Annalog

I try not to rant.   It’s very aging.  We all have things we take for granted of which we say “It’s just common sense.”   But the dereliction of common sense promotes a rant – for example in the matter of getting rid of household rubbish.

Apparently we lag behind many other countries in this.  Our landfill is overflowing and heaven knows what we do for an encore.

In the meantime, large numbers of people just dump rubbish without a thought about wrapping, recycling, discarded food, aesthetics, vermin or health hazard.

I live on a street of mixed properties; council and privately owned. Some houses, some flats, owner occupier and tenants.

Some of the flats have gardens, some tiny terraces.  The upper ones keep their rubbish out the back, those lower down put it out the front.  The local authority collects for recycling and landfill, regularly sends round little wagons with circular brushes and large men with flat brooms.  In the matter of waste disposal, the householders are well served by the local authority.

But the more it does for us, the less many of my neighbours do for themselves.

In the matter of the bin lid: if rainwater gets into a bin full of rubbish, it causes the contents to rot and stink.

The road is full of uncovered bins.

And when was the black bag converted by marketing from “bin liner” to “rubbish bag”?  A bin liner has to go inside a bin.  Apparently a rubbish bag is an alternative to a bin.

When I suggested to one of my neighbours that she might invest in a bin (even in these straightened times, not an item of major expenditure) she asked “Why?”

So she and her flat mates continued merrily to put their rubbish out the night before collection in the cheapest black bags which spilled and split and the foxes had a field day.

The next morning there would be much pouting and tutting, fingers arched away from any contact with the mess, but not a lot of clearing up.  No, that was for the waste operatives – what we used to call the dustbin men.

Reasonably, they have neither time nor inclination to pick up after us, so the eggshells and the bits of half eaten food, the bacon rinds and the wadded tissues and teabags would be left all over the pavement.

Until I went out and picked up.

Another neighbour observing me commented in his best disapproving voice “Bin men don’t do a very good job.”

I straightened up, Queen of the Marigolds; to say crisply “The garbage men do a fine job.  Most people don’t know how to wrap rubbish.”

It wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

Why don’t you think that dumping a rolled up carpet in front of your flat may have solved a problem in the short term when the weather was dry but once it has been raining for some weeks, the carpet is beginning to rot.  And it smells.

Why don’t you understand that a paper carrier breaks down in the rain and disperses the contents everywhere?

How can you not know that foxes and rats are attracted to every kind of meat scrap and that if you don’t wrap remains and put them in a place safe from claws and teeth and a sense of smell far more acute than a human one, they are going to be slavered over., defecated on and are thus a source of horrible odour and putative infection?

If you can’t afford a bin (£25 between two or more of you), what about stronger bags and not putting them out till the morning of the collection – rather than the night before when the critters roam?

I continue to write to the waste disposal department to point out when bags aren’t collected, when fly tipping (the logical extension of the above) occurs, to thank them when they clear stuff away, to wrap and rewrap, frequently swearing under my breath, always with a sense of incredulity.

Because if it is all a matter of common sense, then clearly common sense is as rare as hen’s teeth.

A fashion article recently claimed that ballerina pumps (i.e. dead flat shoes) had stopped being anything to do with fashion now that they had become a wardrobe staple selling x hundred thousand pairs every day.

By a similar token, you know there is a communication problem when newspapers start writing about it.

Why don’t we speak?

“Oh” I hear people say “it’s the pressure of modern life.”

Well then don’t be a victim of it.  Change it.

It is rarely quiet or pleasant on the bus nowadays.  The ride is usually dominated by one person speaking loudly into a mobile telephone, or worse still, two people speaking loudly in different languages on their mobiles.  Curiously, people think that they can’t be understood or gainsaid, so they speak ever louder.

A woman turned to a man mouthing off in Spanish and asked him to lower his voice.  She was polite.  He stared at her cold-eyed and spoke again into his mobile.

“I know what you are saying” she said blushing.  “I speak Spanish and that’s very rude.  I was quite courteous to you.  Couldn’t you speak more quietly?”

I immediately wanted to give her three different kinds of awards – for wearing her ordinary face, for refusing to be intimidated by him as lord of creation and for keeping her cool even as the blood vessels in her face dilated.

For I discovered xenophobia when I spent 20 minutes behind a Russian very nearly shouting into a mobile.

