Sunday 20th November

As you know I am a great fan of Art, especially paintings.  I quite like drawings and can appreciate the skill involved, but they are all too often quite one-dimensional and are in any case often only sketches for the real thing – paintings.  I can remember discussions that often spilled into arguments with Adrian, as he said that one shouldn’t be seduced by colour, but concentrate on tone and texture and the inter-play between light and shadow.  Well, I always have been seduced by colour, especially in those early Impressionist paintings which seem to burst with vibrancy and light; a new way of seeing indeed.  There have been several schools of painting, or movements, since the Impressionists, and one I could never learn to like was the Cubists, and the leading light of that and its most famous exponent was Pablo Picasso.

And it’s not as if he cannot paint; I spent a wonderful afternoon in a small gallery in Barcelona a few years back, which was exhibiting hundreds of drawings and sketches and quite a few paintings by the young Pablo, and they are superb.  Mostly very realistic and incredibly well executed.  And I simply adore his blue period, where his use of that colour (and pink too) was brilliant, and not all of these paintings are simple realistic interpretations, many are almost abstract workings of an idea, but are held together by the wonderful brushwork and balance of the compositions.  In many ways he was copying and refining the Impressionists work, such as outlining in black, made famous of course by van Gogh.  It was with Cubism that he began to lose me I am afraid.  He was heavily influenced by Georges Braque, and together they created a whole new way of painting; it was an attempt to represent the three dimensional world on a flat canvas.  Many of their early works are still good to look at, with their softer colours, and refracting surfaces and the things they are painting, the subject matter, is still obvious and recognizable.  But I find that Picasso’s later works are mostly ridiculous, with their split faces and simple, almost cartoon-like blocks of colour, and scrolls for hair, and fat short limbs. I find they simply distort rather than reveal the beauty of the subject, but then I don’t really think that he was seeking beauty, but what he considered a deeper truth lying beneath the surface.  And this is where I find we differ; I love Art for its attempt at distilling beauty and perfection, especially from the world around us.  To me it is saying, ‘Look, I may simply be a person, but I am attempting to show you a moment of beauty I have captured in paint, or maybe a photograph, or a piece of music, or a poem or a story. I am trying to show you that this is the way the world is, this is the human condition.’  I think Picasso is more cynical, he is saying, ‘You may think you know what something looks like, but believe me, there is something else lurking just beneath the surface, and it is my particular task, to show it to you.’

Of course, I could be totally wrong, and there are plenty who find all of Picasso’s paintings wonderful. Maybe they are all right, who knows, but it doesn’t stop me loving his early work,

but really disliking the later ones. You decide.

Saturday 19th November

Oh, you deadliest of sins, Gluttony – indeed, which is different from Greed, which comes later. And the next town of Anna and her sister the dancer Anna’s journey was Philadelphia, though again why that city should be singled out for such a sin I have no idea.

Gluttony; one wonders historically if this was such a common sin; maybe amongst the rich, especially when one reads about late Victorian and Edwardian banquets, where every variety of cooked and cold meats and pies and puddings were in abundance, and the rich rarely worked either, so over-eating and obesity must have been quite common, in any case gout (supposedly brought on by good living) was commonplace.  The poor, of course, would have mostly been thin.  And in Asia and several developing countries, being fat is automatically associated with wealth; the fatter, the richer, the better seems to be the motto, but as this may be classed as social eating rather than Gluttony as a vice in itself, maybe we can excuse it.

Nowadays the poor are often the fat ones, though whether this is really down to Gluttony or to ignorance and the plethora of cheap and nasty fatty foods promoted by the food industry is debatable.  Personally, I think that there is always a degree of personal choice involved, and after all these “fatties” did not become fat overnight, did they never look in the mirror and realize they were putting on a few pounds, were scales never around in their houses?  Or am I being too simplistic; luckily enough I have never been prone to putting on much weight, and I do walk every day and don’t own a car, so they might also be factors.

