Annalog

Forty years of people – in the face, down the phone, over the radio – means
I have seen and felt and thought a lot about humans.  When people describe themselves as unshockable, I suppose in one way it’s good.  It means you put yourself into witness mode and pay attention without taking time out to recoil.
But in another way, it’s not so good, indeed quite a bad thing – on the same spectrum as compassion fatigue.  It means you have switched off and moved back self protectively.
As is so often the way, the best place to be is somewhere between the two, able to register and record your shock but able to realise your own part in it, shelve that till later, and pay attention.
What shocks me most about the abduction of 200 schoolchildren in Nigeria is that the only Muslim voice I have heard raised in regret is that of a young woman shot at and wounded by her own zealots for wanting an education.  I have not heard one Muslim man, from mosque member on up, jib at kidnap, intimidation and emotional cruelty (both to the children and their families).  Is this perhaps a media shortcoming, as in file under “least said, soonest mended”, don’t stir up the considerable Moslem population in this country for fear of provoking trouble?

The most shocking thing I ever heard about Islam is that the only unforgivable is apostasy – denying or leaving Islam – and it’s in the headlines right now, embodied by a woman held in prison, her husband ill (he has MS), her older child with her, her second baby born there. She describes herself as Christian but the legal code of the country claims that, as her father was Muslim, so is she.  Thus she is denying Islam.
I am not big on interfering in the internal affairs of other countries.  Wars begin that way and whether you are pro or anti war, as far back as you care to go in human history, war is expensive in every way.  The apologist Blair does not convince me.

You may express disapproval, repugnance, appal but unless you are a national of the country concerned, it is not your business.  Because of religious or spiritual conviction, you may want to help in the fight or the consequences of the fight
– and they are at least as bad as the fight itself, numbering starvation, displacement, injury and deprivation among the evils.  But if you are living outside that country, in another country, you have a primary duty of care to where you live.

If we are going to try and offer an alternative to Islamic radicalisation in our schools and on our campuses, then we already know there is a movement to counteract.
I do not envy anybody involved in this.  I admire Muslims who offer their caring services, I respect Muslim communities who offer financial and every other kind of practical help.  But I worry that one kind of brother – a religious and cultural one – is seen as more important than the people of the country where they live.

I have never forgotten a Muslim who wrote inveighing against me as the worst example of Western woman, saying he would never allow his women to be anything like the women of the west.  There was an address, I wrote to acknowledge his point, saying that we must agree to differ and asking, if we were all so foul, why was he living here ?  He replied.   Here, he said, he had a house.  20 years ago, I threw the hateful letters away.  Now, I think I would be writing to his local council.

No I will not be voting for UKip, one of whose few advantages seems to be the media ease of Mr. Farrage.  I strive to remain patient in the face of Europe’s sadly predictable move to the right, where the further east you go, the more splintered and convoluted become political notions of history, class, memory and fear.

I am shocked that the voice of reason is so out of fashion.
I am shocked that so few politicians can work with the media.
I am shocked that we have such a gap between what we hear and what we need to hear.
I am shocked at where we are, not because it is unexpected but because it is unacknowledged.  

Somewhere in the radio years, a listener taught me
“Yesterday is history
Tomorrow is a mystery
And today is a gift – that’s why we call it the present.”
You may recognise this.  I hadn’t heard it before – even though I live by the last line.   And I like the play on words – which made me think about presents.

I only know one person who isn’t good at being given presents.  Most of us love a present.  But getting them organised varies.
Perhaps you believe that a gift is a gift and should be acknowledged approvingly, even if you frankly dislike it.
There are people who have a knack of getting the right gift, others still for whom, if you spend enough, it will be right: they present you with expenditure and they know that you will appreciate it, as such.
There are others who give what they can  – itching sweaters, socks that shrink, cologne or aftershave you dislike.  You either receive these in the spirit of “it is more blessed to give than to receive” or you button your lip, try not to let your disappointment show and quietly dispose of the offending items.
Most of us know some who are easier to buy for than others.  It’s not that they are necessarily easily pleased, more that their taste is so defined that we can recognise it.  Every so often we take a risk in present giving and it either works or it doesn’t but I have great faith in the list.
As a child the family rule was what you got what you needed  (coat, shoes, underwear) for Christmas, what you wanted (as far as was possible) for birthday.   Christmas was added to by “sillies”  – small things in a stocking.   Birthday was added to by cake..   But the list started when I was quite young because I was so particular.   At one stage my mother told me she never wanted to buy anything for me again, it was such a risk (we didn’t have money for risk) and we began the list.