A more sociological experience involved a man with a plum in his throat who was challenged by two enterprising women in their thirties on a packed bus coming home through the rain.  He was conducting a conversation of mind-numbing triviality at the top of lungs clearly trained for field sports.  Challenged, he made the mistake of playing “poor me, it’s all about women nowadays” so that feeling against him from both sexes ballooned on all sides, till it was almost tangible and rain or not, he felt he should take his leave.

“That’ll teach him” remarked the woman beside me as he got off.  I said I doubted it, that personality is always right.

When the work I do slid away from me under the door marked “change”, I reverted to an earlier me.  I always spoke to people but it is easier with a degree of elective anonymity.  I have the security of knowing who I was which allows me to be who I am.

Aztec Rock Medicine

I try to be tactful, not everyone wants to speak.  I am willing to leave it.  I expect nothing.  I am unlikely to meet my new best friend, that horrid phrase which has inbuilt several kinds of expectation.

But most of the time casual exchange does what it always did.

It passes time agreeably.  It often begins with a chance remark about the weather.

But sometimes, it doesn’t.

I sat behind a boy of five or six making speech-like noises.  His mother talked to him, fed him slices of pear.  He interacted non-verbally with her.

When the passenger beside me got off, he knelt up in the seat to face me and indicated very clearly by these noises something on the river.

I said gently but clearly that it was a boat.  He beamed at me.  We commenced exchange – I talked and he responded.  He seemed to understand me but there were no recognisable words.

I took a deep breath, leaned forward ready for anything, and said into his mother’s ear “Please excuse me – this child needs his hearing tested.”

She turned to me.  “I was going to start with a speech therapist.”

“OK” I said, overcome with relief. “But his hearing needs assessing.  If he can’t hear, he can’t speak.  Speech is imitative.  My son was the same (conversational précis).”

The boy was beaming on us.

“Do you think it’s anything else?” she asked.   This is when you pray.

I said I doubted it, I am not trained but his eye contact is good, he interacts and he is clearly bright.

There was more, but she left me in no doubt that I had done the right thing.

It won’t always be as uplifting as that but we won’t know if we don’t speak.

First, there were photographs.   I remember appreciatively the last editions of the magazines that featured photographs – for example LIFE, Look, Realities – and fanzines, pictures of movie people.  There was no process I recall in being drawn to black and white pictures.  I just was.

I have had the oldest book in a collection, which a friend calls “photographic porn”, for 38 years, a book I had seen extracted in Rolling Stone and I found it in a bookshop on my first visit to South Africa.  From then on, I bought books of pictures or asked for them or was given them.  I have never got over books being given to me.

I don’t trust myself with a camera.  I am myopic and ham-fisted but I have a good eye and faith in my own taste.

“Nothing is meaningless” says Gertrude Stein “if one likes to do it.”

About five years later, I began to look at painted pictures.   There were two links to this: the first was cinema and second was cards.

When I arrived, the much younger of two children, my parents were both in their forties and loved the cinema.   So I saw musicals, one-offs, comedies and social drama with my mother: westerns, military and political stories and adventures with my father.  I didn’t miss much and I would still rather see a film than a play.

The spread of commercial cards has developed throughout my life, from cards for Christmas and birthday to cards for any occasion, cards showing reproductions of cartoons, paintings, film stills and original representations.   I began to understand that I might know nothing about the continuum or development of art but I recognised an image I admired when I saw it.

I keep a reserve of cards and postcards, some because I had to have them, some to be sent to other people.  Eventually cards led me to art books, particular artists, and the history of art.  Just as scanning widely through newspapers, magazines and periodicals, I began to keep a modest archive – there were things I wanted to keep – and a lot of them were images.

In my first magazine job, as problem page editor for Woman magazine, I inherited a big notice board from my predecessor Peggy Makins.  Eventually it began to look a bit tired and when somebody from household asked me if I would like another one, I said yes please.  I have it yet.  I change it around with newly discovered quotes and pictures and images, retaining one or two you might call the permanent exhibit.

I have a box file labeled “stickboard” that I go through from time to time and weed out the ones I can let go, either because the eye has moved on or because the thing no longer means what it did – but again, particularly pictorially, if it works for me, it works for me and I have cuttings and cards I can’t part with.

