Annalog

Dear  “wheezing and coughing asthmatic on the Norfolk coast”

thank you for that image (four weeks later) – it has never left me.  First because of your generosity of spirit, secondly because if you have never fought for breath, you don’t know how frightening it can be – and of course, fear not to say panic, makes it worse.

 At the moment a lot of us are fighting for breath – money worries, health problems, that grey pot lid of a sky, unremitting cold rain, the cast of powerful villains, war on umpteen fronts and the preoccupation of news media with bad news – whether you find a new bad story,  or look at an existing one in another point of view.

Many years ago a doctor remarked to me that losing a child

was the worst thing that could happen to any parent. And nowadays our media has to provide us with gory details –  principal among them, hideous car accidents , slashing and  stabbing.

Child of my generation, I watched school populations rise.  When I went to junior school, 700 pupils was a big school.  Not now.   And the “rights” of children are perceived differently.  But  – excuse me –  where is liaison between the educational establishment, the police, the Parent Teacher Association, much vaunted concerned parents and whatever is left in the kitty – I know, it won’t be much – to set up and maintain security which says, male, female or variant – you and your bags are gone through when you come into school ?   If we can stop  mobile phones,

we can stop knives.

 Yes, it will be tiresome, time consuming, eroding of temper, require defining, monitoring and purely acts of will – but it’s better than another mindless death.    We  are all too good at death – positively Victorian in our focus on it – and far too unfocused on survival.   Survival is hard work,

the  business of deciding you want to live   Or you want somebody else to live  who hasn’t even thought about it – the young rarely have any idea that life won’t go on or will be impeded by some horrible  illness or accident.  

This is not in itself unusual.   A small boy on a wall doesn’t know that he could fall.   A small girl wading into a pond, no idea that the ground might fall away under her feet.  I read only this morning of the death  by  an illness I hadn’t heard of,  of the son of a man I have always admired (Michael Rosen).  The idea that this can’t happen – everything can be fixed, that medics have become magicians – is cruelly, stupidly misleading.   Wonderful things are done in  hospital and sometimes, everything tried, we run out of options.   We may call it life insurance but it’s only about money.  There is no guarantee that you will live.

Which is why you have to savour the good  – because life can be cut short so cruelly and mindlessly.  But you can’t fake the good. 

Which take s me back to the wheezing and coughing in the first paragraph.  

If you don’t have incapacity, you take health  – or relative health – for granted.  The elderly say to each other ”Slog on !”  and we mean it.   Try again tomorrow.  Do your best.  No surrender – you can see many have the phrases have military application.   To survive emotionally, you have to find ways to remember the good bits, even if the bad still haunt.   Because, at some level in different  circumstances and personalities, the shadows always will.  Gone is gone whether it’s health or life.   

What you have to apply your energy and intelligence to, is what comforts, what eases, what just for a moment changes the focus on what has gone, what is lost.  Forget chocolate biscuits and gambling . I have learned hard the wisdom of “a day at a time.”

It gives you the right to put yesterday aside, to stop fixating on how tomorrow will b e  because you have certain power to change that.  You can remember the good as well as the bad.  The bad may give you some kind of appal which is grimly cosy, even familiar  because it isn’t yours – but the  good  will put steel in your back and a twinkle in your eye.

The teller said “Good morning “

and I asked to pay my credit card bill.  “Before I do this” she said” I should tell you that this branch is closing in  September.”   I said I was sorry to hear it but the news was not unexpected.   Would they be re- employed ?  Yes.   I said I thought it was very short sighted in a blue collar area, with a lot of ethnicities and a preponderance of the elderly.  “The problem is” she said “ we have this  big building and a terrible pest problem, so it’s easier to let it go.”     If a bank can’t maintain an obviously valuable property,

it doesn’t fill me with confidence about the bank.

