Annalog

From the time I could register it, I knew 21 Briarvale Avenue as home.  I still recall something about almost everybody who lived in the street and once spent a happy night visualizing each house and its occupants, to get me to relax enough to sleep.

Our next door neighbors were Mrs. Guymer on one side and the Milners on the other and when the Milners moved out, the Stowells moved in.

Christine Stowell had pretty hands and read Woman’s Own.  Rob Stowell worked for ICI which meant in those far off days, that he was a young man on the rise.

I remember Christine giving my mother a tube of a cream ICI was trying out  before it was marketed.  It was called Savlon.   And then there was the plastic washing up bowl.

Plastic recycling codes

The one we had was elderly enamel but Christine and my mother discussed plastic as a coming thing and my mother’s next sink tidy was made of it.   To people tired of scraping sounds and rust stains, longing for a bit of inexpensive colour, plastic washing up bowls, pedal bins and storage receptacles were a wonderful breakthrough, designed to last forever.   I thank heaven for plastic every time I close the aged Addis boxes in which I keep biscuits, or snap the locks on the tops of the more recent soup cartons to go in the deep freeze.

But I mourn the passing of bone and natural resins, bog oak and minor gemstones, all of which are now superseded by lumps of plastic in jewellery.  There is of course some remarkably beautiful costume jewellery (Lanvin comes to mind) as expensive as anything real, but then you are talking about label, not content.  The purchase price of decorative plastic is based on – if you can get away with it, do.  This year’s record is held by a grey plastic hairclip in Alexandre of Paris for an asking price of £96.00 – not a error.  I checked.  Truly a fool and his money …

The science of plastics has affected packaging without reducing it, indeed probably increasing the amount of it and certainly its duration, so that older alloys have been phased out, up to and including cellophane that no longer burns: it shrivels.

While I wonder what role plastic plays in the development of long-lasting cosmetics and toiletries, offered to us for our convenience if not our health.  No, I am not going into a rant about plastic surgery though I do think approaching your one and only body as if it were a kitchen extension and hoping you can do it for less is a questionable philosophy but in the pressure to be “perfect” (whatever that may mean), we have forgotten that skin (and hair and nails) are made of cells and they need to breathe.

Giant fish made of recycled botttles in Rio

I was horrified when a beautician told me she had noticed “sort of black lines” on the lips of a regular client who was using 24 hour lip colour.  There is mascara designed to stay on through thick, thin, rut and chlorine (my eyes hate it), “permanent makeup” which is a form of cosmetic tattoo and now the “increased security” (if you are a “strong woman” – which presumably allows you to sweat in the first place) of 36 to 48 hour deodorants.  Well, I am a strong woman and I wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole.

Do consumers ever stop to think that “less bother” might mean “less health” ?

Abandoning cleansing and washing, refusing to accept that wearing off and reapplication is to abuse your body’s biggest organ, the skin, about which a dedicated research dermatologist remarked, we know remarkably little.

When you look up plastic in the dictionary, it has all sorts of more positive meanings than the war many of us have declared on the ubiquitous shopping bag.

Plastic surgery can be a heart lifting experience.   Plastic shapes, plastic movement – these are compliments.  In physics and biology, plastic qualities are positives.

Taken out of context, plastic becomes a comment on the fake, the artificial, KatiePricedom.

The problem is never the substance.  It’s how it’s used and how it’s seen.

In a healthy way it is part and parcel, one of a variety of options.   It only becomes a problem when it is seen as an end in itself, to the detriment of variety.

Which probably explains why the plastic is in the garden catching cherished rain and my washing up bowl is chipped enamel.

When my second marriage broke up, I was in my fifties, in the very place I had encouraged others to avoid.

But there was no hope for it.  He shipped out and I wept.

Over the next couple of years (heartened by an article which said in sum that the first 12/18 months are the worst), I sold everything that wasn’t nailed down,, fought to keep the family home while my son was in university, then gave in and sold just as he graduated.

The worst thing was I had given my best and if that wasn’t goo d enough, what could I do for an encore?  I wore out friends and goodwill whingeing about this but I came to see that there was one thing I could do.

