Tag Archives: books

other people’s lives

Posted on April 28, 2026 | Leave a comment

Just because a film is old, it does not follow it is good.  What we want to watch changes,

in terms of how a film is put together as well as subject matter.  But I have had far more joy   out of Talking Pictures TV than other terrestrial stations.   TPTV knows its market and last night it promoted the return of a series I like very much with the immortal line “ back by public demand”.   You want to leap in the air and cheer!    Magical words.

Can you imagine how rewarding it might be – chastening too – if we had a some modest system of feedback

which wasn’t regulated, filtered and faffed about with just to give the powers that be our opinion on this speech or that film or that case – and somebody gave a damn?   In which feedback was regarded as important instead of just part of the process.

The old British series of Maigret, George Simenon’s detective, is so well done that I watch it every Saturday night unless  – as they say – I have a better offer.  But the French series  dominated  by an actor called Bruno Cremer

is wonderful.  

It is not about what weaponry can be used to torture and maim or the biggest budget this year in special effects – and yes, I recognize that  some of the best special effects people working are British and hooray for them.   Maigret is about  other people’s lives.

Leave to one side the writers of poison pen letters, meddlers, snooper and the self righteous – other people’s lives are often interesting

just because they aren’t ours.

I started thinking about this  because  I wondered  why I have reacted so strongly to the notion of “going back”  from school reunions onward.   And then in my mind’s eye I recalled details local to the house I was brought up in, who lived where, what I could remember about them and for a brief moment, thought about revisiting  ie going back.  And  pushed it away.  It will be  changed.  I will disturb my memories – just as 10 years of  holidays in Crete stand.  I am not going to revisit – it will be changed and I want to remember it as I knew it. 

But I am  self evidently interested in other people from formal history to personal.  My friend Denning who  because he is a wonderful listener is often the recipient of stories – as  am I  – and we occasionally  say to each other  “Oh Lord, other people’s lives !”   But  you couldn’t say they weren’t interesting.  This person stayed in a horrible home while that one packed a bag, took whatever they could scrape up and left.  Gone. 

No going back.  Another life.

A couple of years ago in a candid conversation (they didn’t  “know” me and I didn’t “know” them) I sat with young neighbours by their invitation on my birthday and somebody asked me what I did when I worked.   I explained the radio station and the programme which established me and how I hated to have it or  what we used to call “problem pages” trivialized (a) because it matters to somebody and (b) because in amongst the ordinary stories, were some extraordinary ones. 

They pressed me.  I don’t need much pressing.  So I spoke about the man and his wife who could not  heal after the death of their nine year old daughter,  and non consummation.  Which I had to explain.  They asked intelligent questions.  And I pointed out that that kind of exchange remains rare.

My mother would have said  it was merely good manner not to ask questions, to wait to be told.   I might have rephrased that to “you open the door, I’ll walk through it”  bearing in mind that on radio, there were  certain things which for reasons of legality or responsibility were  better not broadcast  – because you don’t know who is listening. In all senses of that phrase.

But how people reach decisions, what they decide to do  and do, or don’t  and how that plays out remains fascinating,

one of the great mysteries. What is logical to one remains utterly unreasonable to another.   Decisions you or I see as inevitable are unreached.   What people suffer, impose on others or don’t learn from is an endless lesson – not in a book or on a course but  all round us – other people’s lives from which we learn or don’t and muddle through.  

From everything I have read, George Simenon was at best odd and at worst unpleasant.  His output was formidable.  My minor addiction to the major creation of his detective Maigret comes from  18 of his written mysteries – with one overriding common denominator: other people’s lives.

Aldous Huxley said “…ultimately unknowable”

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through not round

Posted on March 31, 2026 | Leave a comment

Upon writing annalog – which I still define as writing copy and most others refer to as a blog –  I wonder whether I am writing for you or for me.   Often and mostly, it’s both.  But I have written stuff, read it and thought – well that’s what I want to write – and then had unexpected feedback or I have written what I thought would appeal to you as well as me and the silence has been deafening. 

