Tag Archives: family

still the story

Posted on November 25, 2025 | Leave a comment

At 4.30 or so on Friday afternoon to a noise like nuts and bolts being shaken in a wooden box to the attacking rhythm of a pneumatic drill,

like hailstones

the screen failed.  I tried to revive it and got a unctuous message about not being able to repair your screen automatically at this time ho hum… The computer man’s company, conceived for business ventures run from home, the elderly and first time users, Is open Monday through Friday so I wasn’t going to be able to do anything until Sunday night/Monday morning when I could phone for help.

Like a thunderstorm, all blown out by the following morning, thank you heaven, on we go.   Self awarded self little red glass heart signifying sangfroid.  

nearest I get to cool

I had looked at the Christmas box, also red, and it had looked at me, so I took a bus to the front of a local church where cards are sold every Christmas.  It was chastening.  Nothing I would buy and if I did, nothing I would send.  I came out into a half closed main road, the smell of heating up fast food in booths, badly relayed rock, five foot teddy bears and mammoth pink bows on lampposts.

I met Ben the florist and told him I can’t do this.  “Why do you think I’m here?  Neither can Dad.   Took one look and went home …”  looking at me, adding wrily.  “It’s only today, gone tomorrow.”   I said “Thank God”… 

I know several people who really dislike Christmas. 

I am not one of them.  But I hate the hijack into ruthless commerciality and even more pink.  Got nothing against pink but Christmas  colours are silver and gold, red and green, with a permitted sidebar into blue and white shading into silver if you must.  And I don’t want to be “must ed” from November on, through an increasingly desperately extended “Christmas season”.

So Denning and I discussed cards.   

 I love Christmas cards, so does he.  We send them – by the Post Office recommended dates if not earlier.  We chose them carefully, with more affection than formality, a hello/how are you catchup once a year to a wide range of people – some you don’t want to think you forgot (Mark in the depths of rural Wales), some in remembrance of things past as well as present, some new – but we agreed, if they are not in the post by the end of the first week in December, who knows when they will get there?  You hear stories of the card that arrived in April the following year, the ones that were dumped and it is an item – a Christmas present – cards, envelopes, stamps, the labour of writing and it is only worth it,

if it is worth it to you.  

Since then, SR sent me a pack of black and white cards from a sketch by an artist I admire – Eric Ravilious.  Hooray.  That broke the card deadlock.  Waterstones came up with something I warmed to in three designs out of four – so I grabbed those.  Christmas cards are on the schedule.

 In New York 62 years ago I was thrilled by the range and variety of every kind of card, especially the picture for the sake of the picture and selling you an envelope, write your own message cards, still am but the range is shrinking. 

Think of the industry that could go to the wall – paper, card, original design or rights to the images, assembly, marketing.   Not a cheap option.  And then add the postage.  

All my long life, people had to think about what they could and would spend at Christmas – and make choices – and that’s fine.   You don’t think Mary wanted to ride that donkey all those miles to Bethlehem, do you?  It was the best Joseph could do.  And the ox moved over, to share the stall with the tired ass.   Not a believer for many years, I love the Christmas story – it is one of hope – and you can’t tell it till you get there – that when you are down and finished, the phone rings or a note comes or a hand is extended, food is offered, warmth shared.   The Kings come through the night with gifts

and the shepherds bring their lambs.  A story for all of us – and we are all stories.        

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running standing still

Posted on September 30, 2025 | Leave a comment

This is all wholly personal. 

It always has been but more than ever , just what I think.  All written in advance  because I am about to go  down the tubes  or up a flue and I wanted  to  offer something before my worst fears are recognized and accursed technology takes a bite out of me.

Likes for annalog have been absolutely heart lifting, enormous thanks.

Money runs through the hands of  Sarah Ferguson,

erstwhile wife of Prince Andrew, like water.  She has never had enough money to live as mythology suggests she might.  So , whatever the greater ramifications are, she was nice to the disgraced Jeffrey Epstein because he gave her money.   She has done a lot of things for money, most of them worked only for a short time and financial difficulties occurred, occurred and re-occurred.   No  dough.  Heaven knows what she spends it on.

The Prime Minister

may have all sorts of moral and ethical ideas about Israel and Palestine  but I suggest that recognizing  the state of Palestine was actually a sop to his younger  MPs, who want to be seen to be being effective in their first Parliament and who themselves or their constituents are largely swayed by the horrors of  Gaza.   Of course it isn’t as simple as that – but it is.  It is called realpolitik and I looked the word up before I used it.

I have  been  very interested to see two US clinical psychologists  talk a great deal of sense: one working in media and clinically (Dr. Martha Deiros Collado, who made the point about  the addiction of anxiety I quoted) and Dr. Marc Brackett who has founded a department of emotional intelligence at Yale, whose programmes are used to some small extent in this country –  and about teaching children to express and negotiate their emotions.  The Princess of Wales  rates him. 

And for both of them – in the very limited amount I have read – the elephant in the room is parents.  