But I am amazed at the vast quantities people actually eat, sometimes when we are out in a restaurant one wonders just where they put it all, especially on help-yourself buffets, where some people just load up their plate with everything going.  And this is perhaps the real Gluttony, those who are not hungry or poor, but who eat out of love of food, for eating’s sake, as if food itself were a rarity, or might be taken away from them if they don’t put away everything in sight.  As a child one had to finish everything on one’s plate, but then our parents were sensible and didn’t spoil us or overfill our platters, also I was never given a whole chocolate bar, or a bag of sweets to eat on my own. “Share and share alike” we were taught, and so we learnt not to overindulge, not to spoil ourselves, not to succumb to Gluttony.

Actually I think the Gluttons needs our sympathy, they must be quite unhappy if they feel the desperate need to keep eating, there must be something else they are really lacking, most probably self-love and self-respect, and because they are inevitably overweight then that becomes another consoling reason to overeat.  But a little bit of self control wouldn’t go amiss, surely.

Friday 18th November

As a child it was always curtains; apart from maybe the very rich I don’t think anyone had blinds at all.  You certainly didn’t see them in the shops, not that you actually saw curtains either.  You saw curtain material, and sometimes poles and cords and such-like paraphernalia but ready-made curtains were unheard of.  If you couldn’t sew yourself you had to pay someone to run your curtains up for you, or get some secondhand.  In Cyprus we had Drapes, rather than curtains; huge rich velvet and satin drapes that hung ceiling to floor, and matching, material covered pelmets with little fringes on, and huge tie backs again either embroidered or be-tasselled.  In truth I don’t think that these had been changed or indeed cleaned in decades, they were certainly never drawn, even in the evenings.  All the windows in our official residence had internal shutters that would be clattered shut at sundown.  I remember this because I was reminded of it in the short promotional film for John Lennon’s Imagine; Adrian and I watched it together on a tiny black and white television in his squalid Hackney flat, and as Yoko went around the room opening up white shutter after white shutter and flooding the bare white room with light, I exclaimed that we too had shutters in Cyprus, though I don’t think ours were white or full length either – but the film had stirred a memory which might have otherwise remained buried forever.  Or is this one of those times you are not sure if you remember it happening, or rather remember the moment you first recalled the memory.

In Putney we had the very same curtains for the twenty years or so I lived there, I don’t think that either Grandma or my mother could sew, and somehow it never occurred to either of them to replace these almost antique curtains.  Once, in a fit of spring cleaning, or maybe shame, I climbed on a stepladder and unclipped the hooks, and lugged them down to the launderettes and paid for them to do a service wash, then with my mother’s help we re-hung them, and I even tacked up a couple of drooping hems.  They looked cleaner but somehow looked a bit pathetic against the yellowing paint and even older wallpaper.

Edward liked blinds, he said they were more modern and cleaner, well – they were cleaner if someone (guess who) bothered to wipe them; I actually thought they were dust traps, but still.  So, we had wooden blinds throughout the house, and yes, they are modern and they can be slanted to adjust the light quite nicely, but when they are raised they offer little in the way of privacy as people living opposite can see straight into ones’ rooms – at least with curtains one can half draw them and sit out of the direct line of vision.  And on those cold winter evenings there is nothing nicer than drawing heavy velvet curtains right across and shutting out the cold and the dark.

So, I think in the New Year I will pop in to Peter Jones and see what ready-mades they have in stock.  Maybe I will treat myself and put a bit more of my character into the old place.  So, excuse my joke, but it will be curtains for blinds from now on.

Thursday 17th November

I was walking in Green Park again today – and how different from just a few short weeks ago, the ground was now covered, layered and blanketed in leaves, leaves, leaves everywhere, and it was gorgeous.  Such rich reds and yellows and the palest of washed out greens and every possible shade of brown, and the trees were almost but not quite bare; and every so often as the wind combed through the branches a few leaves would be torn off and swirl, rise and fall and rise again and then drift slowly, dancing their way to earth.  And even here they weren’t still, little eddies kept swirling about, it was quite dry and though a lot of the leaves from earlier falls were damp and some in the pathways were all squished and mashed up, most were dry and rustled around like sand on a windy beach.

I bent down and picked up a few, some droopy chestnuts, a few squiggly oaks, a couple of simple planes and several large maples with their distinctive three large pointy lobes and two smaller side ones; I wrapped them in a few tissues and carried them home with me.

