Annalog

Here is the good news: it’s a bit warmer and a bit lighter and the election is over which means that once we get past the reassessment (should he. shouldn’t she, why didn’t they, disagreements of family and caste)  we shall not have to have every newscast dominated by an ersatz update.
If politics is now in a new era of inclusion, could perhaps pollsters, pundits and political assessors expand their group to include soothsayers, card readers and future predictions based on coffee grounds ?  There is a lot of bad coffee around, this would be a good use for it.

I am not good at spring.
People are endlessly hopeful about spring.  One day’s sunshine and it’s all bare arms and white linen.    Whatever happened to “caste not a clout till May is out” ?
A warm spring day is a thing of wonder, tiny green shoots, softer light, birds billing and cooing, a gentle breeze on the face.  It’s about hope and people like their hope topped up, refilled and refreshed.

An anxious type, I spend spring trying to second guess the weather and getting it wrong.
I nearly hugged a young woman I don’t know the other day when she said she hardly ever got it right, too many clothes for the cold morning or not enough to come home in, she felt a fool.
This spring has been perverse: warm with a cold wind or cool with a warm one  and as the weather systems have fractionalised and increasingly broken down, it’s harder and harder to guess what will be happening in the next thirty minutes or a couple of miles down the road..

In contrast to the good news, the bad news is endless.
The earthquakes in Nepal, the displacement of people throughout the Middle and Far East, the thousands risking life and limb to people smugglers – which only tells you how desperate and frightened everybody is – to die  or be dumped from leaking boats in the Mediterranean or in some camp that stinks and kills all hope, a breeding ground for other kinds of desperation.
We all have ways of distancing ourselves from bad news.  We avoid the newspapers, turn off the news on radio and tv – or go out of the room and do something else.
Long ago I decided that, for me, avoiding the unpleasant made it worse.
Better to face it, though facing it means different things for different people.
Whatever I thought about the election was summed up in Nick Clegg’s phrase
“fear and grievance has won – liberalism has lost”. He may have been talking about the party but I think too he was alluding to a wider principal which has come to be tarred with the word “woolly” – though there is not much woolly about my liberalism nor that (I hope) of the 5,000 new recruits to the party he lately led.   Generosity (of the purse or the spirit) is not real if it is only based on guilt and good manners.   It has to be tougher and more down to earth than that.

But spring means starting again.   And I am not sure I know how to or where to begin.
I feel like a child who wants to hide under a table till the thunder has passed.  I remember my big white bullterrier who was terrified of thunder, equally frightened and embarrassed about being frightened, that’s how I feel.  I may not like the people in charge for the next few years but they are – to use a friend’s wonderfully evocative phrase – the evil of two lessers.

This spring finds me tired, because I am older and sometimes I feel it, and because I had a bug that must have liked me, it lingered so long.
I can see the continuum of every other season but spring is contrary – better when it’s better, worse when it’s worse and usually in the manner of nature, both at the same time.
Perhaps spring is more a state of mind than a season.
Anyway, file under “must try harder.”   And look for good news.

There is a drawing by the Dutch graphic artist Escher, of a fish looking up through water bounded by trees, leaves floating on the surface.  But in my recall, the water is ice and the fish is trapped.   I’m not very good at underwater.  I am a fire sign and whether it is a fictive film about nuclear submarines under the ice cap or a documentary with tiny figures (some of them must be women, thicker layer of subcutaneous fat) under the frozen sea researching currents or plankton or seal, I sit there muttering to myself about the weight of the water, the dark and the cold.    I so admire everybody concerned.  It frightens me.

And although what I have described is a personal interpretation of a famous work of art – even a perversion of it – the fish under the ice has been haunting my restless sleep.

After the flu (no surprise to me that the effectiveness of the vaccine was so reduced)  I had a late winter sequel, where the nose runs every time you change temperature, and as you change temperature quite a lot, it runs and runs until you think it will never stop.
There have been the usual worries and one or two I didn’t expect.  And though worry is one of the few things I do really well, waking with that faintly choking feeling in my chest or the equally unlovely gnawing in the stomach has been marked of late.  And no, it’s nothing to do with hunger.

