Annalog

The raven was making a hell of a noise and you don’t want to wake to a bird of ill omen.   But maybe he was a crow, spooked by a cat, lone trumpet of doom in an Indian summer.  The garden still thinks it’s summer.  And people cling to sandals and shorts, savouring the last little bit of the sunshine which is reasonable because we all know we need our vitamin D.
But is it perhaps another kind of Indian summer, a sort of dying gasp before so many things go wrong simultaneously that we will be in a global mess the like of which we haven’t seen for some considerable time?   Because, as long as things go wrong here or there, you can distance yourself from whatever it is but when things go wrong all over the place at the same time, you run out of safety, disaster looms closer.   You feel threatened and withdraw, the mists of confusion and bewilderment swirling round your knees …  hide under the duvet days.

I don’t know anything about Scotland.  I am ashamed to say it but I think if a few more of us admitted we don’t know what Union has meant, or means, the atmosphere wouldn’t be so doomladen.   I do know what it means to change everything because of an idea.  It’s expensive financially and emotionally. The London County Council ceased to exist, to be reinvented with attendant expense with a similar function under a different name.  A principle was at stake and there is always a price tag to a principle.   Sometimes the principle is absolutely worth the money.  And sometimes not.(See Melanie Reid’s piece in the Times 16.09.2014 – pay for it if you have to, it’s terrific)

John Kelly’s book The Great Mortality, about the Black Death, prepared me in a way for the outbreak of Ebola.

“Ebola Virus”

Primitive magic seems to suggest that if you name a problem, you risk giving it power.   But scientists researching Ebola and vaccines to counteract it, know that Africa today, Europe tomorrow.   Disease travels.  World Health Organisation funding has been cut.  I’d like some of the money we plough into the United Nations and given to the WHO – more pragmatic, more use.
Ebola sounds like a victim of one of the health fashions.   It didn’t kill so many so we
thought we could afford to ignore it.  But now the bug is training for a marathon.
Back to the lab, let’s find some money.  This is nature against man.

In the background there are migrants ripped off by their own to die imprisoned in unsafe vessels in foreign seas, illegal logging, hostages under death threat, projected flights to kill the right insurgents (how?), Russia bombing Ukrainian coal mines and switching off the gas (because it was expected doesn’t make it bearable), people with mental illness waiting over a year for NHS treatment and killing themselves – I could go on.  That singsong tone adopted by many newsreaders is a way of distancing us and them from the horrid recital of bad news.

I retreat into my visual coping drugs – favourite books, familiar TV. |Until last night the only new things I could contemplate was the reprinted Inspector Maigret series (thank you Penguin), short finely wrought beginning middle and end unlike the ongoing chaos of the world around me.   I have things to do and I haven’t done all of them though on a duvet day, crossing anything off the list of the domestic do’s feels an achievement.
But here is the good news.  On Sunday, my bus terminated inconveniently and not to be late for a friend, I signalled a taxi.  The driver was a very pretty woman with fine hair, terrific eye makeup, all enhanced by exactly the right shade of yellow with green in it.  I do not always know what is meeting and what is recognition.
I said please could you take me to …
She told me she is the oldest person to qualify to drive a Black Taxi, an unbelievable 66.   She has lived with the same man for 30 something years, she thinks he’s wonderful, and she loves the job.
Drive safely, Linda Jackson.

When I woke up I had been dreaming about a wood.
It’s the wood I ran away into when I was five or so, from which my father rescued me in a thunder storm.  And of course there is a whole backdrop to this – what wood?  Why did I run away?  Why do I remember the wood as benign though I was briefly in danger (a tree struck by lightening came down across the path I was happily running along, toward the beloved security of my father’s big figure)?   
That made me think about the act of recreation that we call memory.
Memory censors, blocks, re-evaluates, recreates, and is highly selective about what and how it recalls..

I hate those endless press pictures of Ashya King on yet another trolley, in yet another country, surrounded by microphones and various kinds of camera.  While his parents pursue something to save him, I wonder what the movement and disruption, the tension in the air, the different dislocations and reunions, the pressure and demand of all those strange bodies, is doing to him.  That’s why none of the images are reproduced in this piece.   I am not big on the reiteration of harm.
This is not about being “a sensitive little boy”.   We are all sensitive in that way, sensitive or dead.
Never a Jackie Kennedy fan, I came to see her request that the plane to do a couple of extra circuits while she prinked, only to throw herself at the waiting press, bought time for her children to get off the same plane and go home quietly.
I liked her for that as for little else.

