Tag Archives: fiction

gold among the dross

Posted on July 14, 2026 | Leave a comment

The silly season is a bit delayed but still straw-seizing

through vacations and warnings off, thanking  heaven for an horrid murder, admirable police response and victim admiration unto sainthood.  But there were treasures.

The Bayeux Tapestry arrived overnight without fuss and was installed,

first time out of France for hundreds of years. 

The family Sussex  went to  Highgrove to meet the King and Queen in an operation which must have required  the combined  skills of embassy and secret service, so we were spared breathless  accounts of what she wore and what he said.  Blood may indeed be thicker than water

but it is still only blood.

However  both the stitchery and the Sussexes were moved in  with an economy and privacy which makes me feel much better.  That power to do things without over dramatization was one for which our country was rightly famous.  Gold standard.

There are things to be said and things not to be said – I admit this ruefully, having reacted just like my mother to a memoir of a long and feeling relationship with Prince Edward, predating his marriage to Sophy.   It’s a kind of reverse therapy  situation.  You pay for therapy.  If you write it all down and it makes you feel better and sells, you make money.   

Nothing wrong with money – it’s what you will do to get it. 

In marked contrast (no I haven’t read the book, I don’t intend to – call me Miss Prunes and Prisms if you will) David Roberts wrote a lovely tribute come think piece about the natural but rare death of his little son Finny (see ForFinny.com) and the number of people who can’t or won’t mention the child.  It is a story of preventable unhappiness hence my willingness to back any fundraiser in favour of the Preventable Deaths Tracker and hooray all over again for the art of communication.  Gold.

When you love,

death does not take away that love.  It may change the terms, the perception, the proportion of it to other things, but it doesn’t vanish.  Why should it ?  A generous and constructive love is A Fine Thing, one of the best.   We don’t hear of it often – gold, pure shining gold, amid the dross.

So when I read that James Ellroy, the famous demon dog of LA 1950s crime fiction using in his new book

a character called Fred Otash, I did a doubletake.   Such a particular name, he told me -Lebanese out of Boston, when I met and for a few weeks had the acquaintance of FO.   I was working for Forum, owned by Penthouse, he was sent to meet me in LA, to guide me round  local media.  You can argue that I wasn’t important enough to trouble with, had no relevant connections – and that would be true.

But he was thoughtful and kind and funny, warned me away from Penthouse and explained why over the telephone in Chicago.  Clearly I didn’t know him long enough to know him if you see what I mean  – but his behaviour was gold to me then and now.  Unthinking kindness ie gold.

It’s interesting how taste may change, or not.  I recently rewatched a film I had always liked (The Train), and got much more out of it than the first time around.  I wonder if I shall have the same experience with the 1952 version of Moulin Rouge,

made by John Huston?  It’s on twice this week

 In wanting to know more, I pulled it up on Wikipedia and found Huston’s unwonted tribute to two British brothers who had been his producers on The African Queen – this was the follow up – and for one of whom I interviewed a hopeful secretary.  You could call it a fingertip golden brush with fame  – my speeds weren’t good enough but I was thrilled to  have been interviewed by a film producer !   Though it took me years to understand what film producers do (thank you Ed Zwick).

And my neighbour who kindly included my heavy stuff on her order in this heat – and yes, I do think of the people who make this service possible. 

And my  goddaughter who – in the midst of all the demands of her own and her work – always thinks of me. 

Gold, I tell you.

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grace

Posted on June 30, 2026 | Leave a comment

 My mother was the middle child of three sisters whose teasing father referred to them as Grace, Disgrace and Candlegrease. 

As a very little girl  I thought this wonderfully irreverent and funny.

Grace was what was said before meals, though we didn’t.  My father thanked my mother after every meal.  

I am sure I heard the opposite “disgraceful”.   And I do remember that occasionally  I heard  “graceful”  – usually of a dancer, and I do remember discovering that Ann and its variants meant grace. 

The first time I noticed grace used  to describe someone, it was Amy in the books of Louisa Alcott (best known for  Little Women and Good Wives), which I vaguely  attributed  to long skirts and good manners.

You might hear “having the grace to do the right thing”  and I focused on whatever that right thing was, rather than grace.  I didn’t think of it in connection with me. 

Through ongoing social change, big and small, changing roles, expectation and how those are defined, I have been ageing.  Beyond fortunate, I had first hand experience of that before it came to me – relatively elderly parents.   And beyond coming to terms with it, they didn’t fight it. 

