Annalog

Annalog won’t be posted next week because the magic hands that make it happen are going on a well deserved holiday!  We may be a bit later but we’ll be back!

I wanted to be a writer.   I don’t know what I thought a writer was, or how writing was done – I mean writing aside from agents, publishing, print, publicity and all the rest.   I thought you were born a writer and though I know examples of this, I have also seen examples of those who made themselves into writers like Martin Cruz Smith with a score of not quite good enough books before he hit a home run with Gorky Park and never looked back.

Writing is personal, I mean, what you like and don’t like.  There are famous and best selling writers I can’t read.  The texture tastes as wrong to me as something I don’t want to eat.  It’s just wrong. There are translations from languages I don’t speak, so good I can’t see the seams, so bad that they are unreadable to me.  This isn’t logical but it suggests that writing is felt as well as read (see “Is That a Fish in Your Ear ?” by David Bellos).
For years, I held wanting to write against my chest like a charm. Never mind what else I did or didn’t do, I aspired to this.   Let me say this about myself as a writer:
I am a very good reader.
I didn’t become the writer I thought I wanted to be because the process eluded me.  I became a journalist though for years I was described as “not a proper journalist” and that hurt.  Apparently I didn’t qualify because I never worked for a provincial newspaper, I didn’t have a degree or do a supplemental diploma in journalism.  I just wrote.   Sometimes I wrote badly.  I can see it.   I threw most of my poetry away because it was God awful.   Sometimes I did better and I remain my own sternest critic.

It seems to me dismissive, precious and elitist to suppose that there are only certain ways in which you could be a “proper” writer.  
What about Arnold Bennett who worked on women’s magazines and in terms of the sense and shape of what he wrote, was more influenced by France than England though he wrote about the Potteries, provincial landlocked Staffordshire ?
Or Edith Wharton who evoked end of the nineteenth century monied middle class America with a pen like a scalpel – to finance the life she wanted to live, her escape from an unsatisfactory marriage and to make sense of the family she came from – which like many of our families, outlived their lives inside her mind.

It was Irma Kurtz who edits the problem page for Cosmopolitan who knocked “not a proper journalist” on the head.  “Do you make a living out of writing for magazines, broadcasting and so on ?”  she demanded.  “Then you are a journalist.”   Thank you, Irma.
Then I wanted to be a good journalist, the best |I could be and you learn how to package information by doing it.  There are often constraints of space or wordage and it can be a useful discipline to have to think round what you really want to say and (please) avoid cliché.  Words and phrases become fashionable, first of all, because they are apt, eventually because they are safe.  I dislike it very much.  (“Devastated” is a case in point.)  We have this magnificent, flexible, rich, big language and half of the people who use it employ less than 20 per cent of it.

I published 3 books (a monograph, a novel and a memoir) all a long time ago and the process of getting into print was exhausting.  But one of the reasons that my lovely  Linda encouraged me into the blog was because it meant writing and she knew that at some profound level I still wanted to,      The blog took me back to the mirror I used to play to from early childhood.  I wrote for myself because I believed that, if I was interested and interesting, other people would read it.   It’s been a wonderful experience and I’ve done some of my better writing here.  I long to be clever and wise and funny, just as in front of the mirror I wanted  to amuse and be beautiful ( a person can dream).

I shall never be the writer I wanted to be but I had a consolation prize which was really more like a prize in its own right, not second to anything.  And although it’s the strangest experience, funnelling your best efforts through words into a microphone, I was privileged to be heard and responded to.
And life taught me that being intangible was nothing to do with being insubstantial.  I had radio.  I wrote in the air.

My friend David has a friend called Nina (neither of these are their real names).
They met on a cruise of northern cities.  She is Russian, became attracted to him and he had to explain that he thought she was lovely but he played (so to speak) on the other team.
Blank.
David explained homo-emotionality and homosexuality.
Nina’s eyes opened very wide.
They became friends.

Anna Akhmatova

Born in Tashkent, now Uzbekistan, then part of the Eastern Soviet Empire, Nina’s later life was based in Moscow.  I haven’t yet heard the story of the transfer but her father is dead and her mother still lives there.  Nina moved to Stockholm as a translator, married and only goes home to visit.  David brought her to meet me when she made her first visit to London earlier this year.