The deal is, you don’t get everything that is on the list but it is there so that you
know you can buy this or that and be right. It was a guide to getting it right if you couldn’t guess lucky.   My son and I adopted the list as he grew older.   And we adapted it to add “or a surprise.”   I had two real successes with him as surprises  and I am a joke because most of the time, I want books.

But occasionally somebody takes a risk which is how I came by my Victorian blue and white plates given to me by Wal, Wal who isn’t interested in Christmas,  who only celebrates Christmas because it’s  too much trouble to cancel it,  Wal who gave me this enormous heavy package saying “Don’t open it till Christmas morning !”  He never says things like that.   So imagine me at 5.00 am in half dark, opening the bubblewrap and taking out these plates, totally unexpected, in time for Boxing Day lunch for four and I sat on the floor in my dressing gown with my arms full of china and wept happy tears.

Joy (not her real name) is a friend of a friend whom I first met over email because she thought her daughter in law had prolonged post natal depression.
In the event, she has other problems, the situation has other problems and unmet, Joy and I exchanged views and information.   She sent me a scented candle.  I am not big on scented candles, most of the time less scented than smelly.  This one was from a Spanish perfumery and it was a breakthrough.  That was pretty good.

And we met.  And we continued to email.  Joy came for coffee last week and put in front of me the prettiest package in the smallest Chanel bag (we both love black and white, packaging, photography, check).   “Go on” she said.  “Open it.”  In side was a tiny tissue-swathed beribboned package, which contained a stunningly deep pink nail polish.
Dear readers, I do not have a nail on which to put polish.  I have tiny square hands like paws and should I wish to paint my nails, the manual dexterity of a monkey on crystal meth.   But the bottle is on my makeup tray, I stroke it, I carry it round the house like a talisman.   My eye smiles on the colour, the packaging, the thought.
Would I have chosen it?  Probably not.
Do I need it?  No.
Am I pleased with it?  Exceedingly.
It is the present, it is a present.  Definitely, a good thing.

* “give than to receive”.  

The first dog in my life was a black Labrador cross called Scamp, rescued by my father from being tied up at a playing field.  Scamp endured with patient good humour my lugging him about and playing dress up.   Back in the dear dead days beyond recall, he was allowed to run, collar and licence plainly in view, and came home – – mostly – at night. He bore our teasing about what he had been up to when he didn’t make it back with modest restraint.  After all, we were only humans …

He once ate a whole egg custard from where it was put to cool on a window sill.  I still don’t know whether my mother was more appalled at the waste of eggs (rationed at the time) or that he left her peerless pastry case untouched.  But he redeemed himself by dragging home a quilt when we short of bedding (it was washed and used) and once, a leg of mutton.

Meat rationing was a big deal and mum went round the block asking if anybody was missing meat.  Not getting much joy, she sponged the treasure trove with malt vinegar and water, and cooked it, giving the credit to Scamp along with the bone.

He died in a patch of sunlight one Easter in the front garden and my father buried him under the raspberry canes in the back garden – less recycling, more facts of life (see the film Bad Day at Black Rock with Spencer Tracy and think about the luxuriant green of battle wracked Northern France and Belgium after the Great War.)

Susie was a rescue job and my first experience of an English bullterrier, a breed familiarly imprinted on me.  Nowadays, when four legs and a bad mouth masquerades as a pit bull and a seemingly second Victorian age underscores how the other half live and the money in dog fighting, English bullterriers are widely misunderstood.

Yes, they were bred to win bets at bull baiting or killing rats to time in a pit.  They are grimly good at the latter (one bite, jaws lock, rodent tossed aside) but a made up breed that crosses dalmatians, greyhounds and foxhounds with the now gone English White Terrier produced a longnosed fearsome fighter with surprising eccentricities.   Marmite dogs, you either like them or you don’t and if you keep one, you mustn’t allow it to fight.
Susie was marked like a foxhound in black and white and tan with a gimp leg and butterfly ears.  I still don’t know where ma scared up the £30 for her, but she did.
Susie would stare fixedly at my mother, her gaze apparently searing through the newspaper, till my mother got the hint and took her out for a walk.  The face of accusation with a twinkle in those triangular eyes – I can see it yet.“Ojibway nation which has a white dog – see The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford”

