Annalog

The BBC South Africa editor, a splendid woman with a clear voice, talked about how change would come to South Africa

in this upcoming election because the old dreams of the African National Congress were betrayed and dead.  (If you want to know how dead, SA advocated the equivocation of Palestine’s Hamas and Israel’s Prime Minister – a diversionary tactic designed to take attention away from years of bent politics, increasing violence and no more for the poor under their own than at the hands of the white masters of apartheid – no jobs, no light, no loos.) In other words, don’t look at us, look at them.  More money was embezzled through government in the two years of the pandemic than in President Zuma’s nine. 

There was a thoughtful item on a young white mayor in a rural seat in the Western Cape, who is going for government via one of the minority parties and he is fluent in a couple of African languages.

 Language was always a big part of the deal in SA (see Rian Malan, My Traitor’s Heart)

The young paramedic who has just moved in upstairs remarked that she had a love/hate relationship with SA having been there earlier in the year.  “It is so beautiful” she said “ but there is so much wrong.” I went too early to see the current decline but I remember the beauty.

And no, I am not writing about South Africa and the Middle East because I won’t look at what is wrong in my own country.  But in the hunt for some piece of good news,

I found the story of a man who discovered an abandoned park on his doorstep in Johannesburg.  And who, one day, fed up with having to drive to space when space was on his doorstep, he borrowed the key, took his torch, and opened the gate.   He didn’t go very far because everybody had told him how dangerous it was.  But it wasn’t. It was deserted. 

So he went in with clippers, his dog and a bucket for weeds.   He asked friends to help, he crowdfunded over ten years having formally adopted the space from the city council who agreed to mow and remove the waste  – but he would do everything else.  The biggest difficulty was persuading people it was safe.  So he made 67 metal owls, painted different colours. Children loved them. “Everyone told me they’d be stolen – but they weren’t, not one.” 

He put in red kudu, orange monkeys, yellow pangolin and a pink and yellow giraffe five metres tall

– all in all, over 100 sculptures and welcomed 10,000 visitors a month.  And everybody picks up after themselves.   Asked by others for advice, he answers (in a variant of Field of Dreams)  “if you start clearing,  people will join you.”  A Soweto born colleague agrees: “There is no messiah coming to save us … no point in just waiting for this perfect South Africa. We have to save ourselves.”   

The nearest I came to such a story in Britain was of a retired domestic science teacher who learned by chance that nearby women with young families couldn’t cook because they hadn’t the money to spend on ingredients.  She knocked on doors and offered to show them how to knock up a meal from what was in the cupboard, or with minimal extras.  One woman’s triumph was making a birthday cake for her daughter .  I waited for a follow up.  It never came, sidelined by the developing passion for bad news.

In the desperate hunt for a vote raiser the government is talking about National Service

– an updated version, please, designed to recognise gifts that don’t fit, and allocate everybody who can’t be enlisted into community services like weeding  and clearing, helping out and picking up.  If you don’t see people do it out of conviction, you don’t believe it exists. 

The political system in Britain will break before it changes but the way it is employed and spoken of, could change. If Keir Starmer isn’t offering miracles, it’s because there aren’t any.  Wouldn’t you rather have a nice surprise than a broken promise ? The change is in style, not content. 

Bring it on.   

Many thanks to Christina Lamb of The Sunday Times for the story about James Delaney.

This is a word of which I am really wary.  

Perhaps it isn’t as brandished around as it used to be because the definitions have widened or blurred.  The dictionary suggests technical, medical, chemical and geological contexts for starters.  I have heard it applied socially to everything from oral sex to cleaning your teeth three times a day as in “But is it normal ?”   Which means “Is it OK ?”  Because of its medical context, I was careful.  A number of things taken out of medical context or in changed medical context have become unsafe not to say inflammatory.   Your normal is yours.  

I wouldn’t have started this line of thought without the last question allegedly asked of a beauty editor recently “If I don’t have money for Botox, what is the next best thing ?”  When did the use of Botox become normal ?     