People depend on the resilience of their children.   “He’ll forget” they say.
I hope so.  But I have listened to too many who remember.  They don’t want to
recall and the mind dresses the often unpleasant memory in strange symbols and
settings.  But remember they do.   And very often until you can unpick that, there isn’t much chance of moving forward.

“Walls of Memory” by Tayler Rollins

An old psychiatrist and his wife wrote a book about dreams and I invited him/them to talk about it on air.  He came and our first caller was an Irishwoman who recounted how, though she had long lived in London, every visit home produced great disquiet over several days, even if the visit itself had been uneventful, and the same dream.  “ I have this suitcase with me, d’you see” she said. “It’s big and heavy but I know I cannot put it to down. I must take it with me.”
“Have you ever opened it?”   asked my guest gently.
“Yes” she replied “and that’s the strangest thing.  It’s full of rubbish, dirty old bits of paper, broken things, and yet I know I must take it with me. “
“If you could bring yourself to start picking that rubbish up and examining it” he said  “ you will find memories of the past, the pain and difficulty, stuff you carry with you from home every time you visit, because you are the one that got away.”
She gasped.

But the pain of parenthood is that what you mean, what you intend, is not received by the child you mean it for – so well, oh heavens, with every good wish in the world – as the same.   And the gap between what you mean or meant and what your child feels or felt is very often plugged by dismissal, denial, euphemism and fear.

Being a parent, a caring good enough parent (there are no perfect humans – children or parents) is the bravest thing you will ever do and that’s only something you reflect on when perhaps your more proactive parenting days are done  – and then it is important that you do not opt out but remain, patient, polite, honest, caring  – the role of the parent of adult children is unsung – and I do not mean only taking care of grandchildren.

And you will not remember everything and even if you remember a lot, they will be your memories, nobody else’s.   The parents of sick children remember what they went though to try and find treatment, the child remembers differently.  Neither memory is right nor wrong but memory is personal.   

Both my parents loved words and so do I.
This doesn’t mean that I spend my life trying to use three syllables where two would do but it does mean that I love language, the variations, subtlety and precision, the often very funny coarseness, the shape and colour of the whole thing, where words come from..
“Talk’s cheap” I hear somebody sniff.
That doesn’t mean it is without value.  And a lot of the time it’s all we’ve got.

When you look at the current news (preferably holding a strong drink) you realise that a lot of the mess is because people literally don’t understand each other.   How many people in industry, commerce, media or politics speak Arabic or Russian  – let alone Ukrainian?   
I remember a young man with both parents language teachers (French and Spanish), who were taken aback when he wanted to go into the police because he had inherited their flair and they foresaw security for him in academe.  I suggested he split the difference. Theoretically he’d have real value to the police if he had language aptitudes and qualifications.  Go to university and get the degree, then it’s your turn to choose.

I am fascinated with how language modifies and changes, and down the years have collected odd articles into my modest archive, often very funny for example, like American restaurant jargon, or more sinisterly the language of war, designed to blind people to what really happens.  I once met a man who in telling a story referred to a “wet operation” and I swallowed hard when I realised what he meant.  Blood spilt.
Over the last 48 hours, first one and then the other of the newspapers I read daily has offered me stuff on language, one direct and the other applied, one funnier, the other cleverer – but both fascinating.

Robert Hutton is a journalist and his book is cryptic and savage, about what he calls the art of uncommunication (I used to call it Westminsterspeak).
Robert Cialdini is a psychologist who has been writing about human behaviour in an apparently accessible and practical way since his first book Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion in 1984.   (Of course they are both called Robert – it’s from the Old German meaning “fame bright”)   Details of their current offerings are at the end.

What won me to Robert Hutton was “We must have lunch” which he says means,
“We won’t have lunch.  Even if we find ourselves in the same restaurant, I’ll be at my own table.”   Whatever happened to just shaking hands and saying goodbye?
Modern methods of communication that supposed to make things happen quicker but they risk becoming just one more layer of stuff to be negotiated before you get the reaction you suspected you were going to get anyway.

