Annalog

I emailed  Susan not to come for coffee because my nose just runs and runs.  Though I am grateful that it is running (the idea of a nose with feet is bemusing) because for three days straight, I coughed and couldn’t breathe and nothing happened.  At least now, I can blow my nose.  Of course it’s too much of  a good thing,  and I can’t move without a loo roll and the carrier bag for the discard – but it beats the impasse  where I couldn’t breathe or sleep and was tired and scared. 

Susan emailed sympathetically that  colds are nasty – this one has a Putinsque leer.  

So please – can I try again next week – having just discovered in the low autumnal sunlight, the discard from an enormous bunch of lavender all over the kitchen floor… but of course I wasn’t looking down.  I was en route between the bedroom and bathroom with really not much thought in between except coughing and spluttering and wondering where I got the bug and knowing I wouldn’t give it back – it’s so horrid.

Julia Samuel called August  “a month of Sunday evenings”  and this is September.

Till soon.

Finding a present

for Wal  was difficult. I’d get hung up in what I wanted to give him  – I am crippled with good taste.  I couldn’t afford it, I’d check with him  and that wouldn’t work either because he wanted  a surprise.  Then, breakthrough  …  I set a limit, went to a good TK Maxx, selected carefully  and bought him all sorts of unguents and cosmetic  nonsense – sometimes for content, sometimes for aspiration, sometimes for amusing names or even packaging.  Success.

What we give people, tangibly and  otherwise – the intended not the inferred – can be very difficult.  A friend’s birthday tomorrow is best not marked with a card – short term memory impairment – doesn’t remember.  And what could I give  Elizabeth  (not her name) ?

She had a  horrible, emotionally exploitative childhood hooked to  respectable Catholicism  on the one hand and abuse of everything that taught on the other. She  has  made sense of it, and of most of her life – we all falter somewhere along the line.  She has picked up and rescued her husband ,equally compromised, down the years, this made more complicated by a personality that doesn’t care.

For years she has bailed him out in every way and he has just had the second wanton accident (in contravention of earlier medical advice) and expects her – without acknowledgement or discussion – to take him home and rehabilitate him.  Again.  She has taken legal advice, told the hospital and her estranged son (estranged from them both but still expecting her to pick up the pieces) and the aforementioned  husband  that she won’t be doing it. 

Not this time.

When her son jibbed at it, she said  quietly “Why don’t I put him on the plane and you take care of him ?”   She is  coping remarkably well  – discovering  mess in the house, unpaid bills, presumably  being alone has a down as well as an up (doesn’t it always ?)  And yesterday I was wandering round when I saw a book on the shelves of the local British Heart Foundation shop. I looked at the  cover, I recognised the author whom I met and interviewed,  and the photographer, and I bought it for the price of little more than a card.

I wrote her a note which said  “think of this as a card ….” And yes, I know, it will be pricey to send but we learn over and over again that you get as much from  giving as the recipient gets from the gift.   

When at  the end of one of those weeks when  you think nothing else can go wrong, I lost my credit card, I had just found a pair of  competitively priced  solid winter shoes 

not quite – but you know the kind of thing

which I didn’t want to lose.  I explained to my son , would he  buy them and I would  pay him on receipt ?  He said yes and did it, but when I raised the subject – he wrote and said  “If I can have a moody holiday, you can have shoes  – you don’t owe me anything.   Shush mum, there’s a good girl … “   So I gulped, and wrote to say – I thought the holiday was well deserved, thank you for my Christmas present,  I hold myself free to retaliate !

No matter your background, you  chose to act out of it or against it and many of us do a bit of both.  Occasionally I hear my fierce little mother issue from my lips, complete with intonation.    One of the saddest things about abuse is that abusers were  often abused in their turn.  And  then I’ve just read about the chief scout Dwayne Fields who without the  personal charisma and commitment of his grandmother and his aunt when he was very young, had the kind of background where you wind up in prison, dead or addicted.    Clearly not him .

I had a bad time at primary school – wrong face, wrong voice – until my father lifted  me on to the kitchen table so I was closer to his big height, my mother to the side – and told me “Do whatever you have to do – your mother and I will back you. 200 per cent.”   My mother nodded emphatically.  And I fought back.  I  loved the generosity of the 200 per cent.  Gift for life.

