Monday 5th March

We all knew it couldn’t last, the good weather I mean, and it has been extraordinarily good for days, temperatures in the late teens in London, which for the time of year was such a pleasant change.  Not that, apart from one icy week, we have even had a winter at all.  And it was there on the weather forecast for the last two days, ominously creeping nearer and yesterday, Sunday, it arrived.  That awful combination of cold rain and driving wind, that chills you right to the marrow.   And even though I had watched the weather on Saturday for some reason it hadn’t quite occurred to me just how cold and wet it would be.  I was off to my writing class, and stupidly didn’t even glance outside as I set off jauntily at One.  The class is held at Bermondsey, and like most of South London, of which I have never been a great fan, the tube stations are few and far between.  When I came out at Bermondsay Jubilee line station and knew I had to walk about half a mile I realized how inappropriately I was dressed, a light Mac, with no hat, scarf or umbrella.  For some reason I had neglected to put on my nice North face insulated coat with the hood and the double lined zipper that completely isolates one from the wind and rain, and opted for the Mac I had been wearing for the last few sunny and warm days.

The windy rain was whipping at me, and my thin Mac was soon soaked, as were my tights and shoes. And it seemed head on too, so by the time I got to the class I had a throbbing headache.  I somehow got through reading my piece, and was dreading the return journey.  It was just as bad only the wind, now mostly at my back, was hitting the back of my head and making my headache even worse.  I was feeling quite sick on the tube journey home, and as soon as I got in went to bed, where I tossed and turned, fighting the idea of getting out of bed and taking two neurofen.  Eventually I succumbed and am now sitting wrapped in towels from a hot soaking bath nursing a cup of tea and a headache and looking at the rain battering my window.  A truly awful wet day with little to redeem it..

Sunday 4th March

We all make irrational decisions where money is concerned.  When buying a house; whether the price is 345 or 347 and a half thousand, are we really going to quibble.  When on holiday we buy yet another over-priced straw sun hat or a pair of expensive designer sunglasses at the airport – in fact once one has decided that one is actually ‘on holiday’ all everyday thriftiness evaporates like the mist on those Tuscan hills by mid-morning.  When we are out with friends and the mood takes us we will sometimes in a fit of generosity pick up the whole tab at that chic little Italian Trattoria where the prices would have made Grandma turn away and remark, “Well Catherine, we don’t really like foreign food anyway, do we?”  And yet when going round the supermarket we sometimes shake our heads in disbelief at how much a four-pack of loo-rolls costs, (two pounds, fifty – they have got to be joking), and frantically start looking along the shelf for the value brand.  We all spend money carelessly when the mood takes us, and yet profess to be careful to all our friends; the ever-rising price of everything being a constant source of conversation.  And every so often I open the spreadsheet I keep of my personal finances and look at the ever (slowly but surely) increasing numbers and sigh to myself.  Yes, it really is a decent enough sum, I could do anything with it, buy a house in the country, or more realistically in the Dordogne, give a large sum to a charity, or more cheaply, get the house re-decorated, the garden landscaped, maybe a conservatory.  But none of those would really make me happy. Maybe nothing will.  Money and the spending of it is only a temporary thrill, and then you look around you at your purchases, and yes, they look quite nice I suppose, but never quite as good as they did in the shop, and you know this feeling will not last.  And the next time you open the spreadsheet and see a diminished balance you will wonder at your impulsiveness in buying that new sofa, or upgrading the car again.  Neither the having money nor the spending of it makes one really happy, not half as happy anyway as when you discover that you can actually buy nine, yes nine loo-rolls in the ‘99p’ store and still have a penny change to put in the charity box.  Now that’s what I call irrational.

