Annalog

My mother said “misery loves company” and that troubles come in threes. And I am on the third. I’m not listing them but I couldn’t sit, let alone think so you have no annalog till (I hope) next week and the resemblance to Eeyore has been striking…see you soon.

London buses

– unsung, wide and useful service – have a most irritating habit of pause.  They come along, you get on and three stops later, they stop while an unctuous electronic voice says words to the effect of “The driver of this bus has been told to keep the  bus here for several minutes in order to regularize the schedule.  We apologise for any inconvenience to your  journey.”  Growl.   

The other morning I got up and got off.  The sky was clear.  If I only walked one stop it would be a step in the right direction  and as I began this, I greeted a woman my own age, a little taller, pretty, shabby and she called after me “It’s so nice when people say good morning.”   I went back  – “But you’re Irish

–  you’d expect it.”  She smiled at me.  And I went straight on  (the sin of the elderly and lonely is that they talk too much – and I am guilty) to tell her how my father had described the Irish – that they are NOT the English and that the Romans never got there, followed by another story and she said “ You’ve made my morning” I said  “Mine too” .   And we parted in approbation.

I thanked a girl on a bike who waited because I can’t scurry.  I asked where she was from in the  US,  Montana she said adding  “This person in the White House is nothing to do with me !”

Coming  back, a woman in her fifties struggled to the bus stop, in pain  and overweight, who knows which came first ? – disordered hair and clothes ( I shouldn’t think she cared, understandable in that kind of pain).  I moved back so she could sit down.  She spoke about the weather  and then she used to me a word I have not heard for  70 years.  She said I had an accent.  I said  that was unlikely, I was born here, both parents were.  She insisted adding – “Or you just talk posh.”

and mimicked what I call the “Daddy Was A Colonel” voice.   I let her say it and then I replied “Parents from WW1 – and it used to be called  Received Pronunciation.”  The bus came.

We were driven by one of my favourite bus drivers – he is Ghanaian and if  he were my son I would burst with pride – he is beautiful.

There was a man about my age buying what I call a proper newspaper to whom I said softly  “It will depress you but the coverage is good” and told him about something I had read that morning.   He came after me in the queue.  – “And this ?”  he said, holding up a journal.  I said too far to the right for me but I believe the writing is often very good.  He used an old phrase.  “That’ll do me” he said.  “I buy to read.”

The first shop assistant was Mauritian, and the second, and the third whom I thought might be French, with a timeless chic – dark blonde hair, a good figure, even  nice shoes (I peeked over the counter) – turned out to be from Kazakhstan, “a long way away.”  I agreed but told her I had a wonderful  book on the ancient treasures of her country … “How did you find that ?”   I said it was an exhibit some years ago at the Metropolitan  Museum In New York ,had been featured in a newspaper and I had hunted down the published catalogue – which my son gave me for a birthday. 

And I bought  something  I was too lazy to try on  but have and it doesn’t fit but I can return it.

I thought about “posh” at school and the roughhousing it got me into until I learned to use it against myself and be amusing.  The lesson took time.  I thought about my  voice which has brought me so much, whether my actual voice, remembered, or imagined voice in writing.

There are people I meet and never see again, people I only meet on the bus or at the shops.  And I think of my mother describing enthusiasm as being worth 10 times any cream ever invented.   “Stay interested” she said, “helps the face.”  Wise woman, bless her. 

her favourites

The floor of the entry hall

of the house in which my sister and her two friends  had taken up residence to  further a small company was black and white marble.   I was 14 and we had just driven through from Yorkshire to Hampshire.  And I had raised my voice against my parents.   “Are you going to fight all the way there?”   They stopped.  I don’t remember being invited into the conversation so I didn’t have the opportunity to tell them how frightened I was, that I had seen my mother hiding letters from my sister in her dressing gown pocket until she could read them and then offer them to my father as lunchtime post.   And my father had taken advantage of my mother’s absence for her two evening shifts a week, to talk to me about how worried he was about my sister.  And my mother.  And now they were arguing.

