Annalog

I was late leaving, I pushed my hair off my face, up in a big clip.  It was colder than expected so I put on a raincoat and a scarf over clothes I had had to add and raced off for the bus.

It was backed up in traffic lights, a short distance away and without thinking, I did what irritates me when other people – particularly other women – do: I made an abbreviated ineffectual gesture with my left hand, a sort of half hearted wave.   I don’t know why I did it, I can never see the point.  You want to stop the bus or the taxi?   Do that thing.  Having learned how to put up my hand at school, the course was completed hailing taxis in New York a couple of years later.   If you don’t make an assertive gesture, you are likely to be ignored.  So when the bus started again, I repeated the wave I usually make and grinned.   The driver pulled up, an Asian man in his forties with glasses and a wedding ring.

“I’d stop for that smile” he said.  Me?

“That smile lit up the street” he went on, grinning himself.

So I said thank you and began to think.

I remember Linda coming back from visiting her home city where she had met a former swain who said he recognised her by her teeth – which wouldn’t have shown if she weren’t smiling.

And once upon a time, a very much younger Queen came to Teeside where my father (commandant of Special Constabulary) was on duty.  Majesty emerged from the Town Hall, Pop was on her eyeline.  He saluted with the full flourish of an old soldier and she released on him the full wattage of the Elizabeth Windsor Beam, a smile we have seen down the years, when she is pleased or tickled, the first drink of the evening is a bit nearer… or when her horse wins.

It is a smashing smile.

The school song at Whinney Banks Junior was called Smile, words as follows:

“You can smile

When you can’t say a word

You can smile

When you cannot be heard

You can smile when it’s cloudy or grey

You can smile any time, any day.”

Pollyanna?  You bet.

The first comic I ever took (“Girl”) explained that a frown used 150 muscles, smiling only 15.

Though a smile can lock you out as well as bring you in.  There is the guilt smile which means “I don’t like you, don’t ask me I want to be out of here.”

There is the misinterpreted smile as in younger person smiles at older rake of either sex and is immediately thought to be in some way available.

Or the nervous smile as in “Oh dear, I don’t know what to do – help!”   This is less a real smile than a showing of teeth, an animal grimace meaning “don’t be afraid of me.”   And there is the rictus, the frozen grin which means “I don’t understand, I feel terrible but this is the least charged gesture I can make.”

Smiling is out of fashion.  It suggests connection and lots of people prefer their connections through a technological colander.   For many, a smile is something you only offer in a defined context and I am weary of women of the ages of 40 and on, well heeled, fashionably dressed, apparently with men, children, cars, holidays, jewellery and health – and not a smile to bless themselves with.   Oh, they will look you straight in the face – but you haven’t been introduced, they reason, so why should they smile?   Just such a one moved in up the road.  I passed her as she was unloading from the car and smiled – all purpose good nature.

Six weeks later I saw her again and smiled again.

“Do I know you?” she enquired, shades of those ladies of the manor portrayed with horrid accuracy by Penelope Keith.

“I don’t think so” I said “but it’s only a smile.  It’s free.”

Of course I don’t know what is happening in the lives of other people.  Yes indeed, they may just have been told of deep unpleasantness and my smile may be inopportune or worse, read as superiority in their time of trouble – but there are entirely too many people for whom a smile has to have a reason – winning a contract, making an impression, beginning a social dance – whereas I think of it as a reason in and of itself.   Almost everybody looks better when they smile and in a world often both meteorologically and economically grey, it’s a cheap fix, without obligation, so far untaxed.

Do it more.

Time was when men and women customarily wore hats.   My father used to get very fond of his dark brown trilby and evade buying another, so my mother would get it for him.

But then he’d shy away from breaking it in, he’d say the older one was more comfortable, she’d say it was shabby and they’d disagree.

On one occasion that disharmony was part of something else – probably my mother wanting to arrive with five minutes to catch the train, while my father preferred to have us all lined up with the luggage and an hour in hand.   Anyway, we’d got through that.  We were on the train, settling into seats when – as the train gathered speed – my mother leapt out of her seat, wrenched opened the window (I remember the arc of her body) and pushed my father’s old hat out.  Gone.

There was a moment – now what? – and then they both began to laugh.