Now all grown up, I have shared two English bullterriers, a white velvet tank called Spike who died horribly young of liver cancer and a brindled canine pinup called Elizabeth – Lizzie – which, given my son’s name is Taylor gave rise to one of his father best lines. “Why” asked an unsuspecting American in the park “do you call your dog after a film star ?”
“Great chest and lousy taste in men” was the reply.
Lizzie probably grinned.
Now I don’t have a dog.  Periodically somebody close asks if I would but the truth is, I doubt it.  I am not sure of the lease and the neighbours aren’t always friendly.  I love my garden and I don’t think even a miniature bull terrier would.
I could have all sorts of other things including a Staffie or a French bulldog but they would constitute a tie and I don’t want to be tied.

I haven’t learned as much as I might in life but I know there is a difference between what you think you would like and how that makes you see yourself, and the reality of wishful thinking.   I like the idea of myself with a dog, just as I dream of a big kitchen and lots of people round the table. The reality is I’d have to walk whatever it was several times a day, the kitchen is small and I rarely cater for more than two or three.  I remember the dogs in my life or I “borrow” one for affectionate exchange, which sends me off smiling, even as I am writing this.   Beloved fourfoots, friendly shades.

Below Mark Jacobs and friend.

I have a confession to make:
I didn’t watch Kirsty Wark’s “polemic” about men being more violent to women than they used to be. I tire of the gender argument.

Decent people are decent people, whatever the sex, and those who aren’t range from a bit disagreeable to frankly horrible.  Most of us meet up with them one way or another, at home, at school, at work, in life.

The enemy is humankind, Beings with a different chromosomal construction, just because they are different – no.
I have known nice men and nasty ones, and women just the same, straight or gay, regardless of colour or political choice.

There are men whose anger towards women is racial. 
Their reasoning goes that if you are a woman you can’t be right because you are not a man.   Class, education, dress sense, good deeds, sense of humour – none of them help.  You are not a man therefore you are a wrong’un.
There are women who condemn men just as narrowly.

I tire of the same voices and faces chewing it over via the BBC’s repertory of talking heads in any particular subject area – in this case, Mary Beard, Germaine Greer, Ron Liddle  (in alphabetical order) and so on.  Similar bands of faces front every kind of programme, except where somebody is ill advised enough to invest our money in a comedian fronting a talk show and comes magisterially unstuck.

Sure, the constraints of time and the fact that some or all of these names have long been involved in the gender war, for good or ill, makes their use easier.  But it doesn’t make me feel that this is a programme with either a heart or a head.  In the print, we called it a cuttings job.

We live in a violent world.  

It isn’t always violent as in outright war or totalitarianism, but it is tribal violence wherein people find it harder and harder to cross from one group to another.   And how do the tribes recognise each other?  As ever they did, by what they wear, how they behave, what dogs they keep, what they eat and drink (or can’t or won’t), their interests, their income and (in a consumer society) what they spend their income on.
And it is more difficult that at any point in the last 50 years to cross between the “tribes” because we have eroded the middle ground to extremes at one end of the spectrum and the other, with less and less in between.   OK, my middle of the road isn’t your middle of the road but the point is there was a buffer zone and it is very nearly gone.

Sociologists, political theorists, economists, historians, public health officials and many other specialists may offer comment on where we are and how we got there but one thing we can be sure of: the logical extension of the idea of “expressing yourself” is personified by the trolls on twitter.  People say horrible hurtful harmful things because they can and they have encouraged to believe it is their “right”, severed from context, and context matters.

When the cult of “expressing yourself” became fashionable, children were no longer hushed.  They are expressing themselves.  Well maybe. But to my ears, they are often just making a noise.  Can’t we teach them to express themselves with some consideration for everybody else? Isn’t that the beginning of socialisation, living with each other?

Intolerance and fear grow violence like angel of death mushrooms.
What you don’t understand and you are afraid of makes you angry.
Social change is never accomplished without wastage – the old saw about “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”.  Which is fine.  Unless you’re a chicken.

If we liken social change to a pendulum, substantial numbers of people have just been clobbered with some force because of their age or sex, both of which are accidents of birth.  How can you get people to express that constructively (if you could get them to acknowledge it in the first place)?  Retraining?  Community service?  Chopping wood, rebuilding?  Who will want you?  What will they use you for and will you earn?   And (consumerism again) if you don’t, will it work for you?   Or will you just express yourself hatefully, because you can?
And then the question is whether in the longer term, it makes you feel any better.