I have written before about the wonders of the subconscious mind

– and- in all humility about trying to begin – my phrase is  “to find a way in.”  Above and  beyond the list of things we all have to worry about in the wider world, we all have troubles from the small to the considerably larger and we have different ways of dealing with them.

People  talk about “getting round” a problem.  I commit myself to going through.  This is not because I am better or brighter or tougher, it’s because it works as a philosophy better for me.  It involves making a decision

and taking at least some of the responsibility for the fallout.

We have different levels of power and influence in the making of decisions.  We are different people, we experience things different ways.  

With my anxiety level rising unevenly through 3 months – which is a long time to feel powerless in a personal situation –   I could tell you a long unhappy story about my latest round with he eye hospital.  I have written about Moorfields before ( eg annalog/shruti and the tiger, and others)  always with praise and appreciation.  This latest round has come as a shock to me and a shock that goes on being shocking.

Friends have said I should write about it.  I am not sure.   It risks being a whine – hell, it is a whine.   On several different levels.  But I am near moving on, towards through.   Better an account of that, than the misery of not knowing.

The news media recounts with more and less clarity the ongoing destruction of various wars. 

All of the people involved don’t know.  If they are among the decision makers, they only know  this  decision or that.  Whether it will be positive or not,  they do not know, cannot know.  How or what they decide will play out and what the effects – short, medium and long term – may be remains unknown too.   You will notice a conspicuous lack of names in this writing – we all know the names, we have different feelings about them, but they are the major players, the rest of us exist in varying degrees of powerless, and we wait.

Alongside, the international and national political situation, there have been several books about human pain,

how it is perceived, what it really is, how the current impact of Big Pharma and its witchy pills makes them a fortune and leaves us further powerless.  I remember how people latched on the idea of a name for what ailed them, in the hope that if you could name it, you could treat it and thus banish it.  It works sometimes but not always and we are endlessly told the names of things in the superstitious hope that that will ease the pain perhaps or improve the predicament. 

Pain is part of the human experience, physical, psychological and they are often interrelated.   If you can’t feel pain you are in another kind of trouble.   No signal that something is wrong – again, in the mind or the body or both.    And you can misread the lack of signal as badly as you can a signal – and get it wrong.

And the most experienced doctors  can get it wrong too.

There is endless diagnosis of where we are up to in the history of the world

  – pages of intelligent and informed writing about the countries that are involved, how and why, what it may mean, how it will play, and on the world stage too often, the answer is war.

I can’t go to war with the NHS and the eye hospital.  What I learned is nowhere to fight.   Friends have been generous and supportive.   I have to go through this.    

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Playtex Living Bra*

Posted on February 17, 2026 | Leave a comment

This is a

Wuthering Heights free zone.   In case you haven’t heard  (lucky person, you must be living on Rockall) it’s a film, inspired by a book by Emily Bronte, her only published work in a short life, and the more you read about the Brontes,  the more you think “ … and well out of that.”  It is a film, you will either see it or you won’t.   Because of worldwide release and a woman director it is being talked up a cultural storm.

Rummaging  for  something positive to write about, I came up with negatives. I began to think about what  I don’t like – and I don’t like the Brontes.  And in the case of WH, I don’t like sex to porn as a motif for life.  

At school, I heard

Shakespeare read round the class which is the quickest way to kill it I know.  Kids being asked read in forms they didn’t understand.  Found a partial way back  to WS through wonderful performance, but much later.  

I don’t do

Jane Austen – there are occasional lovely dramatisations for lightweights like me.   I have long  theorized that writing has texture like food, and like food, while you may learn to like it, for most of us – you either do or you don’t.  And I admit to an eccentric way of finding what I want to read – I follow my nose.

I don’t like leggings, I understand they are practical and economical but I don’t like the way they look.  And have never seen a lower half they became.

I don’t like white shoes – white shoes of any shape – white sneakers possibly, in limited context –  but white high heels with pointed toes? 

No.  I remember when the women of the Royal Family wore white shoes.  I didn’t like them then and I don’t like them now.

Nothing will induce me to like flattened longer hair, whether it is Cleopatra or Claudia Winkleman.  Don’t like it.  Rarely kind, let alone becoming, and leads to the old crack “Come out of there  – I can see your feet !”

