Annalog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.