Annalog

Although the notion may not appeal, clothes soil.   Whatever the cleaning arrangements for public transport in London, they are inadequate.  You may be clean in every way but the conveyance that takes you to work and back again is not.

Not even remotely.

So unless you are one of those who buy, wear and discard (very hard on the environment), you will be washing things, or having them washed for you, or investing in dry cleaning.

I enjoy hand washing, cherish an old washing machine and know that finding a good dry cleaner is like finding a restaurant you like, a doctor you trust or a hairdresser who can cut your hair.

It takes time and there are all sorts of stops along the way.

There are people who take their garments to the nearest cheapest dry cleaner, put them in, take them out, wear, end of.

There are very expensive dry cleaners who are a con.

And many of us have horrible experiences – of garments torn, shrunk, smelling more when they come back than when they went in – and we will go to considerable trouble to find somewhere we can afford, where the spirit in the machines is changed regularly or even often: where whoever you deal with can be relied upon to make sure that your clothes come back in one piece.   For those of us who like to keep our clothes going as long as we can, who know that the quality of yesteryear is infinitely preferable to nine-tenths of what is currently on offer – finding a dry cleaner who gives a damn is important.

My Saturday job was in a dry cleaners, there may have been other branches but the business was small.  I worked for Mrs. Wilson who, had I dreamt of calling her anything else, would have clipped me round the ear.  She was the boss.  I got over the smells – of mucky clothes, cleaning spirit, work clothes and dyeing – pretty quickly, though I never got over the pain of trying to drive the safety pins we used to attach the tickets to the garments through the material: Mrs. Wilson had both dexterity and muscles I lacked.

Down the years I sought knowingly and unknowingly for what I saw in Mrs. Wilson’s shop when I was 15.  And when I found John the Scot in Pimlico Road where he ran his own business,

I stayed with him, as did many others.  You could take him something old, ask him to do his best with it and he wouldn’t sneer.  Buttons were tightened – not often, just enough to make you feel it mattered – and a bad stain was brought to the attention of Mrs. Cheung, whose hands looked like some mysterious Oriental roots.

They took pride in their work.   He closed the business when the landlord upped the rent again, saying – “”Well, I am 60 and Mrs. Cheung is 80 – we can’t go on for ever.”

We miss him.   The shop stood empty for ages, eventually becoming another convenience store.

After trying this and that and deciding against going somewhere that might be better but required me to carry weight over distance, I wound up trying a fashionable chain with a snazzy card, probably on some kind of deal, not more or less expensive or good.  But I bet the staff aren’t paid properly because everybody is fed up in there.  The only two who smile are two older women.  Otherwise it is the dyspeptic young, one of whom clearly hated what she was doing and me because I was part of it.

According to the American writer Louisa M. Alcott (who famously wrote Little Women) charm is the hardest personal quality to define.

The dictionary calls it the quality of pleasing, attracting or fascinating.

But charmless is simple: not pleasing, attractive or fascinating: no kind word, no kind look, no grace, shutters down, no interaction inferring “you’re not worth it, I won’t try.”

I have long believed that unhappy people are often generous with their misery.

And no, I don’t want to be swamped with fake sweetness.

I wonder what became of the knowledge that no matter what kind of a pain he or she is, the customer is always right – if only because without customers , you don’t get paid – but also that you can turn him or her round quicker and easier with a modicum of that hard to define quality.  This has nothing to do with nationality, age or sex.

Charm is not illegal, immoral or fattening.

Charm is to do with skill.

So, my next visit to this particular dry cleaning outlet may be my last and if they ask me why – I shall tell them.

There is a lot of building (redevelopment?  refurbishment??) going on round me, probably because I live in one of those areas in London where people can still afford to buy.

So, sadly, we are suffering from relentless gentrification whereby the well-heeled and/or still in work buy or rent from what we used to call “the lower orders” – the unpublicised losers in our society, the working poor.

Across the road is one of several examples of buying a late Victorian/Edwardian house and gutting it.  Breaks your heart.

But the men doing the work are agreeable and that’s a bonus.  They greet me and to their undying credit, they don’t add an endearment.

For the last several mornings, skip disposal has arrived at 7.00 or so but this morning, there was a different kind of noise – like shouting but with a laugh in it.