We did well – gardens, books, teacups.  Both great readers, I referred to a history of WWII I’d liked and she rejoined, “Russia’s losses, the price we paid, has never been acknowledged by the West.  You talk about your dead, your wounded and displaced but they were much less than they might have been, partly because we had the numbers and Stalin threw them into the war machine.  But the losses still scar us.  And you have never admitted them.”  No point in arguing that Stalin killed the same number all over again in the gulag (two wrongs don’t make a right).   Manifestly what she said is so, now acknowledged by modern historians.  It takes 50 years or so to get an overview on history.  Her voice was quiet and matter of fact.  She was not hysterical.  She was bitter.

Immediate post war gratitude shaped the British history I grew up with, in films and plays and books. And the history we learned at school stayed within broad outlines from the Middle Ages to the glory of Victoria, all so much safer because it was more remote.

I had already learned at home that there is more than one version of any history.
My father was born in 1896, he volunteered for WWI and was too old to fight in WWII.  48 when I was born, he told me stories of his young man’s war, troop ship to Calcutta, everything moved up the lines by mule train, rough riding sergeant major at 19, his favourite horse, what they ate, what they earned – but his campaigns are forgotten in the horror of the European losses.   In the thoughtful memorialising of the Great War, there have been few references to the British Army on the North Western Frontier (now called Afghanistan) or in Mesopotamia (now called Iraq), presumably because it shows how long British foreign policy took to alter.

But with regard to the friction between Russia and the rest of us, it is several months since I heard the American writer Anne Applebaum commenting quietly that, before the West began to gobble with turkeycock horror at Mr. Putin and Russia, it must ask its collective self about the money we allowed to be hidden here, invested, laundered and the part we allow dubious people to play among us – over and above any dependence on gas or anything else. And more recently Oliver Bullough wrote (Guardian 20.07.2014) about the west’s connivance with the asset stripping of Ukraine – which, although it is not a poor country, leaves it on a par with the Central African Republic.  And who’s for the old Soviet Union and who’s for any version of Russian supremacy and who’s for independence, with all the side bars and split hairs in between, is regrettably what must follow the dissolution of Soviet communism, which couldn’t banish history, it could only suppress it, thus deepfreezing its bitterness to rise again.

Whether you describe the shooting down of Flight MH 17 was an act of war or a mistake – either way – the dead are dead.
It is a disaster that no one came forward to secure the crash site and nobody from outside the territory was allowed in to do it, or if they were, their safety could not be guaranteed.
The horror of umpteen formally flown out coffins full of heaven knows what and who requires the suspension of intelligence to bring any comfort at all (all respect to the Dutch).
And I couldn’t help wondering whether the violent clods who obtained this mess were as bitter about their historical past as my guest Nina?
There’s an old song that says “I don’t love nobody/And nobody cares for me.”
Which is how wars begin.

I mean joy, take joy where you find it.  Enjoy every little joy
For example …
Germane means literally of both parents, referencing both sides of a subject as in relevant.
Jermaine is a Jackson brother.

Germaine is Dr. Greer.
But Germaine is also a tall AfroCaribbean on the till at Waitrose and she is a tonic.
I’ve met her twice before and she does what the Celts call the craic – badinage, spiky, jokey, chatty – just this side of narrowing her eyes and getting stroppy.
Somehow this is the spoken equivalent of astringent, makes you wake up and run for the verbal ball.  When I went in the other morning, she greeted me with “You’re very early –“ “Yes”  I said, “I was hoping to find something you haven’t got.  It was ever thus” and on we went, grinning for several minutes, laughing throughout what my mother used to call  “rudery” (because it was a word that didn’t exist).
And it was as good as a clean salt breeze.

But then, the next day, at the morning bus stop there was a lapsized grubby white fluffy dog yipping and whining in between panting at his/her owner’s ankles.  They weren’t great ankles and it is not kind weather for animals or children.
Then there was the accordionist at Sloane Square, the only person I know of who can make Nearer My God To Thee and the Cancan sound similar.
And the bus ride was dominated by two large Eastern European workmen discussing everything at the tops of their voices to the exclusion of the possibility of thought,
Not much joy in that but it’s three.  Three, that’s the run.  Over and out.
I spent a lovely evening meeting an almost new friend with an old friend of his who might become a friend of mine.  And we ate and saw wonderful actors at the Latchmere (Frank Sent Me) – one hour in the sweatbox of pub theatre, hotter as hell, weight loss guaranteed.

