Annalog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julianne Moore – my profile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is what a feminist looks like

Simone Veil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to the paper, women who have overplucked their eyebrows to follow an earlier fashion trend can now buy brush on fake eyebrows for a thicker Paloma Faith/Elizabeth McGovern look.   I suppose it can’t be worse than a woman I knew whose eyebrows were so badly dyed ( and somewhere rather exclusive) that she looked like Groucho Marx.
But there is plucked and plucked.

Had I not commenced to pluck my eyebrows at the age of thirteen,  there would have been little shape and I’d have tripped over them.   Secondly I was deeply influenced by a browline running through my father’s side of the family from the lady known as “the Spanish grandmother” (black Irish actually, allegedly descended from the Spanish sailors in the Armada whose ships were blown off course when they reached the Irish Sea from round the north of Scotland, winding up wrecked on the west coast of Ireland)   Surrounded from an early age by fashion and film, I knew how I wanted my eyebrows to look.

I overdid it when I was 13 (I read that plucking a few hairs from the centre made you looked younger and obviously I was maturing fast !) which led to a year of Vaseline and brushing with the baby’s toothbrush then recommended for the eyebrow version  of “100 strokes to make them beautiful”, just like the princess brushing her hair in the story.

But I can’t help wondering how you’d feel locked in a clinch with Mr. Wonderful with the risk of leaving fake eyebrow on his face ?    You see I am old enough to remember the Wandering Shoulder Pad of the Eighties , when your friend told you you looked so much better with the bigger pads in, of course they’d stay !  So off you went and had a lovely time till you caught sight of yourself – at the other end of the evening – shades of the Hunchback of Notre Dame or  more worrying still,  a third breast.  Shoulder pads went everywhere.

Years before, a woman I much admired but who dressed very plainly was chosen to play a rather more glamorous role in the local theatre and I went to see her.   She  looked wonderful, discreetly padded to fill out the strapless evening dress , well made up including false eyelashes and her hands emphasised by impeccably manicured false nails.   She was also very funny, sadly funniest when she flung out her hand in a magnificently cod theatrical gesture and all her nails fell off .

While my friend Wendy who had the most beautiful colouring – black hair, dark blue eyes and white skin and legs from heaven to breakfast – told about sharing a dressing room with a famously curvaceous  popular starlet about whom Wendy, a lesser mortal was a bit shy, until the lady arrived in the dressing room they shared and began to change, taking out of her well filled bra cotton and animal wool, several pairs of clean tights and a great deal of tissue.  Wendy couldn’t keep her face straight, the star was blessedly down to earth about it and they became friends.   But I wonder what she did on a heavy date ?

I don’t mind wearing a lot of makeup (this is as close to fake as I shall ever get) but it’s got to “fade “ nicely.   I can’t stand the black tramlines, false eye lashes like mucky park railings and other coloured constituents that blur and goo.   I think you’re really lucky if a man doesn’t mind but if I were him, I would.

The plain fact is we’ve got the fake mixed up with the real.  Most of the clothes and shoes (oh those horrible shoes) that have been in fashion for the last several years are standing still fashions and I don’t do much standing still.  Just as most of the make up is for clubs and cameras and pretty heavy handed at that.   Heaven knows, I don’t fall out of bed and wear nothing on my face any more but whatever I wear, I want to stay there and work for me, rather than end up on somebody else.

Why don’t you stop and make the best of what you’ve got instead of taking it down only to try and build it up again artificially ?
As mankind does to the environment, so woman does to her face.

“A real face, not a wreck”

Sitting in a French garden in the skin-strokingly warm dark of an early summer evening, something swooped over my head and I yelped.   It was a bat. No, I don’t believe in the legend that bats get in your hair.  It’s just that I have tried and I cannot like them.
I’d like to say it’s because I have read too many Gothic tales but it isn’t true.
I rarely read gothic tales because for me the partition between truth and fiction is hairsbreadth, it hardly exists.  The world is full of strange things and I lack the mechanism to say, much less believe, “It will never happen.”
Having witnessed a tall strong able woman in her late 20s regress into a frightened child before my eyes as she talked of parental abuse, the eyes are one thing, the ears are another.  And if there are five senses you know about and a sixth you suspect, odd can be real.

