Annalog

Tobacco is a killer
If it were grown and cured organically, used occasionally, it might be ok.
But (like meat) once it was produced industrially, marketed and targeted on to the neuroses that blossomed and thrived as the modern world developed (say, for the last five hundred years) its effects grew ever more toxic.
Somewhere I turned up the grim statistic that tobacco in all its variants had killed
more people in the US than everything else put together.
Remember The Insider (1999, directed by Michael Mann) about a tobacco company whistleblower, Russell Crowe and fellow actors at their best?
A very good film but not a pretty story.

My father smoked all his life.   He probably began before he joined the army but once there, he smoked.   And so did almost everybody else.  When he had his first heart attack forty years later, he was told to stop and he couldn’t.  He controlled it to never more than one cigarette an hour, he smoked the mildest brand he could tolerate and those with what he called “spats” on – but he couldn’t stop.

My mother however was quite different.
There was a silver cigarette box, lined with cedar or sandalwood, perhaps a long ago wedding present.   And once or twice a year, my father brought my mother (whether on the off chance or as a result of some discussion, I don’t know) either Passing Cloud – Turkish cigarettes first available in the 1870s, oval in a pink trimmed box – or Balkan Sobranie, black with gold tips.   They were decanted into the cigarette box and one quiet evening, often towards Christmas though I do remember one late summer evening –  my mother would smoke most of a cigarette.
I don’t remember her ever having more than most of one.
And enjoying it.

Through the rest of the year, Pop would smoke some of them and the remainder would be ditched when they staled.
You could say this was a waste of money but it had the air of a private ceremony and here we are 50 or 60 years later and I remember all the details.

Leaving aside the addictive nature of nicotine and the heaven knows what with which tobacco is now doctored (one of the nastiest chapters of the tobacco trade is the cold blooded doping of tobacco to create new addicts and thus new markets – get ‘em at seven, keep ‘em till heaven), there is a big psychological piece to smoking.
Is it reward or coping strategy?  Oral gratification or a pacifier for adults?

I was never a convinced smoker.  I tried but then I tried everything to look sophisticated.  I only liked two or three brands and I didn’t inhale much.  So when I shared a studio with a man who knew a lot about radio (Brian Hayes) but hated smoking, I stopped.   I think I have smoked half a dozen cigarettes in the last 40 years.

I have one great friend who smokes.  She always has and she always will.  So does her husband.   But she works at life with few days off.
She is unstintingly generous of herself, takes care of all sorts of friends and family, much of it over distance, whether in matters of health, the law or bathroom fittings.
She is if you will the “go to” person for many, including me.   She once lit up and asked rhetorically “I really should stop shouldn’t I?” to which I replied that if she could do what she does on cigarettes and tea, I thought she was doing remarkably well.

And several years ago it was with her I shared a cigarette.  Which was my last until I mentioned a certain longing for a Gauloise to a girlfriend who arrived for supper, unpacked her handbag and explained she couldn’t get French cigarettes, this was the best she could do and handed me Balkan Sobranie and a trip down memory lane.
We had one each last week.   My chest held up, the sky didn’t fall and I loved it.
Just the one.

Sorry there are no pictures this week because Anna’s computer decided to have a smoke itself!

The ties of friendship between Pam and me are reinforced by worldclass worriting.
She whose domain is dominated by possession – she never stays anywhere else if she can avoid it – has rented the house to a film company and is currently both appalled and impressed by the amount of work the location team are putting in, and the number of things that have had to be moved or changed.
She hasn’t slept for weeks.   
Before this, she worried it wasn’t going to happen, that there was no work, that the lighting in the street had been changed and that BT really did stand for Big Tit (meaning foolish and ineffectual  – check historical slang) and the computer was going to die.
You will be pleased to know that we laugh at how much we worry – I am up there with her with a slightly different list of worries – but last night we both laughed out loud when she remarked “Do you know, I think I have worried myself into serenity?”

Hah!
Whatever else I am losing with age, nervous anticipation is increasing.