Saturday 3rd March

I resisted for quite some time, but had seen them appearing here and there, and they seemed so handy that I was tempted.  One part of me resisted because of my love for the actual artifacts that books, especially hardbacks, are, even if one is constantly running out of bookshelves to keep them on.  In the end I bought one, a kindle, for myself, last Christmas; I mean, who else was going to buy me one.  I had a little difficulty in setting it up, as I don’t have very good wi-fi at home, but even on Christmas day the very nice man at the kindle helpline showed me how to download directly onto my laptop, and then transfer the books via a cable to my kindle.  Easy as pie, and now I have an ever growing library of books loaded.  I must confess I am a bit of a cheat though.  If I really want a book I will buy it both in hardback for reading at home with little puddy-tat next to me on the sofa, and also buy the kindle edition for travelling with.  I do love to see the spines of my favourite authors on the bookshelf, and the kindle list is a poor substitute, and besides, like downloaded music, do you actually own anything if it just a collection of binary numbers which are all too easy to delete.  Yes I know a complete waste of money, but after all, why not, it is my money to waste and I don’t criticize you or anyone else for how they spend their money.  The best thing about the kindle is that you can adjust the font size to suit your own short-sightedness.  Also it NEVER forgets what page you were on, and is so handy to slip into my handbag and out again if I sit for five minutes on a bench at Parliament Hill Fields or even standing waiting for the bus – no minute is wasted.  And I have discovered there are so many of us, a secret society of kindle users who sit in Starbucks or on the tube, or on park benches – each of us engaged in our own secret world of stories.  Some have white kindles and a few pink and red ones but most are black like mine.  It reminds me of photos of Edwardian children, each with their very own slate, same colour, same size.  Plus ca change, plus ca meme.

Friday 2nd March

Do British Workers have an attitude problem?  Do we really hate out jobs, hate our bosses and probably hate our lives so much? It isn’t just the miserable faces I encounter on the tube, though I do wonder why they go through with it if they are so downcast, why not just turn round and go back home if you cannot bring yourself to at least look moderately happy.  I used to enjoy the occasional “Good Morning” with the road-sweeper, but of late all I get is a shrug of yellow pvc-clad shoulders and a reluctant return to the broom.  The girl who serves me my coffee is even looking harassed and fed up, as if it really is too tedious to serve me.  But yesterday I saw a little charade that encapsulated our whole attitude problem.

I had turned out of the park and was heading home when a large white flat-bed lorry which was actually more of a converted white van than a real lorry, swerved in front of me and stopped at the junction of a side road.  Two men clad in bright yellow tabards over paint-splattered jeans and frayed sweatshirts got out and threw almost in disgust the butt-ends of their cigarettes to the ground and swiveled them out with angry feet.  They sauntered to the back of the truck and threw, yes literally threw out four of those orange plastic cones and then a couple of black plastic sandbags and a yellow metal sign with black lettering reading ‘Road Closed – Diverted Traffic’ and a swiveling arrow mechanism.  I had always assumed that the battered state of these signs was evidence of a car collision of some sort which had buckled the quite thick metal frame and plate, but now I see that it has been inflicted by disillusioned and grumpy malcontents of workers who should be looking after this equipment, or do they get some secret enjoyment out of maliciously damaging their bosses property.  They kicked, yes literally kicked the cones and sign into place, then slumped themselves back into the cab which drove to the other end of the street where the pantomime was repeated.  I don’t seem to remember this resentment at actually being expected to do something for your wages when I was younger.  I wonder is this a sign of our straightened times or just a particularly British attitude to work?

Thursday 1^st March

I have always liked Neil Young, well the gentler side of Neil Young; ‘After the Goldrush’ and ‘Harvest’, and then again after all those noisy records came ‘Harvest Moon’, a late blossoming of his earlier flower ‘Harvest’.  Whether this was a record company wheeze, or something which the ever belligerent Neil wanted to do we may never know.  At the time I thought it was okay, but a bit of a pale copy of the original Harvest, but maybe I was wrong.  One of the songs was called Dreamin’ Man, and I hardly rated it.  As part of the latest issue of Live music from the Neil Young archives was an album called Dreamin’ Man, where Neil plays most of Harvest moon live.  And as a live set it really comes into its own.  Great versions of songs like One of These Days and From Hank to Hendrix, finishing with the brilliant War of Man.  It starts with Dreamin Man and Neil apologizing and saying that the song is not really about him “I’m just a dreamin’ man, that’s half my problem,” he sings.  But I wonder if it maybe is more than a bit about him.  The whole Album, including the weird picture on the cover has a dreamlike feel to it, as you wade through and become enveloped in the music, and as Neil famously said on another Live album, “It’s all one song”, meaning that all his music is interconnected and just a different way of saying the same thing.

Listening to this album has made me realise that far from being a pale reprise of Harvest, Harvest Moon was actually a wonderful and whimsical album which transcends the single songs and becomes something else entirely when all are listened to together.  For a while I couldn’t stop playing this album over and over again, but that is maybe because unlike Neil I am just a dreamin’ man; thank God that’s more than half my problem.