I banked with Lloyds for years until they declined to let me have my  branch locally  – “it doesn’t  fit with our system.”  Tough.  I am your client.  So I left.   I went to the Halifax which slowly closed this outlet and that branch.   Last time I was in  the branch where I opened my account, it looked as if they were just about to take the clock off the wall, pack the filing and leave.    The branch now closing was more convenient.  

The first bank I remember was the Yorkshire Penny

and it had a wonderful curving staircase at the bottom of which I would wait as a small child while my mother paid a bill.  I left Barclays many years ago when they asked me for a guarantor and I knew  they wouldn’t ask a young man in a similar situation.   They currently have some advertising spiel about helping you with your money, the week they declined to let an old friend of mine manage his money the way he always had.  It “didn’t fit with our system”.  We are living through the rise of the machines.

Wal has a bank with people and resources of which you have never heard but then he has a car – he can get to it.  Nobody wants to go far to go to a bank.  The whole idea was you walked up the road with your money in your pocket and put it where you wanted it to be and of course I hope that one of the big banks will turn round and offer a service with a human face.  Don’t tell me  how much it costs – property , staff, standard outgoings – they make money.  They wouldn’t be in the industry else.  The rise – not to say deification – of the machines fills me with horror.   And increasingly loaded through everything from government to health services to the expansion of energy and education, those machines falter – are less and less efficient.  One day we are going to wake up and be unable to access any of the money we think of as ours, benefit payments, prescriptions, standing orders.  I am looking for a loose brick

or a floorboard I can manage.

There are fewer sure things in life.  We used to have three terrestrial television stations and always something to watch.  Now we have 327, very rarely a programme to watch and have apparently stopped teaching the art of programming which is why certain films are on a loop  and occur  twice a week for three months at a time, series that were not meant to be seen more than a couple of time are up for the twelfth and there is a kind of ruthless bonhomie, holiday camp comedians on acid, which makes you want to clean your teeth and try again.

But I did see – by chance -part of the Senate hearings on Robert Kennedy Junior – a living example of how to throw away every advantage you have ever had – and a wonderful plain elderly man, a senior Senator from Oregon

re elected several times on the  platform of public health, take him apart without noticeably raising his voice.   It was magnificent.  

I saw a former helicopter pilot, obviously a man of wide experience, explain the shortcomings of  night flight goggles in a way which had nothing to do with chromosomes, Mr.President – while yesterday, early to the supermarket, I listened as three middle aged working women disparaged the President in much the same tone of voice in which they used to clean their front step.  Rinse with cold water.  

I haven’t read or listened to the all the reports and comments on Southport,

killings or killer.  I was given pause when a woman friend remarked that “they should have known” something was terribly wrong with the young murderer because of his looks.   I rejoined that we are not all oil paintings.  

What becomes clear as you read intelligent summary of all the agencies involved and the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s own comments is that all these organisations have rules about what they do and don’t do, how far they go – but I wonder how many of them if any have a structure to deal with what they and I hope is the exception – the person they can’t reach, can’t help, who is recalcitrant.   All rehabilitative work relies on a degree of cooperation.  Those who don’t co operate  fall away – and carry on being troublesome.

We used to call people like the Southport killer “mad”.   That’s a three letter four letter word nowadays.   We have all sorts of other explanations, other names for things  – the autistic spectrum  which alongside ADHD is the one we are most likely to hear of, if not to understand. 

But there are a small number of people we are not going to be able to reach.   And what are we going to do with them ?   A jail sentence of 50 years plus is the equivalent of using  prison  as we used to use the madhouse. 

This is not a slur on the quality of care but it is what bothers me.

Dollar to a dime,   the Southport killer has no way back from this.  If you add up the time that has been spent on him  for nearly half his short life – and how much 50 years in jail will cost – that is a public expense,

The idea of losing a child

is horrible, whenever you lose him or her. The parents of the three little girls who died,  their families and friends, the other children who were injured, their families and friends, emergency services, people who tried to help,  every kind of witness has suffered.   And  because  it is widely agreed that Southport has  rallied to its best – from immediately after the event and on – it is easy – may be preferable –  to forget the weight of these questions.