At junior school (I was  10)

we had a period devoted to community singing.    We gathered in the hall, the odd lyric on a blackboard, song books some of which seemed to have come from the BBC children’s programming.   Older children, younger, all of us ?   I can’t remember but  we sang together, occasionally cheered on or criticised.   This was not a fill in (as in the “Mr.Elson is away so we will be in the Hall for …”).  It was on the schedule.  

Memory comes and goes,  I’m not going to say with age because it always did, personal or collective, triggered by temperature, taste, smell, association of ideas, a word, a gesture, a snatch of music, a sudden revelation -often when you are completely not expecting it.

Sometimes memorial ritual is enacted but slides away into the shadows, recalled  perhaps in a context that seems unreasonable years later.

A dear friend’s husband died   last week, a long time sufferer from Parkinson’s Disease.  They had gone to live in Spain, recommended for PD, second only to the US.  And often, the more important people are to you, the harder it is to find the words.  So I prayed and I wrote.  And I was lucky, she “heard” me.  

It fascinates me, what history remembers and what it forgets and when remembrance breaks through, how that may be distorted over time.   I read a wonderful novel about the Pilgrimage of Grace.  I thought it was made up and darned clever – but no, it was history I had never heard.

History is not a person so the people who come after choose – remember this, just put that aside and this week on VJ Day

at the elegant National Arboretum, tribute was paid to the unsung suffering of the communities of the Far East – which perhaps because many are now independent, and as we say “moved on”,  raised the difficult issues of Empire, colonialism, destruction and suffering which are much harder to remember than winning.   I’d say surviving all that was another kind of bravery.

The theatre of war in the Far East in WWII touches me because it was the biggest army from India, then not independent or divided, as well as thousands and thousands more. And forgetting them

was a rerun of the small army in WWI in which my father served, in India and Mesopotamia, pushed aside by the catastrophic losses in Europe.    

If there is a positive lesson from all this, it is that “this too shall pass.”     

We all come to the end.  I do hope the resurgence of Christianity among the young will teach a more useful acceptance of the end.   Because everything ends.  No matter how mighty, every  civilization falls – to war or pestilence or geographical infelicity (wrong place, wrong time). 

What I loved about my old community singing was the inclusion.  I am deeply  grateful to my parents, schools and life for teaching me – not that everybody is nice or worthy or you want to be best friends with them – but that we are all human.  And humans end. 

The pursuit of youth, youth delaying age, delay of age putting off death defines the age we live in,   the  subject of endless lucrative and often unbecomingly desperate preoccupation – diet and exercise, mental disciplines, sleep, surgery and all the rest.  This is a millions miles away from taking reasonable care of yourself and making the best of yourself  so that you feel as good as you can to face the day.

There are people who can’t do death.  But war or illness doesn’t ask you. It takes.  And you are left with whatever it is, to get on with afterwards.  John Harlow just didn’t make it (he died in the runup to yesterday’s ceremony). He was on the last surviving  submarine laying mines and he said he always thought of his colleague Mark, with whom he had trained, on another vessel .  “War doesn’t grant you the luxury of goodbyes” he said, ending “ there’s no pride and no glory.  So, forget war and pick peace.”

For the rest of us, life is war, often including dying –  and death is peace.

  *with thanks to Tolstoy

When my son was in a push chair we  took him to Crete

for holiday  where we had been before and Sonia Dioxinadis moved heaven, earth and chicken to turn up with a dozen  eggs overed with bits of grass and hay.  “From the farm” she said.  “Not the store !”  That’s a gift and don’t say  – but it’s only small.   Who’s measuring ?

I gave my mother her first cashmere one Christmas.  She muttered something  and took the dog out rather quickly.  I was a bit  dashed.  When she came back I was in the kitchen,  ministering to food, and she came and put her arms round me  from behind, whispering almost awed in my ear “I am wearing  cashmere – and my daughter gave it to me !”   Forget jewels.

There are people  who don’t know what to do, to respond to gifts.  They say thank you and the day  goes on.   There are people who don’t know how to give them or how to receive them.   Of course you can save up and buy a luxury, but it is often imagination – or even chance – that makes a gift. 

Last night was the end of an era. 

The Boys – three young men who came to lodge in James’s stepmother’s flat five years ago –  have moved on to the next stage – Harry to girlfriend, James to girlfriend and AJ staying with girlfriend.   I did not go and say a collective goodbye having said a quieter one to  both the men concerned.  And when I thank ked Harry for all their kindnesses and considerations, he said  “ But Anna, it’s mutual.   I never had a good neighbour before”   which meant so much to me, I  wrote it down.