A very attractive woman, right hair, trousers, jacket, makeup, stood on a corner upon which I passed . I grinned in approval and greeting.  She gave me that “oh something nasty on my shoe” look and I asked “Have you ever tried smiling ?  It is so much cheaper than Botox.”   When I told Pam the Painter who endorses my occasional asperity, she asked “ And what did she say ?”  I don’t know.  I let her get on with it.  Silly thing.

I recall explaining to my better than pretty mother 35 years ago that the reason I invested in wider ranging skincare was that pollution in the city was high. My favourite photograph of my mother shows her very attractive lines and the quality of her beautiful skin.  One did not cancel the other.  

And yes, I know some of this is the luck of the draw not to say genes, emphasised by a piece a week ago about how terrible to be 80 by a woman with a face like a boot.  You may be sure that by the time you hit 80 what you are will show on your face.

What is normal apparently is fear of age.  

But age comes.  And you can’t blame it on a political party.  Why treat the body as a piece of real estate, planning the extension to buttocks or the uplift/enlargement of bosom as once we used to save for the kitchen extension or conversion of the shed ?  And we are a lot more critical of a bad builder than a bad aestheticist. So the subtext of this is eerily to do with remaking yourself.  

I am all for making the best of what you’ve got

with diet and dietary supplements, exercise, rest (in everything from meditation to shuteye), relevant cosmetics, changing colours, getting a better haircut, realising you should never wear jeans again or those achingly badly cut shorts (all sexes).   I am not for obsessing about any of this. And although every so often there is an update on the increasing numbers of men involved in plastic surgery, they remain small compared with the number of women

Normal has shifted from “as far as we know” – what we know having exploded, often unreliably, in our lifetime to “everybody does it” which generationally reminds me of the Nazis, my first tentative grasp of a totalitarian state.

Inevitably the obsession with youth backs into the obsession with the end of youth ie age.  

I find it the last great freedom.   I can list as well as anybody else the shortfall.  I know now why people might call me a cow  – because the toenails are like hooves (cloven, I am sure).   I can’t lift this or shift that.  I have to ask for help but I have been generously, charmingly, unexpectedly, uplifted by kindness and consideration.  I was shaken to the roots of my being by illness last year – but you have to die of something.

I hope it comes fast and conclusively. I am less afraid of death than dying.   It is in the hands of the Master of the Universe and to him I give thanks for every good day, every grin and silly joke, every generosity, the birds and the beasts and a good life.  And it shows round the wrinkles and the bags into an ability to live, even in a troubled world.  What we used to call normal.

I have never got over the feeling that, if I go out and leave the house untidy, a seraph

will appear, clipboard under wing, to point out my error. Whereupon, chastened, I will go to straighten up and make the bed  (which I leave open for a purpose – airing, mite killing), fold the towel, put the washing where it should be, leaving the house in apple pie order.  I don’t know where this comes from,

I have never been punished for an untidy room.

Indeed I only remember being struck once which taught me the crossover between rage and fear  – something we could do with recalling now.   No blows at school (hooray for Simon Mills who usefully  highlights the sheer humiliation of having incurred punishment)  and God bless state education. An earlier model, certainly, but nevertheless …

My mother – and it really was my mother, division of labour, less a victim than anybody I can think of – kept us clean and decent (her phrase). She cooked well, often conjuring something out of nothing, shopped (till she taught me), washed everything by hand except the bed linen that went to the laundry, ironed  – but my mother hated housework.

One of my earliest memories is of her saying crossly to the vacuum “Oh for goodness’ sake, you’re a machine !

Do as you’re told.”  Nowadays this would probably result in a rights case and anyway, the machine would have a computer which would register disapproval.   

I remember the Slovene engineer who oversaw the end of my beloved family sized washing machine (it didn’t owe anybody a farthing) with the prescient comment “None of them are the same or as good, and the next one will have a computer.”  I thought he was joking.

Wal told me that the engineer who oversaw the demise of his name brand had said all washing machines are the same – so when mine gave up, he arranged for me to take delivery of the same model he has which I walked round warily until Buns told me that the eco programme

might be slow but it was thorough and used less electricity than anything else.