I loathe long nails like talons (very loaded word for me at the moment, I call the pain in my poor back The Claw: it feels how it looks)  My ex husband who had more form than Shergar once recoiled from five centimetres long sugar pink shellac with the  comment “I don’t want that anywhere near me!”

Tired to dislike of talking about  building new  houses.  Let’s start talking about a serious review of existing unused property, how long  it has been vacant , what shape it is in and what has to be done to make into roofs over heads ?  And how you are going to pay for it if AI takes over all those jobs?  Those making money out of it won’t care – but the rest of us will.

And a watch this space from Sweden which 20 years ago, a respectable length of time, phased out books at school and phased in screens.  Literacy has fallen, really, year on year till they have reversed the policy, books are back in, reading aloud  – yes,  I know a pig till you learn to do it – individual help for readers who struggle for whatever reason – and the figures are going back up.   A self confessed book freak, I want to cheer.   The problem is often the tone of the teaching. And Sweden has discovered

that some children have parents who struggle with reading and invited them in too. 

It cheered me too because it was a European example – smaller  numbers and budgets.  And it was about doing something.  As is a new book which is about making peace with the second part of your life – which is going to be different from the first.  I have heard till I am green in the face about diet, exercise, and all the other sensible things which are a mantra against  dying.   But when you get to this second half (and I am deep in it) we are too good at the recital of its negatives and not nearly good enough at looking the good bits – which I find constantly – bad weather and all – uplifting*.

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unstiff upper lip

Posted on February 3, 2026 | Leave a comment

This is one of those days when you just want to hide,

but there is no reliable hiding place.  The world is in at the front door, your identity can be stolen, what used to be called your privacy is compromised in the name of progress, if not dead.   That old phrase about there always being somebody worse off than you is horribly true – doesn’t make you feel any better about your own trouble, but it is true.

So  instead of  making a list of all the things that are wrong ( heaven knows, a long list) here is the tiny  AR banner, still flying positively in the breeze.

I long ago faced that, even if I could stand the style (not always the case), I couldn’t stand the repetition of what is called “rolling news”.   Same thing over and over and over again.  Repetititon sounds like indoctrination.  I prefer print. 

The Sunday Times arrives as you’d expect, the daily Times the other six days though there has often been a hiccup on Saturdays.   For some weeks it didn’t arrive at all

and I had  conversations with several  different people trying to sort it out, one of whom was magisterially drunk at 8.00 am.  I am sure the money is poor, they spend all days on complaints.  It is not a great place to be.  

Then there were weeks when the Saturday edition arrived smoothly and now we have entered another game -it arrives later.  This week I open the door, my hair is up, I am wearing an all concealing robe.   The car – same car as the week before – pauses.  Out gets a young man.  “Good morning” he says without irony.

as good as a handshake

I say smiling “Thank you “   He beams.   I add “Later every week – but thank you.”   He inclines his head, still smiling and says “Have a nice day madam.  You are most welcome.”    I loved  “madam” – me with mucky teeth. Sets you up for the day.

Last week began well with an uplifting photograph of some of 62 state school youngsters

who had exam results which opened them to offers from Oxford or Cambridge, still the benchmark of a level of academic achievement.  All those kids come from not very much and even if you suspect Oxbridge isn’t what it used to be,  that opens the door to other offers with a more sympathetic campus.  So hooray for everybody involved – the young, their families, their teachers, the effort.  

Particularly necessary in a week which documented  25 per cent of all entry class children as not toilet trained, can’t read, don’t know what a book is.   Parents who have children literally because they can, like a pup, feed it occasionally, too often knock it about when it gets in the way; either makes it or it doesn’t. 

The dog may grow up to snarl and bite and so too often does the human version.

We are a society of mixed messages.  We sentimentalise white weddings (horrifying expense) and having babies but not talking to each other or bringing children up – and no, I don’t mean which fork to use – I mean helping the young fit in to life to the extent that they can make the best of it and then make choices.

