Annalog

When I was younger I used to think that the short sight (plus astigmatism) with which I was born was an affliction, a flaw, a curse.   Now I am not so sure.   If you can’t see, you have to look.  You have to focus, screw up your eyes, reach for your glasses or other magnifying instrument and concentrate.   And of course it becomes a habit.  In my case, I notice a lot – colour, gait, hands and feet (shape, disposition, what is on them), hair, complexion – and on and on.   It is a standing joke to those who know me well that the first time my son ducked away from me in a store into the men’s room, I eyeballed everybody who came out till he emerged safely.  I could have done police descriptions.  I am endlessly fascinated by what people notice and perceive  – and of course, what they don’t.

The first time I saw a film about ballet 50 years ago, I noticed all sorts of things but particularly the shoes.  The dancers were from the Bolshoi and it seemed to me that the shoes were a different shape.   The last time I saw a film about ballet was 48 hours ago and I thought all over again how very few dancers move agreeably unless they are dancing.

Watching what I call “Sunday night tripe”, I was fascinated by the change – or lack of it – in outfits.   I am sure that, were I to tackle the costumiers of the second series of Mr. Selfridge, I’d get a wonderful rationalisation.   But while I can accept the floorwalker Agnes Towler daily in the same hat and coat, I don’t think Mrs. Selfridge is sufficiently familiar with any privation in the early stages of the Great War, still less poverty street, to be wearing the same outfit throughout an episode and for the second week running.  Is it presumed we shan’t notice  (though it is quite a noticeable colour) or has the budget run out?

Films and television programmes offer rich pickings for this.  Judging by the
You Say  (radio and TV) column of the Sunday Times Culture section – one of the best reasons to buy the paper – there are men all over Britain just thrilled to be able to tell you that the car or the uniform or the train or the weather was wrong in this episode or that.  I go for broader brushstrokes myself and shall never forget Jeremy Northcote as Thomas More in some unbearable pastiche of Tudor England, lined up with his wife and daughters to receive Henry VIII on the riverbank at Putney, and only the men were wearing hats.   At that period of history no decent woman of any walk of life waking had her head uncovered.  And this persisted for a long time: in an underrated novel of the American Civil War(1860/5) called Enemy Women, Paulette Jiles (correct spelling) described her heroine escaping from capture, driven to cover her head with something – anything – knowing that a bareheaded woman would be immediately noticeable.  

Fashions of the past are adhered to, reinvented, hinted at or ignored in productions, depending upon the actor, the costume designer, the producer/director and the sense of the thing. Sometimes the clothes really don’t matter and sometimes the actor is so terrific, you don’t care any way.  You are observing a person and are held and interested by what is going to happen next.

A medical student I knew had a wonderful professor who used to take his students out in the street or into the pub with him and demand that they observe this man or this woman and tell him everything they could see – what sort of work the subject did, the consequences of that work medically, the age of the subject, their social class (and therefore predisposition to certain medical conditions), their general health.  Now that we know TB is not dead but has become more subtle and pernicious, and HIV patients live a long time, I find myself ear wigging coughs and observing serious underweight with a wary eye. I am not obsessed about health and I am not more than averagely wary of ill health but I am interested in people and in what so often goes unnoticed – the repetitious movement of hands indicating (often) distress, the body language that says something quite other than the words offered, in some cases just watching and waiting to see the truth of something you think you perceive emerge.
It’s called people watching.  Those of us who practice it do it with commitment.  Those who don’t care might learn something.

When “everybody” tells me that I must see this film/play/exhibit, I run the other way, react against the prevailing opinion. I’m not proud of this but I acknowledge it.

People don’t push music at you so much because musical taste is very personal.  But film, the most expensive medium, is shoved at you, through a mixture of hype and consensus.

The only actor I knew thought Steve McQueen’s first film “Hunger” was wonderful.  I found it had some nice shots, one fine sequence (in which political prisoners go to a permitted church service to exchange information) and for me, starving yourself isn’t acting.  I don’t like to see actors acting.  I want to believe in the spell they weave, even if only for the duration of the piece.   It didn’t happen.
Currently “12 Years a Slave” is hailed all over the press and I have only heard one dissenting voice.

I once extolled the painting of Jean Francois Millet to a bright man. “Pretty pictures of ugly things” he said drily.

