More semantics

Considering the difficulty most of us have in commuicating accurately with one another, it continues to amaze me how closely related but diametrically opposed, (nearly typed "diabolically") some words, or the use of them, can be. On the other hand, it may be the meaning with which we imbue the words that is the challenge. Example: recently, I was charged with the sin of vanity. Heaven forbid; I assure you, I have no grounds whatsoever on which to base vanity. What is really going on when I show over-concern for my appearance or curse the wind which has blown my entire morning's work in to a haystack, is a lack of confidence. I do feel more confident tackling a challenging world with tidy hair, don't you? When I put this to the Guru, who was detained on one occasion behind my despairing clutch of the mirror at the front door, he was generous enough to admit that this was the case for him, too. Now, those of you who have been kind enough to keep up, may remember that I was rushed out of A and E and on to a ward at the local hospital because his exceeding good looks were distracting the busy A and E nurses. He has much to be vain about. However, this is not how he sees himself. One example does not constitute a thesis, I know, but think about it. Real vanity must involve a degree of confidence that over-rides all doubt. It may even go against the view of the rest of the world with regard to the attributes of the vainglorious. That makes me think of pride. It must be permissable to have pride, even in one's appearance, without being vain. Mind you, no-one can be held responsible for his/her looks. Surely, they are a gift of Nature, or whatever you happen to believe in. You can take pride in keeping things in the best condition you can manage, but is that vanity? As it happens, I can see that I am vain in retrospect. I promise this was not the case at the time, but, now, I am vain about the figure I lost too many years ago. Dear Readers, as we speak, I am 'D' shaped. I am much the same shape I was carrying the last - and the other - of my children. Well, there you are. Next time you disparage someone for vanity, look and see whether or not he/she is afraid of the dark, addressing a meeting or going to a party made up largely of strangers. If so, you are very probably looking at a lack of confidence.

Similarly, (is it?), I am exercised by minding one's own business. How do you feel when you have been asked a question that seems intrusive or impertinent? Affronted, you may well respond: yes, indeed. But, a big but, what if your interlocutor's interest in you was a loving and concerned interest, not at all prurient ? You have to see that there is an essential difference. For instance, were I to ask a young woman of my acquaintance whether or not she, herself, had had too much to drink at a party she had described as totally out of control and 'neighbour-call-the-police' debauched, she may well reply it was none of my business, angry with it. The situation could be diffused if I were to point out that the question in no way sprang from judgementalism but from a loving concern in her well-being and an interest in how she lived her life. It is still none of my business? No doubt many people would agree with you. Subtly though, the shades of semantic difference are what makes for good relating: Prurience and judgement are not the same as benevolent interest. "Life's too short", I hear in the ether. Life is never too short for a precise and varied use of language. What do you think?

Sticking plasters

In various places over my torso and on the front of my shoulders are some round and some square sticking plaster marks. I expect you will want to know why. Well, I have been strapped up to a monitor via a number of electrodes the base of which act as sticking plasters. In a way that proved a little challenging for this elderly lady, I was whisked in to hospital because my heart was beating about twice as fast as it was engineered to beat. These palpitations started about tea-time and I lay on the bed with my book patiently waiting for them to stop. I tried various ways of breathing around them but nothing seemed to work, so I relied on the patience. The Guru did his best to persuade me there must be a more scientific approach and that the sensible thing to do was to ring the Doctor. Personally, in all my three score and more than ten, I have never encountered a health crisis other than latish on a Friday, that is after Surgery hours, at a weekend or on a Bank Holiday. This one was no exception. After the poor man had been up the stairs about forty three times, seen his beautifully presented open sandwich rejected and reminded me this business had, by now, been going on for five hours, I did ring the out of hours medical service and was finally convinced my omnipotence in relying on myself may well lead to my being 75 not-going-on-anywhere. I fussed about the disagreability of waiting hours in A and E, (ER to kind readers over the Pond) but, as it happened, I did not wait long enough even to have found a seat in the reception area. A wheel-chair, double doors, a corridor, much noise and a few seconds later, found me in a cubicle surrounded by a group of people none of whom looking in the least like George Clooney. Forfend that I should risk boring you. Let it just be known that, after several what one may call homely methods had been used and failed to kick start a more reasonable heart rhythm, I was given an injection that actually stopped my heart. As you will have guessed, that was momentary and, presently, it started up again at 90 to the minute instead of 180. I know all this because the kind Guru had stayed with me in A and E, (see above if you are still on the other side of the Pond) and was watching the monitor with a degree of fascination possible only in the intelligent young. Hence the link: I and the monitor were married via the sticky electrodes and a quantity of different coloured whatsits.