I have passed hats on but never thrown one away.

At a sale in milliner Gabriella Ligenza, I bought a treasured ponyskin slouch, the brim topstitched taupe satin which I gave to a beloved friend when her hair fell out from cancer drugs.  She was very tall and looked wonderful in it.  I remember her stroking it, murmuring “my little pony”.

And though as the money changed hands, I thought I bought the black velvet Joan Crawford special for myself, once I got it home, I knew it was Nikki’s Christmas present.  She has long blonde hair and looks great in black, which sadly I don’t any more.

Tucked into my hatbox there is a pastiche of a 1940s silk shell with just the right amount of flowers, feathers and ribbons, made by Jane Smith who makes for films.  Bought for the bat-mitzvah of a friend’s daughter, it was as they say “a bit of a statement” so I snuck it off as soon as I could, only to spend the whole afternoon with men saying “Please put your hat back on – my wife would never wear anything like that – isn’t it lovely?”  and women saying “Please put your hat back on, I’d never dare wear that, I don’t know what my husband would say – it’s so pretty.”

Such is the power of the hat.

It’s 20 years since I bought it and it still makes me smile when I try it on and play dress up.

Imagine too a small hat, apostrophe shaped from every angle, made entirely of quails’ feathers, brown, grey and cream, and that’s what I wore to my second bar-mitzvah, where I sat, arrested by the mixture of formality and passion – and the food that followed !  Hollywood dream catering, loads of it and absolutely peerless.

When five years later the same hat took me to a Buckingham Palace garden party with Cookie my best ever radio producer (her mother couldn’t make it) I was so charmed to think that with a different dress, bag and shoes, the hat was still smiling away – that I wrote to the designer Nerida Fraiman to tell her what it meant to me to have that kind of sartorial security.

And then there is the leopard.

Now, before you rise up in wrath, it’s been dead for most of my life.

And yes, I have seen a leopard in the flesh so to speak and I have no desire to separate the cat from its covering.  The hat was a gift from a friend of a friend to whom I rendered a small service and the hat was my “tip”.   I wore it this winter with a lacquer red coat and high heels – all very old but the right shapes for glamour – and got hit on by a green eyed Italian Lebanese half my age – which was very cheering and put a spring in the step.

There are sadly a lot of bad hats – silly, frilly, over trimmed, the wrong shape, the wrong size, totally unfascinating fascinators and I am only so glad Princess Eugenie sold hers after the Royal Wedding, though it was an act of charity to buy it.

There are people who hate hats, people who have difficulty with hats and those who make affectation out of it.

The right hat is becoming.  It says the wearer isn’t afraid to take him or herself or their notions seriously, for example my friend Wal in his pre revolutionary Russian mink or Ellie Haddington as Hilda Pierce in the most recent run of Foyle’s War – cold intelligence in a classy felt.

The slogan used to be “if you want to get ahead, get a hat.”

And now, apart from wearing one because you have to, the occasion demands – people who wouldn’t dream of wearing one love to see somebody else making a millinery statement.

It pains me to think that I should agree with George Osborne about anything – he’s the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a chill conservative – but he recently referred to the green lobby as “Taliban” and I have just experienced firewood fundamentalism.

I live in Battersea.

One of the reasons for moving here was because I could afford it but, apart from a tiny garden and a greengrocer round the corner,

I wanted and got an open fire.

And as a fire sign (Aries), it’s the cheapest therapy I know.

I found tree fellers whose side-line is selling firewood and a nicer echo of times gone by you would be hard pressed to find.  Two brothers inherited their father’s business, somebody’s wife takes the telephone orders, and one son helps with deliveries.  They hump it in, I arrange the woodpile on a palette, they bringing kindling and they introduced me to pimps, revealed by the Dictionary of Historical Slang to be “a small faggot used for lighting the fire, London and south counties from 1720”.

Later on I had the great pleasure of making an American visitor choke when I told him that in my house, we burn pimps and yes, I do realise that this remark is deeply politically incorrect but as we are currently reviewing 40 years of the exploitation of young people and the disabled, cries for help ignored by public bodies (see Savile, the BBC, hospitals, police etc.), maybe I’ll get away with it.

Once I had faced down the horrid builder (a bully not a cowboy) and found a sweep, the fire became a lifeline.  As energy costs go up and I get older and colder, I lit a fire.