And at least some of the background to this is that more and more people see destructive violence online 

– small paragraph buried inside the newspaper – so we have to posit two  questions: why do they watch it, and what effect does it have ?    and we know more about the second question that we do about the first – the flip answer being  I suppose, because we can.  Though then we have to ask  – why ?  

I am a bad example because I am a very limited user of the internet.   I bless it when it is useful   I look up films, directors, people of interest, their backgrounds, occasionally artists and all sorts of information – but hunched over a screen  showing me horrible  destruction and how to cut off an ear is not where you would find me. 

I think social media should be destroyed.  

  I remember enough of the trolls when they sat in audiences – I don’t want  them in my home or on my screen, the screen incidentally which is not mine and belongs of one of technocrats and they  interfere with it to a degree that makes me foam.

I know the world  is not made up of sunshine and  flowers.    People are horrid to each other in every forum from the kitchen table to international political war ( see Mao “War is politics with blood and politics is war without blood”) – indeed sometimes they seem to look for  excuses to be horrid to each other.   Love does not conquer all but it certainly helps.  Hence the battle I have with myself every week about  wanting to acknowledge and thank everybody who has supported and endorsed me and the work in progress known as annalog   If we really support  change  we are going to have to think about  these  uncomfortable questions.   Forgive ?  Yes.  Forget ? never.

His first marriage lasted years until it became clear that his ex wife was an alcoholic

(by which time  God knows what damage was done to the children) and he ( a high achieving  businessman, no fool) had a nervous collapse, was hospitalised for three months and had some therapy.  

His second wife was a joy and died  of cancer.   His beloved dog died of the same cancer and then he met Marian (not her real name).   A challenging  funny  relationship ensued.  She had a  daughter from an earlier marriage, was retraining after years as an academic to be a teacher.  He loves a project and this was a project with companionship – and yes that’s the polite way of saying sex.  

And he married her. 

  If he had mentioned that to me, I would have jumped up and down and screamed.  Too  soon too soon, why why, whose idea was this ?  No fool like an old fool.   Marriage does not necessarily make everything wonderful.   It mostly sets new challenges.  You don’t know enough about her.   (Keeping utterly private and away from him  my doubt, my queries, my cynicism – heard this story before and I don’t like the ending.  A dear friend and his partner learned the hard way that  civil partnership, like  marriage, awards a 50/50 split: you may have done it for  tax reasons but the law is the law. so now we have  two people unhappy in a different way, still in the same house and I bet the dogs have headaches.)

When I didn’t hear from him over Christmas, I thought he was busy.  He is very active in the Church, singing, administration, devoted.  So I wrote in the New Year  by  which time we all knew somebody who had been unpleasantly ill, and back came his synopsis of a nasty story in which  significantly his priest who knows the lady from church, has offered to help.  Whatever the rights and wrongs of this, I wouldn’t wish this on anybody.

At best you learn about yourself and not all of that is pleasant.   At worst you don’t learn  which is even worse.   And nobody  knows  how the private  relationship  functions, what you or I would have seen as an amber light, or even a red one.   And Marian  is retraining to be a teacher !!!   Oh I do hope the vetting procedures tighten up soon.

In marked contrast a talented masseur was recommended to me and she comes to the house.  I don’t think I have anything particularly amiss in that direction except  bed rest and the silver linings that brought are nails on every finger – first time for years – and marked amelioration of arthritis.  Anyway, I like her, she’s affordable, she came.

Wonderfully straight forward, she was born in South Africa and is gay.  Fine.  Yesterday  she mentioned “my son”.  I said “So you were married ?”   No.  She decided she wanted children.  She went through the not unusual experience of failed fertility treatment, relationship breakdown under her insistence that this was what she wanted, but eventually she got  twin sons who have magnificently  Biblical name so I shall call them Cain and Abel which they are not.