Other than the rings and bruises from things stuck in as well as on me, I am my old self again. I cant recommend a night in hospital, but I can certainly recommend the A and E experience. The heart-stop bit left me feeling as unwell as I can remember, thinking death might be rather better, but it was only a minute at the most. Nor did I encounter bright lights, nor loved ones that have passed on. You know, it was almost fun and even provided the Guru with an insight he might otherwise have had only from the Telly. The staff were in such good spirits in spite of what you can imagine was going on in the middle of a week-end night: people having been drinking as if there were never to be another opportunity and, indeed,some of them having met with accidents that put such an opportunity seriously at risk. When it was decided I must be found a bed, the Registrar who had been attending me, said that, in any case, we had to get the Guru out of A and E because, being rather better looking than George Clooney, he was distracting the nurses. There was another lovely moment when a male nurse, middle-aged and pony-tailed, an ER bit-part player, having established that I was to be kept in, that is, was alive enough to be kept in, turned to go, and, light as a feather, dry as a bone threw at us " Ah well, another life saved"; lovely. As it happens, I am pleased to have been saved. I just wish I could get rid of the sticky rings and squares - and yes, I have had several baths since. Two more things: any ideas about how, and diolch yn fawr Guru.

More Keeping House

And another thing, how often do you think one should wash one's net curtains? I do have several, I confess. They are not so much to peep from behind to see what is going on in the world of the neighbours. They are more to stop the neighbours from seeing what is going on in my world. One pair is internal and covers a glass door between my little guest room and the room in which I used to work. Finally, there are some covering a window on a half landing. These serve as a sun-shield, otherwise my little house would be a little oven before you can say over the horizon. Governed as I am by the mores of another generation, another way of being in the world, I do feel the need, eventually the guilty urgency, to take the damned things down and wash them. You will of course, have gathered that, physically, I am not the most flexible acrobat in the circus. Picture it: I am up a ladder, two steps are all I can risk, trying, with arthritic fingers, to extract some miniature hooks from the tentacles determined to grab on to them. The door bell rings. What to do. Clamber down from the ladder, replace my shoes and totter to the door? I could pretend I haven't heard - not unreasonable, my hearing is deteriorating as we speak. (When the Guru rings with his office voice I have either to behave as if I have heard and end up making a dinner he has rung to cancel or bellow at him to speak up. A conflict erupts between office decorum and old lady reality.) Or I could prepare an abject apology for taking so long to answer. You've guessed; he/she who was there is no longer there, anyway. Take off my shoes, again, clamber back up the ladder, feel for the little tentacles, again, and so on and so on. Do you remember the Gerard Hoffnung story of the builder and the bricks going up and down in the hod? Well, you are well on the way to visualising my grubby- curtain dilemma. Last time, I prevailed upon the window cleaner to get them down for me, since he was up there, anyway, and definitely more flexible than I. I did have to put them back, myself, but what the H..., who ever said getting older, in housework terms, would be easy?

Far, far more serious: a tissue infiltrated the washing machine. The Wizard of Cyberspace has allies, his trainees, the laundry fairies. They eat socks, too. But you know all this. You will be wondering why I didn't check all pockets for whatever. I swear I did. This tissue got in disguised as a handkerchief. Are there any fellow sufferers out there? Tissues in the washing machine are like blood, milk and cat litter: they get everywhere when spilled. I shook, I swept, I took the cat-fur remover to everything and then I sat down in a darkened room until I felt better. It's all very well, but the Guru is supposed to look the part when he's at work so bits of unidentifiable white on his professional apparel are totally unacceptable. What's more, one of the duties of the no longer young is to look pristine: eccentric is fine, scruffy is out. So please, Wizard, would you be so good as to ask your apprentices in the laundry to move their plague of white, clingy bits to the machine of my worst enemy?