The church one block over and up the road has been given over to the Copts and recently they had some sort of community do – trestle tables set with things,  children milling about – and I saw a young man, wrapped in his traditional white shawl, sitting off by himself, near railings I had to pass, so I asked “You are Copt ?”  “Yes” he said.  “And today is a festival?” 

He said it was, it was do with the death of Mother Mary, a figure  greatly  respected by them – and several other sentences I couldn’t get between the gap between us, his accent, the traffic and my cloth ears.  But he concluded “… and there is lovely food.  Here” he scooped a sort of small meat ball with sauce into a piece of flat bread, and offered through the railings to me.  I thanked him and ate it.  It was delicious.  We sort of bowed to each other and I came home.

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elephants

Posted on January 20, 2026 | Leave a comment

AR health warning: don’t read this if you don’t do the “d” word.

Elephants  are mysterious in their size, intelligence and consoling eye lashes ie not many but long.  The elephants I refer to however are the ones we can’t see, the elephants in the room.  Generally we refer to “the elephant (singular)” but I think they are now reaching herd proportions.

The Australian Rachel Ward was the star of a long ago wildly successful TV romance between a priest and a beautiful young woman who “did it”.  She didn’t like bad press and removed herself from acting to a long marriage, children and a cattle ranch up country, all of which makes you want to cheer but for which she gets no credit at all.. 

Recently she posted a happy snap of herself,

greying hair and specs, on one or other internet platform and was immediately attacked for having let herself go.  If  men were disappointed in the dream made(ageing) flesh, women were even more outspoken.  Their criticism could be summed up as “how dare you be happy and look like hell ?” – the latter untrue.  She looked like a woman who got up and did, in the heat, and liked her life.

A woman came almost at me in the middle of London, 10 years ago, who exclaimed my name.  “You look wonderful” she said “- But I suppose you’ve had everything done ?”    To which I replied “Yes – by heaven, 72 years ago .”    You can make of the best of your older self without all that stuff in your face and off your bottom, with a degree of honesty and imagination which will leave you of course looking older (you are !) but still good.  Hooray for Rachel Ward.

The American saying is “three sure things in life – birth, death and taxes.”   And if the actress Claire Foy -much praised for The Crown (Netflix)

– can talk about childhood  and later illness and say that she never expected to live long, hooray for her.  The idea of eternal life is a spiritual promise, not a physical reality.   Age withers us in different ways  but we do die.

Death has its own meaning  – different for different people.  It differs culturally as  well as personally – but however , it comes.  We end.   

Other elephants include Health Minister Wes Streeting.   We hear a lot about Wes Streeting’s ambition  but I wish his stylist would point out to him that a man who wears his collars as tight as that is about to explode – which is NOT a recommendation for power.

I am not going to give  the latest conceited refugee from the Conservative Party to Reform the name check he seeks.  But I heard Kemi Badenoch earlier in the week as well as in summing up her action as leader in this matter and both times remarked how restful and cheering it was to hear a politician answer a  question.  

It is worth remembering that she trained as and worked as an engineer

which makes her rare among politicians in that many of us only grow up to the taking of responsibility  through work.

I could give you a list of other elephant words which we cease to read or hear much because they are currently considered  judgmental.  I thought (among other things) that growing up  (which I longed for) was  about forming opinion,  making choices, and thus the assumption of responsibility.   Does the herd in the room consider growing up? Or has this been supplanted by the denial of death and/or the quest   for eternal youth?

I have seen one or two who have managed to  continue to look remarkably  youthful I but I have seen  many others who range from  frankly silly to  much repaired and run down garden sheds

Life isn’t only about how you look – it’s how you are.   And life was never about  only what you say – it was the way you say it.   I have no idea what  the present government is or isn’t doing for me or us.  They don’t communicate . I don’t want  prolonged flannel. I would prefer a few sentence designed to  communicate rather than obfuscate (Elizabeth I loved that word when it was new)

Not pain. Not avoidance and nothing to do with death.  Yet.

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New Year Proper

Posted on January 13, 2026 | Leave a comment

What I mean is,

when you have got over too much to eat, too much to drink, put away extra  crockery/bedding/toothbrushes, Aunty Betty has finally got the car out of the way so you can stop fretting about what you are going to do when somebody wants to go to work/take the kids to school etc and you really don’t want another family negotiation for 12 months.  And the first bills have arrived.