Writing can be very exposing and I wondered whether it was the pie in the sky project that demands the best of me without any hope of it going anywhere.  It’s the only way I can approach it.  Hope is too emotionally expensive for me but the endeavour makes me feel exposed.   And when I am exposed, I eat.  I would like to say nibble but nibble is for rabbits and grass or carrots and though I love my fruit and veg (never any need to say five a day to me) when I am writing-worried I eat bread or crispbread and butter and cheese.   The gap inside needs something familiar and comforting and I rationalise that it has been cold.   So I know I am not hungry, not physically anyway.

Sleep has been shallow, like a saucer easily spilled into wakefulness. What you’d like is to fold yourself into coverlets and drift away to deep rest.
Not for weeks.

And the other morning, about 6.00 or so, it hit me.  What I feel is fear.
I have felt it before and  “It’ll never happen” is an unreliable piece of folk wisdom.   Being afraid of something doesn’t prevent it from happening.    Whatever it is may indeed happen and not necessarily to somebody else.
I read that Tom Stoppard had felt that the lack of success for his latest play was because audiences were no longer in sympathy with his frames of reference. I saw the actresses Patricia Hodgkinson and Janet Suzman had expressed concern over the foundation and appreciation of theatre arts.
And though my “popular culture” was much more ordinary (women’s magazines)  I have lived to see something useful and flexible fall away. It is not easy to live through the discarding of something you have really cared about, studied, had success in and it is worth remembering the “forever” is for mostly for fairytales, not humans.
Change comes and as it does, the way that we express ourselves, how we are entertained, our sources of contact and information change.
History is a pendulum and it’s darned uncomfortable when it swings back against you so hard that it hurts.
But that was only the surface of the fear.

Beyond that, I fear the various forms of instability and upheaval in most of the countries of the Middle East, the rise of ISIS  (please see a tremendously informative article by Graeme Wood in Atlantic magazine), the self aggrandizing cynicism of Mr. Putin who says whatever fills the bill – his interpreter will be as loyal to him as Stalin’s to Uncle Joe –and then does whatever he wishes.
I fear the furore in one country after another because of war, because of disease, because of interfering with nature, because of international trade and commerce and how it’s paid for.
I used to think I’d leave the passing of what was to my son and it wasn’t much of a heritage for him.
Now I pray for the courage to face it in my lifetime.

The programme went out live for 2 hours, rehearsed for transmission from the regional television station in Newcastle. The studio audience was small, the whole programme went out from a studio and incorporated actors touring in the area (Joanna Lumley, charming then, charming now), the occasional singer (Marianne Montgomery taping herself into a Yuki dress in the corridor), the famous who were there unexpectedly (like Terence Donovan the photographer), local stories big enough for national notice, national stories locally relevant: this used to be called a magazine programme, something for everybody.  And I was hired as a presenter.

And one night I met Margaret and Peter, seated in the audience to support the mother of a murdered child who was there to be interviewed.   The mother’s name was Ann, her daughter’s name was Lesley.  When the programme was over, we all piled in to the Station Hotel for sandwiches and tea or something stronger.   I didn’t usually linger because I was tired and usually caught the first train back in the morning, to be met by my (then) small son and his father in London.

The night I met Ann, I said carefully and directly that I had never met someone who had lost their child to murder.  I was honoured.  And she held my hand quietly between our chairs for hours, so I stayed up well past my bedtime.  When eventually I stood up she said “You look like Lesley, with that short dark hair.  She’s have been about your age by now.”  What could I say?  And as I cast my eye around, I saw a woman nod and smile almost maternal encouragement.  So I smiled and kissed Ann’s cheek.
I met the couple in the hall afterwards, Peter and Margaret.  We shook hands.  They told me Ann had never recovered, that she was kept in the land of the living by her husband Alan and they did what they could.  We swapped addresses and telephone numbers.

We sent each other Christmas cards.  They lived in a small town in the north east of England, the kind of devout Christians who are truly gentle people and somewhere over the years Margaret put the celebration of Easter together with my birthday which is around the same time and I got cards for both.