…not so you can be rush off and be tweaked – to the memory of my lovely mother

It was a reality to deal with, coloured by general expectation, personal choice, physical limitation. The phrase that best described this aspect of my parents is making the best of themselves  – and it.

I am heartily sick of the pursuit of youth.   I am all in favour of changes that work for you – I have seen elderly men enhanced by better colours or different lines, a changed haircut …   I remember Bruce the Canadian filmmaker who initially dyed his hair because his partner was younger, gave up, went silver and promptly looked younger and more glamorous.   You can dress young and look silly, and dress younger and look wonderful.   Much of this now focusses on looking “hot” because that’s sex – but as  I said to a rude man years ago “Nobody  ever took me for a fella.”    

Improved health is all well and good but obsession –  with  strenuous exercise, step counting, diet, etc., etc.,  to look 20 years younger,  and how people go on about it – is  BORING .

Live out of where you are up to, remember body texture – and let me introduce you to one of the great gifts of age – grace…

Grace is what you  exercise when a young person  (I have had girls do it too) offers you a seat, or holds a door.   You don’t huff and puff about how dreadful you must be looking.  You smile your best Elizabeth II grin, say thank you with all the charm you can muster, go through the doorway or take the seat and forget it.  You have just done what the Jews call a mitzvah – a good deed.  The stressed young feel momentarily cherished for remembering some aspect of their even younger youth.  Costs nothing, mutual benefit, direct response.  Unbeatable.   

Last week an old friend, met through my son when she was in her teens, rang.  She works like a fiend, is a carer to her  disturbed mother and needy twin, so two jobs.  “I have a day off” she said.  “I’ve got the car, do you need anything.”   I said come for tea, which we never got to – it was too hot.

She brought bread for the freezer, a covered container of a wonderfully herbed salad, four peaches (“ooh” fruit), this and that and bits and the two things I had asked her to bring because she had wheels.  We talked and talked and unbidden, she told me why I mattered to her, what I did in those far away days that made the difference. 

When she left I sat in a chair and thanked heaven for the grace I didn’t know I had had or shown to her and for her grace in telling me about it now. 

No there is no mention of the World Cup, Andy Burnham or social media in this  article.  What I have written about is a largely  intangible, hard to define, human attribute, which costs nothing and makes giver and recipient feel better – even all these years later.  

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date matters

Posted on June 23, 2026 | Leave a comment

Is there a room in which sits a committee somewhere, where  it is decided which day

to dedicate to bulbs  or the celebration of Andy Burnham’s mother (yes of course I am being snide ) While we don’t know, supposition is endless and endlessly unsatisfactory.  Why do we find it so difficult not to know ?  Or to wait and see ?

21st June is  the birthday of the Prince of Wales,

the 250 years’ anniversary of the independence of the United States of America, and Father’s Day.  

You can’t argue with a birthday: it is the date on which you were born. Somebody will kindly supply it if there isn’t a record. I remember discovering  Name Day in a Russian novel, which is the day you are christened.  Nations choose days of celebration to unite the populace (lots of disagreeing citizens in the US at the moment, but all patriotic) and Father’s Day is one of the dates I query.  How did we get there ?

I am not very good at an excuse for expenditure.  I have had wonderful times and wonderful clothes but not  because somebody else

thought I should – wedding, reception, block party.  My son asked me when he was 10 or 12 how I felt about a Mother’s Day Card and we had a serious discussion. 

I said I thought it was a commercial spinoff of Mothering Sunday in the calendar (as far as I knew)of the Anglican Church and I didn’t care for what had become a kind of nakedly opportunistic commercialism.  It became a standing joke between us that he might ring  me on Mother’s Day  but  he didn’t send a card.

But  because he is facing all kinds of stuff this year and I wanted him to know I was thinking of him, I bought a Fathers Day card this year.  As a matter of  really trivial downturn one is in the range of cards available to us. 

Most of them are twee or rude, few “mean” anything so I went back to the oriental imagery he and I both admire and bought him a print of plum blossom to wish him all the positives.

