but count this as pre-publicity.   I had no time to think about anything but getting through the traffic, wearing comfortable clothes and reading aloud as fluently and intelligently as possible.

Parthe got what she wanted – useful distance which became clarity in work she had laboured over – and I got to play the only great music I can play – with my voice.  And if I could tack that on to helping a friend I esteem in an effort I admire – then nobody loses.  It’s a win/win.

Everybody has a dragon, some of us have more than one.
Setting aside its flaws, I loved the animation How To Train Your Dragon, partly because I like animation and partly because the boy’s favoured dragon reminded me of a pup of my favoured breed (English bull terrier).
But we all have invisible dragons.

“Lesson 342” in the title is hyperbole but most of us spend swathes of time trying to confront, rationalise, understand and either come to terms with or get over our dragons.

There is the dragon of speaking in public.   You meet intelligent interesting people, wonderful communicators, and ask one of them to address a meeting. There are those who do it and do it poorly – and bless them, they know it.
Or those who won’t do it because they know they can’t – standing up alone would paralyse the vocal cords.  This is a dragon of self evidence – you can get the darned thing to sit down and stop blowing smoke if you can get such a person into an interview – but asking him or her to do it alone will only cause the dragon’s breath to scorch the area.

There is the dragon of getting everything right – running round the house, clearing out corners, throwing things out of sight into cupboards, fresh flowers, fresh towels, straighten the towels, go back into the bathroom, check the loo rolls, straighten the towels again …
You have never done this?
Well either you have someone to do it for you or it isn’t your dragon.
This is a dragon of measurement: I am not sure what you are measured against, maybe against yourself.   Maybe against those untroubled interiors beloved of life style magazines but far from promoting calm in you, they make you very nervous.

Dragon wine decanter

I have a version of this dragon, which is to do with food.  Every time I cook for somebody I care about, I worry.   (And I never cook for anybody I don’t care for.)   It’s got less, because I try harder and worry less but that’s taken years.  Occasionally, checking once more through what I need and how long it will take against when he or she is arriving, I see a scaly tail whip out of the back door and smell unmistakeable brimstone.

The rule I long to live by is “never apologise, never explain”.  This is variously
attributed to the Duke of Wellington or the US comedian Don Rickles but wherever it came from, I haven’t the confidence or – let’s be honest – the social structure of a court or a political party or a definable group within which to take refuge.   I always want people to understand and if they don’t much like me – whether instinctively or because of something I have said or done – I feel that to be a failure and try to bridge the gap, only sometimes to fall into it bruising both knees and my less visible but just as bony self esteem.

Long ago it became clear that you can very often blag the big things but the little ones will get in there and irritate like grains of psychic sand.

I was invited as a filler to a small literary festival, all frightfully hail fellow well met, with a couple of colleagues, one of whom I don’t know.  No fee.  OK, that’s fine.
There was a misunderstanding about expenses, a lack of communication about how much time would be spent hanging about because of the vagaries of Sunday transport.
And audiences for a session across lunchtime are thinner, packed with friends.

But when you have three “performers” on a platform and a putative fourth in the person of the chair, you have too much going on.   I so envied the distance the unknown colleague put between herself and it.   I so envied the known colleague who professes not to care about very much.   I have a distance, but it’s different.  And I am stuck with caring.  I did not shine.  It hurt.    I came home on the train, alone thank God, save for Scaley with his head on my knee.

This morning I saw the star actress Cate Blanchett’s elegant explanation for the attributed claim to her previous lesbian affairs, only enquired into because the film she has taken to the Cannes Film Festival is a lesbian love story, with Rooney Mara.
It may or may not be true but her stance is that she was misquoted (heaven knows that’s common enough) and anyway – who cares?    Oh please can I be Cate in another life?
I wonder if she has a dragon?