Ann suffered cancer and died, I suspect it was the only peace she ever found.  Alan who had done so much for her died more recently.  Margaret told me that her own son had once consulted me on a radio programme and she felt my clarity had been useful to him.   When her husband Peter became ill, she nursed him to his death.  And when he died I took a risk and rang her to sympathise.  It could have been a mistake but it wasn’t.
If this sounds miserable, I don’t think it is.  I accepted my place in the outer court of these lives, as so many others, and it always seemed to me that the very formality of our wishes for each other gave what comfort or acknowledgement we could.  Not small or great but enough.  Time has passed.  Thirty years. And that’s a long time to keep faith and contact with people you know so slightly.

When I read about how many followers and friends somebody has one social media of one kind or another, I prefer my version.  There are people in life you think of as friends and it’s a shock to discover they are not. Anybody who has been through divorce or the break up of a serious relationship (let alone bereavement which doesn’t bring out the best in everybody) goes through the disappointment of finding out that this one or that couple aren’t who you thought they were, because of their role in what’s happening to you or their judgement of it.   And sometimes you really do have to start all over again.

In contrast my contact with Margaret and hers with me has been utterly coherent down the years.  She wishes me well, I wish her well. When we spoke after an interval of many years, it was as if we’d met in the street a couple of weeks ago, not thirty years before in a television studio.

Candles are one of my favourite things.  The people over the road have arranged tea lights all round the sills of their sash windows.   My most treasured memory of my sister is her lighting a candle for me when I flew aged 19 to the US for the first time: I had told her I was afraid of crossing the ocean and without any fuss or interpretation, she kept a candle alight for me till I landed.
Margaret is one of my candles – a small steady light in the dark.

Recently through the door came a luxuriously printed and coloured publication, endorsed if not underwritten by local estate agents, to show what is happening about  us and as where I live is a mixture of old money and new, allegedly on the up, I scan the pages about the body maintenance schemes, the shops, the interior decorators and other services with curiosity.
And they are still selling wood burning stoves as the “best” way to heat a house and keep the air clean.
This in the same week as Paris has banned wood burning in the capital because of pollution.   Am I a cynic to think that this is a clumsy joke, illustrating the difference between Paris and the rest of France, especially rural France, where the woodpile is everywhere ?
And what about the rest of Europe ? Are the figures for asthma, throat and chest cancers and all the other respiratory illnesses significantly higher throughout the land mass ?   Because they all burn wood.
Or is this blaming who you can get hold of because nobody (still less Hamfisted Hollande) can take issue with the combustion engine in the interests of trade, travel and tourism.   It is a bigger country than you think, France, and wedded to the car.

You know how we talk about “joined up writing”, the cursive I was taught when I was a child ?   (I even have an item on the importance of what they call “le graphisme” in French education).  Much more interesting is joined up thinking.
Or the lack of it.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer – a man no more blessed with a manner or a haircut to inspire confidence than his opposite number in the Shadow Cabinet
(he  appropriately named for a politician) – has promised this, that and the other thing. There is to be less to pay on houses, roads to be extended, high speed rail links.  The elderly are to be nourished, the young to be employed and the NHS saved.   We do not know (and many of us do not understand) where the money is to come from but on present evidence, it appears there may be a printer in the basement of Number 11 Downing Street.Either that, or the minister has a money tree.  Or more likely, a grove of them.

And then two days after the Chancellor’s statement, it is remarked that it can and will be done – probably not all but significant amounts of it – by encouraging us into further personal debt – of which we already have one of the highest levels in the Western world.  And it will get worse.
Of course it sounds better when you call it credit – but whatever you call it, you owe.We have become used to owing.

Then there is immigration.  Two and three generations ago, all the families from which my family derived were immigrants.  One of the more positive aspects of post imperialism is immigration to the dominant powers, for education and opportunity.
Sometimes, you came because you were extradited from the territory in which you used to live after nationhood was achieved (for example, like East African Asians), sometimes you came here because you wanted to come or were sent (for example, like Afro-Caribbeans).  
And whatever you think about the European dream, porous borders that allow you to travel unchecked are part of the legal commitment.
But who travels, with what purpose and what they are asked on the way, is another consideration.
Probably how they are asked about why they travel is important too.

What is called economic migration from countries outside the European Community, territories that increasingly don’t function, don’t have work or food or hope – that is not easily talked about.
Say your piece and you risk sounding like a racist.  And the shadow looms of Enoch Powell’s famous speech about “rivers of blood.”