To people with  unsatisfactory relationships with their fathers, from difficult interaction to physical abuse or absence , Father’s Day may be anything from uncomfortable to irrelevant.  It is irrelevant to me to because I don’t need an occasion to remember either of my parents and my father was key to my growing up.  Not that my mother wasn’t  – but  even she acknowledged that that Pa and I  had a bond.   I have previously described my parents as my friendly ghosts

– they are very present in my life.   Looking for a day to think of them specially, I’d chose their birthdays  or their wedding anniversary on Christmas Eve  

I don’t need a day to remember

all the men and women who worked and gave their health and physical soundness and lives for me to live through two world wars, and every other social upheaval you can think of.   I don’t want to be reminded of the Titanic going down – it was a vanity (unsinkable indeed) and it is a mausoleum. I wish people would leave it alone.

I love personal birthdays – mine, my friends – but I keep  a note of those in the desk diary without which life would be shapeless.  Neither party animals or big present givers  – we just remember and write appreciatively. And there are personal reasons to remember, like me and Friday  13th  of anything which I had always been taught was unlucky – but was the day I passed the 11 plus.  Still gives me a wry smile. 

This “day” of one thing or another may be a way of structuring time but it remains a mystery to me, devoted as I am to a day a t a time – one of the biggest gifts of my later life.   And I  still want to  know  who decides these  dates and why, why some are well know (like the US celebration) and why some are revealed in a “500  hundred words on National Darning Day” as a filler in the paper.  Every day is special to somebody.  

by Anthony Heywood

  • and elephants are lucky!

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words and pictures

Posted on June 9, 2026 | Leave a comment

I like to think that I saw the term“journalist” as  achievement

but it’s not true.  I thought journalism was not quite good enough writing and I wanted to be a writer.   I never made it to the writer I wanted to be but I borrowed journalist to go with broadcaster because I got so sick of being described as an agony aunt – as it says on annalog – loved the job, hated the description.  Because it devalued the intelligence, honesty and willingness to learn of the people who spoke to me on air for years.

This is all now history.  We don’t make radio like that any more.  There are those of whom I am proud to be one who are still in love with words but there are also those for whom word is a four letter thing.   I am not sure whether they practice animal noises, bird calls or are just silent.   I meet the ones that speak and I love the fact of the exchange, no matter how small.

Yesterday a handsome slightly overweight woman with tumbled black hair got on the bus with a teenage girl who had white skin, blue eyes and black brows.   Mama and I grinned at each other, and I asked where she was from, observing eyes as dark as mine.  “Spain” she said.  I said “God love you.”  They both smiled.  “And she has her papa’s colouring?”  I asked.  “My father’s” said  she proudly.   “Here we would say she’s a Celt”

I said. “And you?” she asked.  I gave her the brief version, adding “great neck, filthy temper.”   And we all laughed.    The magic of words – and age, which frees me to use them, and experience, which makes me trust what I can do with the voice that will ensure you hear what I mean.

I can’t persuade most of you to buy newspapers.  You haven’t time to read them and it’s an expensive business.   What I can tell you is that when I have a series of interesting well written items in whatever day of the week paper it is, I am delighted.

This is all to do with writing, not what but how it is written so there is a wonderful account by a man who has written a book about Alexander the Great in which his journey to writing it is alongside reinterpretation as history is unearthed and changed – up to and including his own bout with cancer.  

I prefer not to rethink my vision and version of Alexander (I spoke at the Hay Festival years ago beginning that my inspiration was a young Greek man about whom very little is known – “and you can see something of my problem!”) but the word for the piece was   “accomplished.”

I acquired The Correspondent through the local bookshop, admonished “Do try it – it’s flying out of the shop!”  There is a sketch of the author Virginia Evans

interview with Laura Hackett

in today’s review and that’s about the journey to being a writer. 

There was a time I my life when I read about Marilyn Monroe compulsively.   I will always remember sitting beside my mother as she responded to a closeup in “Let’s Make Love” with “Oh, that poor girl, the pain …”  and I was dumbstruck. 

I asked at the bus stop what she meant and she explained that beauty and talent and success are not gifts from the fairies: they cost.  How it made me think.  Always an admirer of the power of photography, there is a new exhibit of Monroe based round who took what pictures, when – proving conclusively (in one the best pieces he has ever written) that the Sunday Times art critic gets it: that camera magic is innate, whether you are subject or photographer.   

And yes, Monroe had a small surgery, probably paid for by Johnnie Hyde on the bulb of her nose and the chin, we could call it “golden plastic.”  You’d never know if you didn’t know.  Which is what reconstructive surgery sets out to be.  And no I have never had any – though I have watched it done – and I cherish the woman who got up to come after me on a bus I was leaving, to tell me how wonderful I looked.  “Thank you” I said, beaming into her face.”  Just me and God!”

