Annalog

On the lengthy plateau that was the majority of my earning years, I fell into thinking that I worked so hard

that the money was bottomless. I can remember thinking it.  Not true.  It is nowadays – and maybe always was – less a case of “the buck stops here” – which has other implications as well – and more that the buck goes elsewhere.

Apparently the immensely rich Lord Alli invested in Kier Starmer (please, let’s can the title – such a drag) and the Labour Party over time, well before Starmer was PM.  Starmer is a barrister and he must know the law to an extent.  And as a major figure and putative leader, he has long had advisers. 

Why then was not a formal arrangement set up with a list of what it could and could not be used for, with receipts so there was an accounting of it ?  

It might not be bleach clean but it would be Persil – washes whiter ?  To be used meticulously by the  image consultants and  advisers, because nothing could be more refreshing ?   Instead of which … I won’t go through it again, you have read about it till you puke.

Worse, a very minor edition of trial by media, confession on camera. 

Heaven forbid.

We heard to saturation about what Huw Edwards knew, suffered, accomplished and abused  – including chunks of public money.  Where was management ?  

But if you hear “depression” in connection with a public face working all hours, on show  above and beyond – call a meeting, first option not last.  Performer, his/her representative, ditto legal rep., managerial head and head of department,  BBC legal rep.  That’s business.  

And show business (even the hallowed BBC News) was always about business.  That buck again.  After a legal sentence, even such a one, HE won’t try a comeback but he’ll have a bit put by.

And now it’s Philip Schofield, not in spite of his efforts everybody’s darling –  just as disturbed as HE but more confused, having entered the unreal world of tv stardom at an early age and continued to feed the beast of successive unrealities up to his latest escapade on camera.  Where was ITV Management when the rumours began ?

Though such a meeting would be complicated almost line by line by the extent to which the person in question can or cannot differentiate between reality and fantasy, truth and lies, self interest and self interest – this last increasing exponentially alongside the other considerations .

Duty of care goes to hell in a bucket if we are making a buck and though the buck in media is story/rumour/allegation, allusion/illusion etc rather than  something more solid, and who tells you about it, that builds into  loyal audience opening the door for credibility, longevity and a major confusion between performance and reality,

as in he looks like a nice person so he is a nice person.

This last is everywhere in business.  That’s why management is important.  And it is preferable that the tools of management are used wisely and well rather than punitively.   It is not long ago when any mention of  “mental health issues” sent the suits  (what we called management) running for the hills.  Let alone bisexuality, indetermination, suppressed homosexuality.  Or greed.

The long shadow of Jimmy Savile just moves to the side and comes back again.  Where is the machinery  through which complaints/misgivings/ concerns can be heard  ? Person to person, not through increasingly more dubious, abused and hacked technology ? That has been ticked on the scan sheet of political correctitude.  But where is the management to follow through with them ?

The frightening rise of credence to Donald Trump in the US is that so many of his supporters (and he) think of life as a game show.  Who Dares Wins.  Of course all too often Who Dares lies dead under oncoming traffic.  Don’t let’s make the same mistake, not the ruling party, not the public.  Politics is about all of us.   And if as Yuval Harari says we have the most sophisticated communications systems the world has ever known but can’t talk to each other and are living through the rise of the machine, that is something we can address: the buck stops here. 

This is a copout phrase if ever I heard one.   It opens the door to stuff we don’t like but to which most of us surrender, because allegedly everybody else does – this last being  a major rationalisation too. 

So I was not researching an idea when I asked for a seat for the first time in my life.  I call what follows  “a sociological experience.”  It teaches me something about others in the society we share, even if I don’t like it. 

On the buses there is a section of seats marked for the elderly, people with sticks,  pregnant women or

… etc etc.     I often sit there. And there is a growing habit of people putting their children in a seat including the earmarked ones  and either sitting along side them or standing over them.  If the bus isn’t full, or the child is unwell, fine – but as a child I sat if necessary on my  mother’s knee or stood in the space in front of her – not much of it but I was small.  Same with my son, and he with his daughter.    

Tired, I asked a woman if I might sit in the seat occupied by her five year old son.   First blank denial, then disapproving and ineffectual huffing. My impression was she didn’t know what to do.  She might lose face with her child ? 

  I gave up and walked away.   (A friend who walks with a stick has been through a similar experience.)