And I saw (again) Espresso Bongo which gives me joy because it stars Laurence Harvey before he lost his edges, even if the piece is dated and awkward and strangely remote.

Then, coming back from seeing the end of term work exhibited by my friend and her class on a three year fine arts diploma course, I got into conversation with a woman who had noticed me waving to the driver and said nice things to me.  In turn I was drawn to a strikingly limpid eye, clear cut features, strong hands with a particular confidence emanating from her.  She told me she was Dutch.  She talked to me about the body’s ability to heal itself, took my address, told me she’d send me the book she had written about it, that she had just joined a rowing club.  And when I emailed a day later to thank her for the book, she told me a relative had called her first thing from Australia to tell her that they had lost a cousin and his wife and children (the Dutch lost 193 nationals) on Flight MH17 that was shot down in Eastern Ukraine.   Which is why I say “take it when it comes”.

Joy is the soap bubble of emotions, soaring high, shining with colours – and gone in an instant

In conversation, a friend told me that his religious upbringing had instilled guilt into him so that if he felt joy, he expected to have to pay for it by his own or other imperfections and shortcomings.   I understand that, of course I do, but I regret it for him, for any one who feels like that, because the world turns on such chance and if in a moment your heart soars, let it.
Like Stuart Scott (whom I discovered yesterday in an online magazine) speaking from illness, saying “You don’t lose when you die of cancer: you win by how you lived, by why you lived, the manner of your living “ and my face broke into a great silly grin.   It’s the first time I have ever heard “fighting cancer” turned on its head and I loved it.   Joy.
Probably lasted 50 seconds.
Grab it.
Every little bit.

We take sleep for granted.  Or, if you have always had problems with sleep, slept lightly or were prone to broken sleep, over time you develop ways of managing it so it isn’t a big deal.There are a steady drip of discussion about every aspect of sleep and its role in your life from power napping to not getting enough rest, while texts on beauty include rest, rest, sleep – usually as the only inexpensive thing in the article.  Most of us don’t think about sleep until we can’t.   And I belong to that group of people who think if you can’t sleep there must be a reason for it, usually anxiety.
Will the money go round, is there going to be any work, will this group like what I submitted to them, how will I manage, what will I do?

Whatever your worries, the wee small hours distort them. The quiet, the darkness or in the city, the strangely lightened disturbed night sky make things more isolating, more uncomfortable, less easy to resolve, except for those largely unappreciated souls who exist on night shifts, who get out of bed, prepare and get on with it, no time for repining.   The theory is that you adapt and in your conscious mind you may, but shifts disturb your body systems.

I have worked through the night from choice (different again) when it’s wonderfully quiet, the phone doesn’t ring and  the pieces that refused to assemble during the day fall into shape.   And then I am OK till about 4.00 the following afternoon when my mouth tastes of tin and my eyelashes ache.   A couple of nights of that and I darken to taupe with charcoal overtones, handsome on a hunting dog, not so hot on me, and I begin to feel cold.

Recently I haven’t been sleeping well ,disturbed by a neighbour who was practising to be a bat.  He stayed up most of the night and he didn’t care who he disturbed.

Momentarily he’s off the scene but I find my eyes open at 4.10 am with monotonous frequency.  So I read..  I have a friend who has been on this schedule for years and makes up for it by having a rest in the afternoon.  Again, you’re told how to do this – darken the room, take your clothes off, get into bed properly.  But I have a comfortable couch and I may just fall asleep on that.   I wonder – is the sleep of a different quality if you prepare for it differently or not at all?
An insomniac friend wore me out complaining about how tired she was (never tired enough not to talk about it), explaining why she couldn’t put the light on, found reading unsettling, didn’t want to take “anything” – from proprietary brands to prescription drugs – and the underpinning of all this was that she thought she ought to be able to sleep and was mightily miffed that she couldn’t.  (Ought and should are dangerous words).  She was ten years older than me and a terrible warning, beached within herself, unable to help herself or be helped.