When we arrived in that hall, my sister thought she was right and my parents thought she was wrong, and my father took me out of it into the garden for a while.   Nothing was resolved.  I’ve thought of that floor a lot recently.

I like black and white – print of course, prefer black and white check to black and white stripe, black and white films and photographs, understand oh deeply that everything is not black and white, and I suppose the most important aspect of the floor was not what it looked like but how well it fitted together. 

I am looking, of course I am, for positives.   I have just had to for a week while the internet provider chucked his weight about and the one of two positives I got out of that was when my own technical advisor pointed out that I was luck y to be able to speak to a person – widely now  bots, AI and nobody to address.  The other positive is that the machine has been regained – I don’t have the language for this. 

I loathe it.  Pam the Painter and I regularly bemoan the passing of typewriters, carbon and copy paper and the telephone – answered by a human.

Much of the reportage – whether in print, audio or visual – is either wonderful or awful.   Shades of grey have been relegated to soft porn (50 Shades of) and it’s a black and white world except where people occasionally say what they mean, look at something from every angle and devil take the hindmost.   But how many people have time to think?

I had complimented the writer I met years ago on how good she looked – some men and women look better in age (that’s not what I said).  When she got over the fact that I remembered her and  discovered my age, she exclaimed “But you must have had surgery” to which I replied (my mother’s daughter) “Don’t be silly.  I am with Dietrich

– you don’t put a knife in my face.” 

Mary Berry doesn’t mean much to me because I don’t like cookery programmes.  But Vogue gave her the cover for her 90^th birthday.  That’s the white of it.  The black is she only gets near the cover at that age because she is on television.   Older people are out of fashion, the pursuit of youth leading to the delay and denial of death.

maybe Mark Twain, maybe our old friend “anon”.

The smart money does a lot of bet hedging and publishes the parlous state of the British economy two pages after their own economics editor suggests carefully that maybe we have the corner – take your choice.

And occasionally you even get what seems white and gets darker line by line as you read it (a profile of the US Vice President) in which the right things are said but don’t ring true.

I confess I do not like remakes – be it Bergerac, West Side Story or Cinderella.  I understand that story lines are used and reused, of course I do, but if you have a stand out knockout original – leave it alone.  And the bad reviews and indeed measured commentary on Disney’s 10 year, multi writer, withdrawn from its London premiere all umpteen million dollars of it, remake of Snow White, obviously heartfelt by the writers, made me into that horrid little girl who was punished for saying “Told you so!”   

It’s going to be a good week – Josh garnished the garden

yesterday and  there is a French film on Saturday next I haven’t seen.  It could be a bad one but I haven’t seen too many of those and I have been exposed to endless Welsh/Scottish/Irish product.  The Gaelic language thriller was outstanding  but the others weren’t.  Doubtless another BBC quota to be ticked alongside second rate Scandi in the name of the good ones which were outstanding.   I don’t  do more than a week at a time.

The key players

in the present world crisis make me angry, afraid, anxious  and to what point ?  They will do what they do, damn them, against the best efforts of an administration labouring through a system in dire need of laxative to move us on to appropriating Russian assets and splitting them with Ukraine, putting rearmament programmes in place and beginning to teach people that they have a social contribution to make and it’s unlikely to be anything to do with a belated diagnosis of ADHD or depression.  

The enemy within is the empire of the drug companies,

the acceptance by far too many people that diagnosis should be ten minutes, a label and a prescription and the mental submission posture that implies “Everybody can do something about this – except me.”

It was a bad week at the hands of an internet provider who doesn’t care and a long haul back to balance.  I met a neighbour yesterday, looking tired and frazzled, who had been trying to  buy  proper waterproof boots for a botanical expedition.  She hit  blank  indifference and disinterest, including Harrods, which she referred to as a vision of hell.  I privately thought she was a decade out to be going there.  I gave up on my favourite “big” store when it offered me a cashmere rollneck for £1200 to a background of rap, for me the musical equivalent of having my teeth filled.

