Tag Archives: life

logbreeding

Posted on October 28, 2025 | Leave a comment

Sometimes you hit a log.

Smartasses will say “ Better than the log hitting you” but it feels similar. In my brief association with “proper journalism” (don’t ask) a brusque but likeable editor growled about my copy “There is a piece in here if we could just get to the hook…” He found it second para down, we moved it.

Please notice – all men!

Can’t find a hook.

Go back to the alphabet (there is a new book on the origins of the letters ) and the first letter is A. A for Andrew. I deeply do not want to write about Prince Andrew, everybody else has, seriously and snippily. Look.

He’s an unpleasant waster, wife similar. Daughters ? Daughters. I am deeply aware of the horrors of child abuse in whatever form, the hurt, the harm but I would rather not discuss it through the prism of Jeffrey Epstein and his dubious suicide.

Andrew is an ageing B for brat, the late Queen’s favourite and a lot of good it did him. Am I the only person more concerned about any harm he may have done when dealing with the no-flies- on-them Chinese in quasi diplomatic mode ? Or is some sexual variant always preferable popular discussion to political insecurity ?

And putting aside affection and respect, leaving an insoluble mess to your offspring is not a kindness. Whoever you are, tidy it up, tie it down. Poor old King, cancer AND Andrew.

B is for book(s), my revenge on scandalously unsatisfactory mess that terrestrial television is.

A respected industry friend said “I believe in the BBC” to which I retorted “I’d like to.” “ It’s our BBC” they sloganize ? I wish. In my favourite TV column endless sensible complaints about the music overlaying everything. Who listens ? Not a soul. We’re sick of repeats, yes we know it’s about money – what isn’t ? Not helped by enormous expense in paying legal fees to settle very public messes – only incurred on this management watch. Je reste ma valise, a phrase which was the finest moment of the non-French speaking husband of a Francophone friend..

C is for the corporate model which means everything is about money

– not service, not human kindness.- eroded in its turn by everything having to fit in with the plan. Not P is for personal just the plan. So when you do hit C is for consideration, you almost don’t believe it.

D is for darling which I am begin to understand is a word associated less with the theatre of my youth and more with age itself. My mother used it to me, it was a family endearment. (I suppose D is for dated – fine.)

We are not going to get through all 26 letters including X for mystery in one go so let me forward to R for readers and responders. After the very considerable technological mess I have been through, nothing could have been more generous than the Response of

F for friends. Without them, including one man who doesn’t know me from a hole in the ground, the lid of the Raeburn head would have exploded.

And then there was Y for YOU. People who read and responded, keeping one of my sorely tried feet on the ground. I can still make sentences, they haven’t all gone off to watch Traitors or Strictly.

They do have minds and thoughts and sensibilities and – they know what they like when they read it. T is Thank you – big thank you. Also old fashioned, don’t care, valuable phrase. One of the tall young Asian men cultivated by the friendly neighbourhood pharmacist recognizes me, thawed by assiduous politeness on both sides, and yesterday made a joke. Feet under the table, bless you. Welcome.

F is for flight of ideas

Heavily medicalized description – mine is more benign

(look it up) which is a wonderful image. Most of what I do is that or starts there. Only sometimes the ideas hide. What you write is wooden. It doesn’t cook. There isn’t a link, only the writer has to see the link though it’s wish fulfilment when other readers get it.

I used to think that I would never amount to a hill of beans because I hadn’t suffered enough. I thought I was finished at 19, I hadn’t as my pa pointed out, even started. Did I have a way to go – not a clue beyond doing my best and reading a lot. Hooray for logs.

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.

last

Posted on September 16, 2025 | Leave a comment

I was so busy reading, my coffee got cold. So when I had absorbed the best edition of the paper for a while, I came back into focus and reheated the drink. Can’t stand cold coffee. And I thought all over again of the vagaries of communication – not just modern communication – communication period.

In an age of increasing division, there are two nations – those online and those not. When we began annalog eleven years ago – I say we because it exists in communication – some kind soul wrote and said she wished I would be on Facebook, I had so many friends out there … And even then I knew, just as many enemies.

I spit on social media.

I am sure it has uses, some of them good, but I like my private life. Maybe I am the last generation who will have any grasp of the difference between public and private life , the difference between spoken and written, any sense of “haven’t you got enough problems ? What do you need any more for ?”

In current parlance , you can get hold of anybody. But you can’t. You can send them a message but there is no guarantee who receives it, what happens to it or how it is perceived. Finding a written article about Erin O’Connor

was like meeting a friend. I did meet her once in the street, six feet tall and colouring to die for. I said “ Excuse me but I admire you so much. Please shake hands with me” and stretched out my hand. She recognised me, we shook hands, and I told her of the early spread she had done which I kept. She said interestedly “ But why ? That was a long time ago ..” Which was logical if you spent much of your professional life in fashion. So I explained: she has a nose, I have a nose, as a definable feature we’re a group, she laughed delightedly – how you want a heroine to be.

If I were depressed I would explain that the cost of stamps is now so prohibitive that the post will die out, or be reborn again as a private paid for service because stories about things not arriving are legion, like a Christmas card in August. And lack of acknowledgement rules. NOT OK.

For all those who live through social media – even when it causes problems (like the 12 year old quoted by a sensible sounding clinical psychologist, who gets 200 hits

to start the day, loves them but finds the time and energy she needs to deal with them makes her anxious) – few have any insight into the pressure. I wonder if anxiety is as addictive as the process of using that all dominating click, while a young person would not necessarily recognise that disruption wasn’t only exciting, it was harmful.

There were always trolls, fixated people who can’t wait to be acknowledged for how they upset you. There was always somebody in any size audience and you learned to be ready and wary. Now they have an additional credence – the message is widely disseminated, which give sit a kind of acceptability. I don’t accept it.

I could write a list of people I would like to be in touch with , to commend or condemn but I have to admit (to myself as well as the reader) that part of that transaction is the acknowledgement.

Which is not under control. You may write to Keir Starmer expressing concern for his response to Mandelson – not only for what he (KS) didn’t “get” but for what Mandelson is, was and always will be – but there is no guarantee it reaches target, it is open to perception and abuse by every pair of hands through which it passes – hard copy, on the way to the bin or the shredder: electronic comment – well, how long is a piece of string ?

When I speak about communication, I mean me to thee, thee to me. Having written for publication for years, I accept that the words are open to interpretation which is why I am serious about what I write, Throw that into the public pond – and we’re back to throwing stones into water

– the ripples go on forever.

Tag Archives: life

logbreeding

running standing still

last

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