I laid them out on my glass-topped coffee table, and examined them closely.  Of course they were all so different, no two alike at all, though all basically the same design.  They all have a central stem, carrying the water from the roots and returning with the chemicals, basically sugar created by the chlorophyl’s interaction with sunlight.  Amazing technology, and far superior to anything dreamed up by man.  And all, well almost all, plants have leaves; they are one of the basic building blocks of nature, and we simply take them for granted.  Maybe they are more like living entities in themselves, working together like bees in a hive for the colony’s, the home tree’s benefit rather than just a small functioning part of the tree itself.  And like those bees, quite happy to surrender their life so that a new generation of leaves can appear, budding into life next spring.

I began to think about how many leaves there might be on a bush or a tree, was it thousands, or could it stretch to the tens of thousands, and then how many trees, shrubs and bushes there were in just a small area such as Green Park, and you soon reached numbers that made the recently announced seven billion humans seem very small indeed.  And each one is different, quite unique, though similar.  And this is the pattern throughout nature, multiple similar but slightly different structures creating a whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts.  And so on up the evolutionary scale, through the fishes and birds and insects and reptiles and mammals and eventually we get to humans, who are not so dissimilar from leaves; we are all unique, though far more similar than we might like to admit.  Though not yet so numerous, thank goodness.

Wednesday 16th November

In the mid 1990’s there was a TV sitcom called ‘Men Behaving Badly’.  It was a great success, and really very very funny.  It also caught a mood, which was being set by magazines like GQ and Loaded, where specifically ‘Lad’ behavior was celebrated, this was really nothing more nor less than old-fashioned bad behavior, but it was dressed up as being clever, post modern and very desirable.  Why should any of this matter you might say, and really I couldn’t care less.  There has always been a certain element in society which likes to behave badly, and luckily except for the occasional encounter late in the evening on the Tube, I don’t meet them very often.  My only gripe with this rise in ‘Lad’ culture was that it legitimized rudeness, in a similar way that ‘Top Gear’ on television has become a byword for boorishness and vulgarity; not that this stops it being watched by millions I might add.

However one of the maybe unseen consequences of men being allowed to behave badly was the rise of ‘Women Behaving Badly’.  As you know, I am no feminist; I quite like the differences between the sexes, and am more than ever convinced that, whereas some women can emulate men remarkably well, and of course the opposite aspect of really feminine men also exists, on the whole men are better at some things and women better at others.  And behaving badly is far better performed by men.

The usual precursor to ‘Behaving Badly’ by either sex is consuming vast quantities of alcohol.  Women are very poor drunks, not that men are good at being drunk, but because of their biology, they can generally drink far more than women can before they too fall over. At times I have drunk a bit too much myself, especially in Italy where the sunshine and lazy lifestyle and abundance of cheap wine and good food all conspire to encourage you to let your hair down.  Perhaps I am fortunate, but I always seem to see a red light going on somewhere in the back of my head, and slow down and start to drink water or juice instead; maybe it is just that I am that bit more reserved in the first place, so have further to fall – whatever the reason, though often a bit tiddley, I have never been drunk.

What I find so sad is the sight of women getting drunk on the street.  And the outrageous clothes they choose to wear, the ridiculous short skirts, the bra straps on show, the stupidly high stiletto’s and the ugliest thing of all – the waistline stringy T. of a thong showing between skirt and top.  I saw a documentary recently made by Stephen Fry about Aids, and he was outside a nightclub in Newcastle talking to the girls going in, most dressed as above and already quite under the influence of alcohol; the shocking thing was how many of the girls were just like the boys, “looking for a shag”, and then at the end of the evening, being sick in the street, clothing and hair a mess, and more than likely prey for some unscrupulous men.

Why, oh why girls do you have to behave like men.  It isn’t clever, it is just sad.  And it won’t make you popular or loved or happy at all. One day you will wake up at maybe thirty-something and agree with me, so why do you have to go through all of this degrading behaviour in the first place.  I know I am wasting my words on most of you, but I really feel they are worth saying anyway.