Robert Cialdini tells you how to “tweak” your emails to get a response – boy am I happy to hear this since there are several of us writing, writing, writing into a cyber silence which is the exercise of petty power.
He says include some small personal detail and people find it easier to respond.
I want Robert Hutton and Robert Cialdini to teach me how to handle the accursed energy companies, one of whom in spite of an expensively colour printed brochure alleging a agreement with me and linkage to Age UK, has just kicked me into touch again because it acts without communication.   It has my bank account details for
direct debit so it can put in or withdraw at whim.   That’s enough to keep you awake at night.  And however alluring the agreement (waste of paper and print) there is this little sentence about “being subject to alteration” which effectively means they do what they want and we firefight in the rear.  No email address, all to be done over the telephone with the desperate for a job and brainwashed.
Suggestions, gentlemen?

Books
Would They Lie To You?  How to spin friends and influence people by
Robert  Hutton published by Elliott & Thompson £9.99
The Small B!g: Small changes that spark big influence by
Steve Martin, Noah Goldstein and Robert Cialdini
Published by Profile Books £11.99

And another thing:

Recently a friend put her daughter into university in New York where the sensible younger woman asked her mother if she thought there was anything else she could do to keep herself safe.  (Security measures in place are impressive.)
The daughter is a freshman so they went to meet the head of campus security who told her “Take your earplugs out of your ears when you go out,
Don’t check your phone six times down every block.
Be aware of what’s around you.
You’re safer that way.”
Makes you want to cheer and send him roses.           `
I wonder how many listen?

Richard Attenborough’s death at 91 is in the news but. I remember him bustling down the corridor, one of several sets of listening ears when I began at the year old Capital Radio.   People keep talking about him as Pinkie in the film of Graham Greene’s novel Brighton Rock but I preferred his unbeatable performance in Guns of Batasi (1964).   And, although I haven’t seen him for some years and then only briefly, his energy made his age seem irrelevant.

Some years ago, I met a sympathetic programme maker and proposed a series about age, its drawbacks, its joys and freedoms, its incontrovertible evidence and its irrelevance, I wanted such a programme to talk to people out and beyond the small group of stars who are rowed in for such things, and I wanted it to be real and funny and moving.   We already knew that this was the first time in Britain’s history that over half the population were over 60.   Sadly, pigs might whistle and what we got was Grumpy Old Men and Grumpy Old Women, quite fun if you like that kind of thing, all the stereotypes neatly endorsed and all the usual suspects rowed in for another cheque.

Age only means what it means to you.  But you aren’t going to beat it.    If you’re psychologically well most of the time, enjoy reasonable physical health and can see yourself clearly, you still have hope of making the best of yourself and enjoying life.  I wish you could teach people that by the time you hit your mid fifties, what you are will be writ large upon your face and if you have spent years being a miserable so-and-so, then that’s what you’ll look like.

Len (shop manager) is 61 but looks 46, spry, slender and elegant.   He says I should admit to 55.   Wal (interior decorator) doesn’t like to talk about age and lectures me “70 isn’t old, not nowadays.”   I’ve quoted two men because men are as concerned about youth as women are.  And it does seem as if the pursuit of youth has become so much part of all our lives that nobody wants to admit to being not so young any more.   But I do because if you don’t tell yourself the truth, what hope is there?

Sometimes I feel old.   You could rationalise it and call it tired or say I was a bit under the weather and God knows, this summer’s humidity has flattened me like an underdone veal chop (same colour), making me sweaty and bad tempered, absent minded and tired … tired.   Half an hour of errands and I feel like a crone in a high wind – spent.

But I do like being a crone.  I like being the old bat who knows that surgical spirit will refresh and brace your feet (or incidentally your white paintwork).  Though I felt old the other day when I used a scented tissue on the bus the other day to clean my hands and the young woman beside me said “Nice smell – what’s that?”
“Eau de Cologne” I said.
“What’s that?” she asked again and I found myself explaining the origins of one of the earliest widely known scents from the German city of Cologne, its most famous label 4711 and how eau de cologne came to stand for a dilute form of perfume..

And I felt old when someone admired Milton Greene’s wonderful picture of blonde hair and exquisite legs on my notice board, asking “Who’s that?”   “Dietrich” I said.  “Who’s she?”