Fortunately there was a seat further back next to a delightful woman (born here , family from St.Lucia) into which I subsided gratefully, remarking  “I don’t get it.”  And we began to talk about this reversal of child and parent, and other modern ways we didn’t enjoy.   She said she was bewildered by it (I judged her to be in her fifties.)

Charm and grace are hard ideas to write about.    Some people are apparently naturally charming , fake is often horribly obvious and even if you  couldn’t explain why this person or that piece of  behaviour  annoyed you though superficially perfectly pleasant – it’s because you sense something to be “off”.  

At his invitation, I recently took a couple of ideas to my 11 year old neighbour JJ who is playing The Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland at school. He gave me the script and we met to discuss it.  I suggested that instead of a grin, he bared his teeth which is what many animals do to show they are no threat.   And that he use the grimace as punctuation.  We went through some lines – yes !   And his mother put a home made card in my hand 24 hours later to say thank you .

Charm can be encouraged like any other gift.   And grace in the sense I mean it is close – Anna means graceful and I try.  An American painter called Norman Rockwell, whose work was commissioned by The Saturday Evening Post and featured on its cover, once made a picture called Saying Grace.  It illustrated just that, at a traditional Thanksgiving meal.  But this is not the 1950s in the US, and culinary tastes have changed.  I wanted to call this piece saying grace because it is about small graces expressed, and why we won’t risk that any more. And before you say “Well, it’s just the way we live now …” at bottom, I believe this is about that great contaminant, fear.

As a young woman I was taught to look for eye contact.  Good luck with that now.  People look beyond you, at the ground, at the screen and because of earphones of one variety or another they often can’t hear if you greet them.

But in years of talking to people anywhere I find them, I have very few knockbacks.   Because you may be safe up there in your ivory conversational tower,

but that’s only because you don’t know how or have forgotten how to do it outside a limited social group. 

Thank you takes a couple of seconds, it’s free and everybody beams.   Charm ?   Tick.  Grace ?  Tick.  Loss of face ? Nil.  Empowerment ?   Total. 

There was no early decision

to be a journalist although my mother’s father was one for Northcliffe when the Daily Mail was a newspaper.  I was employed, I was not a secretary though for 10 years, it kept body and soul together and some of it was interesting.  A moment occurred when I was typing up a discreet ad for the next month’s edition for Forum (who would not let me write for them

– I quickly  came to see that omission as a blessing) .  I forgot all about insecurity and introspection.  I did not care if I had to do it ten times.  This was going to lead somewhere.  And thank you heaven, it did.

It was my experience that if you let somebody know you could type, you would be asked to type.  Like the General Manager of York Rep., in between learning the banal lines of the play for which I was hired.  I didn’t make that mistake again.

I spent years being told (in spite of dues to the appropriate union) that I was not a journalist, I was that lesser thing -an agony aunt – so I got stonefaced about claiming  journalist as my title.   And upon reflection distinguished journalism

– the tribute is always personal – shed all kinds of light in my life. 

A neighbour was briefly locked out this morning until her husband and enchanting tiny daughter came along to rescue her and in that time, she told me she read a paper on line and I said “No, won’t do.”   I need to look at the page, think and evaluate. 

Occasionally (I am a tittle tattle free zone) I spit bullets – as at the lack of attention to the documentary on culling badgers and bovine tb – which directly impacts farmers. Or  I find one of those bits of good news so many of us would like to hear.  Like a growing campaign to limit the age of the smartphone user, in direct response to the unexpurgated exposure of children to pornography and competitive imagery which directly contributes to the extraordinary rise in mental illhealth and social malfunction.    

Or I find something I feel I need to know – a dubious gem as in – The Taliban (may they rot in hell) who have done everything they can to cancel Afghani women. 

Women are forbidden education, swathed in voluminous robes, latticed veils and gloves and now forbidden to be heard speaking, singing or reciting poetry from inside their own homes.  (That’s how Stalin got Osip Mandelstam, by poetry.)

British cricket engages with the Afghani side, and while the former Defence Attache defends this, he informs us that Afghanistan is top of the list for British aid, some $550 million of it.

48 hours after I read this, the BBC news channel reported that an estimated 2 million children were suffering from several degrees of malnutrition in Afghanistan.   So what is that aid money being used for ?  (Rhetorical question, weaponry and testosterone going as they so often do hand in hand, particularly when augmented by brainwashing levels of prayer.)