Sometimes as I lope through the darkened streets – before taking my life in my hands to cross the road already glutted with cars and killers on wheels (my experience of bikes is not good) I wonder why I do this every morning?
And I know – it’s to move my back.
And because I still enjoy newspapers – until there is a run of stuff so ugly and unkind that I wonder – do I need to spend this money?
Yes.  Yes.  For the exercise, for the crosswords and this week (23.10.15) for Peter Brookes’ cartoon in The Times (Page 31) which shows the PM, the Chancellor, Prince Phillip and HM all bending to form the steps into the aircraft, up which mount the grinning Chinese premier and his wife.
Cartoonists are clever and Mr. Brookes is among the finest.

So why, why a package of deals (including a nuclear plant) worth an estimated $40 billion to get into bed with China – when better heads than mine have been talking about the manufacturing slowdown in China, the dissident movement, the lack of accountability, the instability?   A country which is singularly unpleasant to its own.
But the deals are done.  Not a darned thing I can do about it.   And what that highlights is neurotic anticipation – mine.

Anticipation as in looking forward, say, to Christmas, is one thing.
What we look forward to in that context is reinforced by what went before.  But reading the future is not given to humans except the clairvoyant few.

Maybe this is the Chancellor at his most farsighted, ushering in improved if not full employment – bearing in mind that the impossible takes a bit longer.
Or maybe this is a gamble, a gamble with lives that don’t matter a damn to a man with private money.   He can leave if he doesn’t like what happens.   The rest of us will be stuck with it, unexplained.

As I have got older, anticipation has become less about what might be good and more about what might go wrong.    I can worry myself into a black hole over a train journey I have never taken, over being too much of this and too little of that, on whether I can make that dish I have never made, and over what I will do if it doesn’t work.

There are still two or three memories which cause me to grimace with pain as I lie there not sleeping.   But I don’t do a lot of repining.
Done’s done and the milk is spilt.  Let’s hope there is a cat around to lick it up.
I worry about what might be.
I did this before to a degree but as I have become older and more powerless,
I have learned only one thing about what might be: it might, and we shall just have to get on with it.
Whatever is coming will come, I will deal with it as Pam is dealing with the location disruption – you gotta? you gotta.  Get on with it.
Dealing with it – cooking the dish, making the train journey, surviving a future you can not imagine is easier than worrying about what might be.
I say “Into Thy Hands”, imagine the light on the sea in Crete and fall asleep.  Eventually.

…  as in “the elephant in the room”.

We used to ask “And how do you know there is an elephant in the room ?” to which the answer was “Because you can smell the peanuts on his breath.”
(Are elephants ever allergic to peanuts ?)
Leaving aside the issue of peanuts, there are several elephants taking up psychic space at the moment.

84 British bishops signed a letter to the government suggesting that the number of refugees offered a place in Britain should be increased from 20 to 50 thousand.
And yes, I am just a viewer watching what will be necessarily abbreviated news coverage but not once did I hear a word of sympathy for the number of people
(and it’s about the same number) who are going to lose everything, whether directly or by extension, when Redcar and Scunthorpe respectively close or reduce their steelmaking.

You can’t make a market where there isn’t one, I know that.  For years, cheaper imports have undermined the British steel industry, even in its reduced state, and this is the crunch.  So we may well see a whole chunk of the north east displaced by political apathy.  Millions of pounds of public money won’t answer.  When did forethought go out of fashion ?  What are MPs paid for if not to think ?

The north east was a wild place under Henry VIII and several hundred years later, it is still dominated by its own intransigence and introspection, rarely visited by major political figures, occasionally producing remarkable athletes or musicians or film makers – the ones that got away and so were entitled to a ticket to bring them home for a visit.  But as the musician Alan Price told me years ago “If you stay, they say you didn’t really make it and if you leave, they say you betrayed them.”

They are not easy people to help but they deserve at least public consideration alongside of every other needy person.  Suffering know no boundaries, weights or  measures – it just is –  it isn’t less because it is on the doorstep.