I have just realised that we are very near my Mother's birthday. This may well explain my rush of housewifery. She has been in mind. She was a very good keeper of her house, and mine, come to that. When I was at University in London she would come up to see me with, I jest not, some rubber gloves and a couple of dusters - oh, and a pinny. The most embarrassing aspect of this was subjecting my house-mates to the sight of everything drying over the shower rail in the communal bathroom after she had done her worst/best with them. And yes, she did get me to take the curtains down and held the ladder while I did so. Back to work; it's never done.

Love

How presumptuous, I can hear you say. I did think long and hard before giving this post that title. I started by envisaging everyone who had written on the subject, from the inception of the written word. It was a funny thought. It was soon an hysterical thought as the examples tumbled over one another and ran in pairs along my inner eye. However, I don't intend to define love, I intend just to chatter on about it for a paragraph or two. It all began when my cat was sitting in front of me at table, the other day. (This is not a Health and Safety discussion, so you can gloss over that bit.) We had both just had breakfast, she on the floor this time and me at the table, just to clarify what you are picturing. She was staring me in the eye and miaowing, her long 'you-havent-got-it-yet' miaow. There were fresh food, fresh water, clean litter, what could I have overlooked? So I told her I loved her, as often I do. I got the tail-flick response I have come to expect when she hears those words but still, and also, the miaows, which got longer and longer and longer. She must have been a mezzo-soprano in another life; in that the case, she has certainly retained the breath control of a professional singer and her voice is quite low compared with other felines of my acquaintance. Anyway, telling her I loved her was not what I had not 'got'. Then it came to me that one cannot live on love alone even if that were what my beloved cat had been asking me for. So, of course, I got up and found her a little something more to supplement and pacify. Guess what: the miaowing stopped.

It made me think, though. If you cannot live on love alone, can you die without it? I think you can. You wouldn't just lie down and be, as it were dead, never get up again, you'd probably contract an illness which, although curable, somehow wouldn't be cured. Damn it! I don't know exactly how you would do it but it wouldn't be surprising if many ill people were, if the truth be unveiled, quietly fading from lack of love. I do know it is possible to be as if dead inside. Life goes on apparently unchanged, on the outside. A three dimension version of you operates without any noticeable inconsistency; rather like a Stepford Wife, in fact: a facimile of the real thing. There was a film along similar, but kinder and more profound lines: Lars and the Real Girl. Brilliant, see it. But much must depend on the cause of this death by non-love. Rejection will do it every time, wouldn't you say? Being subjected to a pretend love, particularly parental, would be another good way to experience it. We, surely, all know people who are so desparate for love that their lives become distorted with the effort to acquire it. You know, the Mother's Little Helper people who are the first at the scene in a crisis and who are able to devine - and provide - what you want before you are even aware you want it. Sainthood may arise from that very phenomenon. I'm not proud of the way that sounds. It sounds condescending and even pejorative. Forgive me. I don't like myself for interpreting/noticing a hunger for love in those whom I am fortunate to know as really kind people who will do anything for anyone. I don't believe it detracts from the value of what they do: it just serves, anyway me, as an explanation for why they do it. I can't see how I could have the gall to leave the subject there, but, for the moment I must go and check what my beloved miaowing mezzo wants now. If there is anything I can do for her, you would expect me to do it wouldn't you, craven seeker for love that I am.

Gaps

The wizard of cyberspace has been laughing all the way to the delete box. This time he surpassed himself. He took not only the blog but all the functions of the computer that needed the internet, plus the television service. In short, no service of any kind from my service provider . Naturally, this happened at a week-end and stretched in to one with a bank holiday tacked on. By the time the non-service provider had reached me on his list of frustrated and bereaved electronic dependants, a long time had passed. "No signal" was the fullest explanation the screens were in a position to furnish. At last, arrived an engineer who went back to his car with a visitors' permit to park and came back a very few minutes later to say he just wanted to check that all was well. "All is not well", protested I, wondering why he thought he was here at all. "Oh yes," quoth he,"I've fixed it." And so he had. He wouldn't tell me how so I am left with the imagining that he and the Wizard are allies and, together, had decided I had been punished long enough. I do know that I could have taken my laptop to a nearby coffee shop or found an internet cafe and, thus, blogged to my heart's content. Pause: do you really see me as a person who would or even could take all the wires out of the back of this machine and expect to re-assemble them in another location when I don't even enjoy coffee, never mind an internet cafe where I would raise the average age by about 5o years and have to ask for help even to switch the damned stranger on. No, of course you don't. Anyway, here I am and I hope not too many of you have given up on reading me ever again. (Mind you, I have one non-fan who informed me she didnt read my blog because she couldn't stand other people's on and onings; nice phrase, I've decided to acquire it.)