They’re ten and she loves them.   She talked about them a little  – and I realized that although I know of this, this was my first  direct experience.  And it was good in every way as far as I could see.  Her mother (her parents are long divorced) in a  care home in SA helped,  her mother’s closest  old friend  (clinical psychologist) made contacts here, it was positive.  Uplifting.

I am not yet  ordinarily mobile and I miss the people  I meet  at the bus stand, in the shops, on the street but it is clear that that  front  door of mine is only the one door.   Other doors remain very much open – as do my ears, as does my heart.

However widely on line  relationships are accepted, I am old school, yes, and old.  I want to see you, look at your skin and what you do with your hands when you are talking, using all those human antennae for which I have such admiration – not because they are always “right”  but because they are always useful.  I’ve never seen a door as other than a way in.    

Gardening is a lot like dealing with people.  You can learn all sorts of stuff,  know this friend or that who is very good at gardening – but the plants will do what they do.  And the connections, the similarities, the roots and rhizomes, they will still do what they do too.  Like the sea thistle

I chose with love, had potted  for me by Josh who is a professional gardener: it bloomed once and gave up.  Josh says it happens.  I felt I had failed.

With people as with plants there are wonderful one offs.   Katherine arrived at my door and said “I saw you.”  Mouth agape, I stared at her.   “ I saw you” she said again “and you were ill.  So I made you some soup.” 

She made me the best of broths which I have named Malka – the Hebrew word for beautiful – and, survivor of childhood illness, emotional vandalism on the part of her mother and four years of bronchitis when she came from SA to England,  she is the first person to recognize the  toll this  was  going to take of me.  She stopped me and I immediately apologized “I have kept you too long …”   “No” she said “that is how you spend energy and Anna, you haven’t got it. 

You need to rest.  That is your work now.”

My second Christmas card arrived on New Year’s Eve.  It read “(sorry about the card Anna).  It’s Carly from the back garden.  Haven’t seen you

and me and the shop are worried.  Hope all is OK.   Love “– and her telephone number.   I had learned to limit my calls so I had to wait to ring back and then I said “Carly – it’s Anna” and the voice came back ”Omigawd, I’m so glad to hear from you.”     The shop is where she and I often meet with her big sweet dog Nula and where I buy the newspapers which I stopped even thinking about.    In the course of that conversation, she said something which is a profound statement of her background, mine and where we come from – “so great to hear your voice” she said.  “I was afraid it would be a man.”  Because when you die, your male relatives, the doctor, the vicar, the police make the call.   In the context of not knowing, male voices mean bad news.

The nicest meter reader on the 6 Jan said as she came down the hall “Did you have a nice Christmas ?” and I said “I don’t know, I lost it.”  She was immediately sympathetic and told my next door neighbour Sarah who has always been kind if not close.  Sarah bought me apple juice and I can see her in the red woolly hat that suits her well handing me the carton and tulips.

  “Late Christmas present” she said.  “Just get better.”

My nearest and dearest are not near – Ginny is in Warwickshire, Snowdrop is in Northumberland.  Buns is busy surviving and SR is in Gloucester, my son has a killer schedule – but they stuck.  When I asked everybody not to phone – they emailed.   Never was a woman more fortunate.  I found my way back to watching something I enjoyed on television – thin on the ground but I found it.  I ate supper and sat in a chair. 

I began reading Yellowface which is intelligently written if depressing and two chapters in when I hesitated, I found the writer had described this as a book about loneliness.  That I could relate to, not endless technology and wanting success, not a friend in sight and anxiety bouncing off the page.  But using it as a reader got me back to re read Pale Rider, Laura Spinney’s history of  the Spanish Flu.

I shall always remember Carly’s deep fruit and nut voice saying “But Anna what is it ?”   and me saying  “It’s flu Carly and it killed millions of people worldwide in  1918.”

The simplest actions require energy I didn’t know I used.  Bath shower and hair drying is soon but not yet, and every day in an adventure, a slow adventure because my age is an added complication to recovery as well as illness.  Now I am up against that strange modern denial which elides “Oh you were ill?” into “but you’re better now.”   