* And I can’t think of a better arrangement.”   Attributed to John Wayne.

As in “there’s no such word as can’t” which is what school teachers used to say to ham-fisted girls like me when we failed to grasp the principles of calculus or (in my case) simply couldn’t sew.  My grammar school had four houses named after Yorkshire abbeys, each with a house colour so – Byland (blue), Fountains (yellow), Jervaulx (red) and Rievaulx (green).  In our second year of school we were to make gingham aprons in our house colour.  Cutting the pattern out was interesting and my mother – whose own sewing skills were only impeded by fading sight – encouraged me. But seams, turnings, binding the bib – oh heavens to Betsy! I tried, heaven knows I tried but my father eventually rebelled against me muttering morbidly ” Oh, it’s all wrong!” – a phrase with which he teased me for the rest of his life – and the apron vanished, as my mother used to say, “under something” and was only worn a couple of times at home.  I don’t know how I became this exception but gratefully, I did.

So, abiding though my interest in clothes is, I can barely hem, just about sew on a button, I darn quite nicely – and, when people talk about sewing, I say “I can’t”   Nor can I drive (be grateful for that) or make pastry (hands like lead) and I have only grown mint successfully once.   Mint is supposed to be foolproof, assertive, tough – but at my hands it died repeatedly.
And then there’s technology.“This picture shows how technology makes me feel. Technology is the bull”.

“And this picture too – I’m the pig.  Technology has me by the ears.”

It doesn’t make me feel any better to know that I am not alone.  I have a friend who became even closer when she admitted that a computer on the blink could reduce her to tears.  I know just how she feels.

I learnt to use the computer because I had to.  The best single side effect of technology on my work was email, which was invaluable – so fast, so appropriate – that I simply don’t know why people don’t acknowledge in a two to three day time frame.  The new manners seem to suggest that you don’t reply to anything you’re not interested in, don’t care about or can’t be bothered with.   And pooh to you too!

When a friend died leaving all sorts of names and addresses and how she wanted them contacted, I learned to send emails anywhere.
When I began writing annalog, my designer and technical shaman said, “We need pictures.” I was initially taken aback but he explained that people like pictures on blogs so I located and channelled my inner art director.  All those years – of saving images, collecting books of photographs and pictures, keeping cuttings – was obviously preparation.   I learned to find pictures, to find the ones I could reproduce, to copy, paste and send them. Kids’ stuff, you say?
Not to me.

I learned to control the layout to some degree and more than that, I remain pathetically grateful to Linda and Dee without whom I couldn’t manage.   So when one of the computers (not mine) had a bug and mine promptly developed a sympathy headache, I wound up very much like the drawing that accompanied last week’s no-show i.e. tearing my hair out.

Technical support from my internet provider was (a) willing but not helpful and (b) helpful but on going. The people who teach me best re the computer are all blessed with extraordinary patience, their shared mantra being “Say it again and again, AR will get there” and while those of you who are so much more au courant with all this are shaking with laughter, I would like to point out that so far the computer has been treated much as men treated a recalcitrant radio or tank 50 years ago i.e. kick it and spit behind it!
And we aren’t home and dry yet.  

I’d like to apologise but the blog won’t be posted this week due to technical difficulties.  Please come back and visit me next week.  Feel free to send me your own personal stories on your ‘frustration with technology’!

May be this is a reaction to a week of mankind behaving more buffoonishly than usual from maritime disasters (Malaysia and South Korea) to the unremitting Windsor charm offensive in Australasia (yes, The Cambridge’s are doing fabulously well and baby George is a sweetie – now, give it a break).
We just don’t notice the uglies, even when they’re working for us.
If you say “vultures” to most people, they shudder or mention birds wheeling in the sky as a person or an animal struggles to live. I think the only time they registered with me was the three chirpy ones in Walt Disney’s delightful edition of “The Jungle Book” but as this was “entertainment”, we didn’t see them do what they do best: scavenge.  They are not beautiful, they arrive where there is rotten meat and as a combination of dustbin and vacuum cleaner, their digestive systems do an efficient job of clearing away.   Too many people think that vultures live only in Africa but they are widespread over the world and there is a sizeable population in Spain and France where they do the same job.