Another whose sleep I have reason to believe is just as disturbed rarely mentions it.  She had night horrors as a child and thanks to the profound common sense of her parents, has accepted that this is as much her as the colour of her eyes.   When opportunity arises (she works seriously hard and is unfailingly helpful to many of us) she will go to bed early with a movie and allow herself time out.

Recently Morpheus cut me some slack.  After minor realignment of furniture which in most small flats means major rearrangement of books, papers and so on, I was happily tired and spent the evening bouncing between Tony Scott’s “Unstoppable” and Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I, both films that please me.  I paddled off to the kitchen, put in the eye drops (incipient glaucoma), took half a Nytol and slept sweetly.  And I went to sleep three more times during the day that followed.  I felt wonderful but guilty – why was I sleeping so much?  What was the matter with me?  Until I remembered the received wisdom of the generations – the body says “enough” and you sleep because you need to.

Pain is humbling.  I sound like a martyr.  Not so.
But however we experience it, pain changes the way we look at things
The idea that pain ennobles is not always true.  History is littered with bullies in agony, with everything from dermatitis to constipation, their savagery a lashout for intolerable suffering.
What is inevitable is that pain changes the focus of the mind  … and then we forget and have to learn all over again, often from the same pain.

Looking for pain images takes you to back pain, it is so prevalent.  My back pain is much more manageable after the advent of a proper chair, no more long periods of sitting, Pilates and Mr. Nordeen who found via MRI the chip out of the vertebra occasioned by a fall downstairs when I was 12 and told me how he planned to keep me off the operating table.

I exercised. I walked.  I changed position.  It’s just that four times in the last two years I have fallen on the right knee.    This is not because I am a drunk but I am clumsy and after the last fall, my usual nostrums (hot and cold, elastic bandage, rest) weren’t effective.  It took a long time to start feeling like my knee again.  A month later, when a friend arrived to help me paint the bathroom, I forgot all about it and used the joint as usual but when Pam the Painter went home, we were on the segue from discomfort into pain.  It’s been the downward road from then on.

Interested in the mind/body crossover, I had backache all right but reading that Freud relates back pain to mourning made psychological sense.
More recently Sam the Seriously Short of Sleep told me that after 10 hours’ sleep – an event on a par with the appearance of Halle’s Comet – he was still tired.   Perhaps he remarked wearily, he was sickening for something?   Or was he just exhausted with the hooha attendant upon selling his flat preparatory to The Next Stage of His Life?  I had to say it might be both – if you’re ill you may feel tired and if you’re tired you may feel ill.  Stress affects the auto immune system.
When I opened the Sunday Times colour magazine and saw Nick Brandt’s photographs of the magnificent elephant butchered for his tusks (also pictured), I cried with shame. That people will do anything for money I already know.  And I am no saint where animals are concerned, no matter how drawn to them.   But I don’t understand the unnecessary inflicting of pain – from ignoring the watering of plants on up – so I hope what goes around comes around, that whoever inflicted this suffering, suffers too.
You can see that pain has not improved me.   But did opening up to that pain make me feel more of my own or differently?

When you say you’re in pain people opine and draw from their experience.
Wal whose broken back occasionally relapses through strain he’s not aware of with consequent dramatically awful spasm, was of the opinion that my knee couldn’t be what is called “referred pain” because “it wasn’t the right kind of pain”. Or I couldn’t convey it convincingly to him?
Di has a knee deteriorating over much longer than mine after years of theatre and exercise of every kind.  She was offered surgery earlier this year but, casting around for help, she was introduced to a Japanese shiatsu expert.   Not fun.  “Pure pain” is how she described it.  However, three weeks into his treatment, she has 50 per cent improvement in relief from the daily pain she’s suffered for years.

I spent an hour with a recommended laconic thoughtful Australian chiropractor who asked questions, made me stand and move, examined me, front, back, knee and sides, and took x-rays of all of them.  I have a second appointment to discuss what he can see, a treatment plan, and homework, things I shall have to do.   Nobody has said anything about pain except to acknowledge that it brought me to the practice.  He prodded round my knee without having to peel me off the roof.  And in pure terms, it hurts as much now as it did two days ago, if marginally less than one day ago.
But the pain is in a different place in my mind.
It has been acknowledged.
I just want to know if this is what we used to call housemaid’s knee.
My mother will fall off a cloud laughing.

Are you shy?  Or is it nervous?   (I am leaving lonely for another day).