(I have always written things down and sometimes even that doesn’t help me to negotiate self centredness and  Swiss Cheese Syndrome ie holes in  memory.) 

And today he topped it.  He arrived with a book and a card in which he has written all the nice things you might expect, having some social grace.  Though Harry is a velvet glove over a steel fist – I recognize it and I think it will serve him well.  We sat in the kitchen while he drank a glass of water and told me about his promotion.  All three of them lefthanded, he wrote his name and his new address in the book and I promised him a Christmas card.

So little is free nowadays that you can’t wonder at the success of a book about raising a leveret

by Albrecht Durer

and returning it to the wild (Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton), more goodwill than money, with more attention paid to the animal and its history, the weather and the vegetation than anything else.

Gathering  to moan about this or that may be a negative gift perhaps but a gift.  It’s free.   People say talk’s cheap  but if it makes you feel better, it’s beyond price and it’s not cheap in this house.

I prefer to call talk , exchange 

by Hedwig Oehring

because that’s the gift for me ie I tell you and you tell me  or the other way round.  Benign verbal tennis.   I don’t know why  the sound of the spoken voice became so important to me  – but I recognize where it falls short. There is a term in opera for a single singer half speaking, half singing over a narrow range of notes – recitative – and we have all been on the end of those.  Worse still, you can offer suggestions and advice which are shoved aside by the leviathan of lonely complaint.   Not everything can be fixed but quite a lot can be ameliorated.  Not interested.  Callers used to tell me their story over and over,  as if repetition would magically fix it. And it didn’t.  Thank heaven, not many of those.

There are gifts that come and go, and gifts that remain, tangible and intangible.  Gifts that smile or bring a smile to the face  unexpectedly.   Like the print of Victorian household  machines from a Mrs. Beeton book – she advised on all domestic arts as well as cookery – my son gave me when he was 12.  It has the air of beloved memory round it.  Given.

The only person I have known who smelt wonderful in Chanel Five

was my sister.  I smelt like  enthusiastic dog vis a vis lamppost.   I can’t remember – was  I more crushed or more embarrassed ?  Anyway, never again.   A wistful niff  in the bottle promised  like the lure of the sirens but I left it there.

When I spoke about something  two or three weeks hence, my mother would say “Don’t wish your life away” . I didn’t understand then, I do now. When I was so  wipeout ill at Christmas last – a benchmark of all sorts for me – I had to reevaluate me and time.  “Time masters you” said my father.  “You don’t master time.”   Where I was then, you enter time.

Like a mood or a building –  to learn anew. And if that’s the image in your mind, it lingers.

This Sunday morning, so enjoying the preceding evening with  Joan Hickson as the definitive Miss Marple (BBC4), I permitted myself to look at the tv programme for next Saturday to find yes, more  of my Marple but also an episode of Beck. 

   Chickens will not be counted before they are hatched.  It may be cancelled for something  like a pop concert or an  netball championship … You see, it’s always personal.

Not another whinge about  tv scheduling, the Karate Kid on a loop, segments of Midsummer Murders so old they have whiskers and can only have sedative value but I forbear. That’s not what I want and it’s always personal.

I shall not complain again about quiz shows

and how not to make documentaries because it is always personal but so is paying a licence fee for the unwatchable and the endlessly repeated.  A correspondent to my favourite  tv column remarked that the BBC was charging us for programmes  already made and shown (x 6 !) which was financially questionable.  

I forbear to  bitch and moan about  wildlife programmes which feature the presenters in preference to the beasts.   I shall not attitudinise about the style of  some  (not all ) documentaries, the  lack of curiosity which must drive their making  – up to and including questions asked and not answered to keep the flow of bitesized bits moving (Channel 5’s The Secret Life of Trees).  It’s always personal.

Pam the Painter and I discovered the difference in our tastes long ago and she described in detail a recent visit to Dungeness

(look it up)  as  fascinating and made it so for me in the telling.   She is unlikely to watch  BBC’s European editor  Katya Adler  (pause for  cheers ) interviewing  Germany’s former Chancellor Mrs. Merkel – but she listens to me explaining why  I was so interested, my interpretation presumably doing for her what hers does for me.   It’s always personal.