On my way to the bin, I saw a tall man with glasses speaking excitedly into the ubiquitous mobile while a younger man looked on.  I asked what was the matter.

“It’s a snake” said Specs, gesturing.

“I should call the council” I said.  “They usually take about three months.”

“No” he said, into the phone. “I am not going to touch it.”

“There are no poisonous snakes in Britain” I explained.  “It’s probably a grass snake.”

“Then why is it pink?”

“I don’t know” I said, beginning to laugh. “Maybe it’s albino or immature, maybe it’s a glow worm.  I don’t know much about snakes.   Is it in your way?  Where do you want it?”

“You’re not going to touch it?”  he frowned.   I said we could put it in a bin.

“Look” he said as it coiled and reared “it’s going to strike you.”

Heaven bless Marigold gloves.  I am rather scared of snakes but I have seen enough of The Deadly Sixty on children’s television to know that I have to grasp it behind the head with one hand and just above the tail with the other.  If I can’t feel it, I can distance myself from the fear.   I only managed to touch one once when a friend from the Peace Corps turned up with three pythons of varying sizes – I didn’t like the sensation –  and then I was chiefly worried about the cat whom I could see was a frightening focus of attention for the snakes, if not a finally a meal.

So I picked up the snake whom I referred to as George Osborne and we put it in a bin with the lid on.   And the tall man with glasses started calling the RSPCA because he wanted it released where it would be safe.   I hoped we’d be safe too.

“If it’s in your way, I could put it in a plastic bag” I offered.

“No, no” he said.  “It’s a creature.”

Indeed.

“And I used to have a girlfriend who had a ten foot Burmese python, I used to walk round naked with it round me.”

As you do.

I caught the eye of the younger man who had been watching all this, who grinned wisely and developed something else that had to be done.

“And anyway I believe in the God” – interesting turn of phrase, only common in more imaginative writing.  “And karma.”   Fine.   “But you’re a brave woman …”

This is nothing – I think – compared to sharing my flat for five days with a hysterical squirrel (whether hysterical by temperament or just because it couldn’t find the way out, I am not to know) for which I still have trap, lure and gloves from thetrapman.com and, once it had defecated everywhere and hidden, I lured out through lack of water and flaked almonds.  The kitchen window was open, an old towel wadded to make a bridge and the nuts led out.   I went to lunch praying and it left me.   A bite from a feral animal is not high on my list of things to do.

Poor snake, perhaps it had a problem …

An hour later I hear that it has been identified by an expert as an African king snake, quite venomous – though as my enemies will tell you, had it bitten me – it would have died.

Millions of us are going to be affected by varying degrees and forms of dementia.

The sufferers – that’s one thing.  Watching it, trying to care for it – is another.

Research goes on but the incidence of this affects many of us, mostly though not exclusively, older people, with great fear or with just as great a determination to die, rather than to live without memory.

There are wonderful efforts made by families and organisations.

But we know little about why this has come like a latter day plague, metamorphosing dotty senility into something much grimmer.

My sister has dementia.   To my lasting regret, I thought she was just being odd and difficult, not for the first time (we’re not close) – so I was slow to pick up the cues.

She had a stroke in 2005 and was told very firmly to give up a lifetime of smoking.  She has residual sight but was registered blind.   She wanted to continue to live in her flat so various friends helped her do that, though she became increasingly unreasonable in her demands of them.

Think of it.  Blind and demented.  No day, no night.

Eventually somebody rang me and we began a year of having her cared for at home which was a bad joke.

The carers came.  She was usually out, walking compulsively, a feature of her dementia.  The carers put her pills on the table with a note she couldn’t see.  Sometimes, she found them.  Sometimes not.

Nobody cleaned the kitchen.

Nobody cleaned the bathroom.

Nobody threw out stale food she could not see and could not remember that she had bought.

At last, through a small private bureau which helped find different places suited to different people local to where she lived and a social worker who was reasonable even when we didn’t agree, a home was found for her where she was happy, regularly visited, for a couple of years.

When she began to deteriorate physically, the owners of the home shoved her into hospital, said she couldn’t come back to them, her needs were too great but made no effort to tell me that as long her effects remained with them, they could charge for her.  Another good soul told me that, whipped her possessions out and found her another place where she is content and contained, warm, fed, clean and not alone.  It is all that can be done unless you have a calling and I don’t.  She doesn’t recall the flat which had to be sold to fund her care, though she remembers that long ago, she was a meteorologist.

