Annalog

… except very little is.

How depressing is the uniformity of today’s clothes, shoes, habits, appearance (though I cherish the man who remarked on looking a row of upcoming actresses “Good Lord, they have the same breasts !” Same clinic, no doubt).

You know as well or better than I do, that if you are stuck in a situation that repeats itself, you either get on with it, or change it.  Waiting for it to change (which essentially means waiting for somebody else to alter things) is a longer term strategy but still hitched to change.

I was not brought up to try to look like a model or a film star.  I tried inevitably –
youth fuelling inspiration, aspiration, perspiration – but was saved by my mother’s asperity and the inherent message of my belated success: they didn’t want me to be anybody else but me.

This is no longer a fashionable message now, we’re into derivation.  This designer is like that one, those songs came from this musical line of descent.  Nobody has yet likened Benedict Cumberbatch to Alec Guiness –  though taller, more graceful, more hetero – but they will.  They will.
I mourn the days of individuality.   I am not alone.

So the latest political sensation (you have heard of Jeremy Corbyn?) endorses
“we are all the same.”
But we are not.
We may rightly want the same chances, the same standing under law, a more equitable tax arrangement but we are not the same.   We are of the same kind (human) but we are not the same.   We won’t get the same chances and if we do, we will handle them differently.

So – sorry, Corbers – I was delighted to read that the number of pupils at grammar school is the highest for 35 years.  There are onl 163 grammar school in the country.
They have done all sorts of creative manoeuvring to keep themselves afloat but they are liked and popular and I bet any money that is based on curriculum, class size and reputation more than snobbery, pretension and entrée.

Laws passed under Tony Blair (otherwise known as Dorian Grey) make it illegal to open a new selective school.   I know very little about the law but it does make you wonder how all those other minority schools – which are selective in the extreme – got round that.   Don’t say multiracialism to me.  Sir Roy Strong recently remarked (I paraphrase) that multiracialism muddied the water of the lines of artistic, aesthetic and cultural heritage in the name of everybody being the same.   Which is where we came in.

I went to a grammar school.  Did you know they were established to promote the study of Latin?   I did Latin at school.  It’s not terrible, it is a key to some aspects of English (that universally known language, our greatest export) and enables you to sing some wonderful hymns and carols.

Of course you discard chunks of your education, whatever it was, as you go along, like a space ship, outstripping the burnt out bits.
But when years later the Times Education Supplement asked me to do an interview on my favourite teacher, I said I couldn’t and explained that I had fabulous teachers, and I would like to remember them all.  The interviewer said that was a first, and that’s what we did.  My grammar school helped to form my life, along with parents so good I could shopped for them.

I am not blind to the abuses of the triple system (grammar, technical, secondary
modern – I scaled those results as a temporary job at 19).

And while technical never came into it – I hadn’t the hands or the maths – if you had sent me to a secondary modern I would have been bored and for sure Satan finds work for idle hands.   I was too busy filling my pen and doing my homework to be mischievous.

With education as with shoes (thank you Alexander Fury Independent 25.08.2015), we aren’t going back, we’re going forward  – to a better choice and a better choice means a better chance.

Years ago a woman told me on air how embarrassed she found seeing advertisements for sanitary products on television.  “I can’t look my son in the eye when they are going on” she said.
I said I thought that was a pity.
She didn’t understand.
“Because” I explained” it is likely your son is going to go out with a young woman who uses these things and you have a chance to establish straightforwardness, which is invaluable.  Even if he doesn’t go out with girls, there will be women in his circle of acquaintance and acting as if this is something shameful just makes the already charged relationships between men and women more difficult.”I also remember being brought in to contribute to a programme to discuss some sexual research featured in a now defunct publication of irreproachable thoughtfulness called New Society.  Once the programme was over, the presenter – a BBC radio “name” and am I glad I was never such a prune!) turned on me with
“Well, Anna, I hardly think that is what the Great British Public wants with its toast and marmalade !”
I said I had not chosen the material, I had been asked to comment on it and I had used the correct words in context.
So here we are, more than twenty years later, awash with every kind of sexual boast and detail, sending pictures of our parts to strangers, discussions on the art of sexting, fashion that leaves nothing to the imagination, everybody starring in their own movie and glued to the screen to see who will go furthest – and a significant number of young women can’t discuss anything “down there”  with a doctor, still less use the word “vagina”.
They won’t initiate the subject for fear of having to have an examination.
Don’t like the doctor?
Don’t trust him or her as a profession?
Why?
What is going on?
If you thought you had been done on your phone deal or sold the wrong dress, you would stand up for yourself.
Why can’t you stand up for your body?   It’s the only one you’ve got.