I could cook.

Of course I had cooked for years, serviceably and plentifully, occasionally even well, but I didn’t think I was good enough.

And I couldn’t think of any reason why anyone would want to come and see me – unless I could feed them, an idea which must have come from the adage that “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach”.

Food is a social medium.

So, invoking the names of my culinary gods – Boxer, Roden, Slater – I made something I had never made before, fed eight of us to enthusiastic satiety and never looked back.

Bread and salt (for those who don’t know)

I do miss the company of men and no, I am not being coy.

As a small child I sat among rows and rows of men and boys while my father emceed swimming galas and boxing.   I have great women friends, great gay friends but I miss being friends with men.

When, after a gap of 30 years, I met up with my first husband, a genial madman with whom I do much better now that we are just friends and older, I offered him dinner.  And it soon became clear that a meal in, not out, with food he could eat rather than invoking a list of gastric sensitivities, a bit of special without the ceremony, was something he really enjoyed.

So when he comes to London, he comes here.

Fine for me, he’s on my territory.  Fine for him, he can talk without interruption, and he does.

So is it perhaps time to offer membership of a rather select club?

Because I can think of three men I would like to invite to supper, not dinner, not fuss, not candles and The Big Make – just three men I think might be happy to have a safe house in London with clean towels and a square meal.

Whale vs krill – no competition

First is the MP Tom Watson, appealing in his battered dignity and with the invocation of “Assume the worst“.  I want to stop him eating too much of the wrong stuff in the House of Commons canteen, on trains bashing up and down the country and know that this is a News International free zone.

I have heard him speak on TV where he struck me as rather shy but that may be because being a man in adversity is one of the most troubling roles you could ever be asked to play.  Men are supposed to triumph, not just survive, and they are supposed to know and accomplish by osmosis, not study.  It’s much harder to be a man, I think, but then I am not one.

Then there is Nick Freeman (Mr. \Loophole) a lawyer famed for getting his well known charges off their driving offences.  I need nothing from him – I don’t drive – but he is recently divorced and has lost both his dogs.

The dog sharing the picture I saw of him is a Staffordshire bullterrier and if he likes them, we’ll have instant rapport.  I have an affection for the much maligned bull breeds.  And I warm to opinionated men with a soft side they take pains to keep private.  Which is why it stays so, and the public carapace is used to protect it.

And then Russell Howard the comedian who often makes me laugh.  He says he has a lazy eye and people too often think he is arrogant or fed up.  I have never noticed the lazy eye but being “on” all the time must be wearing so he could come here and be “off”.

I realise this is all open to misinterpretation but that tells you more about yourselves than me.

Food and conversation are great pleasures, friendship is a greater one.

I came late to the Nordic Noir craze.   In the first place, I have to be really keen to watch subtitles on TV and I would never have got to Wallender if I hadn’t see Kenneth Branagh in Wannsee and Rabbit Proof Fence.

Henrik Ibsen

The Swedish Wallender was different again and though I admired it, I wasn’t gripped.

After an initial resistance to The Killing (brought about by bouquets from every direction, the Faroe Islands sweater, and, I admit, a bad case of the kind of nose wrinkling that says as soon as you try to tell me how wonderful something is, I find to the contrary) I watched the whole of the second series with enthusiasm.

Gunnar Mydral

I liked the lack of light, physical and moral, and was drawn to an odd, awkwardly beautiful leading lady playing a character I could admire, not least because she looked like a woman who could do her job (i.e. flat shoes, pinned back hair).   And her job was to sort things out, however temporarily.   So – anti-social, driven, occasionally (hooray) mistaken – she became a force for good.  The endless delineation of horrors – whether social, aesthetic, psychological or whatever – just depresses me.  Yes, the world is often tough and ugly.  It always was.   And Sartre’s smart crack about hell being other people too often stops you looking at the fact that you are one of them.   So, for the main protagonists in such dramas to appeal to me, they have to try and ameliorate matters.