My friends collected corks (wonderful firelighters) and cones, the greengrocer gave me Christmas tree bottoms.  It got me through the coldest winter.   The sounds of it cheered me.   The smells reminded me of childhood.   I loved to watch the pictures in it.   It’s no good grimacing over the mess – I have gloves, brushes, the wood ash goes on the garden, you want a fire, you clean it up.

There seemed to be a vogue for wood burning stoves, I could perfectly understand that, and I thought this form of warmth and entertainment was one of the great good points about my cherished flat.

A neighbour told me that, as of 4 November 2012, wood burning is forbidden in the fireplace, subject to a £1,000 fine.

Had I looked at the council magazine?   I usually do but I hadn’t got round to it.  I did.  I rang the number indicated and spoke to a pleasant man who told me who to write to, though he was plainly taken aback.

Air purification is a wholly praiseworthy aim.

I wrote and pointed out that I hadn’t heard of the proposed ban, where had it been publicised?

What about the money I spent on fuel?

What about energy costs and living on a pension?

I got back the party line, a comprehensive list of media exposition – all of which I missed, no word of sympathy, moral rectitude and the offer of smokeless fuel familiarisation which pushes smokeless fuel, a smoke free fireplace and so on, all at more cost.

If you say smokeless fuel to me, I think of those lumps of sullen pretend coal that never really lit.  And margarine.

After years of lecturing us about butter and fortunes made of ersatz spread, we come back to cutting your butter consumption down but not out, and accept no manufactured substitute.

Wood is wood.  Even the council admit that the percentage of air affected by domestic wood burning on a cold day is well under 20 per cent.

So, what now?

Another neighbour says he has just built a wood store and he doesn’t believe they can police the ban.   So he will carry on burning wood.

But he has the means, and probably the luck.

I burned as much as I could through the last days of its legality, feeling disappointed.

I bought a bag of smokeless fule I could carry – three hours for just under £7.00

If I buy more cheaply there is a minimum amount delivered, it will crowd the garden and it’s not slightly.

Opting for a fire like opting for smoking.  Every person their own poison.

Mine is just denied.

Dammit.

A Labour Party activist came to the door collecting signatures to keep the local fire station open.

“You don’t vote for us” he said.

I told him about the ordinance forbidding me to have a fire.

He thought for a minute.

“It’s unenforceable” he said.  “You burn your fire.  If you get into difficulties, I will help you – and you will vote for us.”

Fire sale?

I first heard the word “prosthesis” when I was secretary to a plastic surgeon 40 years ago.

Most recently I heard it in a Channel Five programme called Making Faces.

I don’t like being invited to eyeball misery and deformity from the comfort of my living room so I approached this warily but I was fascinated by the care and skills of the people who make individual prostheses.

Are they artists or engineers or a bit of both?   And I was struck all over again with what people have to bear.

There is a current cancer campaign, aimed at everyone eventually surviving it.

But surviving cancer in the first segment of Making Faces involved removing the eye of a child so a tumour could be eradicated.  The child is now sixteen, loved, supported and highly realised but still, facing life with one eye – and the decision to remove half the face of Diana, who is now in her late sixties.

One of the things I learned on problem pages is not to weigh one person’s suffering against another’s.

Pain is.

But for some reason, probably selfish – she is nearer my age – Diana grabbed me.

A violinist, the possessor of long, lean aquiline good looks, she has survived, walking around behind the personal equivalent of a train wreck.

In the programme, she talked about having no choice.  If she hadn’t agreed, she would have died but after the operation, she didn’t leave the house for two years.

Eventually she went back to playing in the orchestra and seeing her friends with a dressing over the facial hole.

One of her orchestral colleagues commented “It’s not what she looks like – it’s what she is”.   Indeed.

That Diana loved beauty was evidenced in her every move, the choice and care of her clothes, the way she carried herself, even the movements of her remaining face.  But her voice was affected too and I fear that she has had her share of unkindness and disappointment.   Getting used to deformity means accepting change is unlikely.  You may change – it won’t.  If it’s your face that is compromised, it strikes at the heart of your self-image.  There must be mornings when she falters though it was clear from the programme that, if her face is diminished, her personality was not.