And I remember the locum dispenser in the chemist answering when I asked where he was from “Afghanistan, madam – the land of tears.”   

The coverage of war written by Martha Gellhorn sent me off to read all sorts of other things, John Simpson’s spoken coverage did too  and I realised the other day that the two books I have offered even people I don’t know are both  by journalists –  A Bright Shining Lie about the US war in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan (now gone to glory) and Robert Caro whose memoir Working is always on my bedside table – a man who looked and looked and looked some more,  and asked questions and went back and asked them again.  And again.   Not till he got the right answers but until he got as close as he could to the truth.  God love the man, inspirational.

“All the news that’s fit to print” was put up in lights over Madison Square in New York in October 1896.   It was a gauntlet thrown down when Adolph Ochs acquired the stranded New York Times  and set out to prove that quality  meant something and journalistic quality something else. 

I’ll drink to that.

People love to gawp at life’s car crashes

and we currently have enough to chose from. Good news is in short supply.    Without watching a news broadcast of any kind (presentations which all too often make your teeth ache), or reading a serious newspaper (fewer and fewer of those), you open the door to the unknowable provenance of social media. 

What you read might be true, but then again … At least in the past when somebody violently disagreed with you in public, you had a face on them.  Anonymity frees thugs, bullies and fantasists. 

  And the written word and replayed image makes them real.  

To celebrate the death of privacy is to ignore that, often, animals mate alone, give birth alone, die alone. We are animals too and like every other word in the language, privacy can be interpreted positively as well as negatively.  A good example of the abuse of privacy is Grenfell.  

None of those who did wrong thought they would ever be discovered and I am immensely grateful to Martina Lees In The Times (7.9.24) for her article on the police investigation which makes plain the enormity of two tasks – running down the offenders and nailing them in law.  

But how useful is it if the response to the death of 72 loved ones is to talk about prison ? 

  More important is that a criminal record follows those responsible and that they are NEVER allowed to do the same kind of work again. Let’s not wait to build another jail and then find we can’t staff it.  Let’s haunt them all forever, as we are haunted by the blaze and the loss. 

And perish the thought of a memorial.  The world is full of things that mankind built to last forever.  And they didn’t.

  Memory lasts with people, that’s why dementia is so cruel.  If Anita Lasker Wallfisch who survived Auschwitz because she could play the cello in the prison orchestra can dismiss another Holocaust memorial (“In favour of it ?  No.  Plant flowers !”), wouldn’t it be better for the Grenfell survivors to underwrite their own trust for legal advice, English classes, any kind of support – which may just mean half a hour with somebody who doesn’t look for a label for you – that would make it less possible for the abuse of the modest earning multiracial group, the donkeys of our flying horse society sidelined into the deathtrap of a tower block, to be dismissed ever again ? 

Or to make

Steve McQueen’s short silent film (Grenfell), shot looking into the tower from a helicopter immediately afterwards, widely available ? 

Upskirting so called (as soon as something questionable gets a trendy name, you know it is about to be dismissed)

is the stolen image of what is between a woman’s legs for the double thrill of theft and sex for the person with the camera.  Often dismissed because there is no direct contact between abused and abuser, upskirting has led to the trial in France of a woman many years married whose husband drugged her so he could watch other men sexually abuse her.  I don’t know the details of what sexual abuse constitutes in this  case, French law differing from ours.   But from the cheap thrill of sneaking up the skirts of strangers , this pathetic excuse for a person graduated to years of drugging and hiring out his wife as an inert body to be abused.  Forget “sexual” – think about abuse.  Rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power and he disempowered his wife into complicity.  And I bet money changed hands.

So why isn’t France outraged about this ?   Well, you know,

little people – plain people, elderly people.  Unglamorous.  Small town, tourist industry.   So we are left to infer that as long as the female has the vital aperture, who cares what she is or what she looks like ?   Like every other Western country I know of, France likes its vaginas with pretty faces if they are going to receive press attention.        

The mobile phone has made this possible, the taking of the pictures upskirts without physical contact, the spread of those images and the keeping of them, so there is a record which led the French police to the rest of this revolting story.  And this unfortunate woman in the midst of the wreckage

of her domestic life.