But human life goes nearly as fast as dogs’ lives nowadays.   And that saying “time flies when you are having fun” deserves to be re-examined.  That we all have bad times is a given.   The job crashes, health fails, we are visited by death and destruction and loss, sometimes in painful multiples, and we have to find a way through.  And just as you find hope in prayer or colour or music, a favourite comic or a favourite film, it’s worth remembering that quite a lot of what went before the bad times was wonderful fun.  And fun comes round again.

My son married recently and I sat with his new wife’s parents.  My kid isn’t a kid – he is in his thirties and so is his bride – so the wedding party was that sort of age, we were the oldsters and there was a sprinkling of young things.
The 50 people or so at that wedding charged the registry office with such love and good wishes, you could have warmed your hands on it, while the bride and groom shone brightly enough to light up the National Grid   We were all just so glad to be there that age was irrelevant – theirs or ours.

“It’s not that age brings childhood back again
Age merely shows what children we remain”   (from Goethe’s Faust)

Years ago I decided that I wanted to do a radio programme about ubiquitous four letter words, often of much greater impact and meaning than their size suggests, and no, it wasn’t about swearing.  I made lists of them and invited the radio audience to play the game with me, which they did with enthusiasm, insight and humour.  Love, hate, just, very, look and the wonderful Rumanian who said her favourite English word was “road” because, she explained, “it can take you towards something as well as away from it, it permits movement …”

Time is a four letter word and my father said time was the curtain.  If we could draw it aside, everything we wanted to see would be there, waiting for us, forward or back.  How much of this was his idea and how much derived from the theosophical concepts popular when he was a young man, I don’t know.
But he used to madden me by talking about the lapse of time, how you must go earlier if you want to be there on time because it takes time to get there.  In live radio this is a valuable lesson because people who rock up five minutes before transmission with no idea of getting into the studio, settling, or sound checks are not popular.
His idea was to sneak up on whatever his time commitment was, while my mother belonged the ten minutes and rush school.
Holidays were hysterical while he tried to get us to the station for 5.30 for the seven o’clock train (in case there was an accident or a change in the timetable) and we had luggage, which would slow us down – while my mother snorted derision and planned to leave at 6.45.

I am left with a very strong sense of time.  I’d rather be early than late and no I don’t want an entirely unnecessary cup of ersatz coffee but I will take a book.   An early therapist told me that being late is very revealing, about whether you really want to keep the appointment, being afraid of what it might reveal, dependence, hostility and so on.

And I expect time keeping in other people, unlike a great friend of my son’s who once arrived four hours late.   The mobile told us he was fine, he was just late.  I don’t know what upset me more, the food I had to try and keep waiting or what that delay meant to me.

Time of course passes.  One of the best sayings I was ever taught (surprisingly late in life) was “This too shall pass.”   I like to think of it as the other end of the literary bookend from “They shall not pass” perhaps?

It is widely said that “time heals all wounds.  I have never agreed with that.  I have known people – and sadly, I am one – who have held on to the emotional impact of something important and while time has passed, the sense of what that meant to me then has not.

It is widely said that “time heals all wounds.  I have never agreed with that.  I have known people – and sadly, I am one – who have held on to the emotional impact of something important and while time has passed, the sense of what that meant to me then has not.

But in my defence I was recently speaking to a young pregnant woman about the joy of the night my son (now over 30) was born and she said “This is so lovely – it’s like yesterday for you!” and it is.

The proportions and perspectives of life’s challenges change over time but not always dramatically.   Again, I remember that, in spite of a full quota of shortcomings, I was much happier as a later parent than I would have been as a younger one when my neurotic insecurity would have hampered me at every turn.

Times change, we say, and the social pendulum swings from one fashion to another but there is much that stays constant – a sense of humour, being loyal or generous,
reliability, kindness  …

For time is a paradox: we can measure it but we cannot stop it.  And if all our efforts go towards trying to control it, we miss the peace and enjoyment and timelessness of the best moments of our lives – how we forgot to go home and got a cold but the sunset was so beautiful or we sat up till dawn with a dead beloved, unafraid, just not wanting him or her to be alone.
No point in being afraid of time.
It will still be here when we are gone.

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.