So it was unexpectedly pleasing to hear the Conservative Norman Tebbitt talking carefully and constructively about social cohesion which is based (according to him) on a single dominant ethos.  He said (I paraphrase) that once there was more than one, the society began to pull into conflicted smaller parts, and thus to break up.  He did not sound like a “brown shirt” to me but an old tired careful man trying to find the words to convey a clear message with some appreciation of the difficulties and the minimum of offence.

A bargain is something you want at a price you can afford, right?  A bargain is not something you didn’t know you wanted at more than you expected to have to pay but still much cheaper than it was full price, when you didn’t know you thought you ought to have it. Because it’s a bargain.
Is it?

Why do people talk about the “holiday of a lifetime” and in the next breath explain how they got the cheapest seats, hotel package, meal deal and free booze?
Isn’t that what they do on every other holiday?   Isn’t the holiday of a lifetime different, one you save up for, plan for and make as few compromises as you could manage?
Why is a “dream dress” one that costs a double dyed fortune – but doesn’t fit?
Why do you have to have one that costs all that money when you could spend less money and have something more becoming and better cut?

I will look at the sale rail, of course I will.
What used to be known as fair is now known to be inflated.
You save what and where you can. But I have a bargain bypass unless it happens by accident.
I do not care if it is cheaper if it is not what I want.
I want what I want and I thought the whole idea of a “free market” was that there would be such a lot of choice that I was sure to find what I wanted.
Oh hopeful me.

The electric toothbrush was a bargain.  It was reduced and I cynically worked out that if it lasted three months (I don’t think I believe in gadgets) I would save on the travelling version that lasts roughly four weeks and dies. It’s still going strong, I have had new brush heads twice and that’s still cheaper.  Hooray.
But I have lost count of the “bargain” toiletries – body cream, handcream, soap and shampoo – that I don’t like the smell of and therefore want to be rid or that just don’t work.   They were bad bargains – false economies – dead money.
I look at them now, mind and hands closed against them.

My daily shoes are two kinds of bargain.   There’s the extremely successful
(bought in two colour ways, one full price, one reduced, one knockdown) sneakers that have lasted for two years at half what I used to pay for the loafers I loved that are now no longer so well made.
And the indestructible French laceups which cost £180 twelve years ago.
I can’t kill them.

A bargain was my first vase which I bought for 10 shillings old money in Lisson Grove market and which I keep because I still like it (it’s celebrated a half century!)

Last year I bought a bra in a famously reliable chain store.  It was badly made but I wasn’t proud and I thought it would do.   It began to sag and bag as soon as it was washed and when I returned it politely with the receipt, I was informed by Ms. Hoitytoity of 1977 that I should have handwashed it.
I said levelly this had not been pointed out to me.  She shrugged with a shoulder so expressive she should have it insured and I thanked her with the full wattage of my mother’s most lethal charm.
As I walked away, I dropped the offending garment in the middle of the shop.
On the floor, with the other rubbish.

And for the first time I fought over a sweater.  I had budgeted for it – you have to do this on a restricted income.   It had come down in price but it wasn’t cheap.  I loved the shape, the colour and I thought I was buying quality. A touch of glamour, even.
I wore it half a dozen times and it began to “pill”.   I took it back.  I was offered ten per cent discount which I said I thought was derisory.  I was asked what I would like?   I said £50 and the garment, which was good enough to shop in.  And I got it.  This was a disappointing bargain but I give the young manageress of the shop where I have been a customer since its beginning full marks.

Part of a bargain is getting for a price more advantageous to you the buyer something that is “good”.   I have a feeling that a bargain is like beauty, increasingly in the eye of the beholder.
Expenditure is less likely to guarantee quality and less expenditure is less likely to guarantee an advantage  – unless it’s what you want.

My mother hated shopping.  We’re talking about a long time ago.
The supermarket was yet to take hold, the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker had different premises, as did the greengrocer, the haberdasher and the chemist.
Very early on in my life, I was provided with a list and a basket and sent in the right direction.  I proved to be an enthusiastic shopper.  Ma thanked heaven rejoicing and let me get on with it.
I remember Miss Camish who had a tiny space like a cellar but above ground which smelt of earth and all the fruit and vegetables she offered, straight out of the ground – no citrus , it was imported – and the best cooking apples.  Just as well.  There was always a bowl of stewed apple in my family home and there is in mine except mine is made with the peels as well (better tasting) and I no longer use sugar .  I love marmalade and lollop in a couple of spoonfuls.