I have got better.  The extremely expensive to fit boiler has gone squiffy so that in the first few days of warm weather for ages, the heating is on – very low – but on.   I was slow to recognise this, you don’t spend much time near radiators when the sun is shining, but after the debacle with EDF, I am very aware of the price of energy.   I rang the boiler company – the appliance is still under warranty, an engineer will come on Saturday.    But that’s another several days – so – at 5.43 the next morning I switched the boiler off.   

You would have done it ages ago.  Quite right.  But you do not have the profound sense of maladroit that I have in my hands.  I am a domestic craven, and part of the problem is that I am sure I have only to touch these things for them to go awry.

For this reason, once I have put the washing in, I go out.   The worst that can happen is that the whole thing implodes, there will be water all over the floor and I will have to start again.  So be it.   I just can’t cope with the pause. 

In that pause I lose whatever bottle I had.  I knew where I was with the old machine and it never failed.  The new machine does what it is permitted to do and I have to get on with that.   That machine knows something I don’t know and I want to hide.

What is interesting is that this only applies in this part of my life.  I don’t drive, it’s true, though I did learn (thank you Dan) to manage the computer well enough to make annalog possible though after all this time,  when something goes wrong at the other end of putting the blog up, I want to crow “See !  Not my fault this time.”   And wash my hands in fairy dew.

Update: the boiler is OK, but the Peabody  light (see annalog/cries unheard) is still on.

Amy wrote to appreciate something I had written and I replied. In her acknowledgement of  that, she mentioned  a test for  breast cancer,

which was confirmed as cancer in both breasts within 48 hours.  She wrote again – short, un selfpitying  emails, often referencing books of contemplation..  She wrote me a couple of lines in the morning and I wrote back.   Seems like little enough to do for someone facing the beast.

In the journey to her operation I learned a bit about her – one of several children, all adopted, a schizophrenic sister, a disapproving brother, a son she adored and he killed himself which is repudiation, rage and more questions asked than answered.

She had been a nurse, had retrained to become an academic, had a therapist, was an active communicating Baptist. She treasured her friends, was grateful for the kindness

of the medical personnel she had to deal with, took this class, walked when the weather permitted and went to that evening for breast cancer survivors.

Somewhere in there she saw by chance the grandsons her son’s partner has kept from her and she and the boys cleared the air.   There was no miracle reconciliation, just something painful eased.

I had to be honest with her early on, that the tone of some of the stuff she sent me was not for me. We worked round and through, so that she could be she and I, I and we could still brush against each other in a mixture of acknowledgement, reassurance and communication as animals do. 

And she came up against people unmanned by what she was facing, whether the cancer, or its form, or the operation – some of whom gave up and backed off, those who got stuck in a kind of mourning that was much more about them than her, and those who came through. 

She wrote some time later that she couldn’t depend on these people, she didn’t want to  – she was  enquiring for a convalescent bed.  The young woman who ran that part of the service had been a pupil, Amy had forgotten that, and she came for tea.  Wrote Amy “She told me what a tough time she had had recently, I responded, we wept and we had tea.  She will do everything she can for me.”  And I wrote  “Well done for facing the beast and tying a ribbon round its neck.”

She emailed after the operation, I was so touched.  And she has her bed allocated.  And I thought about the beast.

The thread of loneliness is what links a lot of my experiences with people, because I have long known loneliness in myself.  Just as I have long known that shyness won’t stop you functioning, even functioning well, it’s just always to be negotiated.   And the beast is not just the cancer, it’s about the fact that the people you’ve felt closest to can’t get past the convention of what they say, to reach out or in or past the monster, so that you know the washing will be done or the groceries dropped off, or that they are  outgunned by the enormity  but still care and if you would just give them a steer …  As a cruelly ill friend long ago remarked “I seem to spend a lot of time making other people feel better about my illness.”    The beast is the difference between the courage to try to communicate (and implicitly you may fail) and the inability to find that courage. 