Because Snowdrop and I sometimes share books, he got me to re read Henry James.  But you’re stuck with personal preference.  I couldn’t, I am an Edith Wharton girl, HJ was like homework.

What I was looking for was escapism.  I would have embarrassed to say that years ago.  My life is good, what do I have to escape from ?  But the positive side of escapism is that you open yourself to something other than what usually makes up your life.  You might see the performance of something you never thought you’d watch.  The experience of any form of reading, tv. radio, film is all based on suck it and see.   You are in control of incoming cultural traffic.   Pass on HJ, pause on Dancing Back to the Light (BBC2).

There is no logic to my love of ballet except that it is other than anything else and watching this film (directed by Stephane Carrel) about Steven McRae’s recovery from tendon injury x 2, not 20 any more, confirmed a big insight. 

McRae is a principal dancer

at the Royal Ballet and I watched this man put all his physical and mental intelligence into rebuilding and repairing the only instrument that counts for him – his body, in dance – assisted by all sorts of sympathetically accredited disciplines.

And I had an insight into the tension between the endless work – back,legs, feet, stretch, rest – like preparing for an athletic event – again and again and again – to procure the illusion of effortlessness.

Long ago a famous ballerina said “you can have two days off – but then you have to do class.”  It’s like painting the Forth Bridge – unremitting.

And McRae is married to a former dancer (oh that’s an interview I’d like) with three appealing small children, and he came aged 17 to the Royal Ballet from a suburb of Sydney.  Dance is his discipline – and he learnt and talked of how he had been misguided, what he had to learn anew – to students as well as the camera.  

And it was not without reverses.

And I watched him exercise his straight toes – vital of course as part of support of the foot.  No foot, no float …  It’s too late for my toes  but the film shone 90 minutes of light on me in a dark world.

The connotation of saying what you mean

  is too often seen as being  disagreeable when a   more sensitive soul might have  left the matter alone,  used a gentler phrase or  kept quiet.  This  may come as a terrible shock to you but I say nice things as often  as I can and only  when I perceive them to be true.   As in the case of a young woman the other day whose coat I admired.  So I said so.   She looked at me as if I were holding matched snakes.  “Me ?” she said  round eyed.  So I said, “It’s a compliment, it’s free, non addictive, not fattening.  I don’t want money and I am not after your body.”  Whereupon she relaxed into a giggle and a smile.

Whilst in the present ongoing unholy international stew , provocation won’t help – a bit of saying what you mean is refreshing.  Last week I used a phrase from an interview with

BBC’s Emma Barnett in which she spoke about the pressure parents feel to be perfect and wanting to create a panic room for parents.  A  panic room for parents is a slick phrase (can’t beat a bit of alliteration) but the first  given you come to terms with as a parent, regardless of  whether your own were useful to you or not,  is that you can only do your best and know that, with all your  impeccable intentions, it may not suit your child.   Styles of parenting are a whole other thing.

Communication comes into this – parent to parent, and parent to child and on into education, special interests and so on.   One is never done being a parent, even if one has to learn to shut up, stand back and let be.   And you may have what you perceive as a quiet sweet child.  Until you discover that he or she has a will of iron.

You don’t need many words to stonewall.

We talk about children as a separate race because it is easier to sell them and their parents things for them that way but every child is set to grow and they change quite fast.   Speed of development varies  and perfection of children or parents doesn’t come into it.   I am very wary about perfection especially applied to people, other than situationally.  You can behave perfectly in a particular circumstance but that doesn’t make you perfect.  

Perfection is like nirvana.  You may strive for it but the journey to it is where you will learn and grow,  the  achievement of the final goal likely to be denied.    