We had an account at Pybus opposite Hintons, which we only visited in dire necessity and for mother’s chocolate. I never knew why.
And Pybus had a great big wooden counter with a whole cheese which you expected to taste before you bought.  Coffee and sugar was sold to you in strong blue paper bags, sugar prepacked, coffee ground to request (coarse).
Paper products ? Izal toilet paper which was shiny and skidded. Horrible. Never saw paper kitchen towel till I went to the US.
Cleaners ?  Vim (abrasive powder ) and Domestos: I still buy that.

When I lived in South Kensington, in a room I called the comfortable coffin because it was the same shape, a bit bigger but not much, Ma came to spend a weekend with me and exclaimed with admiration over the local grocery shops – by then a small supermarket and a rather specialised deli.  “I can see why you all want to live in London” she said admiringly.  “The shops are wonderful.” And that was way before looking at hats in Harrods.

Obviously this experience shaped my life because I love to shop and still prefer small shops for everything.  At various points in my life, I have happily gone round department stores, even buying from them, but it’s not the same.  Show me a large space full of hundreds of the same coat and my mind glazes over.
A recent trip to an enormous supermarket locally produced the same blank and I noticed (with sarcastic pleasure) that unless I bought “offers”, it wasn’t cheaper, they were just selling multiples.

When last year (December) I found a candleholder I liked, that worked, that I could afford,  in a small shop, I was thrilled.  I have in my life done a great deal of mindless buying, not being pleased and passing on or even throwing away.  Somebody once called me a consumer queen which I foolishly thought was a compliment.   I was just a bad but hopeful buyer.    This item worked for me on every level so in January 2014 I went back and asked if I could order another couple.
I am still waiting.    Morbidly fascinated but waiting.

If this is how they work, then this is why small shops are dying – this isn’t a general criticism because I know this isn’t how they work.  They work on customer communication and small specialised service.  So why hasn’t one of the two men who have seen me at intervals and spoken to me, and been offered my telephone number, to prepay (more fool me) bitten the bullet and either:  apologised, said they can’t do it, too small an order, their suppliers wouldn’t comply( I would have been disappointed but if it’s the polite truth  …)
or accepted the order, hit the telephone, nailed the supplier down and got the items in.

As it is we passed six months where I think both of them expected me to go away.
They took my details several times but were never in touch till I turned ( verbally anyway) into a rather grand dowager and spoke as if to fools.  Then I got a call back.
It is alleged (don’t count your chickens) that these items will be available next week.
I am not holding my breath.

And of course they can be ordered on line which I simply didn’t know.   Cheaper too, I’ll bet.
I think this is what is called a sociological experience.
Learn something every day.

Recently the head teacher of a once floundering, now successful secondary school talked about the importance of uniform binding children together, same start, esprit de corps.  I can get behind that.  I wore uniform to school and its parameters were strictly enforced – only socks of white and grey or stockings fifth form up (tights were for ballet dancers), this length skirt, that colour raincoat.  
Our uniform only looked anything when you let it be what it was and the rule was smart and clean, not fashion.   You couldn’t soften the edges without looking silly so you didn’t.  You made them crisp enough to cut. It was deeply unbecoming (I seriously don’t remember anybody it did anything for), boxy shapes and a horrible hat – but you could make it work for you by subscribing to it.

Recently I looked out of a third floor window in London’s Oxford Street onto a sea of black and denim, every shade and texture of black and jeans.
The uniform for informal work was jeans, everybody else wore black.
The great pleasure of shopgazing is seriously reduced by the misery of repetition from the high street on up.
Uniform gone mad.
Same shapes, same colours (or lack of them), same shoes, same jewellery.
You get a bit more choice at the high end but not much.

Of course there were always fashion conventions: if you were a man, you wore this kind of shirt on that occasion (I remember Jeremy Paxman in pique !), those trousers for another.  We used to say that if you were called as witness in a court case, as a woman, you wore navy and pearls.   There were always people who opened the door to other colours, innovators and artists.  The beaux and beauties changed the scene as and when they could and we all benefited.   Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery but sartorial imitation down the centuries was more to do with inspiration than copying.

