Annalog

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

I live in Battersea.

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

I wanted and got an open fire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Air purification is a wholly praiseworthy aim.

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

What about the money I spent on fuel?

What about energy costs and living on a pension?

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

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

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

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

So, what now?

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

But he has the means, and probably the luck.

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

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

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

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

Mine is just denied.

Dammit.

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

“You don’t vote for us” he said.

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

He thought for a minute.

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

Fire sale?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pain is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was the wrong colour.

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

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

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

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

I felt for her.

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

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

I have just met Diana.

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

She responded with that aplomb that makes her so appealing.

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

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

“Why?”

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

She nodded.

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

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

“And you, mine.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three months, not a couple of weeks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post loses post, emails disappear into cyberspace.

X marks the spot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Am I afraid of death ?

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

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

Once upon a time, we might have chicken for Christmas.

A generous bird with lovely browned skin, fragrant flesh, all the trimmings and my mother’s unrepeatable gravy, the benchmark of when memory is just that and not a cure for reinvention.

Now, I think if you suggested chicken for Christmas, people might think you were “poor” and prevailing social opinion suggests that, while heaven forbid you should be poor, if you are – don’t admit it.

Contributing to a Radio Four programme on attitudes to money (some time ago, I paraphrase) the presenter told me “You are very conscious about money” to which I replied that she asked the questions: I answered.

Poor is a four letter word, meaning different things to different people.

Back to the chicken.

I was perhaps 8 when we tried one of the new battery birds and it was the only time in my home that I ever saw food thrown away.  My parents came through both World Wars and, as recent historical evaluation makes clear, alongside tons of destructive weaponry, Europe’s greatest problem was lack of food.

So taking food off family plates, wrapping up and disposing of quite a lot of chicken, was a big deal.  So was the expression on my mother’s face.

“Disgusting” she said.  “Tasted of fish.”

Nowadays chicken is cheap.   Well, some chicken is cheap and as red meat represents a mortgage acquisition or dietary restriction, fish is mostly just as pricey and we are rightly being urged to eat more vegetables, chicken is cheap(er).

A friend told me the other day how she stood in one of the more expensive supermarkets behind a designer draped couple, he with the stonking great watch and she with the stonking great shoes (visible signs of disposable income) while he said to her “I just can’t see paying £10 for an effing chicken”.

Just as well I wasn’t there.

Because I am a chicken hunter.

Where I used to live, we had a good butcher and chickens perfectly acceptable in price and flavour.

An organic butcher with great chickens came and went.

In those days Nigella Lawson wrote for a magazine I still gave houseroom so on her recommendation, I trekked over to Holland Park and bought a peerless bird.   Occasionally.

I was introduced to Borough Market.   Good chicken.

I went to Jago in Elystan Street – good chicken…  To The Ginger Pig – good chicken.

Tried every stall in my local farmers’ market where chicken was OK but not distinguished (NB I changed ovens so some of this may be my fault).

Mr. Waitrose – usually acceptable.

The best of all meat including chicken came from Jon and Louise at Peradon Organic Farm.

My son once remarked that Mum would go 15 miles for a good chicken.

Obsessed, me?

Of course all this is to do with personal taste but living alone on a budget, a good chicken is an investment.

The first time I found a boiling fowl (£5) and came home to make chicken soup (o joy, o triumph, o thank you heaven – I lived on it for a week), those to whom I told the story couldn’t see the achievement.

“You’re Jewish; of course you know how to make chicken soup.”

I am at best half a Jew – I’d be the first to say, better than none – but it’s on my father’s side and I had never made chicken soup, though I love to cook.

A good enough chicken means hot meals, cold meals and stock.

A not good enough chicken means “Oh …”

And as the taxi driver said “What’s all this about cheap food?   Very little food worthy of the name is cheap.   I want the best I can get for as little as I can spend.”

Hence the chicken hunt.

A couple of years after the dreadful battery bird, with which this obsession began, we had an enormous delicious Argentine turkey.

One of nature’s pickers, I kept going out to the kitchen and taking a bit, and then another, and so on.  There was a great deal left and it kept well but my father told me how when early settlers went to the Americas, they found wild turkey so plentiful that they ate only the breast and discarded the rest.

Even then I found this story disturbing.

Don’t take a good bird for granted.  It’s harder to raise than you think.

PS  The Poultry Council did not pay for this writing.
Update:  www.fossemeadows.co.uk , discovered through Juliet at the Farmers Market – gold star!

Unusually today, I had lunch at a pavement cafe, alone, and enjoyed every mouthful.

The food was splendid, reasonably priced and I was so busy enjoying it that it wasn’t until near the end of the meal that I realised I had.

Over the years, I have learned to do all sorts of things alone.   I don’t have any difficulty entering a room alone, appearing in public alone, though I am ambivalent about being ill alone.  You may want to be left alone but you want to know somebody cares.

But with regard to the lunch – I have never been any good at eating alone in public.

When I came to London from Middlesbrough on my 17th birthday, opportunities for eating out had comprised fish and chips with my parents in the car at Stokesley and probably three Chinese meals, two with my mother.  I could just about handle coffee or a drink, but I was evasive about eating out with anybody.  The group of friends I made drank in the pub and in those far off days of luncheon vouchers, four or five of us saved them all week and then met for a blowout lunch at The Stockpot.  All women, I could manage that.

I was so terrified by the first meal in a French restaurant that I forgot all my French, ate soup and an omelette, and threw the whole experience away.  I couldn’t look at the waiter; I hoped devoutly he wasn’t looking at me.  It was so embarrassing that I felt as if I had blinkers on and could only see what was directly in front of me.  I remember everything about it and it was agony, to be avoided.  I used to meet for  what we called “late dates” i.e. eat first and drink later, or simply lie and say, I had already eaten thank you.   I don’t know where this came from.

