A word of praise for the BBC.
Not only are they rerunning Hetty Wainthropp Investigates but so far, they are doing it in order. This is rare. The schedulers usually throw in any old episode of a long series for the mugs who pay the license fee and use terrestrial tv. The contempt is that the audience won’t notice the difference.
Everybody is different. Pushed to define why this series appeals to me, I’d fall back on the writing. Which recently contained a better written version of “You’re breathing – do something with it.”
With the back injury I recently described, my reading was limited to chunks of serious journalism. I didn’t always agree with it, but it made me think.
My father’s maxim was “learn something every day” – ie do something with your life. I am only describing what I do because it is available to me.
In this late phase of my life, I was always hearing about people who did so much, who accomplished and travelled and signed up for extra mural degrees. I read, again my father teasing “read , mark, learn and inwardly digest.”
It’s not useful to say I don’t care what Donald Trump says.
Presidential blurt is driven by all sorts of input, much of which we can only guess at, but he is the President of United States. Because he can speak in an accessible way, it doesn’t follow we like what we hear, as Europe learned at Davos – not just the political figures, all the economic ones whose attendance we so often forget – bankers and investors and business. But it was a wakeup call. The American Dream is over.
Various chasms yawn at various feet
– it won’t be the same for everybody. Keep calm and carry on looks great on a tea towel but the application is GBCute if we are not going to look at the wider implications and get to grips with them. The more I read about politics, the less I like it – but I don’t like it (them?) any better anywhere else.
In the 50s/60s series based on Simenon’s Maigret which runs on Saturday night TPTV, Maigret says to his wife “Politics – dirty word my dear – excuse me.” It’s like cleaning lavatories.
Unpleasant, but somebody has to do it.
And of course ego is involved. It usually is. I long to be a more useful person. This week for example, I would like to make people laugh. I love to make people laugh. And I accept that a great part of daily journalism is to do with distraction – “how I learned to love my body at 44 “ (not a moment too soon), “I’m a lustful 90” (I don’t care ), Traitors and why Alan Carr is a national treasure (oh spare me!)
I recently began to think about all the “modern” things that have bypassed me
ie microwave, mobile phone (until recently, still don’t use it), tablet, leggings, white pointed toe shoes (and other outer aberrations like false eyelashes like fences, big lips, plastic bosoms and preformed butts). The couturier Valentino may be dead but glamour lives. I have never sent a text. I don’t know what an app is. I do know that yesterday I met a woman half my age looking for a particular thing in the supermarket and I said “You could probably get it on line”. “I don’t want to go on line” she said. “Not for clothes, not for food, not for anything.” I nearly cheered.
Making use of breathing means I am living in my life. It is not over there somewhere, waiting as at a bus stop for further rehearsal. This is it.
While acknowledging the use of occasional delivery, I do not want to live inside my home, pressing buttons and I don’t want to live life outside my house at one remove ie screen filtered.
Allowing for all the bad news, which is sadly as much the attitude of reporting news media (it’s the way they currently do it) as what is happening , I like my life. I am not big on regret.
I am capable of meltdown (you should have seen me one day last week) but I get through. Still breathing.
Annalog 