There are those who are victim to their shyness.  They don’t meet people, can’t speak if they do, reduce life to minimum social interaction.  Such a degree of shyness is truly disabling.  However I have come across people whose shyness has been broken by a particular interest or crisis, in the course of which they forgot themselves and were thus able to function quite differently if only for a bit, or more happily, to slowly change their behaviour.  

I find people who have overcome shyness oddly moving.  You can sense their emotions shifting like something underwater.  Sometimes too, such people come to a more realised place by loving another or through sheer adversity putting them in the forcing house of survival.

There was just such a woman in the greengrocers whom I watched and spoke gently to for ages till one day she turned upon me a truly glorious smile of acceptance over the potatoes.  She had been very happy with a man who had left her, struggled to bring up her child and was despised by her well-heeled family with whom she did not fit in.  She could just about face the job she did to which she clung, and she and her son managed.

I am not shy.   But I am nervous, can worry for Britain and frequently do.  Being nervous never stopped me from doing anything.  There is the five seconds before you go to air where you think “Oh, why did I open my big mouth?”  And afterwards I can’t get my breath, have to push the heart back to where it belongs, out of my throat, or have legs that won’t hold me.

One of the perennial questions bracketing both of the above is confidence- how to be confident.  And there are those people who by an emotional sleight of hand seem so and they get so by doing whatever it is. When they succeed visibly in our world we call them stars.  Like Dolly Parton hitting the stage at Glastonbury.Apart from the fact that I really rate her and always have since I saw her verbally step over Parkinson years ago or staring at her unmissable bosom, it was particularly interesting to see her hard on the heels of one of those books about why women don’t have the success in business they might be due, a book which coined the phrase “executive presence” and then goes on to tell you how to dress and be to get it

Well, here we go: I hated what Dolly wore, don’t like the wig (she’s worn better).   And I weep for the stuff she has done to her face.  But you will never see a better example of “executive presence”.   She wrote the songs, she hired the musicians, she rehearsed the show, she can still sing, she placed it, and wow! Who cares about all that other stuff?

There are two ways to make it, whatever “it”is..  One is the way that everybody else does, a bit like assuming protective colouring.  You just look like everybody else.  In your heart you know you’re special.  And then there is the other way.   I’d have thought after years of men and women who look less than perfect, some of whom frankly look like hell especially when they tried pursuing the sweet bird of youth, we’d have realised that you can rationalise any kind of appearance into working for you if you have the gifts.

You can make looking odd or strange or misplaced or wearing the wrong things actively work for you.   The successful and powerful businesswomen I’ve noticed fronting Dragon’s Den don’t wear anything resembling “serious” clothes.  Nearer to the Parton spectrum.  But it hasn’t stopped them.  Ability is ability, and hard work is hard work. And if you have the gifts, you can deliver.   And different personalities require – and get – different exchange.

I like to think that, in spite of that wellworn patter about the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee, Miz Parton was genuinely touched to hear a whopping great audience from across the pond belting out the lyrics of “9to5”. Who wouldn’t be?    Shrewder than most, I bet she can still tell mild from bitter, in her own mouth as well as most other people’s and trusts her own judgement, whether in the clothes she wears or the music she writes… That’s confidence.  

Poetry is as personal as perfume.
I once sat through dinner with a voice coach from the Royal Shakespeare Company who (not surprisingly) thought the Bard was the be-all and end-all … and I wound up with one foot wrapped round the other in a mixture of embarrassment and doubt.  In poetry there is no universal ultimate, there is only what means something to you.
“I kind of miss out on poetry” said the friend with whom I was trying to share the adventure of how, in recent personal crisis, I found a book called Staying Alive – subtitled “real poems for unreal times” edited by Neil Astley of Bloodaxe Books.  A fatalist, it seemed meant for me.  The selection is wide, largely unknown to me and each section is introduced appetisingly by Astley.  He writes of the title that the Nobel winner George Seferis said “poetry had to be strong enough to help” –and I found a poem that really helped me.
Di Sherlock watched as her  mother’s late stage depression segued into dementia.  While her father struggled as cook and carer, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  Di commuted between Birmingham and London, trying to work, support and keep the family ship afloat.  When she realised that, as neither she nor her brother had children, this was the end of her family, she began to write the poems that became “Come into the Garden” .  Bad things don’t necessarily make good poetry but when I read them, with joyful recognition.  Even as a grown up being orphaned is a journey.