Always perfectly happy to eat a home, in friends’ homes or on picnics, I have never had anything resembling an eating disorder as I understand it but sitting down in any kind of eating establishment produced a lock across the back of my throat reinforced by another lower down, across the stomach.

I was saved from much difficulty in my early relationships because none of us had any money to spend on eating out and then along came a job that required me to take clients to lunch.   I had to do it to keep the job I loved.   So I did.  I honestly believe this helped.  In the beginning I pushed my food round the plate to the manner born but in time, I ate a bit.  And then you have more or less beaten the fear into submission – you eat a bit more every time.  Until I had to eat with someone I was keen on, when the whole thing reprised and I went back to playing at “not very hungry”.   This continued until I was in my early thirties when I beat it by marrying a man I loved who liked to eat out.  So for twenty years, we ate in a variety of restaurants large and small, glamorous and otherwise, and I assumed that “that was then and this is now”.

When the marriage ended, I thought I was older and wiser and it would be fine.  And in many ways, I was.  But it wasn’t fine.

Eating out alone makes me feel conspicuous.  Even in the quietest corner and masked by a book, I feel I am disturbing the harmony of the place, that there is something discordant in me that means that I am not whatever it is that would make me acceptable.  I don’t eat out alone much but I do when I can because I feel that the ills of 50 years ago have no business in my life.  Part of the problem is that I am naturally gregarious so I long to share the experience but I am working my way past that whenever I can.

Last year, I swept into a place, tempted by feta and honey on hazelnut bread and my first ever glass of Temperanillo rose, which made me so happy I could have skated round the restaurant.  A spendthrift as soon as I am remotely intoxicated, I promptly bought a book I didn’t need.

So today was not an exam.   More like course work and presume it will stay part of course work until I can say “Eat out alone? Of course.”

I have never been a fan surrounded by the chosen image embellished on record sleeves and teacloth seeing film or performance over and again, shouting at the match, going weak at the knees in the street.

Quite early on I began to separate people whose physical impact I responded to from people whose achievement I admired, though I also came to understand that intelligence rendered much beautiful to me that wasn’t appealing to other people.

And I am an enthusiast.

Once asked what kept me young (apart from flattery!) I answered “rage”.
Did that mean I was always angry with people?

No.  It’s closer to the French sense of the word which means, among other things, passion.  Long ago. a very important man in my life with a temperament very similar to mine, remarked “People like us should be paid for living.”

At the time, I thought it was the height of conceit but I have come to see what he meant.

I like life.  The Jewish toast “L’chaim !”  (“To life !”) says it all.  I like some bits better than others, of course I do, but I never forget Auntie Mame (film, 1958) abjuring “Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving.”

Life is a series of doors opening on to vistas which shock and amuse, horrify and teach – and I want to be moved, churned up, made to think and choose and be rendered speechless.
Which is what happened when I saw a film called The Gatekeepers.

It is a documentary.  I am pretty guarded about documentary which has been eroded by the merchandising of the corporate brand, the rise of infomercial and reality tv.  

Throwing everything up in the air, avowing that “anything goes” results too often in less – less thought, less imagination, less impact.

But the Channel 4 series Unreported World shows that other people’s lives are quite different, often stranger than fiction, and that the difference is 
interesting..

Other people make choices we don’t even dream of defining.

The Gatekeepers is about the Israeli internal security operation Shin Bet.

The film is short, subtitled and it goes on a small list of documentaries that – apart from newsreels – affected my adult life.

These include a film about World War 2 pilot Richard Hillary, one of Sir Archibald McIndoe’s plastic surgery “guinea pigs”, one about the jaguar in Brazil, one about the black rhino in SA’s oldest game reserve (in both cases for what they taught me about the humans involved, as much as the animals) and The Fog of War, about former Defence Secretary Robert McNamara under whose aegis the US burned and was burned in the wars of SE Asia. (By no means a complete list, there are lots of other influences but a psychologist would make hay with the importance of threat in my cherished perceptions.) 

The Gatekeepers is an exercise in how exhausting decision making is.

Think what you like about Israel, here is a film, the length most films used to be and for my money more effective for its brevity, featuring as talking heads the men who have been charged with policing a small nation in a particularly vexed geo-political situation for 40 years.

You are invited to contemplate candour about pragmatism to such a degree as to render much of current British politics the consistency of cream crackers – familiar, useful, a bit bland, a bit brittle, forgettable.

Six men – intelligent, frightening, weary – not pretty, not actors or pinups – thoughtful, troubled, adult.

It was outstanding.

One definition of documentary is an assemblage of facts – what people do, what people say they do, which may deliberately or inadvertently tell
us the watchers something of what those people think.

How you put the facts together is immediately open to differing interpretation.

In a film, you can make things happen in an order or a way they did not, for greater impact.

You can argue that all the elements were true, you just arranged them.
Is that still documentary?

We used to say bitterly to one another, me and my film loving friends, that acted film was often more truthful than documentary but sometimes – in the exception that proves the rule – the structure and design, the setting of a documentary tells us something we did not expect learn.

It is not to do with my advancing age that I am aware of weariness.
I see what I see and you either grasp the emotional costs of a series of actions and responses, or you don’t.

I sat through three hours of Wyatt Earp (1994) to learn how tiring is the procurement of death in the pursuance of order, because however you choose to get there, the end is the same: too many die.

The Gatekeepers taught me much more in 95 minutes.