Talking of gaps, I'd like to stretch the concept to include slots. My local Post Office, a grown up one with a site all its own, not shared with a shop nor anything else - those, nearby, having been closed by authorities running a competition as to who can boast the longest queues in the remaining ones - has closed the two posting boxes sited on its outside wall. This is for Health and Safety reasons anounces the unblinking appended sign. I enquired further, well you would wouldn't you, and was told this was because the post collector had to bend down to take the letters out of the box. I know, I know; when I was a gal, etc etc. But it does make you wonder where it is all going to end and whether those of us who still have a sense of humour can hold on to it in the face of the humourectomy apparently undergone by the rest of the world. During opening hours, one can post letters in a box inside the Post Office. Later, one must just find a red what used to be called pillar box. I can't see that they are any more back-friendly than those on the wall, but then who am I to bring logic to a strange and po-faced world?

A more interesting gap has been in my contact with a young, sort of related, man. I hadn't seen him for about eight years: from little boy to early man. He had the ethereal look I remember from his childhood and the hair and appearance of the University student he is, currently. I think we both found it harder to re-connect than we would have done had our statuses (stati?) been the same as when we last met: he a child and I less of an old woman. The progression made it rather more difficult. I had never met this young man and could only sense the child I had known well. I think we both found it difficult to communicate after the facts of the gap in time were filled in. He seems a man who plays his cards rather close to his chest so even I, who rather prides herself on her white witch self with a well-honed intuition, could'nt say whether or not he enjoyed the reunion and would be prepared to repeat it. I did enjoy it but was, later, assailed by a sense of the loss of the years in between. They can never be regained. The legions of little stories, and big ones, for that matter, which had influenced and interested him, formed him, were lost to our common history. I would love to have had a visual and audio diary of the little nonsenses and big momenti that we should, automatically, have shared had things gone differently. What can I do, at this late stage, to bridle my over-romantic idea of the continuum and importance of relationships with no gaps? Grow up, I hear you say. Life is full of no signals. Prynhawn da.

Semantics

The vacuum has been caused by a visit to a loved-one in Scotland. I still haven't found the courage to take my lap-top with me, even if it were sensible to add weight to a bag I have to rely on others to lift on and off trains for me. I missed you all, so am happy to be back. But Scotland is delicately exquisite in May. Where I was, there are hundreds of lambs with black faces and protective mothers. Everything is in bloom and proliferating. Hedgerows are full of primroses and bluebells and campions, all at the same time. I have never seen primroses and bluebells blooming together. Still, many a less expected liason has been known to work well.

The loved-one and I had many good conversations. During one, it emerged that what I saw as 'support' he saw as'collusion'. It struck me that there were quite a few split-hair possibilities of this kind. How this one came about: casually. I referred to someone I don't really know and he does as "what's-her-name". Suffice it to say that she has a way of life that, on a bad day, I could easily envy. He knows this and does not approve. After a moment - a long moment - he supplied her name, which, of course, I knew perfectly well. I went in to a thing about expecting his support and he replied that, on the contrary, I had been looking for him to collude with me in my view of her impact on my world. Thinking about it, still, I can't see how support can avoid being collusive on occasion. What do you think? Now , this is quite personal stuff to illustrate semantics so let us move on to the more intellectual. How about the difference between interest and curiosity? Interest seems rather benevolent. Curiosity can be tinged with that lovely, but naughty, Welsh past-time: gossip. I suspect that when we are curious about the doings of others there are a few ounces of malice in the mix. I suppose, though, the two are not so far apart when it comes to things of the intellect. There one can have a healthy curiosity, hurtful to no-one, and sufficient interest to do something about it. In my own experience, I find I am curious when not particularly fond of someone and interested when I am.