Bats.  Right.  The title is the origin of the word.  There is a derivation but not another dictionary synonym for bat.
We used to say “bats in the belfry” probably because of the “bs” but I can’t think of more than one or two belfries with which I have even nodding acquaintance.   And maybe that vocal device is part of keeping the whole idea of a very large order of mammals, the only one with wings and leather wings at that, at arms’ length.   My father’s maxim about “they’re more frightened of you than you are of them” wouldn’t console me remotely about bats.   I’d like them to be frightened.  Away.
I tried to watch a programme on bats recently, in a noteworthy cave (very deep and very old) in Mexico, the presenting naturalist reminiscent of David Attenborough enthusing over his pile of guano (bat poo to you).   But I knew I was going to get windy, jumping at every shadow for the rest of the evening so it wasn’t worth it.  I don’t like the look of them and I can afford not too.  I don’t live in the country where I would be more likely to come across them and I don’t live in the enormous chunk of the world across which they range.

In Texas, Oklahoma and Virginia, bats are on the state flag, invaluable farmers.  Fruit eating bats spread seeds, which is how vegetation survives and flourishes, and humans need it to.   In Tonga the bat is sacred, probably because of this idea of its helping to grow food, and ancient peoples in Central America saw it as a magical animal, like the jaguar, a bridge between dark and light.   Alongside the fruit eaters are the insect eaters, logically related.   And then there are those that hunt for smaller animals or fish.  You can still get your head round that, like an owl or other bird of prey.
And the vampire bats live on blood.
Although natural history records small incisions (and the Masai, distinguished nomadic people of Kenya and Tanzania drink blood the same way), we all know those apocryphal stories of Dracula, altered through creepy to dishy, from Louis Jourdan to Robert Pattinson, a hundred years of being consumed into alternate sexuality and the ultimate orgasm of death.   
Martin Cruz Smith may be best known for his breakout novel Gorky Park but for me his finest book is about bats – “Nightwing” – and it draws attention to the number of bats, the way they collect, their ability to change and grow and how intelligent they are.  It is very unsettling and it makes you think – and we have some thinking to do right now.
Because Ebola got its name in 1976 from the river in the Democratic Republic of Congo where the bug was first diagnosed, it was thought to come from fruit bats – which it did not harm – but the bug leapt to other animals including gorillas, chimpanzees, antelope and porcupine.  In Africa bat meat is bush meat, for human consumption.  And the bug spread through bodily fluids – blood, vomit, faeces, semen, breast milk, urine, tears, saliva and sweat.  About which many in the West are becoming increasingly careless.   (A friend told me about sharing the men’s room at a recent shoot with three other moneyed men and he was the only one who washed his hands.)
There is an old saying “An ounce of protection is worth a pound of cure “.
Protection is not “it will never happen here”.  That cannot be guaranteed.
Protection is “it is less likely to happen here and you can make it less likely still by basic and unremitting hygiene.”  Wash, think, be careful
Protection has always been hardest to teach the public.
Perhaps the bats will do it.

People work very long hours.  Work has been extended through demand, insecurity and various bits of technology.   And I was brought up very short in an interview the other day when the interlocutor commented admiringly on my workload in the days of paid work.  But there is more to work than hours. There are different demands, different kinds of input and output, differing responses.   I learned that I would never see that kind of energy again the first time I worked with Pam the Painter.  Once the brush is in her hand, she is demonic, a driven Virgo and I couldn’t even interrupt her for a tea break because she doesn’t drink it.   This is not a criticism, she’s wonderful.  It’s just a different way of working, when you realise that what you have been doing may be perfectly enjoyable but it’s also tiring.

On Friday afternoon I shifted a lot of heavy and beautiful books from the inbuilt shelves in the corner because Pam was coming to repaint the wall stained by damp.  She had previously filled two offending exterior holes with cement and we had waited for the walls to dry, which took ages and was eventually passed as acceptable by the local old school jobbing builder. I covered the patches with stain blocker and watched the wonderful Neil Brand’s programme on The Music That Made The Movies (BBC4), definitely nothing like watching paint dry!
On Saturday morning I went off to the street market I love and walked back via to the supermarket I love less and less, ready to make a late lunch for Pam who will occasionally admit to hunger.   I am the commissariat – a word reminds me of my pa who would have been 120 this week – I cater.   Pam’s method of working involves hesitation, nit picking, worrying and finally a beginning, after which there is no stopping her till paint needs to dry.   That done, we ate and drank prosecco which is guaranteed to make both of us feel a lot more positive about numbers of things.
She had been back to where she used to work and discovered that there really was no going back – it was all changed, she had the best of it and surviving colleagues told her so.  After an insistent second coat (by which I mean she went at it till it was beaten into submission), we talked about equity release and the future and then she departed.