Now it’s like Stepford Wives gone mad.  You can look at half a dozen young actresses at an industry “ do” and they will be one something else and seven assisted blondes.  Their hair will be the same, long and floppy.  They will be as near as possible the same shape, wearing the same clothes in the same colours, with the same accessories, the same shoes, dammit the same shape jewellery.   I’ve heard of safety in numbers but this is eerie.

Steve who sells The Big Issue in Sloane Square tells me that most of the women he sees between the ages of 35 and 55 look exactly the same.  They wear the same clothes, he’s noticed, from the same shops (he named them). Their hair looks the same, the same colours, the same shapes.  “I don’t dare ask ‘em to buy the magazine” he said.” I can’t tell one from ‘tother.  I might have asked ‘em, before!”

The other day I sat beside a girl on the bus (the steerage class of modern urban transport and endlessly interesting).  She was obviously Middle Eastern with thick black hair pulled back from a handsome face dominated by an aquiline nose.  I am a connoisseur of the nose.  I have one too.  So I said quietly when she smiled at me “You have a beautiful nose.”
“My nose!”  she said.   “I was going to have it done in a couple of months.”
I said “Well, don’t.”   “But” she said “it’s so – strong.”   “That’s right” I said “ and when you get to my age your face will have something to hang on” and we talked about surgery (I used to work for a plastic surgeon) and sameness and she told me her family was Lebanese, her husband was English, she was raised in Canada.
I saw her a second time in the street and as I went past I patted her arm and said “It’s still a beautiful nose” and she grinned and said something pleasant.
With it she looks like herself.  When it’s scaled down, she will be more ordinary.

I find this so sad.  We used to save up money to have a kitchen extension or redo the garden and now in increasing numbers we spend disposable income on reinventing ourselves, not to be beautiful – that I could understand – but to look like everybody else.
We used to look at the hordes in Chinese cities under Mao, all in their similar suits, mostly blue, occasionally grey or brown when the dye faded and the West mocked them for that uniformity.  We saw our freedoms illustrated by our individuality.
Now we have our own uniform.

Julianne Moore – my profile

The poppies we bought from the trays in the street were once silken if not silk.  Now they are plastic.   When you see poppies growing, their most wonderful qualities are colour and texture.  That texture was part of their accurate appeal, fragile,  what made us able to identify them as symbols of  the appreciated flesh sacrifice in The War To End All Wars  – which sadly only became the beginning of more and more wars, small and ugly, larger and more devastating.

My father was the oldest of four, the only boy and his father who was a very goodlooking short man beat the daylights out of his tall young son.  It was a village scandal, how the schoolmaster used his own boy whom they called Young Skipper.   Maybe this had something to do with my father’s enlistment – September 1914 – three weeks before his eighteenth birthday.
He told me about his homecoming but not his leaving.
He was drilled at the Duke of York’s Military Academy in Dover, in what he called “blue canvas slops” (loose denim) and there were no guns.  They practised with walking sticks.

He was sent out to Calcutta (Mumbai) on a troop ship, via the Bay of Biscay and he was very seasick.  He recalled vividly the pitch and heave of the boat and vomit everywhere.  He thought he must have fainted and when he awoke he was naked, wrapped in a blanket and a large hand offered him ship’s cocoa  (made from melted solid chocolate) and two dry biscuits.   “ Break them in half and tap them” said the voice.  He looked up at an enormous man with a brown face and blue eyes, who wedged him upright like a baby (Pop was 6 feet 2inches and built).
“Why tap them ?” I asked the first time he told this story
“Get the weevils out” he said.
He conjured that man so vividly that I found his facsimile at a radio station in the San Fernando Valley 25 years later.

When he arrived in Calcutta, “everything was sent up the line by mule train”.
“Mules ?”  I exclaimed.
He described the flat bed carts and teams of mules.
He told me about the food – mutton fat in the tea instead of milk, milk wouldn’t keep in the heat.   He showed me the scars of the injections on his left arm.  “What for ?”
“Black fly fever, yellow fever, malaria …”  “All together?”
He smiled.