You know that old saying about “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me”?
If you can use words properly or use the proper words to convey what is happening to you, the doctor can do his or her best to help you.
This is not a public relations exercise for the general practitioner.   They are good and bad, like everybody else in the world, some more sympathetic than others.  I particularly respected a woman many years ago who stopped me as I started to speak to ask if she might refer me to a colleague “because I am much better with broken bones than contraception”.   Fair enough.
Where is it written that “everybody must know everything”.  They can’t.   And they don’t.
The problem with self diagnosis is you often don’t know what you are looking for or how to interpret it.
So the mass of information offered by the ever helpful search engines may be barking up the wrong tree.   You won’t know if somebody doesn’t take a look – at you not the screen.
The consultant I saw about my troubles as couple of years ago told me that he had to break it to a young woman of 25 that nothing more could be done for her.  Her cancer was inoperable.  Because although ovarian cancer is known as a disease of older women, young women get it too but they would rather turn to the screen and the search engines than get up close and personal with a physician.

I had a lot of childhood illness and a gynaecological history like the Hundred Years’ War.  I learned directly that not every doctor was as bright or caring as others.
I spent a lifetime on air encouraging people to go and see somebody – a real somebody, face to face, even the wrong somebody (it’s a start) – because nobody can prescribe or help you till they have seen you and yes, that may involve an examination and you may be embarrassed.
There is no substitute.
Unlike cancer, embarrassment doesn’t kill you.
Be embarrassed.
Use the words and live

The other day I looked through the papers and wondered where was “the silly season” – that period of the year when most people have holidays, news slows down (24 hour news gathering means you are dependent on new stories breaking for excitement so a lack of stories = lack of interest = bad for business) and news media are kept afloat with “Calf Befriends Frog” or “Tom Cruise Wears Bifocals”.

But no.  The silly season is upon us.
Awards will be made to Jeremy Corbyn (Labour leader hopeful) who has put the fear of God into all sorts of people by daring to have a personality as well as a policy.    You may not like the personality, you may dread the policy but it is a great deal easier to write a story about something  you really disapprove of rather than trying to work your way through the petroleum jelly of the current government.

Winner of this summer’s award for a parent we hear about who treats his kids as appendages is Bear Grylls.
Apologies to all bears especially my favourite sun and sloth bears for having to share their name with such a twerp.
He decided to have his 11 year old son  “marooned” and rescued by the local lifeboat – without telling the lifeboat crew.   You can hear him thinking “win, win” – toughen the boy up, get pa’s name and the lifeboat’s noticed.  Only the lifeboat crew – who know rather more of what causes problems than Mr. Grylls – were aware that the danger lies in somebody imitating less successfully what he pulled off.
But then, what would a bear know about copycatting?

One of the cheapest ways to make a story is to look for what has been researched recently.  You can make the information contained in a survey into all sorts of things, rather like a written version of those balloons entertainers make shapes out of at a children’s party.

So – out of the 16 countries surveyed – Britain only came seventh in allowing their children the freedom to play, the biggest fears being traffic and strangers.   Honourable exceptions aside, the model for both parents working flat out means that there is little room for walking to school, learning to tell who to avoid, remembering who you can turn to if you’re in trouble – because it all takes time and time and the Smartphone have impinged greatly on the relationships parents do or don’t have with their children.   And the police aren’t around to patrol the traffic.