Tuesday 15th November

When I first started working in that little engineering firm, I remember clearing out an old filing cupboard, and coming across several sheets of lined foolscap covered in some strange markings, almost hieroglyphics, but more like squiggles and dashes.  At first I thought they might have been in Urdu or Arabic, but Wendy, a much older woman in the office, put me straight. “Oh, that is shorthand, that is.  I don’t think anyone here uses it anymore.”  Apparently there was a whole language, which secretaries used, to write as speedily as a letter was being dictated by their boss.  And then they would sit down at a typewriter and type up the letter, making sure to insert a sheet of carbon paper between two sheets, one flimsy, being the office copy, and a piece of stiffer letter-headed paper in front.  And the typewriter may well have been mechanical or an early electric one with some sort of automated paragraph stops and a return key, rather than sliding that big chrome lever all the way across the platen bar, often making a ringing sound.  I am suddenly reminded now of another favorite on childhood radio, “The Typewriter Symphony” which I used to love, but I digress.

For years typewriters were the norm, and armies of women became typists as a career.  In large organizations there would be whole rooms full of typists – ‘The Typing Pool’, and even quite small firms would often employ someone just to type up not only letters, but contracts, orders and invoices and receipts.  There were precious few photocopiers, and typists used to always have a bottle of tippex, or little leaves of correcting paper to overtype on mistakes.  If you made a mistake, there was no backspace and change facility, and no spellcheck either, you had to get it right first time, or go back and manually correct it, or worst of all, start over again.

Then, wonder of wonders the electronic word processor arrived, which had the simple facility of remembering the order of the keys typed, and so standardized letters could be remembered along with all the Tabs and spacings and paragraphs and bullet points, and better still amended before pressing print, and just like a mechanical piano off it went and typed, well – golf-balled most likely, a whole document on its’ own.

Pretty soon even this too became obsolete, as the PC with Word and cheap printers became pretty ubiquitous everywhere.  And now, we do not need those armies of typists, with all their specialist knowledge.  Everyone can type their own letters, and thanks to spellcheck no-one even needs to know how to spell, and judging by the hasty entries one sees on facebook all the time even cares how bad their spelling is.  Mobile phones now come with keyboards, or touch screen versions and there is even software available for disabled people to be able to type, just by using a pointer or looking at the screen keyboard and blinking.  And voice command technology is so good nowadays that you pretty soon will not even need a keyboard at all.  I wonder how long before we will be able to just think our letters and out the cursor on the screen will roll the words, all spelled correctly and with orthodox syntax and any font you want too.   Or maybe we will see the death of the printed word completely – all communication being straight from person to person with no interface at all – much like talking once was.

Monday 14th November

You know that old adage, forgive and forget; so easy to say but much harder to accomplish.  If anything the forgiving is quite easy, at least on the surface – the hard part is the forgetting.  And because the forgetting is so hard, then whenever you remember, you remember the hurt too and that little bloom of anger will sometimes burst open and flower again, and so what was forgiveness all about if it can still hurt to remember.  And what is it about forgetting that we find it so hard to forget the slights, the rejections, the wrongs done to us, and sometimes find it harder to remember the good things, the times people were kind to us, or did us favors.  Are we really so mean spirited that we harbor these grudges for so many years, when the one who supposedly hurt us has in all probability completely forgotten that they ever upset us.  Maybe it is because there is some sort of unfinished business going on here; that riposte you only thought of saying days later, the words you should have said but were too shell-shocked or too scared of, in your turn, hurting them that you held back, bit your tongue, choked back that bitter reply.  But because you held it in it is still rattling round there somewhere inside your mind with no way out, except to resurface every now and then and remind you, especially when you thought you had forgiven and forgotten them long ago.

Sometimes these memories of hurt done to you and unresolved become so bad that people seek professional help.  I have never had any truck with psychiatry, or counseling as they call it nowadays – can you really imagine opening your heart up to a complete stranger in that way; letting them poke around in your memories, stirring up even deeper thoughts from your self-consciousness that really should remain buried.  I have found that working through it all, and yes, as I have done, writing it all down is the best way of dealing with these old wounds.

Someone, I cannot remember who, wrote that at a certain age we are all damaged goods, and yes I can look back and easily blame my absent father or my absent-minded mother, or my over-bearing Grandma for making me who I am – but maybe I should really be thanking them, rather than blaming them.  If I had had an ordinary (though what that is I can only imagine) childhood and hadn’t grown up an only child and so introspective, and reflective, then maybe I would not have been able to have written my book at all.  I mean, who wants to read about a boring and safe life lived with full confidence and making no mistakes at all. It is the flaws in people that we find so attractive not the perfection.