Perfect parenthood is like perfect health.   Health is reliable, maintained through water consumption, exercise, food and rest.   And so many times  we say to each other “but I always thought he/she was in very good shape” as somebody staggers into cancer or heart disease, and worse. 

Because we are anxious (we’d have to be stupid not to be – anxiety is there in the atmosphere, running out of money, running out of time, the pressure politically ) we turn to health as something to be maintained in perfection.  

But it varies  as the weather varies.   That’s why it is so difficult to sell long term health maintenance to so many people.  They just take their health for granted till it falters.  And even if you do all the right things, it is not a marble statue – an achievable goal – perfection.  It is a work in progress and the darndest things emerge as you go on.   If you had been told about them, would you remember them ?  Not till there was a problem.

And then  we’d have to talk about  what kind of a problem.   Saying what you mean comes into that too.  And you may be stuck with a fear for which you don’t have a language – just like the hooha currently going forward with my  internet provider.   Or a child you can’t reach.   Or a  health problem that frightens you so much, you can’t think about it.   Our old friend denial- very primitive, very strong.

Communication is never wasted, even if it is awkward or unpleasant and human to human agreeably at the moment is  candlelight in several kinds of dark –  I will happily share my matches.

the Ukrainian trident

When do I mention  Zelensky ?  I can’t not, because the President of  Ukraine sat with  the President and Vice President of the US – and we retain all the  names.   And when you are attacked, you either give in or fight back, both open to endless interpretation.   Speaking as somebody who has been attacked and done both – yes, physically –  you do what you do.

You have to really want politics  badly at any level, let alone internationally, because it makes shot putt, pirouette or world stardom look like tiddlywinks in comparison.

I looked up the definitions of trust, I’m stuck with trust.

I’ll trust Zelensky – even when he gets it wrong.   Full stop.   Everybody else has written and talked about this  to  punchdrunk, I am not.

One of the saddest things about human history is how long it takes us to learn, if indeed we ever do.   Personally and collectively the human race is slow to learn.  Oh sure, there are lessons like lightening – don’t do that again, don’t buy that again – but it’s been a year  I have been maundering about keeping a spare key with a convenient neighbour until I lost mine and had to be rescued by Wal  – who only  has a key because he doesn’t want to find me dead on the floor for the want of asking “Are you all right ?”   

And  even if  I am prepared to claim it

– I am not sure that my past  does anything for you.   Tell you about me ?   Yes, a bit.   Tell you about you ?  Maybe.   But you can push that away, indeed deny it, forget  about it – until crisis.  Like me and the key.     

Yesterday I started thinking about what I was  going to write.   There are days when this springs to mind, if not quite fully formed, well on the way.  Yesterday  afternoon I wrote a long careful piece about Zelensky and the meeting in Washington – but  it  didn’t work.   Even the printer hesitated.  (Oh how I would like five minutes with the CEO of Epson).

But this morning I saw a sentence that niggled at me and yes, I have read the piece.   It said “ I regret 

every cigarette I smoked.”    I don’t.   I am trying to think of what I do regret and the answer is not much and anyway – why would I share it with media except for profit ?

I also thought yesterday, casting around, of all the things I don’t have/haven’t done.   Not a trip to India – I might have got lost in India – I’d be there for years.   Not Tierra de Fuego.  I can still have those unmet  dreams met by camera.  But all sorts of things.  

I have never sat with a bunch of women, no matter how much I liked them, getting legless on bad wine and talking about their sex lives.  I have never worn leggings – fine for you, not for me.   Nor has peroxide come near my hair.  I f you want to see panic in  the streets – ban peroxide.   I don’t like mobile phones and before you tell me how essential they are – I am cackhanded,  use two different pairs of specs because I can’t do varifocals and when I was recently so ill, its use would have been beyond me.  

Occasionally  I’d be asked why I disliked being called an agony aunt and I would explain that I felt it derogated the writers of letters and phone callers whom I had treated seriously.