‘Boys netting songbirds for food’

That haunted me. For ugliness is not necessarily reduced by the exercise of another’s art.  So what is the role of art?  I think it is to help us understand the outmoded, the distasteful, the incomprehensible – understand better, maybe in a different way.

In 2012 a former agent and video king John Brewer (affectionately known as Mr. Rock ‘n Roll) made a film about bluesman BB King, christened Riley B King.  Launched to praise, the film didn’t hang around in cinemas (though you can buy it) and it certainly wasn’t up there with the big cinematic boys.  Although blues is the underpinning of all modern beat music, those who love it are used to its lack of drumroll.  Blues just is, like the sea or the sky.  The rest takes its turn at party piece popularity.

I saw Life of Riley on BBC4 (22.02.2014).  Apart from the music, there were all sorts of vignettes of the great and famous endorsing Mr. King and his guitar Lucille, but it was the opening featuring rural life in Mississippi in the 1920s (BB was born in 1925) and the facts of his early life that hit me at half past two in the morning.

His parents were in there 20s when they had him, their union did not last.  His father left, his mother who loved him died of diabetes when he was very young.  There was a school but kids were not encouraged to education when they might be chopping cotton: he started when he was seven.  He said he was always staying with somebody, he conveyed desolation.  He spent time briefly with his father before coming back to where he began, to live alone at 15, driving the plough and lifting cotton sacks on a farm.  The white owner was a fair man and he bought BB his first guitar.  He began to lay and sing whenever he could and after WWII, he became a dj in Memphis, the party town of his youth.

An early wife said gently no marriage could survive a man touring 360 days a year.
A later wife said equally quietly that, 20 years later, he was still touring 300 days a year.  When you listen to the roll call of acts and producers with whom he put together packages of recordings and performances or both, you began to realise he worked as he had always worked  – unceasingly.   With great dignity and without a whimper he told the camera:   “When you kill a mule, buy another.  When you kill a hand, hire another.”  BB is 85; his present manager says they are currently working three weeks on, three weeks off.  |Post slavery, life is still a long sentence so music and those other good things just take your mind off the unendingness for a while.

As a schoolgirl, I was shown drawings of how the bodies of people were packed into slavery ships, chained there in their own and everybody else’s filth, to survive if they could.  I understood that slavery meant the end of everything.  It’s very easy to be sentimental about the value of life but what kind of a life with no choice, no independence, and no breath uncounted?

When I saw Life of Riley I saw how the long fingers of pain and loneliness and want found gifted expression through the strings of throat and guitar to become beautiful – if only in passing – and only if reinvented again and again and again,
lack made into celebration through unending toil.
A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

You can miss the smallest or most mundane thing about yourself if it is out of action for any period of time.  You forget – until your back is bad – that all movement hinges on it.  You forget – until you fall on/ break/sprain a toe or a finger – that such an injury puts the whole hand or foot out of action.   What it is currently fashionable to call “wellbeing” is smothered – in my case literally – by a heavy head cold.  No this is not that old argument about the difference between colds and flu, men and women, let somebody else do that.  I am here to tell you that I lost my sense of smell for just inside a week and am glad to welcome it back.

A former SI (special interest) in my life went into the police as a cadet, was seconded to Special Services, had wonderful tales to tell and two discernible injuries: a stab wound in the stomach (one of the first personal things he ever let me in on was that he had adhesions – where the gut sticks to itself – the pain was terrible and if this should happen, I was to get him to hospital fast) and a shotgun blast down one side.   As a result of being blown over and bashed about he also had bad back pain.  And it was he who described aroma therapeutic massage as

the best relief from it he had ever had (other than that obtained by the long suffering physio who put him back together twice and then told him “I’m not doing that again, do your exercises” thus giving him something else to fixate upon.)   The masseur had great hands for him – touch is personal – but she was also very gifted at mixing oils and she nailed a smell that let him let her in, so she could really help him.   This was someone specialising in unreachable so that was a breakthrough.

In her wonderful book A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman tells you that smell is one of the oldest senses, and one of the most imperishable.  You may forget the name and the face but you will remember the smell.    And in a new sheriff-as-private-eye on Five Star called Longmire, there was an incident (and some very shrewd product placement) when our hero drove to break the news of her husband’s death to a woman, though when she opened the door, he was completely unmanned.  Later he explained himself (this was, take my word for it, well written).  It was the anniversary of his wife’s death and when she opened the door wearing the same perfume (Jo Malone), he couldn’t speak.

