Annalog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“please note:
justice is blind”

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

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

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

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

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

Ada Haershon, Lyricist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The last verse of the hymn we began with says

“One by one their seats are emptied

One by one they went away

Now the family is parted

Will it be complete one day?”

Oh,yes – father, mother and firstborn.

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

The circle is unbroken.

Unbroken circle – quilt

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

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

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

That’s life too.

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

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

Oh, good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I thought of her on Bank Holiday weekend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dragon wine decanter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.