Not so fast, Kleinfelder.  Every year a small number of people have a bad time with influenza I have made it thus far, graduated through the illness programme.  I am a flu grad.

I did something completely different for Christmas 2024 – I lost it

Last day I remember a bit of was 23 December when I was told I had a cold and a virus, it was a nasty virus (usual adjective) and I had the additional complication of being 80.

Last week my “hands” rang me and I was somewhere at the bottom of a bin.    She had the same  bug but she is half my age.  Her daughter aged 15 threw it off, it has lingered in the form of a cold for her and I said  annalog ? not a hope …

and here we are a week later. 

I got better, I got worse, and developed an attack of bile vomiting – hooray for the internet, the  Mayo Clinic (clearly  written), NHS Online Direct (ditto)  and I rang the GP on Monday 6 after Saturday and  Sunday on water and Carrs Water Biscuits, no  throwing up, no energy .   He reassured me that the spell of being sick might be this or that or the other (no takeway I promise) but was most likely the bug working its way through the body with the additional complication of my age.

So keep warm, call in help, rest and drink water.

I won’t list the kindness because I might miss somebody out. Can’t read, can’t think – it comes to something when you can’t complete a task like a small amount of washing up without sitting down but a little at a time, slow progress and you will either wish me well or give up and go away to read about Elon Musk.   Who is younger prettier richer and a lot less reliable than me.

I will return when I can, I wish you all the good things for New Year that I was so fortunate to receive over the passage from Old Year to New, so charmed to receive, more later almost inevitably (a colleague once remarked “ you seem to remember  every good thing that was ever done for you”) -but I couldn’t remember how to redial a missed call

till soon

Because Christmas

and thus New Year fall mid week, we’re all going to be drowning in the holiday season, people are going away (hooray) and life will be a different shape except for those for whom it never is.  

I learned at nearly 13 that Christmas isn’t immovably wonderful which is probably why I feel so strongly about keeping the good bits fresh.  We say “don’t look back” but you do at Christmas, and in New Year, because if you have no memories you have no future – even if you are making memories for the first time this year.

I came out of Waterstones grinning from ear to ear, having seen all four of my favourite assistants in one go.  They are subject to some internal company rota, I see one or two at the most but they are all wonderful and it was a real pre Christmas boost.

As I emerged a woman backed into me and I said teasingly “Have you not got eyes in the back of your head?” and repeated it gently.  She laughed.  I was so proud that she laughed,

I went back to tell her – how lovely to make her laugh.  She said “I thought I would never laugh again,”  I asked why.  She said “Because my son was killed 48 hours ago.”  I asked what happened – it sounds like a stroke and for whatever reason it wasn’t picked up on fast enough – she said “I think it was because he was black, they thought he was drunk” – deteriorated and died.  I took her hands, I said how sorry I was very quietly and wished her peace.   

And I was very struck when a nothing if not positive friend remarked that this year, something is missing.  Well quite a lot is missing actually and the gap will not be plugged with elaborate meals and endless sweet stuff.   If you can afford it.  You have to believe in something,

even if it is only yourself.

This government is no better at communication that the last lot.   Sure, we’re in the financial cart for almost everything but there are better ways to introduce it to the beleaguered public than long , boring perorations.   Learn how to talk to people – in the stocking for the cabinet.  I mention this  (again) because it isn’t that they could do it better but they could package it better which would reduce the sting.

All I can remember about my Christmas stocking is that it was a wonderful knobbly surprise, which is what made it exciting.   The best thing in my stocking this Christmas would be peace – in Ukraine, Syria, Sudan and the list goes on.   I have learned to cherish peace, not just as the opposite of war – but as a state of mind.  

Yesterday a family up the road (ma, pa and “nearly 13” year old son) invited me to lunch.  The house shone, the food was lovely, the effort was generous.   Generosity goes in the stocking. And awareness and when to say “can’t do that any more “and withdraw for your own peace.