Years after my father’s death a man walked up an escalator wearing that mixture of tobacco, carbolic and Ingram’s Shaving Cream that was my father and I walked against the down moving stair like a bird dog – in the hope that all reason told me was wrong. I’ve done programmes about the recognition and association of smells which ranged from Granny’s hotpot to Yves St. Laurent, with all the stops along the way – from “scented cushions” – highly scented fat shiny sweets – to babies’ heads and death.

In the midst of the worst British flooding for years, news media have been loath to talk about the sewage in the floodwater, the health hazard and stench.   Though when Canvey Island became a byword for death and destruction by water in the 1950s, my mother remarked, “Oh those poor people – and what they never tell you is that even if you dry everything out, it will smell horrible.”   Makes you want to put lavender in the sandbags, a truly specious thought.

That we don’t all like or dislike the same smells, that they smell different in different circumstances, on different skins is well known to us.  Some natural smells don’t translate though the naming of a perfume may influence how you perceive it.   Did the founder of the House Of Guerlain who invented perfumes (what is called a “nose” – a very strange mixture of chemistry, alchemy and horse sense) name the perfumes too? . . . Though whether we call it effluent, sewage or muck, I fear the smell of the floods will linger, augmented by the terrible damp.  A whole generation seems not to know that standing water smells.

Will smelling it make us any more efficient about dealing with it?

There is a lot of it about, both smoke and mirrors – sleight of hand, deception great and small, some connived at, some glaringly obvious.  Take Putin – oh do, do take Putin .  Away.  Sadly the walk says it all, cock of a lucrative dung heap.  Political watchers will say, “Could be worse” or “Same old, same old” but poor Mother Russia – £31 billion for the Winter Olympics?  People driven out and dispossessed, Cinemascopic corruption, the beating of gays endorsed by state decree (nothing like acting out your fears), dogs destroyed en masse – please invest in The Last Man in Russia by Oliver Bullough published by Allen Lane about how the gross over centralisation of goods and services in Moscow and environs leaves tracts of a continent without trains, petrol stations, work, medicine or food – in a word, dying.

Look at the vast pestilential cloak draped over Jimmy Savile and see how it brushed against the innocent, the would-be innocent, the probably guilty and the caught-in-the-crosshairs – and remember, mud sticks.  I have only heard one person speak publicly about statute of limitations, that beyond a certain passage of time, a case cannot be brought.  She was unappealing but the point was valid.  I don’t remember what I was doing on 5 August last year, let alone 5 years ago and I bet you don’t either. Memory is selective.  We are looking at men of some influence and power who may or may not have behaved in a certain way and memory being what it is, probably don’t remember or chose to forget.  Men and women alike, we all like to be heroes in the bathroom mirror.  The courts are asking people to recall over 20, 30 years.  And there is money on the table and the lure of money is very strong.  If we want to change the culture of sexual elitism whereby the weaker are exploited by the stronger, it will take a much more difficult route and a much greater degree of intention.  Not being able to bring such a case outside an officially recognised period of time may be the only way forward.

Listen to the outcry over the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman, a fine actor, apparently a likeable man but you know and I know – and if you don’t , I will tell you – that anybody whose weight swings as much as that man’s did – is a soul in trouble, regardless of sex or occupation.  (Food is misunderstood as a drug of choice).  And, no matter how unhappy you are, at the top of the heap called show business (forget about the show, never forget about the business) you can do and have anything as long as you continue to generate revenue.  (Think back to our own Knight of Darkness Jimmy Savile).  It isn’t in either case that nobody saw, it’s that nobody wanted to see.  In both cases, gifted people often have money, money buys almost anything you want or might want to try.  It is noticeable that US news media, no matter how sympathetic, is now pointing to the prescription of a painkiller so powerful and addictive that it is “the gateway to heroin” – the latter an opiate first isolated by a British chemist in 1874.   We must wonder – what is the pain, the unmanageable pain?