I remember a Japanese film about a man with what he called The Crab, the beast of his cancer.  We all have beasts, the beast of perfection so that you don’t want the saucer with a chip or the friend with a gimp foot.  Yes, we could have a whole discussion about the nature of friendship –

but people have different beasts.      

What Amy couldn’t know is that I was feeling old and tired, scared of being boring and disappointed that several people I thought of relevant, didn’t find me so any more. I couldn’t fight Amy’s beast for her and she didn’t know about mine.   Looking at her beast let me go shopping for a ribbon for mine.  

This is a Peabody area

with several Peabody buildings abutting the back garden..  George Peabody was an American philanthropist who invested in modest homes for what we used to call the working class.  Over the 25 years I have lived here, the second floor hall light has been left on for weeks at a time.   I have counted my blessings ie it isn’t noise but from time to time, as it shines right up the length of  my small garden, I gnash my teeth.   I have asked the people who live there. Blank.  And I have heard other stories about Peabody deaf ears. So  I wrote to the CEO on 26 March, offended by the light, the lack of consideration and the conspicuous waste of energy.

On 15 April I received a letter from the so named Executive Enquiries Lead/Customer Experience Team, saying that a repair order was raised 11 April and hoping that by the time I received the letter, the problem would be resolved.  Welcome to Planet Peabody. Don’t hold your breath.

Rosie (not her name) has a long, intricate and serious medical history and she was injured 18 months ago in a car crash. 

She was briefly and effectively hospitalised, and it was agreed that the injuries she sustained made her existing problems worse.  She should claim damages.  Since then she has seen the medical specialists designated by the insurance company to assess various aspects of her claim up to and including clinical psychologists.  The suggested techniques for treatment included exercises based round rapid eye movement (from which she was ruled out because of advancing neurological illness and  existing double vision) and cognitive behavioural therapy

– which is everywhere much praised.

For whatever reasons she is disposed against CBT.  She is not against psychotherapy having previously made some effort to find treatment for herself (privately).  But she is now being told that she must have 16 sessions of CBT with the designated practitioner or she disqualifies herself from her claim.  

So is she to lie and welcome a treatment she is not sure about ?  Is she to try it in good faith. saying she is unsure about it and see what happens ? Where is personal choice in all this, not to mention delayed treatment of psychological impairment attributed to the crash ? The appointed solicitors have already changed her representative once without reference or explanation and do not reply to letters, email or phone messages. To whom does she turn ?

While Wal and Howard (not their names) who live in a semi detached property which houses the accrued investments of a lifetime (including jewellery, antiques and furs) for which they pay heavily to have made secure, suddenly couldn’t activate the alarm Wal sets faithfully every night (apart from the timed lights and the locked doors).  

Wal rang the well-known US company.  Six hours later, the last of several unimpressive  operatives opined that he could do nothing, he was working from home. He thought it might be the batteries ?   The company is paid £700 a month and is supposed to check/change the batteries every six months.  Wal and Howard between them changed the batteries and Wal was so distressed, he was still shaking when he rang.   “Nobody cares” he said.  “Nobody.  We are paying for a service that doesn’t exist.  In the past, your last engineer would enter the date that the batteries next had to be checked.   Not now.  And nobody cares.”  I told him about Rosie.  “Blackmail” he snorted.

All I know is that, when you get in a jam,

you are very lucky if you can find somebody who will do anything.  And nobody talks about why.   Part of the problem has to be sheer numbers – the population is staggering and goes on growing, you wonder if the island will sink ?  Companies are vast and belief in technology is crippling.  (my final account from edf is variously six pence (really), £13.50 or so, and £39 plus:  they may trust their machinery, I don’t.)   In the past money bought you a kind of immunity.  Not any more.   The helping agencies are swamped, I have chosen three stories – there are others, and you really don’t know who to turn to hence the title: cries unheard.

There were two things missing

from the item by Gideon Falter of the Campaign Against Antisemitism writing for the Sunday Times about how ineptly and incorrectly he was treated by the police, how he was made the problem, why the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police should be removed.