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after Aesop

Posted on June 2, 2026 | Leave a comment

When Clarice comes to clean

(help since the back injury in January) at least half of what she does is social services. I know it, I said it and she laughs at  me with delight.  We share  a sense of humour, a wish to communicate, she is passionate about voice (as in radio) rather than vision, works like a Trojan, has been to hell and back, and we do really well.  I know and admit how vital voice is to me.  There is real affection – aren’t we lucky ?

So when she arrived this sweaty Wednesday, I asked her if when she had done the basics, if she would help me empty the linen chest (authentic)

because I no longer knew what was in it.  Yes, I could have done this myself – about a third of it – and then had to pause which makes such tasks interminable. 

So we began – not so difficult, a bit of cleaning out, but it led in to the wider cupboard under the stairs.  Which is where I said “What’s that ?” and pulled out a neatly fastened  biggish  box – “Oh, it’s the squirrel trap.”  She burst out laughing and I told her how when my son was living with me, a squirrel

got stuck in the kitchen, roosting behind the washing machine.   No good moving the washing machine – son did that – squirrel bolted, only  to return  like a flash from wherever else it hid, when we had left the kitchen.  This went on for  two weeks.  

I don’t know where it did the necessary and I am not going to go there.  There was no odour, how lucky were we ?  But it retired behind the machine, we could hear it. 

Eventually I went on line to The Trap Man and to this day  don’t know whether I intended to catch the beast or just to psych myself up that I could if necessary …

We were both going out, son went off before me, when I had what Clarice called my Hansel and Gretel moment.  I put a small plank on the  radiator top , not wanting the beast to break anything or be discouraged.  I covered this with a thick old towel.   I opened the sash window at the bottom and I sprinkled  almond flakes (I am an almond addict)  from the front of the washing  machine, up on the top of the radiator, across the sill, and out of the window: went out, prayed and came back.  Shut  window, listened.  Quiet.  Did that several times that night till bedtime.   Shut back door and kitchen windows with care.  Not a sound. 

  Bye bye squirrel

So I never used the squirrel trap.  Since Clarice and I  realigned the  cupboard under the stairs, I have tried to donate an unused humane squirrel trap to  the local RSPCA who don’t do wildlife (!) and two wildlife organisations who don’t do  replies to emails.  Next week I shall try and return it to The Trap Man.

I do not have  several saucers each  with some tiny  edible portion in the  refrigerator – but I do hate waste.  And the trap is unused.  Good as new, etc.

I fought the fight against mice at one stage – they  move to  pastures new when where they have inhabited is being repaired or redeveloped. 

And they made the squirrel look like a walk in the park.

Again, I didn’t want to kill them,

I just wanted them to go away.   But just when they looked like staying for ever, three things happened. 

I think they began to look for some where  more welcoming, maybe more  food – I cleared everything away as if my life depended up on it, I always do.  Secondly  I bought a benign ie unkilling trap  and one got stuck in where it banged backwards and forwards for a long time during the small hours until ARaeburn rose,  yes of course night clothes, but added essential equipment ie slippers, specs and rubber gloves.     

I filled a bucket with  cold water, put it outside the  backdoor, picked up the trap and submerged the whole thing.  When I told him, my son was appalled.  “You killed it !”   Darned right.   It was me or the mouse. 

And they left as of that night.     

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IJDGI*

Posted on May 26, 2026 | Leave a comment

If  Andrew Thingummy

is innocent of all wrongdoing,  why doesn’t he  arrange to see  both the  British and US authorities, attended by a lawyer, and answer questions?   This is known as “helping the police with their enquiries” and would go down well in support of the House of Windsor and the rest of us.  Those who give a damn.  * I just don’t get it (see title).

So – barely two days of heat – and it is already a problem and not a pleasure: I know that it can be tough for this, that and the other group  and many elderly people (me) – but this infernal desire to miserable-ise sets the teeth on edge.  

Not everything is a problem,

the world is not against most of us,  and almost everybody I know – regardless of gender, sex, education, personality and experience – is pretty good at dealing with stuff that even might not be entirely favourable ?   Stop whining.  IJDGI.