Wednesday 29th February

And what a lovely notion that was; I wonder how many women actually took the opportunity, and whether it worked.  Was it legally binding, were there ever any court cases where the shy retiring man claimed his bachelor rights had been usurped by a domineering and demanding woman?  Oh happy day if that should have ever happened. But it is probably just another old wives tale, a bit of folklore which in a funny way did actually represent the very limited women’s rights for so many years. Especially in polite society where quiet tete-a-tetes were not always possible; how many years would a woman be kept waiting while her husband-to-be dithered and dallied and tried to decide if he should propose at all, or maybe the diffident and nervous young man was so scared of rejection that he couldn’t bring himself to say the words required.  How could the woman help him, she was supposed to be demure and not have sexual desires at all; in Victorian novels the sexuality of the woman is completely denied, they are passive creatures in the main, who may love their hero deeply but are never allowed to express their desire for conjugal relations.  Marriage was a desired state mainly for the status it gave the woman, for relieving her father of the burden of keeping her, for the continuance of the male line, to maybe add respectability and gentility to a son of a wealthy but unconnected businessman, but we never hear of the woman’s desire to just have a partner.  Maybe this was the greatest taboo of all; that women actually enjoyed and wanted sex, well unmarried and young women anyway.  Thank goodness we have come a long way from those miserable times, and a woman can let a man know that she fancies him, or even that she would like to live with or marry him without having to wait four years for that accidental date in the calendar, when in probability even then, she would lack the requisite courage.

Tuesday 28th February

Although no more Christian than putting C of E in the allotted space next to Religion on the Census forms each decade, my family still had what one might broadly call Christian values.  At least we expounded them, if not actually practiced them very much.  We believed in ‘Love thy Neighbour’, but on one side we had a crotchety old couple who kept themselves to themselves as much as we liked to on our side of the dividing drainpipe.  On the other, and a decent bike width detached from us, lived a succession of youngish couples, some with children, who never seemed to stay long enough for us to learn their names let alone actually love them.  We believed in helping those less fortunate than ourselves, but as Grandma liked to proclaim that ‘we were as poor as church mice anyway’; so apart from surreptitiously placing a few coppers in collecting tins when embarrassment would ensue if we were seen not to, we did not give to charity.  However despite this almost complete lack of any real relationship with Christianity I was actually Christened, and my Godmother, my cousin Joan did on the occasional birthday send me something vaguely religious.  The most obvious of these and strangely one I kept, when I have discarded so much else was called A Child’s Prayer.  It was full of beautiful photographs and had a simple line on each page “Thankyou God for……..”

So, in a spirit of hope and reconciliation I would just like to say thankyou, not to God, whose existence I very much doubt, but to the World at large and whoever feels it applies to them.

Thankyou for each day, the chance to start anew.  Thankyou for the seasons, to remind us of the measure of our span on this earth.  Thankyou for laughter, especially when passing a school at playtime. Thankyou for sunshine, peeping through on a cloudy day.  Thankyou for the gift of the written word, my closest of friends.  Thankyou for being there for me when I thought I couldn’t go on.  Thankyou for the things you didn’t say, when pity might have broken my back.  Thankyou for the kindness of strangers, when there really was no need.  Thankyou for letting me share these thoughts with you all, unspoken they may not have existed at all.

