Annalog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it was what she wanted.

And then one day we spoke about money.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we like ours best.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think not.

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

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

Celibacy came late and unsought but fortunately memory serves.

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

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

Then these ads are successful.

They lodge in the head like visual jingles.

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

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

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

We haven’t advanced very far have we?

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

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

I don’t like tea (pause) I like gin.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stereotypes rule – fit in with your tribe.

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

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

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

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

Talismanic.

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

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

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

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

“Freezing” I remark.

He looked at me.

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

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

“How?” he asked.

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

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

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

“I don’t know Crete” he murmured.

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

“What’s a raptor?”

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

“Like?” he said.

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

He laughed.   “That sounds like fun.”

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

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

“It’s very old?” he asked.

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

“I’ll think about that” he said.

The bus approached.

“You’ve made my day” he said.

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can’t think of anything worse.

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

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

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

There are all sorts of inferences in this.

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

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

Nothing is forever, and certainly not work.

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

How long is life?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I did much of my running through books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I found him, I emailed, he replied.

Yes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Run and find out.

And the screen brought me closer to the print.

My first response to a telly appearance has long been “must get my hair cut, must buy a bra”.   You can fake the clothes but not the foundation.

Although having a bra properly fitted is sometimes the subject of an item to promote this label or that endeavor, too many public women think it couldn’t apply to them.(A notable exception is Celia Imrie in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, bras nearly as outstanding as the bosom they brace: could we introduce her to the Duchess of Cornwall?)

But I didn’t want to change my life for ten minutes of TV and you don’t have to be famous to change your image.   So, whereas my past was characterized by short dark hair, trousers, flat shoes and no trimmings – I went back to the camera with lengthening hair, a mistletoe green dress, high heels, fishnet tights and jewelry.

Of course you are driven, knowingly or otherwise, by the prevailing “look” and the one that appeals to me is what fashion writers call “channeling the Forties”.  This maneuver involves finding those bits of what is fashionable that you can carry without looking ridiculous – plenty of those around.

And my hair is grey.

Although the hair colour market is booming, you rarely see hair coloured well, naturally or imaginatively, and secondly, maintaining it is an ongoing expense.

I only remember one woman in the public eye with long grey hair, a house model and then directrice of the designer Christian Lacroix.   She was Polish and a one off, delicate and exotic.

Brilliant though he was, Lacroix’s couture house failed to flourish financially and she vanished, I hope to happiness. I have had favorite models since I was about 12, not that I ever looked like any of them.

And grey is one of my favorite colours.

It was Pedro, a small handsome Basque of my own age who, when I was still colouring it, said (heavy Spanish accent) “Darling, we must do something about your hair, it’s too dark, and you look as if you’re peering out of a black bin.” When I asked what to do, he replied “Is a beautiful colour underneath.  Grow it out and then we’ll see.”

In those days my hair grew fast (any growth slows as you get older) and six weeks later, after being cooed over as if I were doing something important, it was grey.

Women have come full circle from 50 years ago when hair dye was the colour of the sexually forward, the film star and the jet set.    Now “everybody” colours their hair (certainly in media) which too often means “if you aren’t with us, you’re against us.”

But I’m not.

Your hair is your hair, mine is mine and I agree with my father that “just because there are more of them doesn’t mean they are right.”

Of course there are days when I look at myself, remember 20 years of that foolproof short cut and think – mad.

But then I recall that the last twice it was really short, I looked like a suspiciously overfed Buddhist nun or, with the spectacles I have worn forever, an American show business dyke.

I have known both and liked the ones I met; I just don’t want to look like either.

Most reactions have encouraged me – Norman and Nicola in my favorite pharmacy, various friends, a former Vogue editor, a photographer I encountered – but one friend set his face against it and when he had at me for the umpteenth time, David Crosby’s song floated back to me:

“Almost cut my hair

Happened just the other day

It was getting kinda long

Could have got in my way

But I didn’t – here’s the reason why

Feel like

Letting my freak flag fly …”]

It makes me smile to be 68 and think that I might belong to a group labeled as something other than OAP, Silver Surfer or Grey Pound – though I would love to be a cougar, the ghost cat, not the group.