So once again, as we do every so often, we begin to examine through general media stories of addiction and unhappiness, the nature of pain and how different personalities respond to it, the abuses of power we permit to those who rise to the top of our convoluted society – although Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry pointed out 40 years ago  (in Helter Skelter the story of the Manson Murders) that the crossover is sex and drugs, and drugs and sex. It isn’t an accident that they are twinned because both may be expressed through addictive behaviour which is hard to understand unless it possesses you, difficult to treat and almost impossible to convey unless you the researcher wish to understand and will put in the time and effort.  Tabloid headlines addiction is not.  Less time being cosily appalled and more trying to understand the nature of smoke and mirrors, how things appear to be compared to what they are, would be immensely constructive on all sorts of levels.   It might even bring the disaffected back to politics.  It is no accident that the phrase was coined by an American journalist, describing his country’s political crisis in the aftermath of the Watergate Scandal, which looks set to run and run and run into tributaries of deceit and decadence all over the globe.

It has been a quiet weekend.  But not of my making.   I took my last call at about 8.30 pm and sent my last emails about an hour later.  A book called.  I took it and went to bed.
And the following morning I went briskly to check the telephone which sat, lights blazing, nobody home.  It was dead.   So I went to the computer, which lit up and took the print but there was no Internet connection.   Even people who have the latest and the best suffer this at sometime.  I was slightly put out by both playing up at the time but those are the breaks.
I consulted a neighbour who thought the batteries in the telephone might be at fault.  She gave me new ones but they were not rechargeable so
nothing happened.  I got the right batteries – no difference.  I went out to supper.  The following day I borrowed a phone to call my internet provider: no answer, cut off after 16 rings.  Nothing to do.
The hairdresser came on Monday and I borrowed her telephone to call Sean and say, “Help”.  He asked what was the matter, I told him and he said he’d be there
in a couple of hours.  When he arrived he said he didn’t know if he could fix it but he would try.  I made him a cup of tea.   He runs on tea. 

He says he doesn’t know what he did but the lights (once dimmed) came on again in some essential part of the machinery and suddenly we had lift off.  The telephone continued to sulk.  Sean is a radio person.  He has considerably more technical knowhow than I – no, wait.  That is misleading.  My friend’s new dog has considerably more technical know how than I.
Sean knows a great deal which he deprecates and he has long been around desks and screens and stuff.  He knows and I don’t.  He took the phone apart, cleaned it and said he thought something had leaked in it.  We waited.  He read, I sent emails.  The phone remained unchanged.  Sean looked up and said, “This is going nowhere.   You need a new phone.”
Shortly afterwards he pulled up a new model slightly cheaper than the old one and a back up for a fiver and announced we were going to Argos in Victoria.

We left the house, directed to a station I knew of but had never used. He said he thought he remembered where the Argos was and he was right.
He had brought the serial number of the new phone and we looked up the number of the stand-by in the catalogue.  I wrote the numbers down.
“Now” he said, “are you paying cash or card?”  “Card ” I said.  “Oh good” he said “then we can use the machine.”  Which he directed and I complied.
When we went to the counter, where a young woman put the boxes down in front of us, I told her “I am no longer an Argos virgin.”
Grinning, she said, “I hope that wasn’t too painful.”  “Painless” I said.  “So you might be back?”  I said I thought so, hoping not too soon.

When we left I asked Sean if I might please pay him, knowing how tight money is.  He refused.  I said “But I would have paid to be rescued.
Why can’t I pay you? ” “You can pay me in buns” he said (he has a sweet tooth).  I protested but he was determined and then on the way home he stopped and pointed.
The line of his finger led to a boxed Panettone, an Italian speciality left over from Christmas.  “Can we have that?”
I was already opening the shop door.  “Is this a frightful cheek?” he asked.  “No” I said.  “It’s called having what you want.  I am delighted.”
The proprietors were too.  So home we came, he set up the phone, I heated the oven to warm the cake and made tea.  And as we took our
first reflective bites, we agreed it was good and I said I had feared it might be dry.  He had had the same thought but it wasn’t.  So we sat, companionably
scoffing, till I wrapped up the last piece for his breakfast and he put the discarded unit into a separate bag to be disposed of in the electronics recycling facility near his home.

“How can I thank you?”  I asked.
He shrugged gently.  “What are friends for?”  

…I am the sheep!