And although she respected the man who built her prosthesis, she didn’t like it.

It was the wrong colour.

He tried and tried – the likeness, the modelling round the eye was wonderfully realised – but she didn’t like it.  It was the wrong colour.

She was filmed leaving the hospital wearing it though I felt this was probably for the sake of the production.

She might be down to one eye but she could still see colour.  She trusted her own judgement.

The maker said he hoped she would wear it, she’d get used to it, it could make such a difference to her – but you can’t insist.

I felt for her.

There is a Turkish proverb “a heart in love with beauty can never grow old” but beauty itself can die and to be witness to the death of your own beauty is surely to die a bit yourself.

Living in London, you may see the famous – Oprah Winfrey window-shopping, Julian Fellowes (Mr. Downton) in the chemists, Michael Caine in the grocers.

I have just met Diana.

I was going home, saw her in the crowd, reached out, touched her arm, begged her pardon for interrupting and thanked her for making the programme.

She responded with that aplomb that makes her so appealing.

“I hope you didn’t think I was being difficult about the prosthesis” she said.  “It just wasn’t the right colour.”   I agreed, it wasn’t.  “The colour wasn’t right, my friends agreed.”

“Yes” I said “but I was so grateful to you.”

“Why?”

My heart stopped.  I could only tell such a woman the truth so I said she must forgive me, I could only speak plainly.

She nodded.

“You were beautiful” I said “and to lose that, must have been to lose some part of yourself.  But you are still you.  I found that moving.”

“Did you get all that from television?” she said.  “How wonderful. You’ve made my day.”

“And you, mine.”

There are nine or ten million people in London and I never get over who you see or who you meet, or how or where, and it certainly isn’t from hitting the party circuit.

Searching for somewhere to put my savings after a “this year something, next year not much” agreement, I happened on a good deal at the Halifax. The banking adviser – in her 30s, married, a human – didn’t know enough to look through the papers I brought with me to get the details of where the money was to transfer it. Nor did I.

I had to come back when I had found the information at home among the documents I had already taken in.

Would I like to use them as a bank?  The bank which held my accounts for 30 years had refused to let me move my account from Hampstead to a closer branch, although I have lived 20 miles away for a decade.

I hesitated.  I explained: I live on state and a small private pension.  I have a small amount of what I call back up money.  Stupidly hopeful after the persuasive advertisements, I wanted to be reassured of a smooth transaction.   It was the week before Easter.   Allowing for the holiday weekend, the adviser claimed it would take a couple of weeks.

I wrote to the erstwhile bank to advise them of my plans.  As expected, there was no reply.  They don’t do customer relations.

Printed material arrived from the Halifax confirming the transfer and execution of standing orders plus the £100 you get for joining.

This was followed by a statement of my account and I transferred outstanding funds from one bank to another by cheque.

A month later I received a further statement of account.  No pensions.

There was a minor tussle about the form of my name.  It was duly noted but not executed.  I had a bank card in one variation, a cheque book in another and a credit card in a third.

In trying to sort this out, I had written to the female signatory of the credit card business saying yes, I was disappointed – because I had asked from the outset and had been assured it could be done – but no big deal, don’t intend to use the credit card, sorry you were bothered, please note the form of signature on everything will be thus.   The letter was passed to customer services.

I received an apologetic letter which seemed to have certain personal touches and offered me a £50 sweetener, changing my name to the preferred form on the second chequebook.

I wrote to the male signatory of the customer services letter on 31 May, quoting the Halifax reference on his letter to me, saying that the money I had transferred did not appear on my statement and my pension were now missing for 2 months.  I was frightened.

Eventually the third statement arrived with the balance transferred but no pensions so, preferring to see the whites of someone’s eyes, I went to see the banking advisor.

She greeted me with “All the direct debits have come through.”

I nodded.  “You’re good at taking money out.  Where are my pensions?”

She looked taken aback.  We sat down.  She said the transfer team had emailed the Department of Work and Pensions for my state pension to be referred and the Prudential similarly for the private pension. Neither had received any notification, they said.

This is now Mandy Rice-Davies’ territory – “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”

The banking advisor got first one and then the other on the line and I spoke to them both.  They told me payments had been going to the old bank and probably would do so until July.