Levels of toleration and interpretation in the evocation of style and period varies.  I remember Wal ringing to inveigh about the china in Downton Abbey – “ how could they ?”   Well, he was a Thomas Goode’s expert and I remember walking into a French museum with a  room of full of china on the right  about which he knew a great deal.  Other people’s expertise seizes the imagination.

 I like my  detectives to be more involved in people than guns.   I accept the idea of guns, and the other day I saw  a bit of a Western I have never seen (The Big Trail , directed by Raoul Walsh in 1930 – not a typo – with a backstory at least as fascinating as the cinematography and the first named appearance of  a 23 year old John Wayne, long on  masculine beauty and short on mannerisms) – I was really delighted – something new in the antique department. 

The French language Maigret on TPTV is a joy in professional integrity  (casting, script, story, period and location) but I accept – it’s always personal.

And as I said to the  very helpful woman  at Barclaycard (lost and had to be stopped) five calls in with endless “just call our app” , “if you take my money the old fashioned way, you can help me when I get into old fashioned difficulty and no AI can do what you’ve just done, thank you so much “ – it’s always personal.      

With the world spinning out of control, I feel badly to be writing something lighthearted but hark back to something within my remit. Everybody else I knew  got their first bra’s from Marks & Spencers.  

My mother had an account at Lockeys in Middlesbrough and  she took me there, to a curtained alcove, where a kindly woman brought things and we chose a Silhouette.  When it washed satisfactorily, another was collected and then – oh the sophistication ! – I acquired bought a Kayser Bondor.   I looked the name up on Google – first place in the UK to manufacture nylon stockings.   So the pattern was set.   I was not big or small or special in the bosom department, so my bras were ordered alongside my mother’s  cherished boxes of Aristoc stockings.

When I came to London on my  17^th birthday I shared a flat  in Earls Court, moving eventually to one half  of a double room in South  Kensington.   On the curve just opposite South Kensington tube station was a shop called Elegante which sold just what I wanted.  I never had drawersful though I did once have a matching minislip and pants in black cotton printed with tiny flowers which I thought was the biz, even if nobody saw it but me.

The pattern was set.  I bought bras infrequently, washed them by hand, dripped them dry.  The pattern of  pants was set too – white cotton, medium size, hold the decoration.   I didn’t buy often, I bought carefully (the aforementioned  minislip and pants cost £25 ! which took a while to work off.  No card, no credit, not much money ).

Underwear in the US where I went at 19 was  revealing ie lots of stuff I didn’t want. 

So I wrote to my mother to ask her to get me what I knew worked and send it to me.  I have still a  letter from home – one from her, one from my father, same envelope in which he says  “ Your bra hasn’t come in yet – mummy will send it  next week – hope you can hold out till then.”   Eventually I found what I wanted Stateside so there was only this one instance

I love to look at lacy pretty frilly  but I do feel a fool wearing it. A new  shop in Kings Road, Chelsea offered a set in dark green lace

and I thought how my sister would have loved it.

Once back in London, I continued to buy my  36B at a variety of small shops or specialized counters – until even a “good” model left me looking decidedly lopeared.  And I was earning well so  I went (never shall I forget it) to the famous Rigby and Peller,  known for underwear and making  swimsuits  for the famous including Princess Margaret.

In R&P, I tried on several much more expensive models  the same size with no more success and said so to the estimable Marie who was tall and heavy and the only person in my whole life before or since to call me “modom.”  Just once.  Made my day.  She asked me to face the mirror and I did so, naked to the waist.  She disappeared and came back with three bras.  I tried on one and was transformed.  The other two did similar magic.  “What have you done ?” I demanded.  “34, double D fitting” she explained.  “Bigger cupsize.”  

I bought all three and remained a devoted customer till I wasn’t working.

A delightful Russian girl I only saw once fitted me with Wacoal (Japanese) in Fenwicks and as those have aged, I took a deep breath and talked to Denning who  does unpaid PR for M&S, where  I am intimidated by the numbers of everything.  But last week, I walked in to find exactly what I wanted but not my size.  Sizes vary so I took the next best thing and with the help of two delightful salespersons and Sue the fitter, tried it on, no I needed the size I thought I needed, come back when restocked.   Wacoal on the phone had a bad line and a bad attitude.  Peter Jones stock some of the range but said the assistant, “I can’t help you, I don’t know it.” And Ginny and I both knew Liz Truss was a wrong ‘un before people lost money.  No woman of wit  appears on national television with a bra as bad as that.  First rule of  live performance – hair and underpinning.  I’m off  to M&S.   