My biggest single fear was always blindness but now dementia ties with it.

A dear friend remembers all sorts of things but not proper names so we have these odd conversations where we try to communicate by the background she gives me to the person we are trying to discuss and what I guess.  She says she has never been any good at names.  If I forget a name – and I do – I see the shadow of mental disintegration like Nosferatu behind me on the wall.

I have learned that, if you fixate on a name or a detail, far from coming into focus – it recedes.  And I have sat up out of sleep at 3.00 am and said triumphantly “Charles Coburn!” I have learned that the mind can project a scenario which is believable but isn’t true.   Most of us have moments when we forget a word or why we walked into the supermarket with such decision.  Or put something down and can’t find it.  You get shaken by this.

Recently I lost an apple, quite large, a Bramley, very green.   I had five when I left the greengrocer round the corner.  I have four now.  I have been through pocket and bags, looked inside and outside the house, tried thinking creatively about where I might have put it?   Did the advent of the neighbour from down the road, asking for her spare key, the boiler had died and the man needed a key because she would be out tomorrow sever a thought process?   Were my mother alive she would comment that I had probably put it in “a safe place”.   Terrible challenge, safe places.   Very hard to find.

I don’t do this often but every time I do, I feel threatened.

Where did I put that apple?

When I moved from family house into small flat (not that small said my son) I thought I would work again but regretfully, I haven’t much which is why this burst of discussing being sixty years old as the new forties and opining how much better it would be if we worked till we were 70 annoys me like prickly heat.

I’d love to work.   Tell me, where do I find this employment?

The working world I was part of is under enormous pressure from changing technology, differing expectations, a savage lack of funds and very much pro-action.

Just as well among the things the Great British Public taught me over many years of prints and microphone is that poverty is a relative term, individual in perception: mine is not yours, yours is not mine.   I can eat and pay my bills though heating will become an issue as I get holder – it costs more and I need more (see “earlier annalog “wood woe”).  My stomach, feet and teeth still work.  I thank heaven for eyesight and the many things that still give me pleasure – just as well – because as you get older, how you felt about life is there for all to see.  You have the face you deserve.

Everything in the flat is cherished because it is the first place I ever owned alone.   It is not an ours, it is a mine.  And I made as few compromises as I possibly could in the realisation of it over time, aided and abetted by wonderful friends.   Having been married to a man with a carpet fixation, I have none and many of the floorboards date from the original (1900).   I have never liked curtains – I have shutters at the front and a French style muslin affair (not frilly) in the bedroom.   And learning slowly that because a plant pleases my eye, it doesn’t follow that it will flourish in my short on sun garden, I have a small terrace full of wonderful trees and shrubs, some in beds, some in pots.

The builders who did the essentials when I moved in were perfectly pleasant one to one but the gaffer was horrid, a mixture of Jack the Lad and a bully, though he did listen (eventually) in the matter of the bathroom.   Understandably there are people for whom the bathroom is just the loo and the shower but I am not one of them.  The bathroom is a room in which I am as interested as any other which is funny because it is small, probably why the charmless builder wouldn’t make a mess of it.   I have collected shells for years (in one great glass jar) and stones (mostly from Crete) in another.   There are two pictures, a lump of white coral, some flowers, and the cotton wool is in a French lab jar from the 1950s.

And for ages I bought pairs of mats from Habitat, one for the bedroom by the French doors leading into the cherished garden, and one for the bathroom.  I wore these till they faltered, dumped them and bought fresh.  It was economically viable, decoratively and hygienically acceptable.  Until Habitat didn’t carry them any more.

I didn’t know what to do.  I wanted something – as I quite often do – that wasn’t around any more.  I wanted something I had had, what met my needs and I could afford.

And then on my way to somewhere else I saw a small rug, folded up, in the window of a shop selling artefacts from the Middle and Far East – and it was as ever, the colours that drew me.   And it was dramatically reduced.  Entering the shop, I asked to see it.  We measured it and I went home to see if it would fit.  It did and I could just afford it by which I mean real money, not plastic.    So I bought it on the understanding to myself that I would take care of it and that, if I did, it might live up to its dramatically reduced cost, four times the price (therefore four times the life span) of a pair of mats I couldn’t get any more.