It’s odd to bring up a child born in that place saying “we are not from here” but by the time I was born in Yorkshire, my parents (both southerners) had been there for years and their experience was that “others” were not easily accepted.   They made me expect not to be.  But like all children I have private memories of my childhood (as well as the shared family ones) and when I saw a new book entitled called Apple Tree Square (Louise Doughty, Faber& Faber) I saw only the first two syllables and I thought of Appletreewick.
During WWII my mother made friends with Mary and Cicely Waddington who drove the equivalent of HGVs to deliver whatever wherever, two women in men’s overalls pulled in tight at the waist, with all the trimmings – makeup, pretty hair, jewellery, high heels and perfume  – which announced unequivocally
“female and perfectly capable thank you.”   Later both married, Cicely to Jim, Mary to Walter.

I was born in 1944 as the war ended, sickly and pictures of me down the road of a lung shadow show why my parents worried.  They longed to get me away to the healing countryside, which is how I was invited to Appletreewick, where Mary and Walter lived.  I don’t remember getting there but my first sight of the original farm kitchen opens before my eyes as if it were yesterday.

It was a big square room you entered at the corner.  On the left was a window and sill sunk into a deep wall, covered with plants.  Beside this was a table and wooden chairs.  To the right was an open fire framed with a full set of kitchen regalia – trivets, hobs, hooks, bread ovens and meat ovens, beautifully blacked and in working order.  In front of this lay a red and black rag rug, reflected in the copper kettle.  A tall clocked ticked in the shadows and above my heads hung great bunches of lavender and other herbs, drying and things, wonderful things … There was a modern kitchen added at the left but I didn’t give it more than the time of day.  I remained fascinated by this room, its depth and shape and the focus of this wonderful factory of a fireplace.  Alone, I ran my hands respectfully over every bit I could reach.

I also remember that the lavatory was an Elsan in a hut across the yard and along the field.  The paper was Izal, which never knowingly dried anything, and I had to be dissuaded from sitting on the larger of the two openings with the risk of falling in.  There was a black and white collie called Chippy round whom I wrapped my arms in the back of the old jeep when we went to Grassington or Fancarl and we hiked to the side together as we went round corners, as if in a yacht. I watched a man drink milk from a cow’s teat and when he playfully spurted me with it, I was shocked to discover it was warm.  “Blood heat,” he said knowingly.   While another man, a householder down the road whose wife ran the sub-post office, handled with wary pride a fierce pungent creature, my first ferret, and bar the red eyes, remarkably redolent of Demi Moore.

Upstairs I discovered a green enamel hip bath and it was suggested that I might like my bath in it, in front of the fire.  I was seven or eight, with long coppery hair which was pinned up for me (oh the glamour) and pans of hot water were emptied unstintingly into this bath – only as an adult do I appreciate the effort.  I was transported, a queen with my own flannel and new soap.  There I sat in the warmth while the firelight flickered on the surfaces and the wind blew, Chippy sighed where he lay and the logs shifted and murmured.  For the rest of my life, luxury is an open fire in a bathroom and Appletreewick more than a small village in the Craven district of Yorkshire is an incantation to joy.

Sharon Stone has ugly feet.

Before you dismiss Ms. Stone as The Blonde or The Body or That Shot in Basic Instinct, see The Mighty directed by Peter Chelsom (1998).

She’s fab.  But not her feet.

She featured in a star sheet spread, usual thing, bikinis and ball gowns, but though immaculately planed and polished, the feet don’t have it.

I was fascinated.  I always am by the idea that if you do enough to an unfortunate feature, it is transformed through effort.  Like men draping long hair over the bald patch.   Doesn’t work.   But I notice feet.  Prevailing fashion holds that you have to have “beach feet” all year round, that not to, is to admit you haven’t tried (reflexology, massage, foot masks, etc) while the logical extension of trying so hard is achievement.  But feet are finite.  Strip sandals are an invention of the devil and only Tamsin Outhwaite has ever had the right feet for the right shoes and vice versa so I didn’t hear a word she said (sorry).  I couldn’t take my eyes off those feet in those shoes.  It was what it was supposed to be and in the last however long that naked feet with varnished toenails in sandals exposing as much as possible (a new nudity ?) have been in fashion – from couture to the Co-op – I have only seen it work half a dozen times.  My particular recoil is saved for slightly too long nails with pearlised polish and I am nothing like a foot fetishist.  I just wouldn’t score highly in the foot beauty awards.  Mine are just humbly plain.