In India, old ways that work are left alone and vultures clear away rotting carcases – but by the middle of the 1990s, 95 per cent of the birds were dead. That’s not a figure you can ignore.  As rotting animals were not disposed of, feral dogs increased and so did rabies – which, in case you didn’t know, can kill humans.
India is (with China) one of the world’s most populous countries and it has cost their booming modern economy billions to clear up the mess, inoculate humans, destroy the rabid dogs and re-establish the birds.
Why did the birds die?

A powerful anti inflammatory drug called Diclophenac was prescribed for various mammals and as is often the way, if it worked with cattle and sheep and goats, it was presumed it would be fine across the board with all other animals.  You get the same perception with humans.  If a drug scores well in research and the majority of GPs are happy with the results, it will be widely prescribed.  Just your hard luck if you are one of the minority it doesn’t suit.  I’m with the vultures.  Anti-inflammatory drugs don’t suit me.

Diclophenac didn’t suit the vultures: it killed them.  If they ate the carcasses of animals, which had been treated with the drug, they died.
Diclophenac has just been licensed in Spain.   If a drug is permitted in one country, it is a matter of time before it is copied, bootlegged or becomes otherwise available in the countries next door.  Vultures dispose of cadavers. If there are no vultures, the countries will have to pay for dead animals to be collected and burnt.  All of this takes time, to grasp that the birds aren’t doing the job, to bring pressure to bear to get alternative arrangements in place.  It costs more inevitably, and while that clock is ticking, birds die, the drug goes on being dispersed and the problem intensifies.

More worrying still, it is feared that other species may find the drug toxic.  We have no vultures in the United Kingdom but what if it adversely affects other prey birds, after all the effort and investment that has gone into stabilising kites, harriers, eagles, osprey, owls and the rest?

The Vulture Conservation Foundation, based in Switzerland, is worried enough to lobby the European Commission, while in Britain a Conservative MP and birdwatcher Sir John Ridley has promised to press the government for a Europe wide ban.

Besides clapping your hand to your head and swearing, you wonder why apparently intelligent people have ditched any concept of joined up thinking. The destruction of vultures was big enough to be an international news story, not one I read about in the local press of the subcontinent or by being an online tree hugger.   \It was covered in the better newspapers, on television in a documentary.  There must be facts and figures and memoranda internationally available.  Not in Spain apparently, a country as far as I am recently aware, without the kind of resource to rectify the anticipated fallout.
Sign on and save the vultures.

Hope is one of those little often-used four letter words which encompasses a working example of ambivalence.

 And when I first registered that latter word, which refers to feeling two opposing things at the same time, it seemed you had to choose.  That was what grown ups did.  Then, as I grew older, I learned that there were other grownups, those who felt two things at the same time (love and hate, desire for two people, opposing points of view, wanting to make a change but holding fast to where you were) and tried to balance between the two.  It’s pretty uncomfortable but most of us do it somewhere along the line.
Back to hope.

Old sayings like ”hope springs eternal” or “while there’s life, there’s hope” are what I call sayings “in the light”, how you think and feel when you have just heard from someone by letter or however else, when your hard-to-reach child touches you or his/her voice does, when there are a few pounds more than you thought there was, a stain comes out of your favourite sweater,  … or it’s the first day you feel good after a long illness or the disintegration of a relationship.

And there is false hope – like wanting to be rescued from whatever life into something easier, finer, more secure.  Like hoping the enemy won’t come, nor will the rain … false hope that if you behave differently, you will have another chance, that the next man will be better with money or the next woman will be better at sex.  (It’s worth remembering that on both sides of the Atlantic, the most usual reasons for breakup are sex and money, or money and sex.) Most of us balance in the middle of this too.  Sometimes we hope and sometimes we don’t.

Or we think – “it’s my turn” – like my father filling in the Pools for years and talking about what he’d do when the ship came in.  But there was no ship.   He had his “flutter”, all he could afford, and he had his hope.  Love him as I do, every time I find myself dreaming like that, I deliberately puncture the shining balloon.  It’s tougher, I know, but I prefer my mother’s version: “expect nothing and have a nice surprise”.  Hope is emotionally expensive and most of the time I can’t afford it.

When the great love of my life proved how disappointing he could be, I had a friend who talked about how she was sure (another four letter word) there would be somebody else.  Everybody is entitled to their own opinion but over time, I became very unhappy about her “hope”.  As it remained unfulfilled, I began to feel that I had failed at something, maybe a whole series of things, but I was damned if I knew what.
This was alongside acknowledging that it takes two to make a mess as well as a success.