There are lots of real elephants in jumbo corner who are being shot and poisoned at some ungodly rate a day because of the buying power of the shooter and probably because of the increasing hold the Chinese have on Africa – China being the greatest consumer of animal parts for traditional medicine and ivory for carving – but as they are our trading partners, this has joined the list of what is not to be mentioned – human rights, animal rights, environmental pollution to name but three.

We once expanded our empire and now it’s their turn and as we once did, so they are now doing, wading through the bodies of the beautiful great mammals, leaving behind wreckage, trauma (to the young) and horribly frequent death.
Once Africa could recover from this. Can it again ?
More peanut breath re the National Health Service.   However naïve I am, I can’t see the BMA “stirring up its members” against the new contract proposed to junior doctors.   The junior doctors got all fired up without any help.  Would you buy a used car from Health Minister Jeremy Hunt ?  And nobody  – left right or centre – has been prepared to deal with the incredible cost of agency nursing on which it appears the safety of many wards depends.

While sugar coated peanuts have the German Chancellor – hitherto Europe’s reliable sensible clergyman’s daughter – shaking hands with the Turkish  President, offering to enable a pass into the European Community, just as stability in his country begins to slip – beating up on the Kurds again while they have offered rare coherent military opposition to the Daesh (Isis is the name of a British river – I’d like to reclaim it.)
Oh peanuts peanuts peanuts.

These are the big issues we can’t keep sliding past and hoping they won’t come.
They have come, they are upon us  and now we have to deal with them.
I wonder who is going to do that ?

Not the tea cup  – I mean bra size.
The bra is a sort of temporary restructuring agent which appears, much further back in history than I had expected, when a society begins to make money and projects some of its images of perfectibility on to its women.

I remember longing for my first bra a sign of growing up.  Then, as I recall, cup sizes were Bs and Cs: anything bigger was the subject of bated breath or nursing mothers.
Today bra cup sizes are increasing like giant vegetables.
This is not to be insensitive to women with heavy bosoms, a difficult figure to dress since the declining fashion for stays or corsets in the period following WWI.
There were bras before that – wonderful moody stories about pretty showgirls with two silk handkerchiefs (!) and indeed, however unreliable Wikipedia might be, the entry on bras is provoking in terms of time line and geography.

And there will always be women who don’t wear bras either because of the beauty of their bosom or sheer disinterest because increasingly the bra is marketed, either to fit what size you think you are, or what size they say you are – and they want to sell more bras.

“does this mean double breasted?”

I have only been fitted for bras twice, once in my forties and again, last week.
Marks and Spencer claims to sell a bra every few minutes but I confess I am not an M&S girl.   An unapologetic snob in this (as in gloves and soap), the first  French underwear I had came from a shop called Elegante, was made of flower printed black cotton.  The bra was built into a minislip which fitted like a dream and there were matching pants.
It wore well and was worth every penny I paid for it.
Then, there were several big shops specialising what we might call “underpinnings.”
Now, almost all of them have gone.

I was earning when I was first fitted for a bra so I went to Rigby and Peller, reasoning that if it’s good enough for Her Majesty, it’s good enough for me.   The wonderful Marie watched me climb into what I thought I wanted, regarded me frowningly in the mirror, muttered “Just a minute” and whisked away.
She returned with two other bras which didn’t look terribly different and suggested I tried one.  I did.   The improvement was visible.   “What have you done?” I asked.
“Two cup sizes bigger, one size down in circumference.”
I went in an undistinguished 36B and emerged a glowing 34 DD.

“Marilyn Monroe’s bra”

That afternoon I told a very elegant Iranian acquaintance – she said I looked radiant, what had happened? – all about it and she was thrilled.
“My mother is sending me 32 FF from Paris “ she said, “ do you think they can help me?”
I did.  They did.  She told me so next time we met.

But times change, bodies change and the industrialisation of manufacture involving thousands of units makes sales imperative.

The woman who fitted me in Peter Jones last week was tactful and patient.   And as I have said before, I have been conditioned into trusting the John Lewis Partnership over many years.
However I know that as the years have gone forward, my muscles are the same age as me or older and a few pounds have gone on. (And JL isn’t the same either.)
The evidence of my eyes suggested that the shape was good though
“c‘est un vrai balcon” (veritably, a balcony) – or as my father would have said mischievously “With all that before you, you’ll never drown!”
But 32 FF!