Yesterday (our meeting postponed by various occurrences on her side and mine) my son’s partner gave me a scented candle she had bought for my birthday three months ago.  I am not big on the idea but encounter them individually.  She and her older daughter conferred about what the smell reminded them of and mentioned a town in Sicily

where they had lived.  It is the  last name of an old  friend .

This morning I read an interview with James Ellroy whose troubles haven’t derailed his talent, and there was a paragraph about his most recent book (The Enchanters) which features “a real life Hollywood private eye “ whom I had  brief but meaningful acquaintance with at the beginning of my determination for any job other than secretarial.   I still shrug away from the word journalist because I remember years in which I was told over and over again that I wasn’t really a journalist.   I have never known what that meant, what I tried to do and failed at, by other people’s reckoning.    It shook me.  I don’t think I thought I was a journalist but I think I thought I was trying for what we might call the hoop – some sort of acknowledged working role.  

This morning I couldn’t write.   I pushed ideas around in my head, like unexplained items with the toe of your shoe.   I could plead the heat. I was stupefied.  I wasn’t going to meet anybody on the bus because nobody rode a bus in London who didn’t have to – they are airless   I didn’t have to work. There is no deadline, no boss.    I do it because I do it.  Unlike the wonderfully talented  caricaturist Quentin Crewe who draws almost like breathing,  I don’t write all the time, I talk preparatory to writing.

Every so often somebody asks why don’t I do a book about … and you have only to look at the  background to The Salt Path to know why I don’t.   It’s 20 years plus since I met with a publisher and while of course there are exceptions and generalisations are pretty meaningless, it’s only got worse.   There is no book I would go through for that.   We publish far too many books a year – think about the trees and the paper! – and I don’t want to publish tosh.

Today is the birthday of Simone Veil,

one of my few heroes.   Now, that’s a life.    I suppose it is inevitable that as you get older you wish occasionally that you had done more and better – though sadly to do better in media requires commitment by the people round you – and it may not be there, colleagues or employers.

Most of the time I am passionately grateful for the life I have had, professional and personal. For the most part, I can look my shortcomings in the face.  I ask other people to do it, it’s only fair that I should do it too – though that attitude to life inevitably leads sometimes to doubt and even despair.   Some people can’t live like that – I learned that late but I learned it.

I could tell you about what I am reading … but then not everybody is as in love with the printed word as me.  And you can only talk to people when you can talk to them.   I have to make that happen for you by a combination of sweat and the grace of heaven we call writing. 

The connections fascinate me, like the town of Lipari and the fixer Fred Otash, with which I began.  Then I have to make them interesting if not fascinating for you and today, I don’t think I can.

By next week, I shall have had the first of two important appointments (they were all important) at Moorfields Eye Hospital.   Perhaps we shall be able to breathe and I shall have lived through doubt long enough to try again.

Readers have always surprised me by what they do and don’t respond to.  A lot of people are away on holiday and I enjoy feedback which means I suppose that I am terribly old fashioned: I prefer the illusion of dialogue to the desperation of “putting it out there”.  If that’s for you, it’s for you.  I will try again next week.    

…oops! My ‘wonderful hands’ is going away and I shall not be filing until the beginning of the week commencing 28^th July.  Just think, I may recover!

First on a personal note:

No, MB

Not AR, not PM , not ever

Can’t reply  – computer ate your details.  Do get in touch.  (ends)

On a train  many years ago the practical sensible “put your money where your mouth is” activist Lesley Abdela asked  if I had thought about politics.  I was torn between being flattered that someone who clearly knew what she was about would mention such a thing, and recoil.   It’s a long time ago and I don’t remember what I hope was a graceful reply.   Me in politics came up a couple of other times. 

The best answer I ever gave was to a young man in an audience somewhere along  the line when I worked for Cosmopolitan.  “I’m in politics” I said.   “Anything to do with people is to do with politics.  From the Greek – polis – a people state.”   

Not party politics. 

I look at the last lot from Cameron to  Sunak, each with their strengths as well as weaknesses, and think  that it must be mandatory to  study the high wire.    And if the monied Truss had the grace and imagination of a cardboard box, she  would  donate or hand back the PM’s pension she doesn’t deserve or need.  Starmer is having a hard time – well that’s the difference between  knowing something should be done and hating how it is implemented.  He is in politics, not popularity.    Speak As You Find (see title).

