Annalog

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”

… 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