This train of thought all started because I saw a woman in Kings Road whose looks I  admired, told her so and  (she’s Irish)  we commenced to talk.  And she was the first person new to me who said  spontaneously that she couldn’t stand Chelsea Flower Show.   Her reasons were very similar to my own – the hooha, crowds of people  with their phones out, taking pictures rather than looking at anything, all local businesses not making extra, completely screwed till it’s over, 

and more bad shorts in one place than you have ever seen. 

If the Chelsea Flower Show is really so important – the British  being now rather more a nation of gardeners rather than shopkeepers – why doesn’t it charge at the gate  for the Royal Horticultural Society  – RHS box £1 per head (as in flowers )– and stop pretending to trendy with  drag queens and sex toys ?  Oh – that’s what you do in your garden …  to each to his own.

As ITV3 is rapidly becoming Midsummer Murders TV, 

could we set a date to run the whole series from Nettles start to finish (series 13, ep 8) through  Neil Dudgeon in sequence ? Apart from patronizing us into the ground (“oh they’ll watch anything”) it’s irritating and very  shortsighted, guaranteed not to improve customer relations.  IJDGI

Couldn’t we have a  series on WHY people want to watch torture, rape, murder, cruelty to children, cruelty to animals ?  It’s mostly a cuttings job ie extracts from other programmes, it needs a good presenter who can be both serious and amiable, not necessarily at the same time, and as such, wouldn’t cost the earth, especially if you reserved the right to name all the  successful series who wouldn’t contribute without a fee ?

The idea for  IJDGI came from Giles Coren,

talented son of talented father (Alan) for whom I worked at the long defunct Punch magazine in one of the bonuses of my professional and personal life.   “Oh” said  a colleague uncomfortably.  “ Aren’t they all men ?”   They were and they were terrific – amusing and agreeable, talented, not a wrong move. 

Which  brings me to GC asking whether a swan can really break a man’s arm with its wing ?  and I was transported back to Albert Park in Middlesbrough (I was about 6) with my mother when I saw my first male swan with his wings outstretched. 

He was so beautiful that I went forward – I wanted to touch him – till my mother very gently called me away and echoed this piece of folk wisdom, so often repeated we think it is true.   But this is an I Do Get It because (according to the British Wildlife Magazine) it’s an image of the strength of the swan. Not a reality.  Or at least not a documented one. 

If I read another article about somebody who had  a horrid home or difficulties on the way, I will refer them to  the designer Alice Temperley(“I’ve had my breakdowns over the years  but I have kept them private”)  and a number of musicians and performers interviewed recently who have hinted at accepting who you are (not Mick Jagger)  and enjoying life all the more for knowing it.   Context – written or spoken – is key.      

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missing bits

Posted on May 6, 2026 | Leave a comment

I was  brought up short the other day  by  two of my young neighbours in discussion about what there was on television.  They mentioned The Secret Garden (David Attenborough’s latest) and I said “The music spoils it for me.”  But they agreed – they both liked the music. 

  And I  (cynical old bat next door but one) thought “Yes, because you are used to it.”   Grew up with it, knew no other.  But I did.  

And yesterday a friend  told me  most unsettling stories about his experience with his GP re his skin and the A&E in  a local (if you have a car) hospital, about his eye.   And he said , not for the first time, that he felt everything was changing and declining round him.  He never thought he would feel nervous walking to the tube station and going two stops to his film club.  But he missed that security.

One of the things I thought I missed was the chance  to have a column in a newspaper.  And when I came to understand the  relentlessness of  writing  copy to a standard every week, I saw too how easy it was to fall into “ a knocking piece”  – moaning or  bitching and moaning, amusing if you could manage it but otherwise  a complaint or a series of them … columnists  did it a lot, and I didn’t want to.  

The world is full of things that  make me purse my lips so I look for the ones that make me smile. I grinned at a man in his forties making his way down the bus the other day and before he got out, he said  into my ear  “You smile !   How wonderful …”

Forget Pollyanna’s “Glad Game”.  

The world is full of big bad horrible things and I am helpless in the face of many of them.   And I am  more and more aware that whatever you say, with whatever degree of  sincerity, it can be perceived, written or talked about  as the opposite.   The  explosion of every kind of media has made that worse.   Everyone has a comment to make, with or without a name attached, and people glory in the confusion.  I don’t.

You know you are old when you bought a book, read it and let it go and then miss it – and buy it again.  Which I just did (Pied Piper by Nevil Shute).    Old verities …

And the pernicious use of the word “everybody.”  