At 9 I didn’t know what irony was

but I remember my father calling up to my mother in a sepulchral tone “Gas is out …” pause “No post” …  pause “ Dog’s still not home” and wondering why the grownups laughed when I said “Happy New Year, Daddy!”

Last week Pam the Painter asked  “What’s existential ?”   and I said  “I don’t know.”   “Gosh” she said, “I don’t think you have ever said that before”  so I explained – I don’t know how to use it so I don’t use it, and asked why she didn’t look it up on line ? “Because” she said “it will tell me what AI thinks… ”   ah yes. 

In trying to find out whether Waitrose was open on New Year’s Day, the  AI summary said no, but the entry for the branch I wanted said yes.  I rang the store.  They were open.  Maybe AI stands for Approximate Information.

And when we have finished giving all sorts of jobs over to it – do tell me how the unemployed are supposed to earn a living – or shall we all be nourished by a different kind of injection by then?

Whether it is my generation or my personality or both, I am repelled by the over simplification of losing weight – and only now are the informed beginning to talk about what you do afterwards?  How long can you take the drugs? 

How will you look?  What will it do to you?

A friend is using them carefully in accordance with a much  altered food intake and regular checkups. Though she says it will be slow, she looks wonderful.   While another  said “If you don’t alter what goes on in your mind and understand why you eat what you eat, you can do anything you like – it will always come back.”  There are many books written on obesity and I am not going there but at 21 I worked for a man who administered a daily shot, doubled on Saturday to get you through the weekend given alongside a very carefully managed diet: and those who stuck to it, did brilliantly  – like Miss Flynn in a size 14 dress, a plain woman made radiant by liking herself so much better.  After 60 years, the modern edition is cheaper and more accessible – but the marketing

is merciless.   

Even allowing for meteorological  catastrophizing (overstatement necessary to get even passing attention) Storm Goretti promised trouble in the midst of which a contributor was heard to say “And we are asking people not to climb mountains tomorrow “ because, if they do and get into difficulty, somebody else has to risk life and limb to rescue them.       

I don’t know which I like least – the  build up to Christmas or the extended few days to New Year and  beyond – but this year it was all through a filter of pain – big little word –

and I don’t mean discomfort.  I mean couldn’t bend, couldn’t walk much, couldn’t sit much, truly incapacitated.  But hooray for the osteopath and doing as I was told, Thursday 8  January was the first painfree day since  27 November – partly to do with  injury and partly to do with age.  So that was New Year for me.  

But you always learn something – I learned how much I take  for granted  – small movements, cherished freedoms …  It concentrates the mind quite wonderfully when you can’t sit in the structurally chosen writing chair and getting on and off the loo is a time consuming challenge.  

I learned to wait, ideally breathe and wait.  I drew heavily on whatever and whoever was offering whatever support.  I learnt to be rather than to do and breathe and count my blessings. 

So – this is the beginning of New Year Proper – hell on wheels so far but here we go.

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in between

Posted on December 30, 2025 | Leave a comment

On Christmas Day I read a book

– right book, right time, thank you Rebecca.  All the way through, like I used to do when I was 15.

I tried to cook an elderly

goose breast and it was horrid.  Wound up throwing it away and giggling at myself in the passage leading back from the front door.   HWKE (He Who Knows Everything) said “ Oh I could have told you – the fat goes off…”  Indeed.  The vegetables were delicious.  I ate raspberries and yogurt and dried fruit and nut at about 3.00 and in the early evening I ate cold poached salmon and salad.  I think I was previously a rabbit or a squirrel. 

The  novel mentioned above was written with ease and I could separate the narrative  which is too long for me but has a point to its length, from the documentary evocation  which was terrific.  I have read a great deal about the war in Vietnam –  but never had such a good picture of the sheer shock of young Americans being sent to fight in a country they  knew nothing about. Not even about the weather. 