Last night I watched a movie in which Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin play a divorced couple, he remarried to less than perfect happiness. They meet, have a wonderful evening and begin an affair. Like many movies, it was too long, and 45 minutes before the end, I switched off, fatigued by the character’s perennial girlishness. It’s as if silly is youthful and the currency of youth is hope, so that in spite of ten years’ painful learning, she failed to recognise the unchanging nature of this leopard’s spots.   He thought of himself first, last and always.  And perceived Hollywood wisdom has it that you must have a man (especially if you’re a leading lady). So (thanks to MovieSpoiler) I know that she traded the old one in for a new one, having put herself through the wringer and treated her loving and quite grown up enough to understand children as though they were thick, a triumph of hope over experience.

A much smaller TV movie based on an Ophra Winfrey endorsed bestseller with a cast led by Sissy Spacek and Beau Bridges featured a divorced woman who fell in love with a con artist and who eventually, not withstanding loneliness and financial exposure, and the fact that they all wanted to love him, opted for her own and her children’s integrity.  That’s a triumph of a different kind of hope, a more realistic kind that says you can be your own person and still have joy, living in the moment that laughter and tears are close, instead of in a future that may never arrive.  

“It will be just like all the others “ said my son cheerily “ won’t it ?  I mean, the figure doesn’t change anything ? “  “Yes” I agreed “ all just figures except for 40.  At 40  I loved your father, I had you, a dog and work I loved, bien dans la peau: 40 was my 21st.”

Although habits exist principally to be broken, I like order in the morning so I get up, drink two big glasses of water, pull on old soft clothes, spray my face with mineral water and walk up the road for two papers.  Then home to fruit, yogurt and coffee.  Unplanned habit: I have three lumps of sugar a day – two in the first cup of coffee and one in the second.  No more sugar, no more coffee.  I do the simplest crosswords, and sometimes read the obituaries but often the birthdays and today I did because it was mine.

Sharing a birthday with Marlon Brando got me through being teased about my nose .And Doris Day is now 92.  I hope she has friends and someone to talk to.  I watched an 87 year old on the news recently saying she has family and visitors  but she still gets lonely.  Loneliness is as unmentionable as cancer once was but negotiating with it must come down to inner resource.  As long as my eyes are spared and I can read, I shall never be lonely.  I have books.   Waiting for the world to happen to you is a waste of time . Better to weed or deadhead the garden, take up embroidery, fretwork, sculpture – anything. When time hangs heavy, we all want to be rescued and we rarely are. We have to rescue ourselves.

This year I noticed that I shared a birthday with bellicose Alec Baldwin, a good actor inclined to embonpoint.  I wonder if the two are related – that he gets more furious as he gets fatter ?  Quite simply, if he were an actress looking as if he were a sausage about to pop, he wouldn’t work.  (Oh dear, I sound like the woman I knew  who suffered with the menopause and made us all suffer with her, who used to sigh “Who’d be a woman ?” reducing my son and I to rude giggles.  After all, who’d be a man ? )  But I do wonder about the double standard when I see male presenters with hair like boot polish why nobody suggests that, on that salary, tactful and becoming hair colour is not only more becoming, it’s an investment ? You’re worth it.

The person I am proudest to share a birthday with is Jane Goodall whose research into chimpanzees (Gombe Wildlife Research Institute, Tanzania), and from wanting to protect them into a life’s work of better relationships for all of us, is truly awe inspiring – like the colours of the sun on the water or certain pieces of music.  I only ever saw her once and made a gesture towards her which she emphatically cancelled so she is either very private and shy or one of the people who can’t stand me.  It is good to face up to the existence of the latter.  It keeps you, as they say, grounded.

Michael Burleigh is a historian I haven’t read but he’s on my booklist and maybe I’ll get to him this year. It has taken me so long to get to The Second World War and that I am doing it in the year we mark the centenary of the First has a fearsome symmetry about it.

It’s singer Tony Orlando’s birthday, he of “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” fame.  I lived briefly with his manager and once at some do, I sat down smack in a perfect pratfall.  When it was inferred that I was drunk, I got up and did it again.  I t can’t have helped my back.