Greta Garbo

Watching Borgen (The Castle) confirmed that I was less interested in a fictional representation of politics than in the enactment of politics themselves.  The balancing act between the personal and the professional became ever more difficult to locate, though the relationship with the press stayed sharp and clear.  The whole was beautifully integrated – shot, lit, written, played and edited.

Then BBC4 launched The Bridge and I didn’t care.

Carl Larsson

If there is a savage god in television, it is the success/repeat/success/burnout syndrome through which whatever you like is pushed into duplication too fast, destroying everything you admired in the first place.   Theoretically it’s slash and burn so that the crop grows ever richer but in practice, it rarely works out that way.

Forget the New York and Miami spinoffs, the CSI mother ship is a perfect case in point.

Carl Dreyer

Everything – characters with enough unexpected back story to be interesting, imperfect people doing their best, a group who liked working together though there were frictions and sexual intimacy was atypical, a picture of science as benign and useful, the endless discussion about where, when and if to be personally involved, how much and when to step back – that made is groundbreaking is now gone.

And everything that was new in the run of Scandinavian thrillers is now familiar – the oppressive sky, the misfit characters, the insomnia.   Oh dear.  Same old, same old.

August Strindberg

Literally incredible is a female officer of any nationality who begins every action by hooking her hair schoolgirl fashion behind her ears.  The current range of clichés for female leads is that they must wear skintight pants and boots, are even (gosh) occasionally bra-less but they must have long floppy free flowing hair.  I saw two actresses I admire the other day – both American, one mid forties, the other ten years older, both with immaculately coloured and coiffed hair halfway down their backs – both playing senior police officers and both looking pretty silly.

And then there’s the serial killer, the sort of fake heart of a series because he runs to little logic but his own – presumably why writers love the idea, freeing them to react against the certainties not to say predictabilities of the genre.   But this is done so often now that it is more unusual (and requires more skilful writing) to feature less extraordinary people.

Jean Sibelius

Whenever you watch a series, you stay with it because you want to see where the story is going – that’s the pull of “next week” – and similarly there is a moment where you give up, because you have worked out what is going to happen – or you don’t care.

Mauritz Stiller

I gave The Bridge “three strikes and you’re out”.   Couldn’t turn Southlands off.

When Johnny Greenwood’s music track for We Need To Talk About Kevin was nominated for Best Original Film Score at the Ivor Novello Awards, I hoped it would win because it was remarkably effective while playing its part in the film.

Music used to be part of the soundtrack.  I know that music is only one kind of filmic sound but it was part of the whole cinematic experience and how sight influences sound and sound back again is always interesting.

For many years, there was a recognisable repertoire of musical themes which cued when the “baddie” was creeping up on his next victim, when the lovers declared their feelings, when the cavalry came.   And though we might deride them, these musical messages were pretty effective.

Increasingly music has been used in film and television programming as it is in shops, as white sound, to lull us into unthinking acceptance, to reassure us that what we are seeing isn’t so bad (in any sense) as we think it is because – listen ! – here comes that song again.

An early example of music out of its groove would be “The Go Between”(1970), a film remarkable in equal parts for physical beauty, psychological bitterness and musical bathos, this last enshrined in a repetitive tune of such irritation that I never saw the film all the way through, only in bits on several occasions.  The music track was like chalk on a blackboard – worse, counter-productive: eventually, I didn’t care what happened; I just wanted the music to stop.

More recently, having read a congratulatory piece that touched on the making of David Attenborough’s latest BBC series, the integrity of the team, the skill of the cameramen (fabulous above all else), DA’s invaluable hand on the project tiller, and on, I tuned in to watch.

The music annoyed me so much that I tried turning the sound down and missed commentary.  I did this several times, counseling my soul to patience, until at last, awash with unnecessary musical cues when the wonder of white universe was all I wanted to think about, my thoughts interrupted by musical signals that told me when to laugh, when to cry, when to catch my breath in wonder – I gave up.  Here’s hoping the makers sell it wide high and handsome.  But the use of music in that series is less about art and more about propaganda.   And it is the music that offends.