My first husband called them umfazi feet.  He told me it’s a Shona (Zimbabwean language) word for woman.  I was a barefoot girl and as it says in one of my books about dance, dancers’ feet bear weight and barefoot dancers’ feet are hooves.   Under pressure to modify and conform, I attacked them with hard skin remover cream, too nervous to use one of the widely offered peelers or sanders.  Better.  I slapped cream on them.  It helped.  I have wonky toenails, no polish in the world becomes them.  I tried.  Twice.  Waste of everybody’s time and effort.  Clean, neat and think about something else.  No strip sandals, hate thongs.  Broad strap across the joint, sandal attached to foot.

25 years ago, arriving in Paris for a glamorous weekend with second husband, my left foot wasn’t comfortable.  Examination revealed something nasty in the woodshed between the smallest and the next toe.  I slipped shoes off at every opportunity and come Monday, went to see a chiropodist who reduced a soft infected corn to manageable proportions while trying to sell me on having the little toe broken and reset.  I declined.

For years the degree of discomfort caused by this small imperfection varied.  The best money I ever spent was with Bastien Gonzalez, foot man to the stars, a former skier, whose massage of the leg from knee to ankle and painstaking clean treatment of the foot really was as good as a week’s holiday.  In the sun.  And the after effects for three months.  Looked good, felt beautiful, lesion rested.

The only person who closed that lesion was Margaret Dabbs, former nurse retrained as podiatrist whose “medical pedicure” I found through The Independent.

But the product she used – an iodine based substance made for podiatrists called Ichthammol – is no longer manufactured.  And when I asked my current foot woman why, she answered “Because it is too cheap.  Not enough profit.”  I used surgical spirit every day between the toes after a shower.  Post-war child, I was used to nurses sponging their feet with it to refresh and toughen the skin.  Cleans white woodwork a treat too.

So – here’s what Santa put in my stocking.  It’s gone.   The soft corn I have had so long and whimpered over at intervals for years.  Gone.  I wear softer shoes and heaven interceded for me.

An odd girl I once visited at a Laingian refuge said I should try and make friends with my feet.  They worked hard for me.  I took them for granted, didn’t respect them and you can’t get far without them.   At the time I thought her remarks strange but time has proved her right.

You don’t have to flash feet about but you do have to take care of them.

We had a choir at school, first led by Mrs. Quinn and when she retired, Miss Pringle.  We sang madrigals, ballads, traditional airs and bits of classical music by, among others, Rimsky Korsakov and Mozart.

At Christmas there was a school carol service where we sang carols from all over the dominions which in the 1950s still coloured large swathes of our globes and maps the reddish pink of Empire.   The language divisions sang in French, German and Latin while the choir sang (among other things) arrangements of Benjamin Britten’s carol and The Song of the Nuns of Chester,

Music at home was dominated by all of us singing anything we could remember, usually in turn in the car, and the great bass voice of

Paul Robeson.  I had friends who studied piano and they played classical music but I had no great exposure to it other than the odd thing on the radio.  Which was just as well.  It unsettled me.

I used to say that, if you wanted to derange me, all you needed was a dark room and a set of classical recordings.  If they didn’t appeal to me, the conventions of theme and repetition set my teeth on edge.  If they moved me, they moved me so much, it was frightening.   The emotions they released were too big, great dark waves of feeling I didn’t understand.  So, for many years, I avoided classical music.

In autumn 2012, a friend asked me to go with him to a Sunday concert at the Wigmore Hall.  I hesitated but one of the great things about being older is how perceptions change, clear, alter, have different shapes like rocks emerging from water in new light.  And my friend said how much he enjoyed these concerts and he wanted to be able to share it with me.  Bless him.

It was an eye opener, with a string quartet.  We went back again some months later to hear a pianist (Itamar Golan) who changed every idea I ever had about classical piano.

Emboldened to try by myself, two years ago I watched the Vienna State Orchestra concert on New Year’s Day conducted by Daniel Barenboim.

And putting aside the fact that the music wasn’t to my taste, if you can make The Blue Danube rise new to the ears above all the times you have heard it churned out so that you see the river in different weather, its moods, its beauty and its power – thank you musicians, thank you Maestro.