One was any acknowledgement of the limitations of policing repeated sizeable demonstrations – the standoff between pro-Palestinian supporters and any kind of Jew being frequent, expensive, troublesome and to be contained at all costs, not the least because of hurt and damage and the inequity of numbers involved.

And the second was because you are asking beat coppers – ordinary police men and women – to use language as flexibly as Tony Blair (who trained as a barrister, remember).   And they can’t.

So if you wear what European Jewry called a yarmulke and the more modern call a kippah – that little skullcap -you are a “discernible” Jew.  Deduction is not an insult, even in parlous times.  Demonstrating crowds turn uncontrollable with horrifying speed, and violence against Jews and Muslims has increased since the war began..  Containment may not be comfortable,

even occasionally discourteous – but it is an unarmed and often effective method of policing, albeit expensive in budgetary terms..

As when, some time ago, a policeman approached me in my fur gilet and asked me if I could get off the street (now, there’s a line !) there was an anti fur demonstration just round the block.  I said gently “But this is fake, it’s made of cotton …”   “Madam” said the officer wearily” they don’t know the difference, we just don’t want any more trouble.”   I went and had unwanted coffee.

In the age of reruns, the Foyle’s War segment (Saturday 20^th,9.00, ITV3) was positively valuable.  Never mind Sister Act for the 40^th time, that script (FW), one of the later ones, contained historical reference people don’t even want to think about. Britain is involved, from before the founding of the state of Israel, from the division of who gets what in the Middle East, after the First World War (see the Sykes/Picot agreement).

The Middle East – all of it, and that’s a lot of territory – is an inflammatory mess, largely armed by one Vladimir Putin, and the war between Israel and Palestine is the present chapter of how two wrongs only ever make for a third.

It is both true and untrue that I have been trying not to write this piece.  My politics are my own – yours are yours – I don’t want to interfere in something to which I am peripheral  though I deeply believe in the importance of information – whether it’s about power then or power now.  

Hamas is a death cult, never mind whose death, and sections of the Palestine community turned a blind eye to that knowledge and caved in, because they were already desperate and disappointed past bearing with the Palestinian Authority.

Under its present government, Israel took its eye off the ball of national security.   Hamas violated Israel on 7 October with rape, torture, murder and kidnap – what is called “terminate with extreme prejudice” in bad movies.

  It is war – hideous, expensive and destructive.

And here we are.

The Metropolitan police force isn’t quite as much maligned as Israel but it has its problems – flat recruitment, lack of funds (Mrs. May’s worst day’s work) and appalling management which fails to support the men and women who try to do it right, at every level and in every way.  And they incidentally only have income because they work overtime as a norm.  The money just doesn’t go round.

Rowley will stay where he is for the same reason as Sunak will stay where he is – because another change is not helpful to an already beleaguered government.

Enormous numbers of police from various forces will try to keep the two sides of stand off bitterness (Palestine and Israel) from violence on the British streets, which seems desirable to me.

The broadcast media will finally get its collective head round the fact that war is horrible and stop going “Ooh” and ”Aah !” to the joy of the bloody brethren of Hamas , the British will have a General Election and with luck, so will Israel.

All parties file under “must try harder.”

Accepting that everybody’s taste is different

and it would be a dull world were this not so,  Pam the Painter  asked  me to try the second episode of The Cuckoo (C5). She and I have  taste that diverges widely and suddenly crosshatches perfectly. In this case, I lasted five minutes.  “Wow” she emailed.  “Five whole minutes ??? You really tried …” So I explained that I only have to see those moody camera angles and hear the menacing soundtrack to think  “No thank you” and switch off.  And I don’t care about any of the characters, fortunately a yardstick with which she can empathise.

There is a bad version of don’t care when you tank through the world over everybody’s toes, physical and other, and a good don’t care when you refuse to rush, take the next bus, dump the lilac tshirt your mother gave you (never liked it), read and watch only what appeals to you.  When somebody tells me they feel they must try and get to grips with whatever book it is, I am likely to say “don’t”.  There are few exceptions.  And the world is full of books you might like better.     