I watched DA’s one off programme about the giant egg he found in Mauritius.  He was wonderful, it was wonderful and the music was under control.

The over use – abuse? – of music in film is wrongheaded.  Either that or it is shrewd and knowing in the worst way.

For example, we are going through a phase when many wildlife documentaries increasingly focus on a presenter (though when the presenting chores are shared it works better).  When it’s one face to camera, we start with a double bluff – “Here am I, all by myself in the Cascades, looking for bears” says the presenter – but you and I know that, if this is being filmed, there is a camera team out of shot doing the filming.

Otherwise, how could pictures of the location, the presenter and the fauna be combined?   Cue – emollient music, to bind everything together and make it seem all right – here is a baby bear, there is a thunderstorm, this is the road back to where most of us live.

Real sound (wild sound) and the sounds of silence remain incredibly potent because they pull you in, closer to the image, they spare you less.

In “Le Fils” (by the Darenne brothers)  which is short and tight, there are only natural sounds, of shutting doors, of nails drumming on a surface, timber being piled, the rustle of money.

While in Paul Haggis’s undervalued “Valley of Elah” (biblically, where David slew Goliath) the sounds of the “real” world (the click of a light switch, cigarette wrapping unfolding noisily in the dead of a sleepless night) marked time in the story, the slow discovery of what happened to a missing son, his death at the hands of his brothers-in-arms and why no-one wants to know.

And maybe the enormous success of “The Artist” serves to underline that in a world of noise, even musical noise; silence still has something to say.

I met a tall woman in the street, draped in a magnificently coloured shawl on which I complimented her.  We had a cup of coffee and I discovered I couldn’t invite her home for a glass of wine because she doesn’t drink it: she drinks Scotch.

She is the daughter of a grand Prussian house, trained late in art history and by one of those strange coincidences, her great love was a man I had a crush on when I was 17.

We talked to each other about our children – my son, her son and daughter.

She rang me with complimentary tickets to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition Ballet Russes and Beyond and we had a fine time together.

We talked on the telephone about people and clothes and books and art.

When I met her she had spent a year in a small clean box of a service apartment, waiting to find a flat she wanted to buy.  When she found it, she gladly released her treasures from storage and moved in.  It made me nervous.  In my experience of even looking at such properties, there is always a sum you haven’t bargained for, tucked in somewhere between “mod.con” and “garden view”.

But it was what she wanted.

And then one day we spoke about money.

In most friendships of any worth, you have to choose when and if you will attempt a serious conversation about money, for two main reasons.

The first is that people’s attitudes to money are strange to everyone but themselves.

I recall a high flying business executive who frequently wore several thousand pounds’ worth of clothes but carried the same beat up handbag with everything.

And the man who wore Brioni suits at £1800 apiece, who lost weight, ditched them, and bought them all over again, the same man who never repaired anything.  If it broke, he put it aside and bought something else.

There is a man with £300,000 worth of jewellery in a strongbox, who buys his groceries at week’s end in M&S when they bring the prices down.

And think of those endless people who cut the corners on the holiday of a lifetime, or won’t shell out for the right underwear under once in a lifetime Versace.

Each to his own, I hear you say?  Well, yes, OK but it is rare that people see money for what it is.

It has emotional meaning and people are funny, that is to say peculiar, about money.

And secondly, beginning a dialogue about money risks having to wade through cliché before you can get to real exchange, remarks like “But you always look wonderful” ..

It is rare and to be treasured to find someone of either sex who is straight forward about money.

I have a great friend who is wealthy and carries it with more grace and less attitude than anyone I have ever known.

Trust comes into this of course but so does the wish to communicate and be plain about it.

So my friend in her new flat had been hit with “hidden costs”, her share of repainting “the common parts”, a phrase that made her giggle even as she worried herself sick about how she was going to manage both in finding her share and keeping herself afloat.

She said she had some things to sell, she thought she would take them to a famous auction house, there were old ties through them to her family, surely that would count for something?

I drew a deep breath and said “Let me give you the name and address of my pawnbroker” not that I ever pawn anything.  If you don’t have income, it’s the last thing you must do.  I sell.