So Forgive, yes Forgive by all means, it is really quite easy to Forgive  – nothing really matters that much, it was only life after all.  But do not Forget, no, never let yourself Forget, but treasure that hurt, harbor it and use it to make something good come out of it.

Sunday 13th November

Although one hesitates to comment for fear that one’s observations will be obsolete before daybreak, what with elected heads of government toppling almost daily and stock markets zig-zagging their charts across our screens hourly, and the wringing of hands and almost constant summit meetings of Merkel and Sarkozy,  (I quite like the term Merkozy actually, it has a ring about it) and the smugness of our own Cameron and Osborne that we aren’t in the Euro, thanks of course to the much reviled Gordon Brown, who of course will never be thanked for it – it is actually in an awful mess.

Co-incidentally, after yesterdays post, and of course nothing is co-incidence – it is all linked, the whole thing kicked off shortly after the war ended and was an attempt by France Germany and Italy to tie their economies together so that they could never go to War again.  Laudable and completely logical, especially after the dropping of those awful atom bombs on Japan, when the understanding was that all future Wars would end in this sort of annihilation, (well they were wrong about that) and given that European history of a millennium and more of almost constant war the prospect of any future War in Europe was viewed with such horror.  The thing grew and grew and became a roaring success, and at least some of the participants were aware of the logical inevitability that they were creating a United States of Europe, or trying to.  But unlike America, which grew exponentially, as more and more States were formed by wiping out the Native Americans and filling up the space with mostly poor and dispossessed Europeans, Europe was a different entity entirely.

And now that the Euro, the financial precursor to political Union, is so spectacularly falling apart, one has to begin questioning the logic of Europe entirely.  I am certainly not one of those Tory backwoods supporters who have never gotten over the fact that we no longer have an Empire, and no little Englander either, I quite like the multi-cultural society we live in, especially here in London.  In any case one cannot stop historical inevitability, and now that air travel has facilitated easy and cheap mobility, people will move and want to work in whatever country they fancy.  Maybe we should just forget about borders completely and let people travel where they will without let or hindrance, it will probably sort itself out in the end in any case.  The war on illegal immigration seems to be going the same way as the war on drugs; vast expenditure and very limited success, and fortunes being made by criminals fighting the system.  Am I advocating Anarchy?  No, but maybe just accepting that the world is becoming much smaller and facing up to the fact that companies and people will move to wherever it is most advantageous, so maybe we should be trying to equalize conditions and taxes and wages all over the world, so that Nations become more like regions and we stop worrying about all of this competitive growth that is ruining the planet, and concentrate on living together happily.

Oh Catherine!!!  Pipedreams surely, but actually – that is probably what most people really would like, so why not.  You know why not, stupid.

Saturday 12th November

When I was a little girl, shortly after landing back in England and moving to Putney I joined the Brownies.  Well, in reality, Grandma enrolled me in the Brownies – she thought it would do me good “It will buck you up Catherine, and you will meet lots of girls of your own age.”  I really did not like the Brownies that much, I couldn’t understand what all the stuff about Uniforms and being in a Pack meant, to me it was just another part of this enforced culture being shoved down my throat.  I was a very reluctant Brownie, I didn’t mix with the other girls and used to miss it quite a few weeks, skulking in my bedroom and hoping Grandma didn’t remember it was Brownies night.  But I can remember twice taking part in Remembrance Sunday marches, I was only eight or nine and though the war was fresh in all our collective memories I had been born just after it ended, so I couldn’t really understand what all the fuss was about.  How strange to be celebrating all those who had fallen, (died of course, but fallen sounded more poetic) as if War itself was something heroic.  We were formed into rows about six wide and had to wait in the cold and drizzle until it was our turn to join in, behind the cubs and before the Boys Brigade, then we had to walk along the High Street, lined with onlookers in dark coats and umbrellas, and to the Memorial gates where we were again sorted into groups, us brownies quite near the front.  There was a ceremony with laying of wreaths and a trumpet solo, and then slowly everyone left.  I don’t suppose that at that age I thought about it that much, the horror of war and dying for ones’ country were not things that a nine year old girl normally dwells upon.