So frankly tv, film and print picky, last night I came a cropper.     I watched a Norwegian detective thingummy, seduced by the speed of editing and the opaque storylines into watching both episodes.   Past my bedtime.  Nodded off.  Can’t remember anything about it.  Shaming. 

And I have tried.  Hence the title.

Isolde (NHN) is always reading but I have noticed that though her eyes move from left to right and she turns pages, she rarely remembers what she has read or in the case of something more interesting, has much to say.  I am certain she doesn’t look up those unknown words and terms I rush off to source.  A bad sleeper, she reads – anything.  Stuff. 

Yes I know

 Drifts past her eyes.  Rarely important or interesting or gripping.   

Reading is the great pleasure of my life.  Has been forever and Julia Donaldson’s poem

I Opened a Book explains it beautifully.   Latterly it’s how I overcome the perfectly terrible terrestrial television programming   – go to the two or three charities that cherish books and buy something that hold my attention and makes me think.  And I shall never get over Oxfam finding me a book from my early teenage years, without much to go on.  And I was so glad to reread it, strengths/shortfall and all.

Whether it’s content, style or characterisation ie people – endlessly interested in people – something has to speak to me.  But if it’s gurbling in front of my eyes, it won’t be for long – because it is a waste of time.   And life’s too short.  

I have read tripe to see how it works but it has no charm for me.  A woman I know buys everything that is listed by the Booker committee.   Too clever by half .  I follow my nose.  I can get it wrong – but I can get it right !   Like the last film about Mary Queen of Scots, a character who always repelled me. 

But it was such a good film and director and scriptwriter had both read My Heart is My Own which led me to John Guy, who can weave his painstaking and unexpected research into a darned good story, closer to the truth than the conventions of accepted history ever permit us to go.

I never thought I would watch wildlife programmes with the sound turned down but I do- because of that cheap music which Noel Coward described as potent, which brings me out in hives.   Though I find bits of wildlife on different programmes are often thrilling if bloody – truly, nature red in tooth and claw – with short sequences of leopard, my favourite and views of an Africa, old and still.

I’ll spare you the list of what I don’t like or can’t watch or won’t read.  Yours will be different from mine.  I don’t hold it against Toby (NHN) whose life is informed by social media.  We just agree to differ.   And on balance, I like the wallpaper still – not that there is any in my home.  The walls are white, ready for projection of any kind.

NHN – not his/her name.

You do not often hear an old pro like my optometrist

exclaim with pleasure, because the injections into my right eye have delayed visual decline and my specs only need altering (after nearly 5 years including ageing and cataract) by a point or two.   That and her hail as she crossed the reception to meet me after two years  (“My favourite client !”) made for an early birthday card.

Somebody wished me a week’s birthday rather than a day and that wish came true.  And just as most Christmases, when there is a card that I look at wonder “now, who …?” so yellow roses and white freesia were delivered by eflorist, with no message.  Believe me, I am a good looker and I know where to look. 

But it took my son’s intervention to stop me banging my head against the brick wall of the company’s inaccessibility.  “Nobody” quoth he “ever had a positive customer experience

with those guys.  You got the flowers ?  End of.”   So somebody who was listening sent me something I can’t thank them for. 

I cooked nearly to standard for Pam the Painter the day before – but I know what is wrong and it’s not a mistake I will make again.  Ginny was coming to supper but her mother fell and is even now recovering in hospital, thank heaven.         

A birthday is the one day of the year you can do anything you like – so I did.  Nothing. 

See   Gertrude Stein “Nothing is meaningless if one likes to do it.”  I pootled about and drank coffee at 6.00 am.   I exclaimed with pleasure over who rang and what was sent.  I went up the road for the paper.  I cherished every moment and walked more slowly, balanced properly.