But I told her how I found them, where they were, established in 1770 as a “discerning moneylenders”, dealing in assay weight.

And I told her I had used them, to help a friend sell a Rolex and for myself, when I wanted to go away the year before last.  She made a note and it was done.

She rang me later that afternoon.  She had been to the auction house whose employee had been slightly dismissive.  And she had gone on to the address I gave her, where she was received politely and professionally, and offered exactly twice the first bid.   She couldn’t thank me enough.  And as with all risky things in friendship, if they work out, they make a bond.

We laugh about now.  Once, we say, we’d have swapped dressmakers and hairdressers.  Now, it’s pawnbrokers.

And we like ours best.

One of the advantages of being a retiree is daytime television.

“Oh but” I hear you say “you could always record it.”

Most of it you wouldn’t want to watch, let alone save to watch.

Occasionally there is a film, one you missed when it came out or an older model, or a documentary repeated at some odd hour, but even series you once enjoyed are now run and rerun on endless loops, producing a cross between stupor and heat rash, numbness and irritation.

How can a series of 30 years’ duration like Midsomer Murders be reduced to the same 12 to 15 episodes played over and over again ?

Why don’t we rerun some of the splendid stuff from the past?

And the advertisements are repetitively about money, insurance, fitted kitchens, gardening, incontinence, money, denture adhesives, vaginal itch, valueless food and pets, borrowing money, selling gold and depilation.

On daytime TV there is a whole school of women with long dehydrated coloured hair telling you how wonderful it looks when a fool with half an eye can tell you it looks like hell.

I have sat incredulous while assured that if I sprayed myself with the ersatz edition of cat’s pee (I apologise to the feline thus maligned) I would drop pans, skid across the tar macadam on an elbow, crash cars and climb out of the wreckage raving to fall into pouting lust with the nearest pair of knickers, garments clearly designed to be removed by someone far stronger than I.

I think not.

And I have grown heartily sick of drippy women climaxing over cream cakes, confectionery and various forms of chocolate.

Like Elizabeth I in Michael Hirst’s admirably scripted film, I have become a virgin.

Celibacy came late and unsought but fortunately memory serves.

Sex was a darned sight more enjoyable than chocolate and I like chocolate.

The advertisers will tell you – well in the cherished era of Mad Men they would – that, if you remember the advertisement, no matter how annoying it is, that shows it’s successful.

Then these ads are successful.

They lodge in the head like visual jingles.

But even the good ones – like Colman’s boogying bull – wear out their welcome because of the number of times they are repeated before our glazed gaze…

And now we have the masculine version of the girls with the sweeties in the form of a young man with a steak.  (Interesting how the female is always in multiple, suggesting perhaps that one man is worth five women – in what sense I wonder?)

Back to the beefcake: an attractive man kneels to camera to propose in all the conventional phrases but his object is to get the unseen target of his appeal to cook him a buttered steak slice, fully organic, without additives – clearly this is anti-Viagra.,

We haven’t advanced very far have we?

Gravy is for families, sweet things for women and a real man needs red meat.  I hear we are in Post Irony but I do miss the giggle.

To which the Aldi ads are an exception, especially the one in which a weary woman shows you two brands of tea – one dearer than the other – commenting “My husband doesn’t like this brand.  He likes this brand.

I don’t like tea (pause) I like gin.”

The smell of gin makes me heave but leave it to daytime:  it will drive you to drink.

There isn’t room to hang all my summer clothes and as at the moment, it doesn’t look as though there will ever be summer again, they are in a large suitcase, suitably wrapped and mothproofed (see Susannah Frankel Independent 14.04.2012).

However, a friend was going away and although she assured me that the weather there was much as the weather here, I was looking for a garment I wanted to offer to lend her.

Unable to find it, I began unloading the whole lot to search – and found The Sundress.

It is among a small number of things, not all to wear, that I keep for talismanic purposes i.e. they mean something to me, inspire some hope; remind me of some vision of self or some aspiration that I can’t quite manage but I like the idea.