I cleared space to move, had a bath and, tired, waited for sleep to come.
It didn’t.   Neither an old favourite book nor half a proprietary sleeping pill worked.   So by Sunday I felt and looked like hell, lumps on skin, hair like bat wings, leaden.   But hanging about doesn’t help – I find waiting more tiring than ditchdigging.

So I went walkabout to an imaginative hardware store where I thought I might find spider spray.   And I did.   Before me loomed the door of Christies the auctioneers and because I was drawn to something in the window, I wandered in.  There was a woman in black with a clipboard and I enquired if I was permitted to just walk in. “Indeed” she smiled “encouraged” and told me a bit about the sale.  There was a lot of stuff that leaves me cold (I hear my mother’s disapproving voice in my ear saying “And who’s going to dust it?”) but there were some lovely old copper pans, a table, a chair and a jewellery department, Cartier eat your heart out.   The security man offered me a pass, “I don’t have light fingers “ I said with a smile and in I went to things of beauty  – how lovely to be able to admire instead of wrinkling your nose.   So I wandered around and came home to join battle replacing the books, which occupied me very happily till fish pie not of my making and Downton , both equally benign and digestible.

It may be hard, if you spent most of your life working Monday to Friday and occasionally extra, not to think of the weekend as special time, time off – but the living room wall has had a facelift, the books are back in a more thoughtful arrangement, the autumn has arrived (infinitely preferable to the sweaty hectic last throw of summer) and everyone should have a friend like Pam.   And last night “golden slumbers kissed my eyes”.  Lucky me.

No more milk in glass bottles, says Dairy Crest.  260 jobs will go, plastic is preferred and cheaper.
Is that because plastic is cheaper – really – or because you can’t persuade a significant number of people to deal with milk at the door when it might be delivered or collected with the rest of the groceries?
If plastic is cheaper how is it that the imported French crème fraiche (forget half fat, fat free or any other tweak) is the cheapest, sold in a glass jar?

Put “is burning wood environmentally friendly?” into the search machine and again, it seems that the answer depends on who you ask – the purveyors of stoves?  The environmental agencies?   The local authorities?
Check out an article called Power Struggle by Danny Fortson, pictures by Jez Coulson in The Sunday Times Magazine, 28 September.  It’s about bringing in wood pellets from Mississippi for the power station at Drax in North Yorkshire. And it gives a whole new slant to the idea of food miles, food in this case for the furnace.
Everybody has an opinion, everybody has answers for the questions but what is to be believed?

When I recently injured a knee, my GP – a sensible Ulsterwoman with people skills – said that she’s like to have an MRI of the afflicted joint with a view to (query) arthroscopy.    Immediately a friend sent me details of a Canadian survey which showed that some 8oo plus people who had had arthroscopy had suffered discomfort severe enough to call pain and no improvement. When I raised it with the attentive registrar at the local teaching hospital, he said in their opinion, it was a good intervention but required some sensitivity in timing – administered too soon or too late, it was a wasted procedure.   I can see those of you who have had some experience of timing and the NHS smiling wryly.
Cheap or free is supposed to be the ultimate recommendation.   But it backfires:
look at the number of people who don’t bother to ring to say “No thank you, not coming” so the appointment can be cancelled: they don’t have to bother.  It’s free, free to be treated with contempt.

And we are caught up in generalities like the stylistic director of J. Crew listing
Fabulous Fixes for the Over Forties – only they may not work for you.  Most of them didn’t for me.   “You must” she says authoritatively “wear a tinted moisturiser.”
Well I would but there has never been one invented that didn’t upset my skin.
Same with pressed powder.  There is something in those products, probably a fixative or something to prolong shelf life that makes me break out in a rash.  So although J.Crew have the most agreeable store staff in London, I am much more likely to be influenced by India Knight (also in the ST) who writes about what works for her and in the case of Raw Virgin Coconut Oil (a pure plant product) it’s cheap enough to play with and incidentally has been miraculous on my poor old scaly hands..