There are rhino and elephant, wolves and bears, the dancers Karsavina and Fonteyn (before the nose job), ancient cattle and Hokusai’s tiger in the snow: there are shapes and shadows and bottles, untypical of one painter and early of another, cards from friends and two or three things from friends I have never met, the legacy of radio that makes you feel you know somebody, even when you don’t.  There are slogans and cartoons, Dietrich’s legs, a 1913 Lipton’s Tea competition entry form, an advertisement for The Economist, and a poem by Edith Wharton copied out in black ink on stiff white card by my son when he couldn’t find me a black and white card.

I sometimes wonder how it feels to be bored.  It doesn’t really happen to me very often because these fragile images, much of which is ephemera, send me off to read, or think or find out, comfort my unsettledness, and make me reflect all over again on the man who told me a long time ago that love is recognition, not discovery.

That seemed entirely right to me for – in looking at my pictures – I feel not taken out of myself but rather confirmed in myself and it is for that that I cherish them.

I just bought a pair of tights, dark brown fishnet; the best there is, reflecting all over again that there are only two kinds of women when it comes to tights, tights as distinct from stockings – another discussion: I digress.

There are women who find the cheapest they can get away with, use, abuse and discard them.

And then there are women who know what they want in terms of colour, fit and texture, and are prepared to pay for it because (barring accidents) those hose will be around for a long time.

I am in the second group.  Some of my tights are up for endurance awards.  And yes, I am a card carrying snob about quality most of the time.  Discard fashion does not do it for me.  Environmentally it makes me sick.

If I can find something cheaply (three cheers for Muji), I am very happy to do so but I don’t expect to and I would rather do without than compromise.

“It’ll do” isn’t my favorite phrase.  If a thing doesn’t work from the off, it never will.  I grew up immediately post WW2 when there wasn’t much of anything.  My mother remarked more than once that her definition of luxury was buying something and then not having to wear or use it.  So I am her luxuriously uncompromising daughter.

Once upon a time we might claim “You get what you pay for” but sadly this mantra is no longer as reliably true as it once was.

Rows and rows and racks and racks of garments and accessories are all made in the same factories, whether for H&M or Harrods.  The Financial Times fashion writer Vanessa Friedman has described this process and with it, the narrowing of the range of colours.

There is great price snobbery.  The luxury brands have survived the present financial turmoil by being what they are and implying through their powerfully suggestive promotion, that if you can afford them, you too can be bulletproof.  But I have watched ranges climb from pricey to impossible and quality declined exponentially.

However, at the other end of the scale, I also bought a tube of hand cream for £1.42 which price suggests to me that it is unlikely that I shall ever see it again.  It is probably the end of an in-house range that didn’t sell well because it didn’t trade on current emphases like “organic” and “herbal” was not celebrity endorsed or merchandised competitively.

The tube is monochrome, the emollient is described as “conditioning”: like the old barrier creams, you can use it to cleanse after chores (celebrities don’t do those) and rinse off, or you can use it to protect.  I am three days in and I am delighted.  Though, heaven knows, if anybody had suggested I went looking for the cheapest hand cream, I would probably have laughed derisorily because I have too often bought cheap and thrown away – hand and body creams that didn’t absorb, mascara that clotted, soap that smelt disagreeable when wet, tights that sagged, a t-shirt that didn’t wash – so sometimes cheap isn’t saving.  On the contrary, it’s a false economy, dead money.  And I have long come up against the same thing in commercial chemistry as I have in medicines.

What works for the majority is sold heavily – by which I mean, sold to us and bought by us.

Just your hard luck if these things don’t work for you.

Earlier this year, my trusted and true proprietary brand headache/flu remedy was suddenly no longer available except in “super” form – that’s another of those buzz words.

But I don’t want or need extra caffeine and I have tried the suped up edition which is not as digestible (my original reason for using the brand) as the straight forward version.  I sought out the sales assistant.  The product has been superseded, it was being withdrawn.

The best facial cleanser I ever had was Boots own.  Gone, gone, and never said goodbye.

More and more units, less and less choice.

I feel the victim of petty planned obsolescence and I am not alone.

But there aren’t enough of us to do anything but shop around and share our triumphs with our friends, who do the same thing in return.

And it isn’t new.

At the beginning of modern mass marketing my mother said “As soon as you get used to something really good, to eat or wear or use, some so-and-so takes it away from you.”

The consumer society is nibbling at our toes.

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.