Very quickly it became one of my pleasures.   (You may sniff “little things please little minds” but if the little things keep you going, what the hell.)   It is the only piece of Persian carpet I have ever owned, a Sumac, handmade in dull yellow, warm gold, a particular dead leaf brown, a mellowing green, a vegetable bisque and I smile at the floor.

A magic carpet.

The email read “What is she wearing? She looks like a failed pot noodle.”

Thus Tessa Jowell in a vivid and unflattering multi coloured top.

TV is spectator sport for all of course but this is the second time Wal the interior decorator has communicated with me in terms of outrage about what women over 50 wear.   His mother, the only woman he ever loved, was famously and amusingly feisty.

She had a proper job at Columbia Pictures and she was dressed, coiffed and shod all her life.  His father invested in couture for her when she got the job and she spent her own money on it as soon as she had it.

Wal doesn’t do well with women who can’t dress.   He is not disagreeable for the sake of it, he’s not a snob about his own or anyone else’s clothes but, man or woman, they have to do something for you, and if they don’t, he wants to know why you are wearing them?

This started a year ago when he rang and said without preamble “What is that woman wearing?”   As we watch different things, I had to find out to whom he referred but once we had run it down to Kirsty Wark, I told him that if he watched Newsnight,

He got what he deserved.  We are supposed to have our minds on higher things …

“But look at it” he insisted.  So I did.  And it was terrible, featuring a sort of ruffle round the neck usually reserved for lamb chops atop an unattractive skirt.

“Why?” he asked.   So I tried to explain.

You either take the position that there is no such thing as bad taste – one is just expressing oneself.

Or else – facing up to the fact that within 50 years, we have gone from elegant to sexy as fashion’s adjective of choice, illustrated through racks of rubbish in a massive market obsessed with cheap at one end and looking cheap at the other, the obsession with youth and fear of wearing anything other than what youth wears being seen as the beginning of admitting to age.  And obviously the dread if ratcheted up if you are in the public eye.

We have few wardrobe securities.  Women of a  certain age whose images are permitted to us are either actresses or performers (dedicated to the illusion of youth in order to keep working), royalty (circumscribed through another kind of image building) or occasionally women of achievement who though we admire them, often have access of money the rest of us don’t have  or they just don’t care – which may be personally liberating  (sculptor Louise Bourgeois, hooray: the lovely Joanna Lumley – er, yes).

What is missing is the Lagrange solution, embodied by Christine of the name, head of the International Monetary Fund who wears the kind of plain clothes that have to be well cut (expensive and are thus becoming (one of the fashion words we no longer use), wonderful handbags, shoes for feet not fetish, and a nice line in scarves.  Her jewellery doesn’t often appeal to me but her husband gives it to her, so you can see why she wears it.

There was a time when I would  have sighed “Oh well, she’s French” but such is the universality of dreck in clothing stores that there are nearly as many appallingly dressed French as British women – same lines, same stores, same old – though we are burdened with that “girly” thing which is so much less workable and so much more unkind than anybody seems to want to recognise.  And we have nobody in our public life any longer who just wears clothes.   They are all in costume.

I want to smack the Roayl milliners for putting Majesty in the hard lines of many of those hats.

I am tired of being told that Kate Cambridge dresses in the high street as does the PM’s wife, as if this were somehow exemplary.   If those clothes work (see Miriam Clegg) they look better than high street and if they don’t, I don’t understand why they are wearing them.   Cheap is only a recommendation when it works and it rarely works for either of them.

It isn’t just me.  I recently spent a day with 10 women – youngest 46, oldest 78 .  We couldn’t have been more different one from another but among the many and far ranging things we touched on, we all found finding clothes and shoes difficult.

There are more units than ever and less choice.  And this extraordinary conformity, so that the pressure to wear what is on offer is heavy duty. Less variety than at any time for 50 years.   Looking at practically permanent sales, does retail have a death wish?

Seems so.  Keep what you have going as long as you can: haunt the charity and secondhand shops: find a dressmaker:  look up Ari Seth Cohen on line and read Eric Newby’s Something Wholesale for laughs.

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.