Years ago, I was referred to a famous literary academic who told me I would never make a poet because I had no moral conviction.  I didn’t know what that meant but except for the odd moment where something drives my hand, I stopped writing poetry.  I was young and deferential, I thought he must know better than I.  I often thought people knew more or better than me and it wasn’t always true.
Poetry still speaks to me and often where and when I least expect it. In a very bashed up edition of the Penguin Book of Women Poets I found the prayer of St. Teresa of Avila, ecstatic founder of the Carmelite nuns.  I’d always liked this poem and though this was a different translation, the last line was unaltered – “God alone suffices”.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Glen Colquhoun, a doctor who’d written a collection called Playing God – poems about medicine and disease – it was just after a friend had been diagnosed with Parkinsons.

The American poet Elizabeth Bishop taught that poetry isn’t interpreted but experienced – like me reading Carol Ann Duffy’s “Foreign” and weeping in the street.  Nothing ever captured  more vividly the pain of exile.
I can’t read very much at a time because, if it’s good, I’m sated though rereading is a good reason for buying books.  Not that I need a reason.  And I smile when I remember that out of the four volumes of hooha called The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, I got a poem by Cavafy – The City – that still makes me smile in recognition.

Sometimes the poems that you like sing to you but often the metaphor of music is just that  – a metaphor – a way to describe something indescribable.  Like me doing a voice over – for me, the purest process, the producer speaking in your ear, matching words to image, adjusting that to instructions that only mean something if they convey what somebody else wants to achieve, changing a phrase in the moment to get the timing right – heady.  Poems are where sound and writing cross like the beams of lighthouse lamps.Last week a friend gave me a book by Billy Collins and I found this:

I want the scissors to be sharp
and the table to be perfectly level
when you cut me out of my life
and paste me in that book you always carry.

In the book I always carry is the poem my son wrote me when he was nine.
No scissors sharp enough.

Recommended

Staying Alive edited by Neil Astley     ISBN 1-85224 588 3
Come into the Garden by Di Sherlock  ISBN 978 1 291 69754 4
Penguin Book of Women Poets           ISBN 0 14 042 225 0 (secondhand)
Playing God by Glen Colquhoun          ISBN 1 905 14016 9
Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes ISBN 978 0 330 37650 1

Birds are a bonus like feathered lilies of the field.  They exist, small miracles of engineering, parallel with but independent of humankind, often wonderful – literally, full of wonder if I am the onlooker.  A feather can fill me with awe.

At the lowest point in my life, I stayed in what had been the family house.  The bricks soughed round me.  The man went on the Monday, the contract for my job was not renewed on Thursday.   So I was stuck, and I sank like a stone.

One day, looking out of the window of the room earmarked as my office, the promise of which had convinced me I could put up with a house I disliked for too many reasons to list, I saw a tiny and particular silhouette with a distinctively upright tail – a wren.  I rushed for my spectacles.  It was indeed a wren, I heard its metallic surprisingly assertive call.  And then it flew away, a soft bullet.

I recalled that my mother loved wrens and I had bought her a china one she kept on the mantelpiece.

There was more than the odd one in the small town garden at the back of the house.  Do you think you see these things when you are ready to?  I had not noticed them before..  The size alone fascinated me.  One day I saw two clinging to the ivy at the back of the house.  They must have nested somewhere nearby because I saw them again, teaching their fledglings to fly from the spine of nearby garage.  It was comforting that something was so alive when I felt so blighted.
One day, walking down an unfenced path to the station, I heard and saw the little bird.  So I began to add another line to the prayer I repeated for my own guidance and the protection of my son –“ and please God, take care of the wren.”

I had a good friend who was terribly ill, life leaching out of her like water under a door.  Her decline paralled the first two years of my emergence from the tunnel.  I saw the wrens at intervals, heard them, glimpsed them in flight while my friend Jizzy’s life ebbed.

One night she stayed with me and a picture, heavily mounted and properly hung, fell from the wall.  She was sleeping on the sofa in the living room and as I skittered down the stairs in response to this odd noise, she called to me.  I told her what had happened. “A picture fell down?”  I had a dictionary of superstitions to consult but she didn’t need it.  In Scots tradition, it presages a death.  It was her permission.  She killed herself shortly after my birthday.    Her life had become unbearable to her, she had tried before.  This time, she made it.