Monday 27th February

The British seem to have an unhealthy obsession with Class.  Maybe we always have had.  It has certainly been a part of my life since I was a child, though I like to think that I have moved away from all that sort of snobbery in my later years.  I have to keep telling myself that everyone’s life is just as valid, and it really doesn’t matter if they watch Springwatch or The Only Way is Essex; and for all I know there may be millions who watch both, and why not.  Part of the fun of our culture though is in puncturing the pretensions that class carries with it, it has been the basis of so many comedies from Dad’s Army, Steptoe and Son, The Likely Lads, and of course Keeping Up Appearances, where Patricia Routledge superbly exposed all the foibles of a snobbish middle class existence.  In some ways it all seems a bit dated now, especially when we watch re-runs of Fawlty Towers, which was mostly about class too.  We can pat ourselves on the back that we have come such a long way, from that class-ridden way of life.  And while class may be less important today, it is still there.  Hunting, with those well to do county types in red riding jackets and silver hip-flasks is as popular as ever, and we do like to shop in John Lewis, and eat at Celebrity Chef’s restaurants, defending our choices as liking nice things, whereas the working class idea of niceness, with DFS sofa’s, chips with everything and shopping at Asda, can raise more than a touch of snobbishness in some of us still.  We seem to be having trouble getting class out of our system, and out of the system itself; class is far more deeply embedded than we like to think.  You only have to look at the bosses of large companies, most of whom were educated at public school to realise that the working classes still have a long way to travell.  In fact it is probably harder now than in the egalitarian sixties for a working class kid to really succeed on talent alone, what with student loans and middle class internships and help up the social ladder.  One only has to look at our politicians, with a cabinet made up old Etonians and Oxbridge graduates, and even the opposition is determinedly middle class these days.  The only working class voices one hears are advertising on-line casinos or on those wretched DIY makeover shows, or am I simply showing my class by even mentioning them.

Sunday 26th February

Why is it that we choose to portray some men with guns shooting at soldiers as terrorists or bandits while others are depicted as freedom fighters?  Is there really any difference?  If there is no democratic route to power, or if you are one of a threatened minority that will always be persecuted, if you are the wrong colour, or the wrong religion, or even the wrong faction of the right religion and you resort to violence are you ever justified?  And although we all preach democracy, when the people who get elected are not our friends than we covertly and sometimes overtly support those who would try to bring them down.  This used to be called realpolitik, the facing up to the world as it is rather than how you would like it to be.  But does it have to be this way?  Have we not grown up enough to realise that violence solves nothing, or in the end does violence always solve things?  The last Foreign Secretary we had who tried to create an ethical foreign policy had a heart attack which at a stroke removed him from the Foreign Office, the Cabinet and his own life.  He was replaced by someone who knew where the real interests lie and did as he was told.  And so we go on; there is no doubting that the ruling government forces in Syria are behaving atrociously, there is no democracy, there is a small ruling elite, the soldiers are shooting people in the streets, they are shelling cities that are in revolt, so who could possibly not support the rebels?  It may well end with a rebel victory, but not before a lot of people have died, and maybe a protracted civil war, and who is to say that life for ordinary Syrians will be any better after Bashar Assad departs.  And by the way, just who is supplying the rebels with their weapons?  It couldn’t possibly be us could it?   And in the end the only way to stop the fighting is to talk to each other.  Just why do so many have to die before this dawns on everyone?

Saturday 25th February

Having read avidly and extensively since a child I think that we humans are mostly made of the same stuff; our thoughts and reminisces, the way we behave in situations and the trouble we have with memory.  In many ways memory is a spectacular and quite amazing thing, the very fact that we not only recognize faces, even from forty or fifty years ago in my case, though who knows whether at eighty that will stretch to a sixty year span, or an old photograph unseen for years, or films we saw as a young person, but also the smaller things.  The way memory works is quite extraordinary, sometimes you just hear a snatch of notes and you know exactly what the piece of music is, though you haven’t heard that particular one in years, or suddenly when you least expect it a conversation comes back at you from out of nowhere at all, and you are there, right there again with all of the hot emotions you may have felt at the time.

Just as surprising though are the things we manage to forget, or have difficulty actually remembering.  Sometimes you really want to recall something and it isn’t there at all.  Blanked out maybe, or erased, or just shifted to another less accessible part of your brain, and try as you might it remains stubbornly unremembered, though the very fact that you can remember something about it, just not the detail means it hasn’t gone completely.  And on those TV detective things where they are investigating something that happened many years ago, and the suspect seems to have almost perfect recall of times, even remembering glancing at their watch before opening the door to the gunman.  Well really, would you remember those tiny details; I know I have difficulty remembering how I filled my day yesterday, let alone on a specific day years ago.

And then there are those memories that you do remember, but you aren’t quite sure if you remember remembering them or actually remember the thing itself.  My earliest memory was of a motorcycle skidding across a wet road, the headlight’s beam splaying across the road and lighting up some memorial gates to a park.  I replay this time and again, and both of my parents are with me, but sometimes it is a single rider, and sometimes there is someone on the pillion.  Am I remembering my memories of recalling this event time and time again, or the thing itself.  And of course my mother cannot remember it at all.