We want the police to give priority to terrorism, immigration and paedophilia, all of which are labour intensive.   We also want them to do all the things they used to do AND cut their budgets by millions of pounds.
But you can’t have it all.
We had a massive bike race through Central London recently and when I approached a young officer and asked him when my local bridge would be re-opened, he said he was afraid he didn’t know.  He and his partner were doing their best but the police had not been adequately informed.
Worship of the bike in London is approaching Golden Calf status.

Dairy farmers have taken cows into supermarkets and got their names (the farmers, not the cows) in the news with a threat which has long bothered me: “ We are putting in jeopardy the security of our (national) supply of food” said Meurig Raymond, president of the National Farmers’ Union of England and Wales.
I hate to say this to you but if dairy farming goes down the plughole, it will take a lot longer to repair that re-establishing Kids Company (cheques to the Addington Fund, a farming charity – thank you Clive Aslet, editor of Country Life.)

While the Prime Minister must regard as a PR disaster the daily re-iteration of how he was “mesmerised” by Camilla Bhatmanghelidjh, founder of Kids’ Company, to the detriment of the allocation of major public money.   Mesmerised by what?    The scope of the problem  – abused children and chaotic families with every kind of difficulty and lack, who congregate in big cities?   Or what she said she could do about it?   Solutions to such problems are seductive indeed.  Cameron was not the first and he won’t be the last.
So, not such a silly season.

*first recorded by John Fornset, a monk at Reading Abbey around 1250.

I have never liked gulls.
They have that cold eye and they are always bigger than we expect and while every second journo is doing that “how could they attack that poor little dog? there is no explanation for their numbers trebling”   – why do people love to be scared ? – there is a reason and it’s down to us.
Waste.

A couple of years ago one of the Sunday colour magazine featured a terrific piece about the Rise of the Gull, only one person salaried to study them, protected, powerful, aggressive and nourished on landfill which – though expensive – is still where waste goes and most of our waste is now full of singularly nourishing things  – throw away take away, for a start.

Gulls are smart. They aren’t going to spend all that time being buffeted by cold winds, chasing falling sea stocks (fish to you).   Just come inland a bit and feast like a king.
I am so sorry for the small dog killed in front of her young owner but this will go on till a gull attacks a child or an old person and then we shall have screams of “Hitchcock  – The Birds!”

“Wrong colour but you get the drift!”

It is always somebody else’s fault, never our own.

Some time ago, Britain was described as “the dirty man of Europe” for its waste disposal – not a sexy subject so not given the coverage it deserves in any branch of the media, ill served by well intentioned tv documentary because it is so depressing.

Living in London is like living in a rotten tooth.
And I live in a borough which has made strenuous efforts to face up to waste disposal for the 15 years I have lived here, up to and including staff who answer emails, and a delightful man who introduced himself at a public meetings with his name and “I’m waste!”

Walking through allegedly posh Knightsbridge (Harrods and that), every window ledge had a can or packaging on it.   There were discarded bottles (plastic and glass) on the top of every telephone terminal, fire hydrant, every available surface.
Given that this is the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and rates and charges make your eyes water, if I were running a business there, I’d be steaming.

We did away with street rubbish containers because of the IRA allegedly putting bombs in them and more recently because every such site becomes a collecting point for the rubbish people don’t want.
In my own street, the council operatives collect loose rubbish in distinctive green bags which are often tied to a lamp post for collection a bit later – by which time the pile up of discarded doormats, old curtains, general rubbish, unwanted wood and plastic, cigarette packets, sweet wrappers and dog muck (wrapped of course) has been assembled round it.  I am happy to report that it is nowadays standard to wear heavy duty gloves for waste disposal.   I wonder where they go when they are done?

This was for me a weekend of not liking the world I live in very much.   In the 1950s part of the function of my mother’s enormous handbag was to contain a spare paper bag and rubbish went into it to go home into our bin. Packaging then could be crumpled up.  Now it is often rigid and thus much harder to dispose of, even if there were somewhere to put it and we had enrolled footballers, pop stars, gangsters and saints to drive forward a campaign to deal with it.