This is based, explained the saleswoman helpfully, on using the closest set of hooks for 4 months, second set for 4 months, last set for 4 months.   We did not discuss what I call the fried egg syndrome (ie spread) that had clearly taken place to get me from DD to FF – and who cares what size the labels say if it looks all right – but I did wonder how we went from a more comfortable (say) 35 inches round me to 32?
I was tempted to say “in your dreams” but apparently it’s to do with the elastic, and a sense of constraint that made me want to giggle.
They do say that when a woman is dressed to kill, her first victims are always her feet. I am consoled by the thought that a tight bra is less miserable than tight shoes and less compulsory in the wearing.

Thirty five years ago, I sat in a Salvation Army Citadel to shoot the last of a series of six programmes about programmes about faith and belief and how those ideas applied to the agony column.   And an old man taught me a wonderful lesson.
“Faith is a bridge of glass” he said.  “You don’t know it’s there till you put your foot on it.”
Never mind what you call him, for me, the Presence is there.
An American friend used to refer to him as The Man Upstairs.
The gender of the address is less important than the respect – I know radical
feminists who refer to the Goddess.  It is another face of the same thing.
Atheists, leave now.

From time to time, any of us may have a bad day. It used to be called being blue but the blue has darkened.
For some, depression is a major part of a personality, a condition or an illness.
But I am talking about the days when, for any of a variety of reasons, any or all of us might feel pulled down.
Sometimes we have an explanation for this, sometimes we don’t.  The air of our troubled world is fraught with conflict, smoke, illegal emissions, the endless hum of electricity and duplicity.   The one you love doesn’t call back.   Your child is in trouble, someone is unwell, things you thought would run smoothly don’t…
Happy (or at least happier) are those who can ignore what’s going on, work their way round the impediment.
I am not one of them.  “Don’t think about it” doesn’t work for me.

Is the glass half empty or half full?   It doesn’t matter. It’s the same glass.
Life is awful and wonderful usually within seconds of each other and often puzzlingly.
There must be a logic but it isn’t a human one.

“I never thought of you as a Christian” somebody remarked in affronted tones.
I am not.
“But are you Jewish?”  Through my antecedents.  Reading yiddishkeit (of Jewish matters) has consoled me for the sense of dislocation I often felt.
I think God is a good and powerful monosyllable, even if it’s unfashionable.

At my secondary school, we sang a hymn at morning assembly.  (TV
programmes on singing together reiterate the sense of community it offers).  Somebody read aloud a short extract from a thoughtful book (including the Bible), the headmistress made her announcements, different prayers were offered from time to time, concluding with the Lord’s Prayer.   But there were only three Jewish girls in that white generally Christian school.
Nowadays in major cities we have children of umpteen nationalities all piled in together, learning some form of English as the common language but with the constant presence of other tongues, other ways, other beliefs.

If there was ever a time for respectful inclusion, it’s now.  You believe what you believe, I believe what I believe – the form of belief is a human invention.
The Presence is what unites us.
But we have sectionalised and broken away into a kind of stamped foot specialism, ie “my belief is better than yours” and with such good intentions.
We intended to honour and to make allowances for difference, but the difference has splintered into something much more sinister, encouraged by all those languages, many or most of which are only spoken by their natives and their children.

I had a really bad morning recently and looking awful, feeling awful, I was cheered to find something I really wanted in the charity book shop where I heard a young woman’s voice bemoaning the facial work in which the singer Cher had invested.
(What follows isn’t as far fetched as it sounds, Cher and I are of an age.)   And she
segued out of that into examining my skin – which was right next to her, saying kind enthusiastic things about that grey skin I had brought down the road, trying not to think about, bemoaning the lack of a corduroy veil.
God she was good.
And so is God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“picture of a knee jerk”

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

The curse of the four letter word rides again!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“slow loris”