Nobody is everybody. It’s marketing hype. I emphasise  again and again that we have different tastes and  now I would add that the herd mentality – “oh everybody likes a white wedding”  – won’t spare us where we are up to.

I have never liked white weddings, not even as a young child.  

I don’t know which offends me more – the pretence or the expense.  I could write a list of performers I won’t give house room.  Alan Carr (rapidly becoming the C in BBC), with all that glub round his middle or Ant and  Deck from whom heaven deliver me.   Voices like  nails on glass and self satisfaction enough to make you throw up.   Every time I see  some  reporter on camera waving his or her hands  around, I think of  my first piece to camera in Oxford Street and the producer’s voice in my ear saying “Put your hands down, dear.   You are not a windmill !”  Where is  he now when we need him ?

I have never been to a hen party.  I don’t think I missed much. 

Let everybody have their go – I am all in favour of it from karaoke to beauty pageants, from bungee jumping to the long slog to the break in opera or acting or starring (different !) or public life.

There was a lesson to be learned from the recent US state visit of the King and Queen. 

You can make the best of yourself – and I am all for that – but you are what you are.  And if you haven’t spent time finding out about that – you are going to miss that security in the days to come. 

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fallout

Posted on April 21, 2026 | Leave a comment

One of the things that fascinates me about journalism

is that somebody else – not often the person who is writing or speaking it – decides which way the item will be presented, slanted by need for audience, bias of producer, etc. and where we are up to in whatever story.

How can we go on being asked to be surprised at the depth of confusion and misinformation that surrounds Peter Mandelson? 

  It’s how he thrived.  You don’t need to be a major wheeler dealer, gay, a fixer or anything else of any weight.  Most of us know or have experience of somebody like that, from the “I just wasn’t quite sure about him” to the “No way, Jose!”      If he were a builder, you’d use him once but never again. 

Starmer is unpopular so he can’t do right for doing wrong.   It’s only 2 weeks max since I read an article which said, as he was going to be trashed at the forthcoming elections, he might usefully use the time left to make unpopular decisions, he was so unpopular already it wouldn’t make any difference to him and it might to us.

So he makes a decision – that’s difficult enough in the existing system of what I’d call endless chewing – bang. 

  And is promptly accused of throwing the head of the civil service under a bus.

Point of reference: making a decision has (at least) two sides and one of them is that somebody or bodies has to be in the wrong.    Unless you are the Faerie Queen.   And the Civil Service runs the country, never mind who is in power.

If there is a service to be rendered to British public life, it is to revise the system by which we are governed because it takes too long.  Or if it is to stay, we have to negotiate and accept a limited application of short cuts.   By the time all the considerations are over, the situation is likely changed.   Trump exploits this, Putin too (differently, same game) and Xi too.   

I began this week thinking “Oh, stop …”    Whinge, whinge, whinge about the state of our defences and no action.  This lamentably reduced military ability has been achieved over many years- when Labour and Starmer were not in power.

There is an old phrase “guns not butter” and successive governments, lulled into false security by peace, ran down the guns and distributed the butter – better housing and schooling, better medicine, more money around …    We are all very wise after the event.

The Armed Forces and the BBC have this in common: we over economised and wondered why the service faltered.   Neither organization connected with us, the poor devils who finance them. 

I can go on and on about television

(I don’t listen to radio – I confess I loved being part of it but don’t want to listen – never did) but I am bleakly cheered by more and more people complaining about the quality of scriptwriting and the gutlessness of production – an odd wonderful item is not enough when we all pay for this.   The repeats are like echoes down a well, repeating themselves and the programming is dire.   

The few good bits are tucked away later than most of the ageing population – which is the principal audience – stays awake.  

By the same token, the endless repetition

of the same complaints, and the same shortcomings – whether political or artistic – wearies us.  You can see why people switch off to football or snooker, to endless hooey about the Windsors larded with looking back at what once was,

But you can’t live in the past.  We are in the present.  And in that present, I have found joy in much better journalism that I knew existed which includes a piece about the Vice President JDVance and the memorable image “When you look … for Vance’s defining identity, the soul of his true self, there is nothing there, only a pile of receipts from… useful transactions.” (Gerard Baker, The Times.)    Which provoked a wonderful conversation on the bus last week with a CofE vicar, a girl in a wheelchair, a friend of mine and me – exchange, laughter and handshakes.

When did you last hear or see the word “soul” in a political piece?

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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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