And when the clearing up and the funeral were over, I looked up the wren.  In English tradition, “the cock robin and the jenny wren are the Queen of Heaven’s cock and hen.”  I saw them again and again.  I listened for them. The smallness, the plainness of them mattered to me. I’d had a lot, this was a new and cherished little.  I read a painstakingly recreated Celtic novel in which the wren featured as a sort of spirit guide.  The Romans and the Manx called them holy birds, country people attribute power to them.  The wren was my newly recognised joy.

When the winter grew colder, earlier with cold rain, later with frosts and snow, the wrens were casualties, tiny things, easily chilled.  But then I heard one in a garden near where I sometimes walked, up a different street, in another part of town.

There are a pair in the dense shrubs on the other side of the street where I live now.  I hear them sometimes when I go out for the papers in the morning.  And the other day an old friend at the end of a completely different conversation suddenly said  “And I have found you a wren’s feather.”

Harry is one of the few heterosexual men I have ever known who is emotionally rich and realised – loves his life, his wife, his kids, thinks, feels, claims the pain of loss – good for Harry.
I have a soft spot for such a person because I loved my father.   He was big and funny and fey – mysteriously and wonderfully psychically aware.  And his legacy is that, regardless of room size, I am inclined towards large men, large dogs, large furnishings.   I don’t mean anything as spurious as “fancying”.  This is far beyond appetite, more like emotive appreciation.  I remember my father’s size and body density from when I was a child and because those associations are good ones, I am stuck with them.  I remember the sensation of enfolding Number One Son when he was a small child and now that he is tree-sized, we have a kind of benign role reversal.  For the magic few seconds that he embraces me in hail or farewell, I revisit childhood.

One of the more valuable insights of my grown up life (maturity will be a work in progress till ten minutes after rigor mortis sets in) is that I am very glad I am not a man.  Any kind of man.  I have only wanted to be a man on the two or three occasions when severe physical force would have been a relief and sadly, channelling Clint Eastwood didn’t work.  Otherwise, it’s such a strain.  You have to pretend to know, even when really you want to sit on the kerb and howl.  No wonder men get hung up in their own power.  Everybody else wants to take refuge in it – why shouldn’t they ?

Twice in my life I have really missed out on men and many years later (not that it’s any use to any of us) I still think of them with rueful tenderness.  What an unthinking twit I was.  When the technology made it possible, I looked them up and there they are, good luck to them.  I left them alone.  I do not approve of rearing your head just because you can after 20 or 30 years of silence, other than with extreme care.

Twice in my life men surfaced from long ago  – one a correspondent I had never met and it was great to tell him he was not forgotten. The other wrote and asked to meet.  I wanted to know why.  Our brief relationship was over a long time ago and I perfectly understood why he hadn’t stayed with me.  When I met him, I said it was like applying for a job I had already been refused.  But I learnt more about him in the time it takes to drink two cups of something than I learned in several weeks in his bed.  I had thought that of you went to bed together (reserve hooking up for haberdashery), you got closer and learned more.  Not always.
Like everybody else, I have my heroes and villains, my fantasies and realities, my friends and my rather not.  And like my mother, an occasional and violent antipathy for one or two ( men and women too) like an animal’s hackles going up.   Perhaps such a reaction against a person unknown is an acute version of personal taste but there is also a feeling deeply beyond words.  Who knows where that comes from ?   Suffice that it does.

Time taught me that men were people too.  Those you liked, those you didn’t, those you couldn’t and that they swapped roles (for example, the trusted becoming untrustworthy) was apparently part of life’s rich pattern.  It does not surprise me when a woman opts for a grownup with a good sense of humour rather than pinup of the month.  Men are just as burdened by their appearance as women are.

Let me tell you about Bill, the husband of a friend, 80 something on Sunday, wonderfully youthful with his own hair, lanky, droll and wise, full of lantern jawed charm and a good heart.  Bill who periodically lets me stand in for his wife when she is busy elsewhere, takes me somewhere and beams at me. “A good man is hard to find” says the blues but my friend did.
A hymn to him !