And the idea was to evoke the absolute  estrangement on returning home of the very few women who served as nurses – historical fact – now of course a pressure group, a statue etc.

Beyond a few minutes of this and  that, the tv stayed off.  And on the 26th, I read something else, went for a short walk and watched Goodnight Mr. Tom  – yes again, yes with real appreciation for all concerned.  Terrific cast, good script, production, camera  etc.  I understand estrangement.

A headline read something about human wisdom remaining important as the reliance on technology grows.  Thames Water Board

fielded two operatives for hours, then a third who went down the  manhole at the front but the drain at the back remained unmoved and was eventually remedied by  3rd man saying to man in charge when he began to suggest  “a second job” – “We are not leaving this lady like this.”  Five hours work (three of them, think of the cost), it worked for less than 3 weeks whereupon I recontacted TWB and called a private contractor who has unblocked it so far.

Very grateful for small mercies.

People who  work often enjoy this odd period between Christmas and New Year.  I generally do not like it,  I feel stuck. But this year it has a purpose – rest. 

The impact of that word on my long life began Christmas 2024, the week of which I lost.  Christmas  2025 I  moved  slowly and discovered the value of wedged in warmth, resting.   I know I sound  140, quite a lot of the time I feel it.  A woman whose French bulldog I stopped to acknowledge widened her eyes when I told her my age (it was  apropos , really – though increasingly it becomes the only thing of  interest about me).  I said  laughing “Yes, yes  – the face has held up.  You should see the arms – crumpled tissue paper !”  And we both laughed.   “Oh bless you” she said.

I regard New Year with respect. 

We do not know what it will bring and we are in every kind of trouble.   I could write a list – from war to waste.   The subpostmasters still without  settlement,  victims of soiled blood products likewise.  Trump suing the BBC and why it behoves us to support the entity of the BBC even as we criticize it (like me).  The most  positive ending to  fashion , trends and lifestyle copy ever ie “be less influenced” ie trust your own judgement.  And try to remember other people use the pavement as you set off for that run that has become the 11th Commandment.

By the time you read this we shall be in the anteroom of year’s end, waiting for year’s beginning and why start drunk?  If it doesn’t sound much of a Christmas, I learned things which is always good and it was very much better than culinary overkill and attitudinizing.  I loved my Christmases past, I remember them with all kinds of affection.  And New Years too.  

Here’s to you, see you later, and all the very best to you.

a tree of memory, and hope

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rows of stockings

Posted on December 16, 2025 | Leave a comment

Man of the week for me was

Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary general, who named the fear to say Putin will make war on Europe and we should get our heads around it now -shortages, cold, bombs, disruption.  File this under “prepare for the worst and hope for the best” which is a good way to live

 I wish I could send cards

to everyone I wanted to but it is expensive, impractical and unrealistic.  So here, for the record, are things in my stockings filed under what I want: what I don’t want: and what I wish for, denoted w, dw and wh.  

I wish I could thank you all for staying with me this troubled year (w). I wish I could thank every journalist, writer and presenter who has given me pleasure – quite a lot, hooray (w).   But you can’t get to them, even if you could fork out for the postage.  I would ban, blow up or otherwise disable social media (w) which I regard as the Other’s War on the west,..However it came about – oh the hubris of humankind.

I’d like us all to do a bit more towards every kind of peace up

to and including world peace (w)and I would like to be out of pain (w).    I would like to send a group card (w) to my local Waitrose –  a shop staffed  by kind professionals, a credit to the race.

Christmas brings out the competitive – the best food and drink, clothes, gifts, party, guest list, decorations – like the eleven plus with holly.  I would ban the word “perfect” in this context.

(w)    My Christmas  is mine, about the past  (both glowing and grim memories) but it couldn’t have started better.  I hope in the smiling anterooms of another world that my parents know how much I appreciate their love, the food they gave me, the wonderful simple memories they created for years (w). I remember my son’s second Christmas and the smallest blue jeans on the planet.  