As soon as you say to me “everybody  is” doing something, I don’t want to.  I have never listened to podcast.   I don’t listen to radio any more: when it’s good, I miss it and when it’s bad, I muse fruitlessly but briefly on how much work I could lately have done.  

I cherish every cigarette I  smoked, every man I went to bed with  (quickest way to learn about them).   I can’t cherish my  bad language (horrible) but I cherish where it comes from – anger, displeasure, frustration,  heaven help me, the occasional wish to shock.    But whether this will help anybody else – that’s open to question.  We learn for ourselves, it defines us.    The  people who won’t learn

– that’s who we have worry about.      

*thanks to the Who

Where does the idea come from that, if you got up earlier , you could

steal a march on the day ?  In the matter of housework, yes.   Put the washing in and wash the kitchen floor before breakfast  – before, I would say, anything.   In reading demanding technological documents (like legal papers) – yes: get up, get the morning beverage and read before anything else has a chance to impact the mind.  

But time is, and it will be what it is, and its steady unrolling

– unimpacted by light or lack of  it, or whatever else you allow to interfere -is often – though not always – consoling.

I can’t do it with writing. The idea of throwing myself at the fence in the hope that I will achieve better clearance doesn’t work.  I write badly.  There is a moment when I think I might begin and then – and then only …   No guarantees  but pushing it doesn’t work.  I am at the mercy of time.  Aren’t we all in varieties of ways ?

You know how people worry about age.  

I read a piece this morning about skin care quoting nobody over 50.   I want to write and say “Pooh-bah, sucks to you !”   But it wouldn’t be published (no advertising value) and the stamps are expensive.   I overheard a man on the bus the other day  saying  jokily  “Don’t call me old – I am not old !”  as if it was the worst thing.  So I said “You can stop that .. I am old and it’s the last great freedom.”  And beamed at him. “Never heard it called that before” he said.  Think about it.

Alongside all the minor painful trying bits, the body very often rallies  – like  a sort of Last Hurrah before decrepitude.  And even if the physical falls painfully away, the mind often reaches for something else and cherishes it, like a terminal cancer patient  discovering birdwatching.

You still see clearly, literally and psychologically, at odd moments.  A wise and generous friend cheered me on after that  truly flattening illness at year’s end.   Here’s a thought – if you abdicate (thought, opinion, perception, enjoyment) you disintegrate.   But you can only inhabit what makes it work  – for you.   I used  an image to a friend that has been of great personal significance to me.  She  liked it and responded warmly – but she doesn’t know what it means to me.  And rather as keeping a secret is not telling anybody, I don’t intend to explain.  Call it my magic.

There are plenty of things I don’t like – but the endless recitative of miseries doesn’t improve skin, digestion or temper.   I thought about writing  a list of what I do and don’t like but was momentarily halted by the fact that the “d” of  do and don’t is the same – I’d have to find a better way to do it.  I didn’t think about how much time it might take  because as I say, time is. 

And I have it.

Not thinking much about time is a position of privilege.   I am not working, any deadline I have to meet is my own.    As any interesting film is almost certain on  between 2.00 and 5.00 am, if I got up and watched it and then went back to bed for the rest of the morning, it wouldn’t matter.

I remarked to Denning the other day that my house needed cleaning to which he replied “whose doesn’t ?” and we laughed.   If you are coming to check on the dusting, you will have a field day !

You can use time or waste time  but  you can only grow time by abandoning yourself to it – until you come out the other end  and  recognize what has transpired – how much time has passed and why you are cold, hungry, thirsty or whatever.

You can save time  by not  ironing the  pillowslips or turning off that truly  boring  Scottish Gaelic miniseries on BBC4 last night (every cliché known to man except the Asian  detective in charge of the case) but otherwise – time is – and you can’t beat it, endurance rather than evasion.

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.