Tag Archives: writing

control

Posted on November 4, 2025 | Leave a comment

Anthony  Hopkins

is a very good actor.  That’s all I need to know about him.   And in the interview in advance of a memoir (he’s 87) a thoughtful journalist doesn’t get much more. 

I read the piece once, yes, yes, and then I read it again.  Of course  AH  wouldn’t tell you if he ever had therapy.  Why would he ?  Why would anybody in public life who has drawn on the wellsprings of rejection, confusion, anger for  most of his life ?   The French say “Don’t spit in the soup.”  If this what  make things tick

for you, don’t  be seduced into analysis of it (pardon the pun). Or confession.  Control.

One of the illusions of success in any field is that you will be able to control what goes forward.  Or at the very least have  input into it. As life unspools

before you (whoever) realise that none of the stratagems in which you were encouraged to believe work,  much  beyond washing your neck and survival.  And you file what you do control under the mental equivalent of lock and key.  Not tangible lock and key of course, because a real lock begs to be undone by somebody, for one reason or another.  As my  lovely deep voiced neighbour Carly says “everybody has secrets.”   And a secret is only a secret if you tell it to nobody.  Or the one person you can trust.

We acknowledge now how out of control we are. 

  I am keeping BT’s last letter to me as evidence of  how not to write a letter, any letter, personal or professional, starting with chummy and ending with “how to make a complaint” – which they have just cancelled.   I rang.  The office is in a geographical area I know and the accents are not unfamiliar to me.  Ears still good.  And alongside the accent, the  young woman on the phone had a voice like a hysterical clockwork mouse.  And  (God forgive me) six sentences in, I put the phone down.  She rang back.  “’S BT” she squeaked. “I said “Yes, I’m sorry, I hung up.   I am familiar with the accent, I am the other end of the country, old and  you should not be doing that job.  You are unintelligible.  “  Phone down.  

That represents a life change for me.  I have been young, poor, unskilled, desperate – but you could hear me – in life, or on the phone.   That’s all the control I have. 

I had another model of different variety, same ailment re the delivery (cherished) of the newspaper I read.  Operator didn’t listen  – I was quiet and civil, promise.  On the third repetition, and her repeated unnecessary apology, I pointed out with force that (fourth time) a colleague of hers had asked me to call back if what happened October 25 ever happened again and it had, November 1.  

I know I have a “thing” about communication.  It’s been my life, from childhood with articulate accessible parents ,through the experience of being ill as a child, learning, learning, learning and some success.  Do I have the illusion that I am in control of it ?  Honestly ?  More than many.  But like a good carpenter, I am still practicing. And I still get it wrong.

Nora  who is  American, intellectually educated and capable, 24, whom I met at a bus stop said  unequivocally “I am terrified of where we now and what might happen …  The  working models my parents instilled into me don’t work any more.  There are no jobs …”

Did  anybody  – I hesitate to say  “in power” because that’s a relative term – think about masses of  lower down the scale jobs being axed ?  At that level – I lived  there for a long time – you don’t work, you don’t eat.  And it is happening simultaneously with the well educated, the skilled .  Let’s not hire them it is too much trouble. They are replaceable.   

How are we going to feed those who can’t work ?   How many good minds are shelfstacking in  outfits  themselves under hostile takeover from machines ?

Shoppers as opposed to  shopping addicts ( the first goes to buy, the second goes to spend) know  that you can’t have  what you want.  You can only have what   “they” want to sell you.   40 years ago  my mother said “You have only to like something for it to be withdrawn.”

No this is not a declaration  of mass victimhood but it is conjecture into what we control , really.   Not very much.  If the late great Aretha were singing now, the anthem would be called “Disrespect”    and we are being offered political roads lined with roses.  The problem is, none of them leads anywhere without immense cost and  whence you do not want to go.

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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.   

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not that simple…

Posted on October 21, 2025 | Leave a comment

Apparently Mark Twain

said “if you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything” which is one of many largely impressive, occasionally gnomic utterances about the nature of a beast for which we need to have more understanding and respect.  

My sister didn’t care if she trod on your toes if she told you what she really thought.   And most of us have come across someone like that.  And it’s a weapon.  Not only says “I see you for what you really are “ or “what it really is”  – both of which are perceptions – but claims moral high ground. 

The truth may be simpler but there is a way to tell it and a time to tell it.   

 And how long are we going to confuse therapies of the mind with media?  It may feel wonderful  to tell all on camera  but better and safer in a more human context , from having tea or coffee privately in your kitchen with a good friend to the signed sealed and delivered  locked door confidence of the talking therapies.  All too soon we are in dirty linen territory, how to get back in the headlines … 

The price of fame is very high.  And a significant number of the people who attain it (rather than those who have it thrust upon them) have all the insight of a pine cone.

The weekend yielded three profiles – Keira Knightley, Charlie Sheen and Mick Hucknall – of whom two grew up and one is still a work in progress.    Yes, one woman and two men.

After years of hounding by the press,

Knightley worked out how to evade most of the worst of them but one day, still very young, she just walked away.  Her parents applauded.  And she describes how for the sake of sanity she became not-Keira, until she found a way through and could breathe. She spent her 40th birthday with her husband on a metal working course – happy.

The son of the actor Martin Sheen, Charlie hid in consumption of drugs, rewarded financially beyond the dreams of Croesus and in every other way for roles in for TV and films – married three times, paid sex with men and women and put so much up his nose and down his throat, a Mexican cartel temporarily refused to sell any more to him.  Paid bounty to keep his name out of the papers about his same sex encounters.  

Spent 30 years life trying to kill himself.  60, sober, watch this space.

And Hucknall, famously musically gifted, plain and charming, talks about a long journey which includes rescue by an imaginative art college and ends powerfully with knowing who he is – brought up  lonely by his father after his mother left, unafraid to stop when he needed to stop, understood from early days the power of deal.  And, given that we are all on the journey from youth to age, never didn’t know for long who or what or where from what he was. 

Admirable.

What becomes clear is how the rewards of extreme success get in the way of health and happiness.   As the Cheshire Cat says “We’re all mad here…”  Everything has a price tag.  Money buys perceptions or the means to block them.   And appearances are deceptive.  

Complications accrue around creativity and business deals, who’s involved, their axes to grind, rewards, perception – and so on.  If you don’t have some sense of you, the price is unpayable – in every way.

In these three weeks plus back to internet and landline (yes, I bought a mobile, a whole other discussion), I thought about my little fame.  Having my name recognised opened doors for me, it gave me pleasure.  It once got me a pair of shoes reduced.   Like everybody else, my self knowledge was learned.  I enjoyed almost everything I did and I made fewer compromises than most.  That has impact.   And these three interviews make it plain that you are not ready till you are ready.  Therapy may not work but it won’t if you don’t want it to.     And the truth will set you free.  And then it depends on how you use, for yourself and others, that freedom.     

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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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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.

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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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