Ginny’s sister has an equally  particular nickname so I didn’t recognize her full name on the back of the cards she has begun to design and sell as part of recovery from a long and challenging marriage, three children and loss of self – self everything.  When I recognized  it, I wrote to her – She wrote back.  Worth jewels.  In the stocking.

All I recall about New Year was staying up  to see the New Year in  – which really meant listening to Big Ben on the then Home Service. My parents had a drink  – one drink, usually rum, the cheapest spirit – and I had a thimbleful with hot water and sugar.

This year has seen the failure of organized religion to offer the consolation we had thought to have from it, your religion or mine, the failure of theocracy to observe human decencies, to negotiate.

A Scottish neighbour who came to do me a kindness said the greatest failure was to cease to  talk – to talk across fear, stand off, difference – “because once that door is closed …” he said and shook his head. 

Whatever he has done or not done in Israel, you can’t deny that the chief US negotiator Anthony Blinken has worked at it.

We cannot know what efforts have been made in our names in a vast complicated state such as we live in.  We used to trust it but now we doubt it and doubt is a poor bedfellow.

So New Year is perhaps more important this year than often.  We need to believe  better is to come. 

So I shall light candles to that, and pray to all my gods, and for you who have walked the annalog walk for a long time.    

Back the week of 6 January 2025 and peace in your house.

Alison Uttley wrote a series of children’s books about Little Grey Rabbit, Squirrel and Hare.

They came in square pale grey slender hardbacks and my mother approved of the degree to which the animals were rendered cosy for children, in other words still recognizable as animals, for example, she remarked on Hare’s frock coat.    And it was Hare who proposed a toast  – “ old friends to meet, old wood to burn, old wine to drink.”   Which for some reason stuck with me. 

I could understand that you were supposed to keep friends so I could see that old friends would be important.  I couldn’t get my head round old wood.  Our wood (coal fires) came in small handy cords from the grocer.  I don’t remember having much of it to hand and if there was it was in the  coal hole, not piled up  – we never kept it long enough.  I learned later that old wood burns better .  And I knew nothing about wine,

except it featured in some stories, in glasses or special bottles.

Over time I learned it was a Scottish toast and it says a lot in a few words.  We think of catching up  at Christmas, hence the cards  if not the meeting.  But friendship is no more static than anything else.   Who you stay friends with, why and what changes is a book subject. 

Old wood to burn could also refer to the rubbish, the stuff you’re always promising yourself to deal with, the habits that one year you just can’t keep to – it’s not the same, you don’t want to pretend.  You make different arrangements, or none.

And I appreciate wine but I can’t tell you I have ever gone out vintage hunting except  for somebody else ( and only two of them).

But the toast lingered – like a sort of promise to the future.  That if you went back and met old friends , some of them might offer you something they couldn’t offer if they hadn’t known you when  …  and perhaps seen it just the same or totally differently or forgotten all about it and remembered something else.  Memory is as variable as the weather. 

And there is an edge to meeting old friends with whom you have not kept in regular contact.  Time passes, things happen, you may change, they may change .   And the hymn to keeping it all the same is unreliable.

The fact that “old wood to burn” comes next suggests to me that sometimes you can’t go back.  Whatever it is, it’s done and change cannot be ignored.  It has happened.  You may make one sentimental meeting but you feel you can’t make, indeed, don’t want another.  

And if I think of burning old stuff, I think of Pam the Painter, a world class exponent of “let’s just keep it in case” who went through files, her wardrobes, the kitchen shed at intervals this year and reported cheerfully how much better she felt  because she knew what she had and  -= most importantly – why she had kept it.   It was no longer “I can’t throw it away”, it was “do I need to keep it ?”

That business about “throwing everything out, clean sweep”

has mostly made me shy away.  You can’t.  You keep things for a variety of reasons including what I taught myself to ask “Am I ready to get rid of this? “   It took years to shed unsuccessful writing projects, no use to man or beast, nobody is going to give me a series at  80.    But the very pages resisted… till they didn’t.