Usually , if you say you’re going to call the council, whoever you’re with shakes a wise head patiently and says “Don’t expect too much.”  And I expected nothing. 

Desperate with lack of response from the neighbouring landlord,  I rang the local town hall.

Fully automated, not a human.  So I  searched and I found the section I was looking for  and  – eureka ! – an email address.  I wrote a brief letter of appeal.  It was acknowledged with a signature  to which I rereplied saying “Don’t leave this – this is a way of doing things” and the addressee turned up at the behest of his manager, took pictures, asked questions, checked.  I was so grateful.   SAYF.

When I grew up, there was the BBC and, barring Radio Luxemburg, that’s what there was,  And I was longtime loyal.  You have read me criticise what the news coverage has become – alongside that fact that only one member of current Cabinet I have seen presents well on camera – and Glastonbury  is not for me, nor Oasis or a dozen other things.

And if I wonder about who thought about  what acts were booked and why at Glastonbury, I presume all question was subsumed into “it’ll be all right”, “might cause a bit of stir”  and profit.

My friend Buns (a longer life than mine in various aspects of broadcasting) thinks the right to protest is sacrosanct and if you don’t like it, turn off.

Bearing in mind how it was set up, what happened was predictable.   But there was no broadcasting contingency plan (as in Broadcasting Buck and Cover).  

Five years ago before the seat of Director General was offered to Tim Davie, a wiser head than mine suggested forcefully that it was an impossible job,

which should by run by two people.   I disagree with two, which leads immediately to factions – but three, a triumvirate – yes.   Then there is always somebody to give a casting vote.  As it is, nothing we have heard (remember, it’s your BBC ! they say) from sordid Savile onwards demonstrates decision.  It demonstrates avoidance, moving here, saying there, leaving a little time, when in doubt have a meeting., publicise the findings – that makes us really feel better !

There is at least as much  problem in British business in management as in workforce.   And the BBC like the  NHS is overprovided with middle management ie far too many people with vested interests, reporting just so much to somebody  else and then waiting for suitable action.   What we might call The Unstoppable  Buck. 

And this in  weary parallel with scheduling that leaves you going for a walk or reaching for a book.    Yes, such choices are always personal.   But at the moment there isn’t much choice.

Hence SAYF.   

Suddenly 

a columnist whom you have basically distrusted or disagreed with down the years  says something with which you wholly agree.     I used to get communications which began “ I don’t always agree with you  but at least I know you’ll tell  me the truth” – and none of that  “your truth, my truth” thing  which is really about perception.  You see what you see and it means what it means.   Yes, of  course, personal taste, experience, upbringing  –  but they come later.   How restful to have a clear statement.

I can’t make the  national political situation or international unrest (admitted and/or implied) uplifting.   We are in a long dark corridor and I hope to God there is a door to the light at the end of it.

How many times am I going to be told about  or read about new homes, “affordable housing”, (affordable to whom ?), building on green belt –  when I cannot remember an insight into  how much stuff is standing vacant|?   Surely we should be able to rule against anything standing empty longer than a year – mandatory to sell after that ?   What about what can be fixed ?  Yes, I know  mending and making do is only on the periphery of fashion as a current concept  but until  it is public knowledge that we haven’t got enough housing,

I question it.

The dependence created by the NHS cripples it.   Going to the doctor or to the hospital ?   What about going to bed ?   Numbers is not just a book of the Bible.   It is the problem – numbers in school, numbers in hospital, numbers besieging every  facility to the detriment of function.  

What happened to personal responsibility and  common sense ?  Yes, you can pat my head and say  wonderingly “Poor old dear !” but until we begin to think less about who will do what for us and what can do for ourselves, scupperdom  comes  ever closer.

A BBC producer wrote to invite me to take part in a programme to discuss failure.  We arranged to speak and I began to think.  I looked up a thesaurus of quotations.  No women on failure – only men.  And then I sat down and thought.   Failure has not been something to which I have given a lot of attention.   I was focused on survival, figure the terms out afterwards.   And I thought about how this attitude was formed.  Home and the 11 Plus exam.  Me worrying about it (I had missed a lot of school through illness) and  the  “pass or fail” thing.   I was taught” Pass or fail is for exams, not for life.” And I asked myself –  flat question, forget the qualifications and circumstance – at what had I failed ? 

by Rochelle Dulay Razon

And answered:   marriage and contraception.