I saw bees hunting blossom and a pair of great tits who danced in and out of the shrubs and trees, unimaginably graceful.   And outside the supermarket to which I went for the pleasure of it (shopping

always makes me feel better, the first “big” thing I was ever trusted with as a child, just the basics, nothing elaborate) there was a tiny girl in a white waterproof with marigolds all over it, the design in keeping with her size.  I exclaimed “Oh, how pretty …”   The eyes contemplated me.  I put my hand her mother’s arm and asked her please to tell her daughter how lovely she looked.  She replied in the accent I am beginning to recognise and I know enough to say “Bella !” with a big smile which was answered.  Sometime later, they walked past me and the little girl waved and called “Ciao !”

ITV’s Goodnight Mr.Tom

may be 30 years old but it is head and shoulders above most things about children in wartime.  Everything works – actors, script, camera, settings.  And I rewatched too the first ever episode of the House of Elliot for that same integrity and wonderful wardrobe.

Then this morning, encouraged by a second day with wind rather than rain, at least to start with, I did a small washing and put it out on the line to dry

– it smells better, even in London.  The young woman in the flat above is leaving in less than happy circumstances and she knocked to say goodbye, so I wished her well and went on to meet a woman of my own age, who lives just round the corner, with whom I had a proper conversation in the convenience store.  She is a Scot, a former veterinary nurse, enormously angered by the new anti hate legislation in Scotland and we had read the same article about it so we thought we might have tea  …  I’ll put a note through her door this afternoon and see.

Yes, I read the paper.   Once a day.   Yes, I watched the news, once a day.   Yes, I tend to see the unholy arithmetic of war, displacement, destruction, famine and natural disturbance as an   end of western civilisation as we know it, history that is always easier to read about than live through but in thanks for all the good things in my life, I shall go on looking for them, small and idiosyncratic though they may be.  A smile still uses fewer muscles than a frown and it’s a whole lot cheaper than Botox.

This birthday feels to me like passing

my 11Plus for the second time. And please don’t tell me all that “it’s only a number” stuff.     

My parents were pragmatic about age, though they adapted quite differently.  And I was never disillusioned because I was never illusioned.  “Just do this and you will – “ has its place in fairy stories but you confuse wishes and dreams

with real life at your peril.    Or as Marilyn Monroe sang “When you get what you want, you don’t want it.”

Most of us remain very susceptible to good will.  It doesn’t take much to make you feel better – a greeting, a few words, a kind action.  And thank heaven many of us know that to keep the good will muscles working, we express appreciation.  But appreciation and good will don’t work like debit and credit.  It’s not as straightforward as I give you so you give me.  I give you – and with luck, somewhere down the line, I get back what I put in.  Or something just as good.

Yesterday on the bus there came from upstairs an immense almost unintelligible wall of noise,

often evidence of an unquiet mind and recourse to the bottle.   The driver paused.  The bus was not full.  We listened, the driver didn’t want to go upstairs.  Heaven knows what he would get into and he’d risk missing his place in the schedule.   I am ill equipped by age and strength, all too aware that “having a go” often ends in somebody else having to come to the rescue.  We waited.

A young woman came downstairs.   “Drunk or deranged ?” I asked.   She didn’t know.  But as she “placed” me (elderly but OK ), her shoulders came down and she smiled. The men behind me shrugged patiently and the driver put the bus in gear. 

A couple of stops later, a young family

got on – parents, a boy and a girl under five – and they went to the stairwell, where they were arrested by my voice saying “Excuse me” twice. They paused and the man looked at me.  “There is a shouter upstairs,” I said. “The sound is horrible.  It might frighten the children.”  He and his wife beamed thanks and took the children elsewhere.    

We drove without further mishap to my stop and as I got up the children’s father said “Thank you for your intervention – it is much appreciated “.  

  I can’t remember this ever happening to me so I said “You’re most welcome –“ and, grinning at the rest of the maybe 15 passengers  -“I know, .nosey old woman !”  And they grinned back. “But it is such an assault – take care, good luck –“ the children waved me goodbye, and I went off  home smiling to myself.