We increasingly ask teachers to do what we don’t or can’t do or just don’t want to do ourselves – just as  we  all too often ask the police to act as interim medical aides or social workers – and complain mightily when  due to sheer lack of man and woman power , they can’t and won’t.

Running standing still means none of this is new.  It’s where we are.   The names  of the commentators may change and how they package their ideas may have a new title   but bottom line, this is where we are.  Both of the two I speak of   know we have to start somewhere and neither of the two I refer to think difference can be made easily.  Hooray.

President Trump has his views.   The driver on the way to hospital  was a former Afghani farmer and he talked very intelligently about mass production of food and abuse of hormones up to and including the imbalance of the genders: more women than men

because of the hormones in mass produced food, especially meat.  This is not new  but people won’t think about it.  This is not an attack on farmers, I am not a closet vegan.  But for the majority of us who like a varied diet he talked a lot of sense.  And we have to keep on talking about it because people won’t think.  Nobody can think for you, you have to do it for yourself.  

And something happened to me last week, that I have seen on film and read about  but have never experienced before.  On the bus were a couple, Middle Eastern, neither  dripping with money nor starrily  lovely.  And she was wearing a dark grey roll necked sweater.  Not £800 ‘ worth of cashmere – but it is rare to see a woman from there in a dark colour.  And we had already grinned at each other.

Getting off the bus, I said “How nice you look in that colour !  And I am old, I am  allowed to say this…” And she took my hand.  Which she held gently and lightly throughout a brief conversation with both of them.  So  for those few minutes not running, not standing still, just breathing the sweet air of kind difference – which is currently pretty rare.

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the meaning of the word

Posted on November 26, 2024 | Leave a comment

We went through  a time when it was fashionable to talk about stress

as in “She’s very stressed” or “completely stressed out.”   Refreshingly the actress Judi Dench remarked that she was tired of hearing it, there was good stress and bad stress, good and bad sense in every term.    There are all sorts of other terms that I would use instead.   As soon as a word or a term goes into common usage across the board, I look at it sideways.  Words change in time and context.  And  like everything else, our opinions of words range from “words have power”

to “talk’s cheap”  with all the variants in between.

We are a month away from the big  midwinter festival, call it what you will.   My  hairdresser (40s) remarked yesterday  that she didn’t want a month spent building up to Christmas, the anticipation  was maddening,  marketing coercion  lamentable and what had that to do  with Christmas ?  

Whether you believe in it or not, Christmas is a story  we need.  That’s part of its magic.  As far back as you go in human history, there are stories with these components: renewal in the dark days of winter, a magical child, miraculous birth, a humble so admirable human father figure, purity, spiritual apparitions to simple people,  visitors from far away who recognized a sign – The Sign -captivatingly a star. 

And I am tired of hearing the Victorians simultaneously blamed and admired for the Christmas glut.  Because glut it is and a long way from where the story began.

At best, Christmas balances out between half you like and half you could do without.   Too often, it comes trailing obligation and an absolute inability to move on resulting in stultifying artificial interaction.   Once again, there is good and bad in this. 

If you really don’t get on with your family who are as out of tune as broken bells,

you can either manage a couple of days of observance and civility or you really have to declare “not this year “ preferably by October and stick to it.  As the last survivor of my natal family where there was pain as well as joy at Christmas, I cherish the good bits, shelve the rest and reinvent for myself with the aid of the bits I love.  This year I found the courage to decline a neighbour who wants to fill up the days with underemployed bodies.  Not mine.     And asked “what are you doing for Christmas ?”   I say  “As little as possible (adding under my breath, with a good heart).”  

But if financial insecurity continues, this will be the last year of cards

– too expensive to buy let alone send.  Every second named writer will be opining about  the year of “Christmas stress” – buying, cooking, dressing, drinking, I’d saying  “behaving” not because you believe in it but because you don’t know what else to do.  And that old cry about “everybody else does”.  So ?   Be the first to do it different.  And don’t confuse sending cards to a few people you’d like to remember with sending them because you “should”.

And my early Christmas story is the two young (20s) nephews of an old friend with a family every bit as  difficult and dissonant as the bells I referred to earlier  who is making  Christmas for them, their mother (her favourite sister), her mother (my age) and an old friend.  And the boys  abjured “Somewhere to come, all  together, food and drink and warm – it’s not about presents.”  

Bless them, let’s have a few more like that.

Money has gone mad – £29 for a nailbrush ?   £135 for a hairbrush ?   Hiked up and sold to you as a “must have.”   What about the people who simply haven’t got it ?    Harder and harder to find anything small and pretty and inexpensive.   The under two foot Christmas tree I so enjoyed doubled in price: keep it.  I could rant about Christmas food because I don’t like most of it and I don’t buy slavishly.

And I was shocked earlier in the week when after God knows what in the way of other people’s troubles,    two friends spoke to me very firmly about stress in the aftermath of mini strokes.  And I listened, I understood the meaning of the word.

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