So that’s what I said to the producer when he rang.  He asked what I meant.  I explained – two marriages , both ended in divorce – and abortion.  No good being evasive and saying contraceptive failure. And we went on from there.  

The system under which we live is as deeply  imperfect

as any other though it has its pluses as well as defaults.  And it has long been our way nationally  to let somebody else make the decision and then complain about it.   We have  above all else too many people who evade work – it seems they can always get money from  somewhere – and people who do work and aren’t paid enough on which to survive.             

This isn’t a generational Dunkirk (look it up).

We are avoiding the scale of what is implied and threatening us.  The will is there but the machinery is  too cumbersome.   Sometimes inclusive is too expensive.   I don’t want another  person of dual nationality who commits a ghastly crime interned int British prisons.  Strip of them of our nationality and send them home.  There aren’t many and they cost us a fortune in prison.    Make it a condition of living here that you speak discernible English (loads of us waiting to help you learn)  and have  a qualification.   And close the gates for  say a year while we figure out how to stop the islands sinking,  literally or metaphorically. 

I don’t know anything about Bruce Springsteen

except odd bits of music, the profile and the wonderful “stand up and be counted” riff in the face of Trump and what he represents.   And I don’t know anything about Johnny Depp except that he has a face which has been used by an industry

which  does that: chooses a  face, builds what is now called a brand round it  – and devil take the hindmost.  It works for you – great.  It doesn’t ?    Good luck with that, bottomless supply of faces.   I never underestimated the price of fame from my twenties when I was told that something I had written could make a hit  and asked “Do you know what that involves ?”    And it was spelt out.  

I had no great insight, I just didn’t go further.   When recognition came, I was doing something I could do.  I did it well,  apparently it worked for a lot of other people and  I had a shape to my life which enabled me to keep going, learn, limit and appreciate.  

I was propped up by all sorts of lucky breaks, starting with my parents (two  lone gun loners if ever there were) who imbued  me with a profound sense of self.   I didn’t access this insight easily or quickly, it was ongoing and still is – but I bless them. 

The  Institute of Group Analysis advised me that I either dominated the group or the group dominated me.  One on one would be more helpful.   Thank you.  I am as fascinated by  groups as wary of them.  Sometimes, one is all it takes – to change minds, to give you an insight, to change the course of history, to  overcome and make change.   Change is another big little word.

Most of us fear change, whether it’s BT or banking.   Wisest thing I was ever taught about change is that it will come. 

Better to face it than try to build a wall against it.  Walls tumble and bricks fall on your toe.

You can’t blame the decline of a nation on one thing, there are  contributory factors but one of th things that gives me the creeps about  where we are now is the avoidance of benign individuality  – your face, your nose, your wrinkles, your heroes, your health, you as an entity.   So  the rise of fat injections at the same time as the decline in helpful vaccines is fascinating if depressing.  I don’t want any child to be ill with measles.  Unchecked it is a harmful killer – see in the US right now.   And  today I read for the first time of the negatives of weight loss by injection ie face falls.   Well, I could have told you that.   Which will mean more injections of course.  Lucrative. 

This week’s experience of  my “one” was a Tuesday night wracked with  anxiety

about the landlord of the flat next door, long story, won’t bore you but Buns issued the rallying call-  the Party Wall Act.  And on Wednesday morning I spoke severely to myself “- Come on, you’re a big girl, you can do this”, and did what I feared to do.  I read on line.  I found a group who would refer me to Party Wall surveyors in my area, I could ask advice so I filled out the form and I waited, secure in the knowledge that I can deal with the phone.

A man rang and asked if he could help  me, stating his name, all his details and his relevant experience (he said 15 years, thousands of clients ). I asked permission to give him background and when I referred to afore mentioned landlord, I called him a toad. (Sorry, toads.)   “Why ?”  he asked.  I replied “A man who thinks women are a lower form of life.”  “I bite them” he said and when I laughed, he added “and if I don’t Henry (NHN) would.”   I asked  who was Henry ?  “Miniature dach” he said.  “Don’t go anywhere without him. “  After a few more sentence he said “Look, money aside. Let me draft this letter for you, you’ll OK it, we’ll send it on my bells and whistles stationery and let’s see.   And if you need muscle, I’d be delighted.”   And that’s what he did.   One.