Of course there is wish fulfilment at Christmas –  there is leave, to go and meet (w), there is warmth and nourishment and colour and light and extra ordinary patience – with this one’s indigestion and that one’s paddy.   But I w ill do it my way, not your way, and I’d encourage  people to read everything they could about the origins of Christmas and the stories that have built up around it (w) – sure, they are stories.  A Russian proverb says “A story is more powerful than the Tsar.” 

  Let’s hope ours, acted on, believed in and committed to, will be more powerful than Putin (w).

Forget endless food of no value overloaded with fat and sugar and heaven knows what else (dw)  Only those catering to extended groups need food on this scale (dw)  You make a selection from the trimmings the children adore – they are unnecessarily expensive unless they mean something to  you (dw).  I have unscented candles 365 days of the year (w) though I was tempted to one in a dark red glass container, scented with things I liked .  But I don’t need it. 

For the first time for ages, I saw a coat I liked (w), a bracelet I liked (w) and a tempting lip gloss  (w) .  A person can dream.  All three of these could be countersigned as wishes (wh).  I don’t need them and can’t afford them but it was lovely to see something I really liked, to have an innocent yearning for something that pleased my eye. 

 I wish(wh) to keep my temper better – I have lost it twice recently with twits. Yes   that is a value judgement.  Trimmed with your best baubles, a twit is a twit.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if people reinvested in basic courtesies and good manners , realizing that this is the hallmark of power and maturity, not necessarily weakness and evasion (wh).   It’s all in the tone. Whoever is next in power, I hope they can communicate better than over the last many years (wh).   It’s a learned skill, it should be mandatory in public life to learn it.     Make war on dumped rubbish, large or small, get some of the bright directionless young to do something about it (wh) Believe in commonsense (wh), smile more often than frown (wh) and understand that this world is the only one we have and cherish it (heartfelt).

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on the record

Posted on November 18, 2025 | Leave a comment

Three cheers for John Humphrys

about whom I know nothing beyond that he gave a me an interview at the old Talk Radio (briefly a radio station), encouraged me at one of the few industry  do’s I could be persuaded to attend  and spoke with unexpected candour to me at  Radio 4, in the bowels of the BBC, long before its present convulsions. (see the owl in last week’s annalog – personal experience of him, myself as witness.)

Accurately quoted temperate and even appropriate criticism of the BBC (for whom he worked 30 years and more) from his latest book (2019) took him he writes “from hero to zero in the BBC.”    And therein lies the problem – corporate defensiveness is his description.  I call it bad management.

And of course Donald Trump

is going to pursue charges against the BBC: he is famously litigious, he has several actions outstanding in the US including against The Wall Street Journal.  He can afford it, and he hopes it will keep the mind off Epstein, his involvement with whom in the US still has a way to run and fallout that can’t be estimated.   What we used call “trouble at the mill.”

If it is a mark of appreciation to continue to be interested in somebody when they get it wrong, I’d think of Michelle Obama

(new book The Look, about dressing for every kind of eye, and why, and how.) 

Having read her autobiography Becoming, I was agreeably surprised.  But then she appeared for Kamala Harris’s ill fated campaign and for my money got it all wrong.  She looked wrong, wearing black (very difficult on tv camera), too much jewellery, fake plaits and she had (as is common now) her speech on autocue.  And it was wrong – too long, too much agreed hagiography – ill judged.  I wanted to shout “Throw it away and speak!”  

Those were the days …  

But I like her and she carries with great grace being 6 feet tall, Afro-American, good looking, intelligent and successful.  And it’s hard.  Easier to criticize her arms than listen to what she is trying to do.

I think of Shabana Mahmood, the only front ranking Labour government appointee I have seen, unequivocally praised in print by political rivals. 

She works, she’s bright, she’s trying to do something on which it is too easy to pour scorn – and be herself, a British born Asian (parents from the Pakistani side of Kashmir) making difficult decisions in public.    She appears less in the press that a President’s consort so we haven’t got round to sniping about her sartorial taste yet but just wait till she makes a misstep – and you will hear all about her flat hairdo and the length of her skirt.

I don’t want to write about the BBC, I don’t know nearly enough but you can rely on JH’s experience of “you’re either on the bus” ie blanket endorsement “or off the bus” ie dare to have an independent thought and the doors close. 