I am the greatest exponent of keeping what you keep ie no logic in that except for you but what I have kept is reduced.  I do believe in getting rid and moving on.   I don’t want to leave a stuffed house that my executors have to rake through and will only dump when I am gone.  Burn the old wood, as you can.  That’s what it’s for, to give you space or light, to keep you warm.

Which leaves me with old wine to drink.  I think I would prefer nice wine to drink, cheaper, more accessible and a matter of personal taste – like everything else in this world. Here’s to you.   Or raise a glass to the past, and those no longer with you.  

I wrote last week “it’s not about presents.”   So what is it about ?    Mannie is a devout Christian and his Christmas is shaped by observance of

the Christian calendar.  His choice, dear man, good luck.

Wal’s Christmas is shaped by his not liking it, his partner loving it (for some questionable reasons) and the desire to give other people something they like even when he really doesn’t care for it.

My Christmas is  quiet – a quiet full of sounds I might miss in day to day: it’s about unscented candles, small pleasures and passionate gratitude – this year heightened by knowing how ill/or troubled other people are.  

The driver who came to collect me  for Moorfields ( OK so far) had a voice and a grin and came from the Ivory Coast

25 years ago.  I exclaimed without thinking “Cote d’Ivoire !” and he was so excited that I might speak even some French that he talked in both languages, all the way to the hospital.   It was wonderful, he spoke in French till I said something in English and then we went back to English, before he went into French again. The implied compliment of this is heady.

In the hospital, I saw a tall pretty woman with a walking stick decorated with flowers. 

  And when we saw each other again in the second waiting room – it’s staged into three – I told her, my friend had  a stick like that, she called |Maude.  “Why Maude ?” she asked.  So I explained it was really “merde” but she didn’t want to upset anybody, hence Maude, and I talked a little about her.  And she burst into tears.  I got up immediately and went to hold her hands .   She said  turning her head from me” I’m sorry, it’s just that people expect you to be well.  That’s what they want to hear and I know there is something wrong with my feet and my legs and it’s painful.  But they just want me to be all right.” 

So I said that my dear friend facing cerebral lupus told me that she spent a lot of time making other people feel better about her illness.  And I held her hands (I had noticed her feet and legs) and I made her promise to find somebody  to talk to about her pain – an old friend, the local vicar, her doctor – but not to just leave it, never mind what anybody else said.   I was called to the next bit and she promised.

On the strength of persuading  another to do it now, I took a deep breath and asked  my favourite shop assistant in Waterstones (we have had various private conversations) if she would like to come for tea or coffee

and she was delighted.   Then I got cold feet 24 hours later and went in to say “You didn’t think I was bothering you ?  That’s not what I meant …”  And she beamed and said “I’ll be in touch after New Year. Roll on 2025.”

Talking to Sim in Waitrose about books, a voice at my elbow asked about something I had said  which is how I met Mo – neither of these are real names.   Mo used to be a copywriter, she’s seriously interested in books, we took up floor space for some 15/20 minutes, I wrote things down and she asked questions.  We met twice  more round the fitments, till we were laughing.  “I am not pursuing you !” I protested.  “Nor me  !” she said laughing.  “I hope I haven’t bothered you…”

Her husband died  eight weeks ago.  I kissed her cheek and gave her my email.  She wrote yesterday.  Another date for  the New Year.

While yesterday, trying to get out of the West End of London, brought to standstill by demonstration,  I met a Neapolitan born psychotherapist, working at the University of Norwich

this is the cathedral

and we sat on a wall, she for whatever reason, me to rest the aged knees – and talked.  She told me she didn’t live in London but  comes up and would  be in touch.

So my Christmas  run up is so far  about going to the Selvedge Christmas Fair, a thing of wonder and colour (one of my  “observances”) and finding another door to open to communication.  And another.   And another.