I think Cilla Black is well off out of it.  Of course we still don’t know the cause of
her death – half a story being another one of those things maddening things about modern life and 72 is considered a very young age to be dying.
But a woman only a few years older (Gill Pharaoh, 75) enlisted all her family and her partner to her own powerful will to say goodbye to her by lethal injection because she could not face an incapacitated future. She was a nurse who had spent years in palliative care and she wasn’t going to risk it.

“Woman of the week”

Cilla famously missed her husband who managed her career until his death and growing older alone is tough for all of us.
She has gone out remembered among other things for the grin, the legs and the grooming in paragraphs of guff.
There’s no business like show business.

Years ago my skin broke out.
There’s nothing particular about my skin, but the occasional spot is one thing and a rash is something else.
Of course I did all the usual things  –  I heard my mother whispering in my ear “Leave it alone !” – kept it clean, kept it dry, applied my favourite and trusted remedies.
Nothing helped.
I went to a skin specialist.   Perhaps we should pause there.

Nowadays the gap between beauty therapy and medicine is more blurred than it used to be and it was pretty blurred then.

“You can see where the spots came from!”

I have come to know that there are almost as many shades of medical opinion there as there are in the beauty world and let’s face it, the enormous business of private medicine and the even more enormous industry which incorporates skin care – leaving cosmetics and hair colour aside – is personal. You don’t care if it works for another living soul as long as whatever it is works for you.

He was a pleasant man, and he asked if I used cosmetics.  I explained.
He asked what I had done to my skin that morning.  I had washed it with an olive oil soap and sprayed it with a fine spray of spring water.
He pulled a pad towards him and wrote a prescription for an enormous dose of antibiotics, three times a day for several months.
I said I couldn’t take antibiotics like that, I didn’t say that even in those far off days I was wary about their over prescription.
He hesitated before saying “Well, there is one other thing you can do but it’s very old fashioned.”  Nothing wrong with old fashioned, I murmured.
He said “Milk.”    According to him, a little bit of any kind of milk, put on with clean cotton wool and left overnight.  It contains lactic acid which would rebalance the skin.
I left the prescription on his desk, went home and tried it.
My skin settled in 36 hours.
And it’s as good a place as any to start.  It’s cheap, prepared under clean conditions and if it doesn’t work, at least you have tried it.

I am not going to say that this made me afraid of the modern world, that I never tried another dream cream, life changing detergent or another convenience meal.
Until something occurs to us, we don’t worry about it.
We don’t think about what is in food, or washing products (whether domestic or personal), what is on the towel or the pillowcase, until it causes an abreaction.
Most of us have at least one friend who has used the same stuff o n her face and on her hair for years and it works so why should she change?

The beauty business exists on improvement, miracles, promises and anxiety.
Of course I have subscribed to it over the years and I have had one or two great successes and a lot of disappointments.
I was taught to take care of my skin because when it begins to be affected by age, weather and work conditions – which happens to us all, men and women, regardless of individual biochemistry and past history – what you put into your body and what you put on to your body will matter cumulatively.   The young always think they are invulnerable and the rest of us know nobody is.

I don’t read every label in the supermarket.  I don’t trust them anyway.
It doesn’t take much sense you’d have thought to know that the simpler food is, the harder it is to muck about with it and the better it will be for you.  But then we come up against numbers which mean that food is prepared to look as if it is healthy – like bagged salads – and it is not necessarily so. Because of what the vegetables are rinsed in, shelf life, profit and sale through the supermarket.

Whereas in the matter of making the best of ourselves, we are endlessly hopeful and better minds than mine know how to manipulate that.  Elizabeth the First, who was one of the best educated women of her day didn’t know that the lead in the face paint she relied on was destroying her face and most of us aren’t much further on that that.   And we have to contend with much wider levels of suggestion, advertising, promotion, half knowledge, competition and anxiety.
And if there is a growth industry, it is in the latter.

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.