This is an illness of radio in general.  One minute you are doing it to apparent praise and certainly appreciation and the next minute, you end the programme on Friday – and you’re gone   -somewhere else, gardening, extended plastic surgery – gone.

But it is kind of shocking to see it, in measured tones, in print, years after the event – and I did wonder.  Senior political reporter treated just like little me – till I could find another raft and scull to something else. Public life means you treasure your real friends and you learn to roll with the curious, the disapproving, the unfriendly.  Reinvention may be just as profoundly considered but less talked about and quite different.

Would I consider another radio show?  Yes, if I could work out the logistics of it, through fatigue to a quiet mind.   But nobody is offering.   I had a wonderful innings.   Nothing lasts forever.  There are second acts in public life but we only call them second acts because they involve the same progenitor: what is done is almost without exception very different.  Like marriage – for better or worse.  

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as others see us

Posted on November 11, 2025 | Leave a comment

Every so often, some kind person  suggests that I

might write another book … For the record, I wrote  three or two and a half  – this last was really commentary (I learned to call it a monograph) on some previously unknown  pictures of  the  film star Joan Crawford, who caught my  imagination.  JC’s story was the first time I  appreciated the cost of coming from nothing to something and having to make your life up, not once, but over and over again.  It also taught me that you should never be surprised at the backstory of an enormously successful person,

especially in media,  because  what is seen is  underwritten  by a lot of other less attractive qualities.

On BBC Radio Four Wednesday 12 November  you can hear the story of a writer hung out to dry, after many years of work which fed her writing, the in-person support of those she wrote about  and, for my money critically, that the people in power in the publishing company had not read the book that set off this catastrophic unravelling.  And  finally shamingly had to admit it. That is of course now down played  by  a statement from the current “suit” about  it being in the publishers` past,

deeply regrettable, sincere apologies to all concerned, etc.

Categoric statement about any kind of creativity:  if you haven’t with your own eyes

seen the picture, read the material (article, magazine, leaflet, book and so on), seen the film or play, examined the statue or the woodcut  – you don’t know what the hell you are talking about.  And this story, of the author Kate Clanchy called Anatomy of a Cancellation, is about how you can be taken against to the detriment of your life and work. 

I remember meetings with publishers.  I had sort of some sort  literary representation at one time.   I didn’t generate  pennies or profile so I probably wasn’t as interesting to them as they gave  me to understand.  Nor as malleable, or as skillful as they in those first enthusiastic moments  implied.   Thank heaven.

I remember changes of personnel at publishers without so much as “I thought you’d like to know …”  although I was directly involved. I remember disinterest and I remember dissatisfaction (personal, this) with the length of the procedure.

I wrote a memoir ( you couldn’t call it an autobiography – too soon) on spec.  No money changed hands, I wanted to see if I could do it.  I think of it  as I affectionately  pat the kitchen table (still with me) at which I wrote it, on a reconditioned manual typewriter (office model) which I still prefer.  

Hardback was painless, it went to paperback where a snooty editor asked me for a definition of “pack ice” – I said she’d  find it in the dictionary, which is where I found it – and checked it, before I used it.  I fought for the text I had written. 

It’s not my favourite book  but  I reread it a couple of years ago without  regret.    I didn’t get much in the way of review, because it was unfashionably candid.

Bear in mind please, that this is at a time when I thought writing a book was the be-all and end-all and would  confer on me  a kind of direction and serious mindedness to which I aspired.   And  respect. 

I wrote a novel of which I was reminded the other day when SR sent me a note about it and  A Psycho Analytic Analysis of the Mother and Daughter Relationship in … of which I had never heard. 

  36 years later,  I live and learn.  Mine is very much a first novel, an only novel.  I had a lot of work to do and I didn’t do it.

I learned over time various truths about  me, the life I was in, and writing.  I discovered that I might aspire to journalism – which was  going to be a long journey, God Bless the New York Review of Books, Robert Caro and all sorts of  people who made me think and kept me going, try again, try again – and a whole new appreciation of the  broadcast spoken word as  achievement.

No such thing as white collar occupation – blood on every collar !     

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