Every so often, I dump one of these objects having exhausted its magic, or pass it on cheering – but there are things I cannot part with.

I am the antithesis of a hoarder.  When I moved from the family house to my present flat, a friend told me that I would fill a skip at either end and that I wouldn’t miss any of it.  I miss a Prussian blue wool jacket from a shop called Les Deux Zebres in Covent Garden.  Otherwise, she was right.

Though I wish I had kept more generally, especially in the matter of clothes for the days when what the fashion is means less to me, because the quality and colours of what I had were undoubtedly superior to what is currently predominantly on offer.

You do have the odd “find” but odd is the word: it is unusual.

Too many of the shops now offer rows and rows of limply similar dishrags.   It is very sad when I remember how a stroll around the shops used to lift the heart, even if you couldn’t afford to buy anything.

And before you say “Oh, but you can shop on line” – I look, but I don’t very often find.  The quality is the same and the screen is selling to a target audience and I don’t know that I was ever part of one.

I like to look and choose rather than fit in with everybody else because apart from the price and the quality, it is the tyranny of fitting in that is so depressing.

Stereotypes rule – fit in with your tribe.

What I can’t part with includes an old Jordanian kaftan, heavy with hand embroidery, for the terrace of my dreams: an Armani linen turban in which the proportions are wrong but the idea is good and I might get round to working from it one day – the longing to be chic doesn’t die: the sundress, neither skintight nor frilly, pure cotton, high waisted, French – to remind me that charm is not dead: and my father’s roll neck sweater.  I cannot and do not wear these things beyond trying them on but touching them comforts me.  I have some childish idea of sympathetic magic which suggests that, by their presence or just handling them, the qualities I think they embody will be reinforced in me.

I do the same with books.  I had to stop buying the books I wished I could read (or absorb without reading) but occasionally (for example, the compendium on Chinese art, the new catalogue on ancient artifacts from Kazakhstan, a book on Jewish ethics) I find a book I just want to stroke, as I caress my two cherished pieces of Inuit art in the hope that what is within will seep magically through my skin into my soul.

I can read an article of journalism and so esteem what it encompasses that I want to lodge it in my mind – a mind burdened as minds often are with pin numbers and minutiae and birthdays – so you can see how I progress to the childish idea of absorbing it, as if by magic.

Not to forget is only part of the idea – the rest of it is that you remember when you need to – and that is just as magical.   That, back through time comes an image, a taste, a feeling, a perception triggered by a colour, a line, a seam, a thought, a phrase…

Talismanic.

The Post Office still puts a note through the door when they can’t deliver, a red and white form telling you where you can collect whatever it is and asking you to bring identification.

So I set off with my son’s driving licence (it was his parcel)  and my passport: best to be prepared.  In similar circumstances I have been asked for one and both and neither.

The man behind the desk recognises me; grinned, got the package and I went out to get a bus because it was too cold to walk if I didn’t have to.u’

So there am I clutching something from New York and my scarf round my throat while standing at the bus stop when a tall young man in front of me half turns and I catch his eye.

“Freezing” I remark.

He looked at me.

“What will happen to the birds?” he asked.

I say the first thing I can think of.   “I know the wrens are at risk, because they are so tiny, the body can’t manage the change in temperature.” (I love wrens, they were the instruments of my return to happiness at a very difficult time – I don’t tell him this).   “But they are great survivors, they come again.”

“How?” he asked.

“I don’t know” I said.  “I belong to the feed them and admire them school, I don’t know much about birds.   Are they your interest?”

He nodded.  “I like the country” he said, shrugging away from the buildings round us.  “I go wherever I can, to walk and watch and listen.  I’ve been to Spain and Romania and Ireland, just to walk and see.”

“If you like birds” I said” you must go to Crete.  It’s a sort of way station for all sorts of birds; the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds recommends it.”

“I don’t know Crete” he murmured.

Oh I do.   “We went for holidays when my son was little.  He fell in love with a book called Birds of Prey of Greece.   He loves raptors.”

“What’s a raptor?”