The banking advisor handled me well and assured me I could always come to her.

Three months, not a couple of weeks.

I did not mention the letter to customer services which I only risked because there was a reference.

Sure, different people deal with current accounts and personal banking from those who deal with credit cards but what about a telephone?  What about personal initiative?

Keeping an elderly person uncertain about their income doesn’t seem to be very much in keeping with the theme tune of a choir singing “I’ll be there”.

I dread shooting the messenger.  All the counter staff have been civil, some are charming.  The problem, as I wrote in the letter I bet hasn’t arrived, is the disconnect between the promise and the reality.

Why don’t the transfer team check with the banking advisor?

Why doesn’t the banking advisor check with the transfer team?

Why doesn’t customer service liaison check with the banking advisor and/or the transfer team?

I have written a second letter to a designated director since then.   Not a word.

The post loses post, emails disappear into cyberspace.

X marks the spot.

Must go, emailed a friend, running to a funeral …

I can identify with that.   Sometimes, that’s just how it feels.

When I mentioned my will for the fourth time, my son asked if I were concealing some terrible illness from him and I had to confess that, no, I just loathe the disorder people leave behind them because they can’t face the inevitable.

One of America’s best sayings is”Three sure things in life: birth, death and taxes.”

Making the arrangements isn’t so bad.  It’s the updating.

Objects you bought for little turn out to have appreciated in value because nobody makes them any more.   It’s a rewrite.

You make a list of specific bequests – people move abroad, you fall out, they jump the queue – and you have to write the list again.

Or you thought you could ask x or y to be executor.  Then he or she is borne down by a parent’s decline, or a late and all-consuming love affair.

Blast it, your best intentions of dying neatly are frustrated by the business of living.

I have to thank my father, a major emotional mentor, for my special relationship with death.  He was fey and he taught me from the beginning that death was just the other side of the coin: you had life, therefore, life ended.   “Death is a curtain” he said.  “Some people get to draw it aside.”

This was absorbed before |I was old enough to notice that my parents were quite a lot older than the parents of my contemporaries.   My mother was 44 when I was born, my father 48.   The endless lists of the Great War’s missing and dead in black bordered newspapers haunted my mother all her life.   My father volunteered 3 weeks before his 18th birthday and spent the war’s duration in Mesopotamia and on the North West Frontier (now respectively Iraq and Afghanistan).  The catastrophic European losses meant that his war was forgotten.  Now 100 years later, we notice the territory and occasionally I ask my pa “Can you hear, darling ?  They’ve got it now …”

I know people who can’t do death.  They can’t do dying either which is much harder work.  Dying and living get all mixed up and require another kind of courage.   The form of death has altered as medicine changed in research and practice.  You’d think spiritual beliefs would influence the acceptance of death but I have lost count of the number of card-carrying believers who can’t hack the notion of an end.  It always surprises me.  If you believe in the Resurrection and the :Life, how do you suppose you are going to get there except through an end ?

Of course, form helps.  The Jews sit Shiva, seven (that’s what it means) days of mourning, providing comfort, prayer, food and remembrance.  Imaginative people may make up their own rituals but are dependent on communication for making it happen, as in “Shall we get everyone over for a meal and toast George ?”

“Oh yes, lots of candles and his favourite music …”

Recently I heard the popular writer Martina Cole remark about the value of a wake but you don’t have to be Celt or Roman Catholic to understand that if a ritual marks the passing, coming to terms with it often takes longer than you expect.   And death is not cast in tablets of stone, it is cast in stories, funny and sad, horrible and wonderful, often introducing another side of someone you thought you knew.

The illusion that we all want to live “for ever” is some kind of perverse inheritance from fairy stories and presumes that ageing goes into neutral at about 60.   I wish.

Only the undead live forever and few vampires are as attractive as Robert Parris.

I long for what is called “a good death” of which rock ‘n roll says “Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.”  Too late.

I am not young, I have lived temperately  and how you look when you’re dead is how you look.

So I hope to die swiftly, with little pain, when I am not so very old.

Am I afraid of death ?

I don’t think so but it is a mystery.   Or maybe death isn’t but life is, so the ending of life is mysterious too.

God (prayer not exclamation) let me have my memory.  It will carry me where I must go.