And if I resist a positive end to this dark writing it is because you can’t applique sunshine and flowers on top of this destruction and pain – alongside the blood products scandal and the sub postmasters.  Less a question of  “what have we come to ?” than how did we get there ? Or maybe we always were.

It isn’t just the sky that’s dark.   

“Everything after 40 is maintenance” said model Linda Evangelista,

though the word  is missing from certain vocabularies.   The owner of the upstairs flat, for one. 

Three loosened tiles on the front step

soon became four and I knew her first words at contact would be “Can’t we do it cheaper ?” which is the beginning of weeks of proving procrastination is the thief of time.   If we asked the agents who let her flat, they’d have to have a board meeting to decide whether the step was in or out and whether they were responsible.  By which time the front step would have begun to disappear.  

So I called not the cheapest but the most reliable, let the current tenant know what I was doing, put my money (!) where my mouth is, and had it properly fixed, no false promises, by a Levantine as charmed with me as I with him (“You look like my mother !”) same afternoon I called.  Done.  The building dates from1900 and even when Poodle Twinkers (not her name) lived there,

she was a three act drama, and I lived through it several times.  Not again if I can avoid it.

Maintenance or rather lack of it is what has caused the newly appointed Labour MP for Ilford South Jas Athwal to verbally retrench  –  although  “ I had no idea” following denial isn’t the forward for anybody except  a ripoff artist.  He has seven properties managed and let by an agency.   Too often, bullying deferred.  The heart sinks. 

It is significant  and shameful to the new Labour government that tenants were afraid to talk to the press,

and if they did, would not give their names.  They are hanging on to their flawed, damp and infested housing for dear life, getting a roof over your head being at premium in the city.      And all for lack of maintenance.  Surely there is a Parliamentary device by which Mr. Athwal gets a period of time to clean up the housing  which he would have had to do directly before he got too big for his boots,

fire the “agency”, and behave like a human.  Never mind what he says, let’s see what he does.  Poverty is not a sin and it’s always with us.

I wonder where maintenance fits in with exercise – I only ask because most of the runners and joggers and  “just going to the gym-ers” I see look less than cheerful. And I walk, every day.   Of course I understand the maintenance of exercise in sport, though better in dance – the late great Margot Fonteyn said she could substitute other exercise for two weeks  but then

it was back to the barre.

Maintenance used to mean having my hair trimmed every six to eight weeks maximum.  But without telling the saga, I have found somebody who can cut hair – rare nowadays, one of the skills declining, like being a sempstress – and triumphantly in 2024, reduced my visits from four times a year to three.

Maintenance  means having the  rugs (x3) and chairs (x2) cleaned in house once a year and worth every penny.  It means having the window cleaner  – when I can get hold of him – three times a year.   And it means “you tell me” timed visits from the osteopath who comes to the house, thus obviating the journey home which often undoes what you have just paid to have done.

Maintenance means washing bedding and eating properly.   It means being wary of headlines that offer you not just the quick fix  (weight loss) but incidentally better skin, hair, nails, resistance to diabetes and  – blast of trumpets – retarded ageing.  Oh and did I mention it’s a great nail polish remover ? 

Snake oil lives.  What you hear is an old fashioned snort.

Maintenance has to do with upkeep.  You do for the car, the council does it if you’re lucky for the road and the pavement, maybe even the traffic flow – though so far, sadly, no control over bikes.  You do it for where you live and if you are lucky, y ou are met half way by the owner, though rarely any specially appointed intermediary.. 

Abandon maintenance and fall to rack and ruin ?   Sounds horribly familiar.

Apparently three days of lying flat (Tues 13, and on)

reduced the inflammation in my back where I have damaged  ligaments.   So thank you for your acknowledgements and  kindness.  I can now sit up to half an hour– rigged with support – “but don’t push it …” Not a chance, miss.

I won’t bore you with a list of what I read – just to say – that if you are a reader, it matters. Didn’t miss watching television: nothing to watch – which is beginning to include the structure of the so called national news, which takes a story and beats it to schnitzel,

over and over.

While the loss of life on the yacht Bayesian would be under any circumstances regrettable, the endless emphasis on its status as super yacht, as on those lost as moneyed, moneyed and  again  moneyed  got right up my nose.  Is there some inference here that the more you pay, the safer you are ?  Because nobody wins against the sea.  That’s why the RNLI is so important.       