“Like an eagle, a bird of prey.  I bought it for him, thinking he would like to look at the pictures but he insisted on reading most of it and we’d go out in the car to spot different kinds of birds from the drawings …”

“Like?” he said.

“Brown eagle, probably immature – on the left!”

He laughed.   “That sounds like fun.”

“It was wonderful” I said, remembering the heat across the undulating land, the simplicity of it away from the holiday coastal strip, the weight of it waiting for me.

“You see I had wanted to go there since I was about 14, when I found a book call The Bull of Minos, about the ancient civilizations  …”

“It’s very old?” he asked.

“There is a street of jewelers in Chania, the state capital, which is 8,000 years old.  (I don’t know if this is true but I like the idea.)  And old castles and forts and villas.  And wonderful people, invaded by everybody of course, because they are an island – the Turks and the Venetians and the Germans – but still themselves.”

“I’ll think about that” he said.

The bus approached.

“You’ve made my day” he said.

“Why?”

“Well, you’re white and I ‘m black.  And white women don’t speak to black men, not young black men.”

“But this is all there is” I said, gesturing to the space between myself and him, from him to me.   “If we don’t talk, there is nothing.  And this – this exchange – is the most political thing, not party political, political meaning of the people, the most political thing that any of us ever do and when we stop doing this, we’re finished.   It was a pleasure to meet you” and I held out my hand.   “I’m Anna.”

“Hi” he said, beaming.  “Hi, Anna.  I’m Dean.”

“Some believe that with an estimated 125 billion friend connections (the world population is just over 7 billion) Facebook has become so vast that it is undermining face-to-face interactions and replacing them with online ones” (Sunday Times 13.05.2012)

Not when Anna and Dean met on a cold morning in the Wandsworth Road.

What is a job for life? I keep reading “no more jobs for life”, usually on the same page as living for longer, saving more, sex at seventy and sentimental claptrap about how many more of us will be living to a hundred, as if that were desirable.

I can’t think of anything worse.

Yes, I have the personal acquaintance of two ladies, both over 90, in reasonable fettle, borne up by various kinds of help and family.  And my own mother died at 89 with little marked decline, thank heaven.

But it is a sight too long if you are ill or alone, or can’t-buy-the-basics-without-wincing poor – and increasing numbers of us are going to be all three.

Recently employed by a TV show, I met various well meaning souls who said bracingly “But you’re still working aren’t you?”

There are all sorts of inferences in this.

To which I replied “Only here.  Eight jobs last year, ten this.   I read a lot of books.”

|I don’t enjoy the mixture of shamefaced apology and jollying along that seems to accompany the expectation of endless employment.

Nothing is forever, and certainly not work.

So, the other day walking home, I reflected on the idea of a job for life.

How long is life?

Because – setting aside 10 years as a secretary – I worked more or less continuously for 35 years, with two unplanned breaks of about 8 weeks or so – in regular fulltime employment, regular part time employment, and freelance – in women’s magazines, newspapers, on radio and TV with the odd speaking engagement thrown in, all running at much the same time.  I was married, we had a child, there was help in the house, the shirts went to a service and we took turns at walking the dog.   That was a life and things change.

One of the best things I was ever taught is that change is inevitable – change in working practice, change in one’s field of work, life change, change in expectation and situation.

You can spend a lot of time trying to maintain the status quo and things will still change.  It is revealing that the man who insisted I get to grips with the idea of change hated it when it came to him because it was not under his formidable control!  Change was OK for other people.

We often talk about change resentfully because change for the worse is easier to categorize than change for the better.  So I remember with affectionate respect the old lady whose shopping I carried as we trudged home through the snow, who suddenly said “They weren’t good old days you know, for most of us.  They were bad old days.  Today is better.”   Change, you see.

The actress Cherie Lunghi (whom I have seen close to on a Saturday morning shopping, with a bit of lipstick for makeup, her enviable figure in jeans) is the first “popular” woman to be quoted as saying “Forget the Botox and embrace your bus pass” (Daily Telegraph 07.04.2012, quoted from The Lady) while some Simple Pleasures for the Over 70s made it to the second page of Times 2 (same week) including a break, thank heaven, from all this relentless “keeping busy”.