I was 30 when I began as a “problem page editor” in women’s magazines before the term “agony aunt” was current and I worked in radio concurrently.  Print and sound are often different disciplines.   Part of the crossover is you can”colour” your voice, it’s much more difficult to do in print.   And the other bit of the crossover, beginning with letters but continuing through email and texts, was how often people got in touch – to say what they liked or didn’t like, had found helpful or not. It was not always a direct transition.   It wasn’t because you had called in  – heaven forbid !- but you had heard somebody to who you could relate and it clarified something for you.

At pains to reduce the amount of paper in the house, I can only do this when I can do it.   This is my past life I am shredding and as I worked I came on a folder with some of those contacts in it and the goodwill

rose like steam from the page.  And I had a belated insight into that past touched on in annalog/backwards and forwards.

Radio was for me, I was good at it – but without the callers and correspondents, I would never have shone as I did.  Forget podcasts – one way traffic – not discourse. So, dear Great British Public, thank you, thank you each and every one for exchange and time and knowledge and abiding pleasures.  Thank you for an enormous part of my life.  Your birthday too.

Where can you live but in the past?  What is the future? 

So I might express misgiving about people who live in the past but I accept that in order to go forward, I have to go back.

The future of my borough’s food waste collections includes six pages of colour printed leaflet explaining that in a couple of months I shall be given special food waste bags, a caddy for indoors and a bigger one for outdoors.   I have read what I should put in the bag in the caddy and when I should put it out more than once and I am left confused and disbelieving.  

I can’t remember the last time I cleared a plate into the waste – I clear my plate.  I discard the heel of a loaf occasionally ie not more than every two weeks. Eat it up. Fruit and vegetables – hardly ever discarded, nor meat and bones.  Eggshells once a week max if I forget to crush the shells onto the garden (thank you Phil).  Dairy ?  No, except for the odd washed out milk carton, along with washed out yogurt pots in the dry recycling.  Rarely tea or tea bags, coffee bags never.  Coffee grounds, down the sink or on the garden. Fishbones  (lovely drawing) – never.

Yes I realise this says more about me than a lot of other people but I am still being given three bits of kit and asked to comply with an additional schedule.  And if I find the leaflet less than clear, I can think of a whole lot of other people who won’t try to make sense of it,  probably don’t recycle, just bung all the discard in one bag and probably will continue to do so. 

So this is an exercise that looks like forward but leads backwards.   Minus money.  

Makeup heralds The New Matte.  There is nothing new about matte, it’s been around for ages, it is an excuse for a rejigged colour range and prodding falling sales.  If it becomes you.  It renders me a death’s head.

Do you want to live to 120 – and if so, why ?  The Nobel prizewinning molecular biologist  Venki Ramakrishnan puts it in the same category as colonising Mars.  I’ve never been very good about doing something just because you can.  I like to think I have accepted that I shall live as long as I do  – but all I can think about 120 is what will break down, how will it be shored up,  the wider costs to the medical establishment (already faltering under sheer weight of numbers).    I shall look even more like hell than I do on a bad day and be a miserable old b.   The money will run out. And Mars to me is a

chocolate bar. I am much more interested in  doing our best with this world than finding another to export all our troubles to.

The backwards of the title at this point is to look back at where I have been, what I did, who I met, how it was, what I learnt, how it felt, what it looked like.  This is like a series of internalised books, pictures and print, of which I do not tire.   Perhaps noticing things was a kind of revenge on having to wear spectacles for short sight at eight.  Perhaps it was my personality.  Certainly some of it was my parents – “Look” they urged “and ask.”   I watch, I listen, I observe – obviously with omissions because I am tired or memory falters or what strikes you didn’t strike me and equally obviously because I want to see and a lot of other people either don’t or don’t want to be bothered.

Forwards gets harder, trying to see what my little best will do.   So much easier to destroy and undermine that shore up and look at whatever it is again.  That old maxim about “a day at a time” can sound trite and smug but if you take the good with you and go forward without expectation (I can’t transform the lives of those I know and love, no matter how much a I know and love them), then  backwards becomes a hopeful way forwards.   And it’s the only way to go.