At school I always quite liked poetry but was more interested In the mechanics of metre and rhyme than the sense of the thing, but at about fourteen I started reading Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and the other War Poets and it suddenly hit me, what all the fuss was about.  The suffering of the troops, especially in the First World War in the trenches, and the horrendous casualty rates, had been so traumatic that society had more or less renounced War forever. And one just cannot imagine the true horror of that war, as poorly educated farm boys were shipped off to tramp in fields of mud and sulphurous gases and knowing they were just waiting their turn to go over the top and face a hail of bullets.  Incredible then, that we managed to stumble into the Second War in a generation, and so soon after too.  And I see the observance of Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday parades as a sort of collective shame that we have failed those who fell in former Wars, by not ensuring there will never be any more War.  And yet we still continue, here In the twenty-first Century to send young men, hardly more than boys off to War; and though we might hide behind UN resolutions, (or in the case of Iraq, the lack of one) we simply do not learn the lessons of history, that War solves nothing that could not have been sorted out by talking instead of shooting.  So, as Messrs Cameron, Clegg and Milliband will be laying their wreaths tomorrow at the Cenotaph with heads bowed and serious faces, they will happily commit even more young men and women to die in maybe Syria or Iran, or wherever they might decide in the near future.  Because for all the bowed heads and wreaths the simple truth is that the dead cannot speak.

Friday 11th November

Having just taken you down the by-ways of nineteen seventies television, how about coming bang up to date with the wonderful ‘Frozen Planet’?  I have always loved Natural History programs, and nobody does it better than the BBC.  In fact I think that ITV have stopped altogether – maybe they think there is enough wild life on X factor already.  Well, if the audience figures are anything to go by then watching poor innocent lambs being torn apart before our very eyes by ravenous vultures is as popular as ever.  I have only dallied once, when, out of sheer boredom, and maybe a modicum of curiosity at what all the fuss was about, I watched a few minutes of X factor; and a few minutes was enough.  Maybe it says a lot about our society that this sort of thing is so successful, at least I suppose it might be considered one step up from Big Brother.

As a child I used to love those Disney wild-life films, you know, the ones about a bear family in Yellowstone Park, or prairie dogs or the mountain lion jumping from rock to rock. Then we had the wonderful Life on Earth and all the other Life ones which followed, all beautifully filmed and sound-tracked by what was at the time, a relatively youthful David Attenborough.  What is it about his voice, with those slightly arched and old-fashioned middle class tones that we find so reassuring and attractive?  He is, by all accounts, quite curmudgeonly and very right wing in real life; none of that stops him from being able to talk with what seems such intimate knowledge and enthrallment about the natural world, and the dangers which mankind is threatening it with.  So, a long quiet love affair, shared by millions I am sure, and possibly we were always a bit afraid that the current series might be his last.  Someone once reviewed the Rolling Stones (no, I do not like them at all and never have done) that one went to watch them not to see how good they were, but just to see if they were still alive.  But David Attenborough just seems to get better and better; nowadays he doesn’t walk through caves where millions of fruit bats are roosting and, incidentally, defecating on his head, and he doesn’t sit in a forest glade with silver-backed gorillas’ any more, in fact one fears that never more will we see him in those baggy khaki shorts and safari shirts.  He just narrates, and brings to life the spectacular photography, and what photography, slow motion and time-lapsed ice crystals forming or melting, and the beautiful underwater ice sculptures are just incredible.  My only small gripe is the bit tacked on the end where they show you how they filmed it, this takes away some of the romance I feel.

Maybe in a hundred years time, we will have begun to properly explore Antartica, if the technology has improved significantly; though in all likelihood we will destroy more than we manage to preserve.  It used to be a real rarity for anyone to reach either pole, and it was only a hundred years ago since Amundsen beat Scott by days to the South Pole, but now our modern-day adventurers’ Polar achievements are hardly even newsworthy, but I was dismayed when this past summer they managed to take a ship right around the Arctic circle, now ice-free because of global warming.  The most sobering thought is that this program may be obsolete at some time in the future, as our Frozen Planet becomes even more of a rarity.