I’d rather remember Sally Thomsett for The Railway Children rather than anything else, just as I prefer Eddie Murphy as the donkey in Shrek – he’s very clever, I just don’t want to have to see him.

Wherever Tony Benn is now, I bet he’s as thoughtful and forthright as he was in life – the only major political figure who didn’t hesitate to admit to getting things wrong (and explain why).

I know very little about astrology except that it isn’t just a matter of being born under a sign – the rising sign and the sign your moon is in must also be taken into consideration.  This is very important to me because I have just learned that I am sharing a birthday with Nigel Farage and I can assure you, that’s all we share !

How’s this for a double standard?
The Times carried a piece about “a lesson in love” (their headline) that the famously priapic film star Warren Beatty taught Rob Lowe (recently 50 pin up, best known for The West Wing) when the latter was at the gate of his career breakthrough.  
It involves (more names from the past – I chose the prettiest for the picture) Natalie Wood and Frank Sinatra, and “f***ing”, that preferred pastime that gives you such pretty colour for dinner (to quote Dominic Dunne).

So, when was “f***ing” anything to do with love?
I quite see that the four characters of “love” fit better into the headline than the three letters of “sex” but really, this is a new depth for coy.  You can tell us what really went down (to coin a phrase) but you must sugar the pill in the headline.  Nothing against “f***ing” or love.  Just wary when the press confuses them and resorts to the asterisk.

Elsewhere in the same newspaper the UKIP leader N. Farage tells us that V.Putin is the leader he most admires, “not personally, politically”, a separation Mr. Farage may be able to make but I’m not sure about Mr. Putin.  Heaven forbid this admiration leads to emulation. Because the idea of Mr. Farage stripped to the waist in combat gear, with or without horse and gun, is regrettable.  And I hope he won’t copy the Putin walk, a lethal mixture of self-consciousness, power and apparently painful verrucas, a power mince.   And don’t tell me he just walks this way, it’s his natural walk.  Not true.

I went to the last day of the Cornel Lucas photographs at the National Theatre so that, while the embankment swarmed with people in the sun, inside all was calm and cool and the pictures (see online) impressive.  I am always interested in portraits, particularly photographic ones and found something new in several cases – either images of people who have faded from memory (like a very young Petula Clark), the well known reimagined (David Niven, a breathtaking Leslie Caron) or the unexpected (Bill Brandt, himself a noted photographer).   There was also a fabulous picture of Virginia McKenna as a young woman.

McKenna has been distinguished by involvement with wildlife conservation for so long that we forget how good an actress she could be (see A Town Like Alice, British black and white film making at its best) and because she looked great in a tweed skirt and no makeup, who thought any further?  So here she is in Lucas’s portrait, ravishingly good looking, standing against a stairwell with something draped round her (either an unexpected dress or a lump of textile with a rib in it – still pictures being a working example of “what the eye don’t see, the heart don’t grieve over”) and a pair of shining earrings.

I was with Jo (not her real name) who has spent her life organising photographs and we went back to look at this image several times because it was so unexpected.  We both know that interesting looking women are often reduced by such pictures, rather than enhanced, and we discussed why the image worked.
“There’s just one thing” said Jo.   “The way whatever it is draped and caught under her left arm, it’s driving me mad – it should be …” and she gestured to make it symmetrical.  “But” I expostulated” that would change the whole sense of the picture.   As it is, the picture says – even with imperfection, this woman looks wonderful- and anyway, that couple of inches of the line of the underarm is unexpected and so deeply erotic.”
Jo didn’t agree.

But Emma Watson might.

The former star of Harry Potter took some time to find her feet after the gravy train of the brand concluded (good for her). She tried to stay away from films, did a stint of modelling (sleight of hand again – she is tiny), attended university and eventually found her feet with deserved success against type in The Bling Ring directed by Sofia Coppola.  Watson has said before that there is unhealthy pressure of young women to look perfect and she now says she is looking forward to age which you can afford to do, when it is remote.  But the point she makes is fair.

When did we stop focussing on doing our best – any best, best exams, best ponytail, best press call – to start focussing on the impossibility of being perfect?
When did perfection stop being an inspirational goal and become a social ball and chain?
Look at any of the world’s many layers – the natural world, the manufactured world, the design world, the world of images and advertising – and perfection is only ever a discipline of trying – what is important is the journey, not the goal.
You don’t need age to recognise that, Emma.  You need intelligence, the most underestimated quality there is.