Change is fine when it happens  over there – before  it affects you or after you have gone – but living through change  (upheaval, even) is a different beast.    I have never before recoiled from watching  BBC News.   It is repetitious, I don’t like the format.  And there isn’t much else.

The BBC4 reruns of Parkinson included Billy Connolly,

Rod Hull and the Emu, and me.  No I didn’t watch, but two of my oldest friends did and sent me once in a lifetime letters.  And Hamish Clark wrote to tell me that I had understood Connolly’s humour better than any foreigner he had ever seen  – a big compliment from a Scot.  And I recalled my last meeting with Parky at Waitrose in Kings Road, recognising him from the side.  It’s not a nose you could forget, and purest Yorkshire.

We walked slowly towards the exit and caught up till outside on the pavement, we faced each other.  He asked if I was still working (he was ten years older than me).  I said no.  “That’s a shame”  he said.  And I asked “Why, Michael ?”  “Because” he told me “ you were good at what you did, radio and tv – and that’s rare.”   I thanked him and we shook hands.  A gent and a total pro.

Last week too Phil Donahue died, a journalist of wide experience and competence who understood that housewives weren’t all stupid, just because they were home in the afternoon all over America, and built a massively successful “You talk about …” type show of which Oprah said “No Donahue, no Winfrey.” 

He recorded five shows over here to one of which I was party.  Walking along to my place, I heard a building buzz just like a swarm and grabbed an assistant , asking “What is that ?”  He took me to a place where I could see the audience and I watched Donohue warm them up – shaking hands, introducing himself, introducing them to each other,  joshing and teasing and being warm and pleasant, moving all through the people of whom he said “they are the show.”.   He clearly believed it.  It was inspirational.   .

And Nell McCafferty died,

a fine Irish journalist, feminist and lesbian at a time when it was a fight to put those three things in one sentence in Ireland.   For International Women’s Day that year, the evening began with Mary Anderson talking about being  gay in Ireland, and Nell, not wanting her to feel isolated, stood up, affirming “And I’m Nell McCafferty from the Irish Times and I’m a lesbian too !” To be joined by the much respected Sister Benvenuto who had done terrific work with the homeless in Dublin, leaping to her feet with “And I’m  a nun !”  It remains in my mind one of the most racketty and good humoured television occasions, we all talked and laughed and I never got a word in edgeways, very good for me.

I don’t like the term “passing” for death. Passing and failing was the language of exams – and my parents didn’t approve of that, either. So of death,  I usually say “Gone to glory” .   That’s some of what I thought of, lying there. 

My mother (Jane Taylor 1900-89) used to refer to something she really could have done without as “a pain in the neck.”

Over my lifetime we heard more about  “ a pain in the a-“ (buttocks,not beast of burden) but that was the US form.  I prefer arse , a Great British word, from the Old English, of German origin.

But both fade in the reality of a pain in the back.

On my proto-Olympic search for nomination as Twerp of the Year, I have put my back into spasm and getting right will take time.  I can’t sit for long – leaving the loo is more of a relief than using it, food is strictly refuel  – so sadly 

no annalog this week

The only good osteopath I have ever known is coming on Wednesday unless she has an earlier cancellation and I hope to regroup for

the week commencing  26 August 2024, provided we are all still  here

take care and wish me better

… different.   

Most of the time we are quite comfortable with difference, “it would be a sad old world if we were all the same” we say comfortably to each other. It’s OK as long as it works for us and doesn’t get in our way.  This has led to a long long time of not discussing the impact of our immigration policy and sheer numbers on our systems, educational, social, and medical for starters.   

And then something happens like last week in Britain – not Bangladesh where roughly the same number have died as we traced and are hauling into court, or Sudan, deep in civil war – but all too close to home.   And we have to look hard and think.

When did being liberal

came to mean being soppy ?   I though being liberal was being generous, opening your mind to difference, accepting that a decent person is just that, never mind how they vote, the colour of their skin, who they go to bed with or how they worship. But alongside that generosity, you had to find a way to be honest and practical and communicate, even when what you had to say was not popular. And face up the fact there were people you disliked and would dislike, no matter who they were or where they came from

Being liberal is taking a terrible bashing at the moment on both sides of Atlantic  –  though I long to see the Harris/Walz ticket in the US take Donald Trump’s snide interpretation of “Make America Great Again !” and say “Yes, by all means, great again – by inclusion not exclusion –  new blood, new directions, a nation built as it was, on refugees of every kind – political, social, racial, religious.”  