Sometime last summer I saw that Barenboim was conducting Beethoven with his East/West Diwani Orchestra on BBC4 and I thought, well …  I could always switch off.

Instead, I sat in the dark and laughed and cried and watched his right hand lead me into sensing, feeling, understanding as I never had before.  The left hand did the tempo but the right hand was interpretive – and it was thrilling, being led into music.  I felt as if I had begun to read another language.

A famous British academic remarked that the world is full of readers and writers.  I am a reader.

It’s no good anyone telling you that you should or shouldn’t like a voice, and really falling in love with a voice, classical or otherwise, doesn’t happen very often but in dipping into a concert with Placido Domingo. I heard a voice.  I saw a well-made woman in green with no attempt to look like a starlet or a pop star, dress down, hair up, and what a voice !

I raced for pencil and paper and sat, rapt, till she finished, to get her name – Joyce DiDonato – which I promptly  Googled.  Since then I have heard her sing in the first full length opera I have been to for 20 years or more (don’t get excited I can’t afford opera tickets – I saw a cinema link between the Curzon and the Royal Opera House).  In the past I admired the skill, technique and the sheer strength needed to produce the sound: now I was watching a woman who made me believe she sang as naturally as she breathed.

It was exhilarating.

Music is very personal.  My taste is wide, or no taste, depending on your point of view!   In Greenwich Village when I was 19, we used to say the only thing wrong with folk music is the folk”.  There are sounds and shapes that move and excite and others that don’t even jar – they are meaningless.

The success of AA programme such as the one I watched on BBC4 about the development of classical music after WWI was the range of talking heads, composers, players, and the interested who communicated their interest.  It has always been true that your imagination can be caught by anything if the speaker speaks to you.

My ears are still where they were, on the side of my head, but open in a different way.

Putting the American use of the word to one side – implying all kinds of wildness, drink, drugs and sex – this is party time.

The pause between Christmas and New Year which used to symbolise some sort of return to normality is now seen as a brief sag immediately followed by a build up to a bigger head of steam. The gap before the big blow out has to be filled with something and what you can’t do with shopping, you do with hooley.

Pass.

I am repelled by parties. They frighten me.

When I was a child it was to do with looking as I did, thin, dark and aquiline, or as my father put it proudly “like a Hindi child.”

(Incidentally though the Oxford Dictionary says hooley is most Irish or NZ usage to describe a wild party, it also lists a similar sounding word (Hoolee) which is a Hindu spring festival and it would be typical of how language travels if it were of

Anglo-Indian derivation.)

I thought, as many do, that if I could just get the right clothes, I could pass.

It took me a couple of years to attain the long longed-for forget-me-not blue net with puff sleeves and my mother met my eyes in the glass.

“That does nothing for you” she said evenly – she knew I knew.

Belief in the transformational quality of wardrobe took a hard knock.

Wishing does not fix it.  You have to dress what you have.

When I was older (17 in London, 19 in New York) parties happened and I went to them, hiding in corners, finding somebody to talk to, being useful.

You Could Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties.

By then there were new varieties to be braved – drinks or cocktail parties: “any excuse for a” party: and “new clothes, make a hit” parties: plus more formal assemblies for 21st or graduation.  But none of it did anything for me.

I like to talk and you can’t make yourself heard at parties.

I’m a cheap drunk with a poor head and I don’t like a skinful with any but my closest.

Far from making me feel safe, the noise makes me feel threatened.  I want to know what it masks, what else is happening.

The manic gaiety doesn’t happen to me.

Twice in my life I have enjoyed big parties – where the food and drink came in good-natured waves, everyone talked, the music was low, turned up briefly for a dance and turned down again.

At one, I was thrilled to identify the South African anti-apartheid campaigner Ruth First – but not her husband Joe Slovo (later Mandela’s Minister of Information) whom I thought a charming Middle European Jew, always good for a natter, which is what we were doing sitting on the stairs, when she came up.

And  the other given by the William Morris Agency at a famous luxe Belgravia hotel was so beautifully catered and served, the experience of watching it happen was much more exciting than those who dressed the set.

And yesterday we had a party, all two of us, a dear friend and me with some good food and the prettiest table I could come up with.  Candles on, shutters shut.  Bottles of Prosecco (so much more digestible than any other bubbly), gifts – we hadn’t seen each other before Christmas, shouts of delight, trying on, more laughter: wicked bitchery – we have kept each other’s’ confidences for 25 years.