He described drilling on horseback, telling the sergeant “Sir, I don’t think …”
“You’re not paid to think, lad.  You’re paid to die !”
He was a rough riding sergeant major at 19 which is when he met Ned, the ugliest horse in the Indian Army, thin with a big head and a leg at each corner, who wouldn’t let anybody on his back.  They became friends.   Pop went into his first cavalry charge whirling a stirrup iron round his head because his revolver had jammed.   Ned was shot under him some time later and when my father died fifty years further on, we found a little picture of the horse.

He described to me (his late child) being chosen as one of the few who could swim to go across a river, having to take his glasses off and realising the water was sticky.
Sticky ?
“Another regiment got chopped up badly a mile up river.”
He swam through death.

His parents were told he had drowned off a troop ship on the way home (I have the letter from the War Office) so when he turned up through the twilight, it was all a rather wonderful surprise and everything was upbeat till he saw his mother putting bed linen in front of the fire and asked what she was doing.  “Airing the sheets” she said.  “I haven’t slept in sheets for five years” he said and she burst into tears.
He told me “Her boy was gone.”

My son asked me yesterday “So how did you get on Sunday ?”
“Sunday?”   “Remembrance Day.”
“Fine, thank you.”
I am not big on the poppies, the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
I’ve been to the Cenotaph and stood with the gun crews and watched the horses in what I can only describe as a private act of worship.
I remember.   

This is what a feminist looks like

Simone Veil

(if you have managed to escape the furore)
is the slogan on a T-shirt which several major politicians were persuaded to wear and be photographed in.
The Prime Minister declined.  So his PR people or his wife or some part of his brain not often in evidence deserves credit.
The T-shirt cost £45.  £45!  For a T-shirt.
So first of all there is a fuss about what’s a feminist anyway.
Second string hooha is the publicity.  I should think the magazine that caused this thing to come into being is licking its chops, publicity being the oxygen of present day existence.  And it was supplied through a chain of shops and retail can always do with a boost. And then there is the third bite of the press apple when it is discovered that the offending garment was made under “sweatshop conditions” (predictable) and the great and the good have to look shocked when actually, they should just look silly.

Where did they think the t-shirt came from, who did they think made it?
If it was that price, somebody  – indeed, several somebodies – were making on the deal.
Feminism be blowed, this is about publicity.
For a magazine which has a budget for the same.
For a chain of shops, ditto.
And anyway, do you know anything less flattering to man or beast – unless you are young, glowing and in terrific shape – than a short sleeved badly coloured T shirt, cut like a bag, with a slogan across it?

You will note – please note – that I have not named the magazine, the chain of shops or the politicians.  That’s deliberate.  They all want publicity and they can’t have mine.

Last year I shared a radio studio with four women who embodied feminism as it came to notice 30/40 years ago.  They founded and ran anyway they could raise the money a magazine called Spare Rib in which I was briefly involved.   I do not have any resentment about having worked for them for a few weeks.  I never did. They had very little money, I could earn more elsewhere.   I was a regular reader of the magazine, I applauded what they tried to do in theory if not in practice, I am thrilled to have it on my CV.
All the arguments about what the magazine looked like, what it contained, who it was aimed at, came later.  These women took Spare Rib from idea to reality and that’s never easy.

“This is what a feminist looks like” is a clever slogan because it is open to
interpretation.   I never knew what a feminist looked like.  One of the first and most heavyweight I ever met had my year’s income on her back in the form of a superbly tailored couture suit.   She probably had a manicure too.  And she saw no conflict between the points of view she espoused and the way she looked.
I’ve never known or been terribly interested in what a feminist looks like.
It was wonderful that it wasn’t about what you looked like.

The women I met the radio station are all better looking now than they were then (and I can assure you it isn’t to do with plastic surgery: like wine, some of us do improve with age).  They had great hair, solid attractive bodies in trousers and casual clothes, and all, with the exception of yours truly, wore unobtrusive gold wedding rings, which seems to suggest that whatever a feminist looks like, it isn’t a man-eater.