Here we are busy being bitchy as only the British can be.  Sarky about the police, sarky about the King – should have said and done more, sooner.   Sarky about the Prime Minister who doesn’t always get it right .  

But the man hit the ground, running – and Mr.Starmer  if you are listening, never doubt that this is the time to say as well as do, because  there is a real complaint here and it has been coming these 40 years.  It should be acknowledged, it won’t go away.

40 years ago or so, I sat in a Tyne Tees Television

studio , while a major player in the then Labour Party (Denis Healey) was presented to the audience and questions were taken. And the first person on her feet was what we now call a perfectly ordinary woman in her forties (because nobody knows what working class means, anymore), who raised her hand and got to her feet.  “When” she demanded “are you going to listen to u s ?   You never listen, you take us for granted, y ou take the North for granted …”   And successive governments did.

This has resulted in the violent expression of rampant prejudice,

inflamed by the internet and lack – real lack  – and frustration because you can’t get anybody to listen (annalog/cries unheard) in the established channels.  A lack that is not going to be met by a programme for new builds – and anyway we need a census first on what is available.   We need access to doctors who don’t just write another prescription.   And so on, and so on – you have heard it all before.

I am no kind of analyst, political or social.   I just watch and listen and write about what I see and hear, and inevitably, think.   But I was struck meeting Tanya (not her name) in the street the other day, my American neighbour, who is highly placed in technology, who commented negatively, unbidden (she and her husband have 2 children) on social media.   “And TikTok” she said “is China’s cancerous gift to the West.”  

And I am going right on doing what I can do, saying please and thank you and sharing good news wherever I can – hurray for the people who gave a damn, who cleared up and checked up on their neighbours, who hit the street in wholly peaceful protest. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know something is terribly wrong.

Wal said “Something a bit more upbeat ? 

I think the last few have been a bit ..”  and I could hear his face. I said  “I don’t think so, they just didn’t appeal to you” knowing that Wal is not a writer and is an erratic reader (money and Irene Nemirovsky’s best novel).  Upbeat in a week when people are stabbed in the street and rally to riot with the help of the gutless Tommy Robinson and accursed social media ?  Tall order.

Last Thursday I went to see new work by Ilona Szalay (father Hungarian, mother Canadian) which were painted on glass .  I had to look up its long and interesting history.  And I’d cheerfully have robbed a bank for a trilogy called Landscape 1, 2 and 3.   The weather was stifling, the gallery a long rectangle so I didn’t stay long. Out in the street wasn’t any cooler, shopping crowds, tourists, gawpers so I raised an arm (trained to summon attention in NYC  ie do it like you mean it) . 

The taxi seemed to be coming, the driver said something as he went past and I thought he’d gone. 

Over the heads of the crowd a tall young black man called “ Miss !   Miss !  He’s waiting for you round the corner”   I pointed at myself – me ?  “Yes, Miss, yes “ and he pointed.   “Thank you” I said in my big voice “Thank you…”   I was beaten to the cab by a woman with 42 carrier bags so maybe she needed it more.  It was the “Miss” I loved.

Friday I lunched with an old friend the warmth of whose embrace lingers.  And she is younger and happier being blonde – strokes and folks, an object lesson.  Thank you Phoebe.

On Monday Elsie, Bebe and Alice went to glory at the hands of a teenager who stabbed them and anybody else that came his way. Stabbing (I was told by a man who was) is extremely painful and it is going to be very ugly to hear the background of that story. 

Losing a child to  violence is an unbearable thought, an even more demanding reality. 

The vigil in Southport was pushed aside with stones and bottles and violence by people who, for the most part, only know the town because they could read a map.   Pity they don’t to do maps for hell.  And Southport, like Sunderland, came out and cleaned up afterwards – those people’s comments remain largely untold – up to and including the man who bought pizza for a work crew – “It’s what I could do.”

Somewhere in there I managed to wash and dry the loose cover, ticking courtesy of Ian Mankin, whose name I looked up online and from whom, through the charming offices of his studio manager, I bought a reduced recycled cotton spread in colours I love (graphite and ochre).  