About every decade, a man or a woman stops washing their hair ie stops using shampoo and there is a little story about it, we all wrinkle our noses except those of us who are persuaded and the story goes away until next time.  But we don’t know what shampoo does.  Its claims like those of so many cosmetics are more to do with anxiety than health.  Like toothpaste.  You can clean your teeth with wood ash or soot or salt and you won’t smell clean and minty but your teeth will be OK especially if you keep up the dental appointments and use floss every day.  There are whole nations of people who don’t use toothpaste or shampoo.

But finding out how to deal with a damp patch on the living room wall or how to
approach your landlord about purchase of the freehold requires specialist knowledge and there will always be half a dozen answers from which you will have to select one.
In spite of more information, there are still specialists in every degree from those who know to those who sound as if they know, and you are at their mercy still.
You don’t know who to believe.

A young man, his dreads flying above a singing orange sweater rode his bike down the road, reduced speed and cried to the four winds “What a fool !”
I doubt if he meant anybody but himself and I really sympathise.
Is worry the other side of perfectionism ?   Of always wanting to do your best and if possible get it right – being convinced that, if you don’t get it right, you are without doubt a twit ?
Worrying about what you can’t do keeps you awake (don’t I know it) or wakes you with a knot in your stomach.   And then you have to unpick the knot along the lines of “  I am not harming anybody, not costing anybody anything: we have agreed that I should do this or that (the “we” isn’t royal, they’re the people whose opinion I value), if you don’t try you’ll never know ….”    Round and round and round, like a cartoon cow with a particularly sticky cud.

Achievement does not alleviate worry.   You may do and do, and do with a reasonable degree of accomplishment.   Those accomplishments (however modest) may shore up the rational side of your mind, make it easier, so to speak, to hear the voice of your own reassurance echoing in your ear  (as in “we got to this stage last time and you got past it, it will be fine …”)    But it doesn’t stop you worrying in the first instance.

You worry about what might happen.   You worry about what might go wrong.
You may be able to recite – for yourself, dammit for the Albert Hall filled to capacity – the reasons why it won’t go wrong, why even if it does go wrong, it can be remedied – but none of that stops you worrying the first place.  I speak as one who could worry for Britain.  Interestingly however, worry is always selective.
At this level of functioning neurosis, worry is not a broadcast net, you don’t throw it over everything.

You worry because you have offered  out of the kindness of your heart without thinking and now (a) you wish you hadn’t, (b) you can’t work out how to retrieve yourself from the position you have taken and (c) it’s going to weigh on you, perhaps with money, perhaps with emotion.

You worry because you want to do your best, be your best, whisper it quietly be thought of at your best – but best is not constant.   You have to keep striving towards it.  And there is always a voice urging you “more, harder, better” which has to be offset with consideration, life experience and having your feet so firmly planted on the ground, you risk being up to  your knees in it.
I have a tall friend, a carer, who is one of the kindest and nicest people I know and  one of the reasons is because he has painfully learned who he is and what he can and cannot do.   But he could make me cross and he does make me laugh because he will listen to me fretting and tell me “Chill !”   This is a personality type I’m stuck with.  Chill is for refrigeration and death.   As far as I know, there isn’t a little light at the back of my throat and I’m not dead yet.

I didn’t choose worry.  It chose me.   I was first aware of it as a managing device in anticipating what goes wrong.  I am not shy, I am nervous but that doesn’t always show so I am judged  (like so many of us) by my exterior, neat/lower middle/good voice.  It’s only when I am seen to be exhausted by effort (doubled because of the worry) or shaking because I wanted it to be good so badly, that strangers remark
wonderingly “You do worry, don’t you ?”

I have learned down the years that worry is anticipation.  That if I stop trying to second guess the situation and begin the process of “doing” whatever it is, I will feel better, it will feel better.  And for that reason I bless the slogan that really helped me – – “Just Do It.”   Begin, begin to deal with the real stuff instead of all those shadowy dragons and pitfalls.  They’ll come back, they always do but at least when you have begun to do what you need to do, you can see tell the difference between a real fight and shadowboxing.
And feel less of a fool.