But mostly giggling, carefree laughter, she wandering back and forth worrying about me locking the back door, me with a recalcitrant bottle wedged between lace-covered thighs while I wrestled the second stopper into submission.

On Sunday I picked up the paper and there is sodden youth.  I am sure there is sodden every kind of age but youth is in the spotlight because of the enormous rise in diabetes (sugar in alcohol) and liver disease among the hard drinking young.

And I bet most of them don’t have a job or an aim or much hope for the future.

Managing them costs a fortune, drives the rest of us off the street and must exhaust the already stretched emergency services.

Makes a nice word like party into an obscenity.

Bear Street and Gin Lane by William Hogarth – he drew, we snap – familiar?

If you don’t like Christmas, don’t subscribe.  You can choose.

Is that why so many people don’t?

Because you could sue (if you could find out who) about what Christmas has become, under the Trades Descriptions Act.

It is no longer to do with the birthday of the Christ or even (often) the applied values of Christianity like comfort, joy, peace, kindness, family and generosity, to name a few.

It is about merchandising.

The carols have yielded to endless reruns of elderly ballads and Saint Nicholas, patron saint of children, has morphed into Father Christmas or better still Santa Claus, father being rather a loaded term.   And if there is a god involved, it’s Mammon – dictionary definition “riches, avarice and worldly gain personified as a false god.”

Of course there are still those happy people who give friendly drinks and dinner parties, families delighted to rally, happy relaxed children of every age.

Acts of kindness are valuable and moving.  Loneliness is a problem to those it bothers but like stress, it has a positive side.

My favourite seasonal tweet so far says “Christmas food reinvented – organic, vegan – and lots of gin!” though often the drinking motif means we have gone from a bit to a bonanza, methodically slurping through several days – wine, cocktails, anything in a coloured bottle including morphine enriched cough linctus.

So let me speak up for the 25th.

Yule is a very old festival, long predating Christianity and in Northern Europe, it celebrates the darkest point before the slow rise towards a new spring which may be long in coming.  As a child, my Christmases were unburdened by religious belief but inclined to the spiritual because my parents were, and we all loved stories.

My parents married on Christmas Eve.

On Christmas Day when I was 12, my sister’s fiancé was killed in a plane crash.

I have never not had a lovely Christmas, I suppose because I commit to it.

I do whatever bit of titivating I am going to do to the house, I light candles (to see us through the darkness I mentioned), I forget the clock, I look at the garden and if I am lucky, I listen to a cherished silence so dense it has a sound of its own, depending on the weather and the fact that everybody else has gone away.

In December this year I spoke on the radio about the happy birth of any baby symbolising hope and that started me thinking about the components of the story, the supporting roles if you like – the shepherds and the Three Wise Men, the angels and in the old British tradition, the animals having the gift of speech for the night of Christmas Eve, the woman and her husband chosen as guardians.

My favourite Christmas poems are The Sheepdog by UA Fanthorpe, about the angels appearing to the shepherds from the point of view of a collie, and Prayer for a New Mother by Dorothy Parker in which Mary is allowed to enjoy the birth of her son.

I would cast as shepherds Kevin whose wife is terribly ill, who sells organic produce in one of the markets I frequent and David the window cleaner, his wife Lynn and their sons: they constitute simple warmth and grace in a busy tough world.

I have endless Magi, wise men (usually women) with gifts, Lala’s coat, Di’s hat, Daisy’s daisies, Slad’s pearls – and the unending gift of friendship.

My Mary is a Semitic Grace Kelly.

Joseph is in my memory, gone but not forgotten, my father, the lawyer Sir David Naply, Lee and Stacey who had an inspiring life partnership and shared everything they learned.

My ox is a Staffordshire bull terrier called Rico whom I met in the dark outside the convenience store, where (once his boss had introduced us)

I was allowed to caress his apple head while he pranced and smiled.

And my ass is every beautiful horse and mule including Joey in War Horse.

There is a tall gardener in the Pimlico Farmers ‘ Market called Rosalind from whom I bought a wreath, half a dried oak branch complete with acorns, some fir and holly, and that says it all:  some will go, some will stay.

Try again tomorrow.