Of course you don’t have to abdicate everything you used to do but there might be something specific you are longing to stop.  Or take on.   In listening to other people’s problems for years and having given appropriate attention to my own, I contend that people who make themselves artificially busy are usually avoiding something – along the same lines are those endlessly hard workers who retire and are dead in a year to eighteen months.

Change has to be learned.  It is governed by need, health, disposition, income and imagination.

Change makes me revisit books and without exception I get something different out of them, the second time around.  They haven’t changed but I have.

A devotee of the print, I have reduced my newspaper habit to three a day and I have learned to love crosswords.

Change has made me cut back on cheese: the mouth loves it but the stomach doesn’t.

I am not a cat with nine lives.  I am a woman who cherishes tracts of time but who recognizes this is different – a change – to another life.

The phrase “The People of the Book” (ahl al-kitab) – the connection between the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims – has another resonance for me because I like to think of myself as a child of the book.

Books sustained me through my childhood illnesses, fed me ideas, conceptualized for me, comforted me, made me think, weep and roar with laughter and offered me some subconscious idea of stability.  The motto of Rudyard Kipling’s mongoose Rikki Tikki Tavi is “Run and find out.”

I did much of my running through books.

I do not keep every book that comes into the house.  I sort and recycle regularly.  There are things that pass me by or I can’t read, and others that I just have to have around me for that 2.00 am “I’d like to look at” feeling.

And I become wildly enthusiastic when a book shows me Something Else, Something Other – like Let Our Fame Be Great by Oliver Bullough, about the peoples of the Caucasus.

Because you must know that history has favourites and then it has gaps: history we all know, at least know of, and history that has been forgotten, shelved.

Bullough’s book seized my imagination to the extent that it is the only time I have ever buttonholed a BBC producer whose work I had admired and begged him to read it.

I am not at ease with the computer, with anything about it – the screen, what I can get it to do.  I am scared of it and have to be talked gently through it as befits a Luddite.

But my son taught me that, if you target the question, you can get an answer.

The first time I did this was to find an English academic on the faculty of an Australian university, who had written a book about three of The New Yorker magazine’s most famous cartoonists.

I found him, I emailed, he replied.

Yes!

Recently the mini edition of The New York Times enclosed in The Observer offered pictures of artifacts thousands of years old from the borderlands of Persia, west Afghanistan, north into Kazakhstan – mostly animals, beautifully worked by the largely nomadic peoples of the area.

As is often the way, things you have never thought of shake the eyeballs and the heart.

Years earlier, I fell in love with Inuit art the same way.

I emailed the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (New York University) saying there must be a catalogue, if I prepaid – would they send it?

Back came the reply saying it’s out from Princeton Press at the end of the month.

Then my delightful Libyan neighbour went to get on his Vespa to go to work as I came through the doorway, clipping in hand, saying “You’re going to think I am mad but you must see these things, they are so beautiful …”

“Oh” he said, taking the cutting, registering “they are lovely” incredulously “they are how old?” while I told him where I found them.

We looked at the details of the exhibit.   “I shall be in New York” he said “I shall go.  How did you know this was one of my great enthusiasms?”   Would I write down the details and put them through his door?  I did.  And then I emailed my son.

“Rude question: have you got my birthday present?  If so, no harm done.  If not, I have found something knockout.”

He rang to ask what and I told him the story.

About half an hour later, he emailed “It’s ordered.  Don’t bother ringing to remonstrate, it’s a busy day.  Talk later.”

The book arrived within a week.   I still don’t know how, he hasn’t explained.

And the images are exhilaratingly strange and wonderful.  there is no written record, very little is known except by deduction but importantly the long held judgment that a society had to be settled to produce to such an artistically high standard has been shot in the foot.

Why did these remnants of turquoise and gold and jade and wood, horse harnesses and votives, jewelry and charms appeal to me so viscerally?

I have no idea.  In the back of the head are “more things in heaven and earth” and I trust my nose.

Run and find out.

And the screen brought me closer to the print.