To me “I’m a woman, take me seriously” in seven inch heels, bottom stuck out in skimpy shorts, enough slap to repaint a liner doesn’t ring true.   First of all you’re not a woman, you’re female, yes.  But woman is a smashing word which suggests some kind of maturity, dignity, strength and grace.  I like grace.  Underestimated, grace is.  And that’s because I don’t like many of fashion’s current conventions.   I haven’t for years. I used to think it was because I couldn’t wear them but now I know I wouldn’t wear them, even to the bin.

“This is what a feminist looks like” is perfect dumbing down:  it seems to be one thing, but plays (finger in corner of mouth cute) as something else.  God forbid we should be serious about women!  Only half the sky, female genital mutilation, women stoned for adultery, domestic violence unchecked.  I don’t know if I am a feminist but I believe in the rights of women.   And I would never wear that ugly expensive T-shirt.

30 years ago (well, nearly – 1985) I put my name in the front of a book at the radio station where I then worked.  The idea was that, whether the book was used or not, when its day was done, it would be passed to the person whose name was in the front.
The book was the Women’s Institute Calendar of Feasts by Maggie Black.   It contains some uncredited pen and ink drawings and information about how life was regulated, seasonally and by the Church, till the two crossed over and you had all sorts of feast days, something to aim for in the endlessness of rural work which nobody who hasn’t done it understands.
I can’t sentimentalise about land. I’ve seen it worked and it is unremitting labour.   And  – whether it’s our country or another, that’s where food comes from  – I have respect for the land and the people who run it.

There used to be a big hooley at the end of October – first All Hallows (October 31), then All Saints (November 1) and finally All Souls (November 2), only one of which now survives.   Three days of mystery meant you’d have a bit of fun and extra food, lots of teasing and magic (how much you believed was up to you) and drinks, hot and alcoholic.
The celebration of any of these now, in certain parts of the world, would mark you out for trouble.

Today’s shops are piled high with pumpkins but when I was a child, I think the only pumpkin I ever saw was in Walt Disney’s cartoon of Alice In Wonderland.   We used turnips.  We hollowed them out, fixed a piece of candle inside and several of us together, draped in black, used to go round to neighbouring houses, ring or knock and when the door was opened, line up behind the lanterns and mumble threateningly.
For this reason we were called mumblers.

Invited in we were given soft drinks or hot drinks, depending on how cold it was and invited to play bob apple – apples floating in a tub of water, two partners with their hands tied behind them, to see who could pick up the apple in their teeth.  There is an older version with the apples suspended and swinging but then you need something to hang the apple from and even houses then called modern didn’t have handy beams.

Once you had your apple, you were given a knife and had to peel it all in one.  If you broke it, it was no use.  If you got it off in one piece, you threw it over your shoulder and it fell, it was said, with the initial of your true love amid much nudging, shrieks and giggles.

If it was cold you might be given soup or a jacket potato – I have eaten jacket potatoes on every possible festive occasion but the best were cooked in the ashes of the Guy Fawkes’ Night bonfire on the common when I was about 10 – and I can taste them yet.

My nicest grown up experience of Hallowe’en was the first year in South London when three boys knocked at the door, yes, dressed up but not plastic heaven, two medium to tall – I’d say maybe 12 years old – and a smaller figure who may have been the same age but sounded younger.   I raced for chocolate, satsumas and 50 pence pieces which were received with enthusiasm.  “Wow” said the smallest figure “food AND money!”
They were kids.  It was lovely.

The following year I got in the chocolate bars but nobody came.  So I took them to the Coptic Church nearby, thinking they must have a Sunday school, and thus heard a fragment of truly beautiful and unexpected music – their service was in progress when I arrived.

Hallowe’en has not come to call since then.   I have heard increasingly uncomfortable stories about glass in Hallowe’en food, children expecting money, the Transatlantic “trick or treat” gone mad, the elders dressed up in every kind of Gothic gear, the youngsters in imitation.

I didn’t have any idea about what All Saints or All Souls’ night might be beyond
Mussorgsky’s “Night on A Bare Mountain” in (again) Walt Disney’s Fantasia.   My Hallowe’en is like all questionable anniversaries (New Year’s Eve is another): I treat it with profound respect, light candles and stay quiet.  There is much unrest and discord in the world.   If I cannot fix it, I will do my best to stay away from it in the hope that it will burn itself out, not burning too many of us on the way.