And a young woman I’ve spoken to before on the bus, swept me up with her mother and her child, to sit and have coffee

in a pretty busy street in what’s left of the ambiance that used to be Chelsea.  Her husband is in the IDF, the family are South African.  I never do this, I make better coffee cheaper – so this was a real treat for me.  

And I wandered off, to be hugged by Jen who has had health problems ever since Covid, and buy an ankle support (do laugh, knee support right leg, ankle support left leg.  Going to pot – as in poor old thing.)

And I tired – so, stiff upper lip nowhere in sight, I went for the bus where some 20 people  milled about, queues being a thing of the past.  Standing surrounded by them all was a very large very tall man, 6 feet 4 inches square, tee shirt and shorts like bell tents who, when the bus arrived and without a word stretched out his hand to me. I looked at him for a second and gave him my hand.  The people broke round him like water round a rock as he moved me in front of them, supported my right elbow so I could mount saying quietly “Here you go !”  To which I replied over my right shoulder, and into his face “Age before beauty, right ?” And was rewarded by the sweetest smile.   

I am possessed.  No I don’t foam at the mouth for congress with the Devil.  I grin in affectionate memory.  But I am haunted.  It often happens that, as you get older, more distant memories replay with sudden clarity.  Why you didn’t buy that loaf this morning is inexplicable. My memory is as full of holes as Swiss cheese but the bits that are clear come back into sudden focus, often in shortlived flashes,

utterly vivid that makes me smile in recognition. This experience is not influenced by weather, the bank balance or the horrible headlines.

Teaching English to Pola (not her name, and actually imbuing her with the confidence to use the language as well as she soon did) I knew she loved her father.  So I told her about seeing mine, in clothes I could detail down to the socks but in a room he didn’t know, in a chair he had never sat in.  She said ”Anna, you are telling me you believe in ghosts.” I agreed.  Most of mine are benign unto joy, though in expressing a certain kind of usually disapproving vim, my mother emerges from my mouth like a cartoon drawing.  I can feel my face change – and there she is. 

Conjured.

This morning, because her name occurred to me, I looked up the gospel singer Marion Williams whom I saw on tv, when I was 19 doing the ironing in Tenafly, New Jersey in – I discovered – what was a rare appearance on a folk revival music show called Hootenanny.  I saw a white pointed satin shoe with a dizzy heel lay down the beat, the camera came up and we were off.  Never to be forgotten.

My parents sang – not choir, not church, at home for the hell of it.  Of course I joined in, I brought songs from school, bits from the movies.   And the other morning, all these years later, there stood my father in the hall, singing a little song called “River, stay ‘way from my door.”   Music travels

the same way speech does so I don’t know where the song came from.  What I remembered after all these years, was the lyric, like words unscrolled. 

In a recent conversation my son asked had I read any Russian history ?  Where did that come from ?  But it rang a bell.  I fished up the name Orlando from the depths of memory and found the last name Figes.  And I read a primer on its history called The Story of Russia, up to and including Putin which I recommend to anybody.  And remembered Natasha’s Dance which I always thought was a very clever title for the cultural history of Russia which I am currently reading.  And what you get in both books is a profound sense of how ideas travel over time, are subsumed and re-invented.   So you hear what you think is a folk song and it was written in Nashville.   Like one of the few songs my voice will still accommodate.

One of the great successes of High Country (Australian policier on BBC ) is the integration of the impact of unknown wild country

the land has a memory

with two story strands –  a man who has visions and the First Nations history. Australia isn’t a relatively new country, it is a very old one.  They have their unquiet ghosts because of the many years they were there, and then targeted by European settler  policies against the indigenous people.  Cal Flyn wrote about this in Thicker than Water and how she could not sleep overnight on the site of a massacre.

For years I thought that Pop’s reference to death –  he often called it  “the veil” –  was a late Victorian/Edwardian nicety. But it wasn’t.  It was a very old idea indeed.  That’s what love transcends – it transcends time.  Love is – that view, this occasion, those people,  laughter and tears and  my mother’s voice when I complimented her on the wonderful singing violet of a dress she had had made by Mrs. Greenwell – “Of course, darling, it’s your father’s favourite colour.”