Fear and wish are worrying bed-fellows, too, but harder for me to see as interchangeable in daily use as, perhaps, the other examples are. You will be, naturally, conversant with the expression that one should be careful what one wishes for; the whole poisoned chalice thing. I have heard tell of a lady who married rather late in life having had the aim to be wed since she was six. It seems her spouse would not have been the easiest of people even had she been accustomed officially, to sharing her life with someone. Anyway, when asked some time later how she was enjoying her new life, she is said to have replied," Be careful what you wish for". Oops. The one I am really uncomfortable about, though, is beware of what you fear. Fear of loss, at its gravest, actually seems to attract loss. Illness, divorce, bereavement: I havent the statistics at my finger tips (literally, since I am typing), but observation confirms that the fearful do seem to suffer more than the breezily confident. When I was young, cancer was always referred to as 'C'. Sadly, many of those so afraid they couldn't say the whole word, did contract the disease. A woman who used to look forward, eagerly, to the friendship of her children when they were adults, always feared they may end up in Australia, as many Welshmen do. They did, or anyway, some of them did. She feels desolate, estranged and without accesible grandchildren. Self-fulfilling prophesy will probably cover it. We can't see electricity so there is no reason to expect to see the force of attraction that draws like a magnet our profoundest longings and direst fears.

I hope you have been interested rather than curious and will support my efforts to communicate the hidden complexities of our language to you - in my experience of it, anyway. Please, do collude with my wish for your goodwill by leaving a comment sometimes.

Gambling

Last time, I indicated that I had had a brush with the demon Gambling. At the outset, I should make it clear that I haven't had so much fun for years, and, certainly, not since I was an inadvertant attendee at a night club in Portsmouth - see below, well below by now. Having established that, I must explain that I went on a purely professional basis, to establish whether or not the company concerned was doing what it said on the tin. (Yes, M'Lud, it is an unlikely explanation but it does add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing tale.) Anyway, there I was, at 5.30 in the afternoon, presenting myself for membership of an institution with a narrow door and a vast interior. The door was staffed by the biggest man I have ever seen and, from having been doubtful about the verisimilitude of turning up at old ladies' tea time, I swung to intense relief that it was still broad daylight and I was unlikely to be taken for a ne'er-do-well addict or any other kind of trouble maker. Neither was it an optimum time for real ne'er-do-wellers who might take a fancy to making trouble for me. The Guru was with me because there was less likelihood of my being mistaken for a spy - which I was - if I were accompanied by a young man who knew the ropes. (Don't ask: personally, I'd rather not know how he knows about a lot of things, one way and another).

It was surprising I passed the inside vetting. Having being apprised of the need for a passport or driving licence as proof of identity, I was horrified to find, that in the interests of having less to carry and less to lose should I have been attacked by said ne'er-do-wells, I had taken out of my handbag the wallet, habitually carried, which houses my driving licence. I know, I know: I should not be let out on my own. Of course, I wasn't alone, but the Guru can really be responsible only for my relationship with the Wizard of Cyberspace and his instrument of torture, the computer on which I lean as we speak. Dottiness is my own responsibility. As it happens, my 'bus pass proved acceptable and in we went with the mildest of reproaches and a request that I bring my passport next time. ( For faithful readers outside the UK, a photo- pass is issued to the over 65s which entitles them to free travel on public transport, 'bus or train, within a certain radius of the home town. Very encouraging it is, too). Although something of a stranger to slot machines and other instruments of addiction- relief I registered in a sweep of the extensive premises where we found ourselves, I am familiar with Roulette. So, we headed for the familiar, bought some chips and one minute and seventeen seconds later, I was £35 richer then I had been when we went in. Following the lessons learned in an earlier way of being in the world, I pocketed my original outlay and went on playing with the winnings. I have to tell you that it was one of the rare times in all the years of his life that I've known him, that the Guru was driven to absolute silence. Whether or not my luck continued, I am not prepared to tell you. Suffice it to say that I am a bit of a witch, myself. The Wizard of Cyberspace can't be allowed to win them all. Guru is, however, seriously concerned that it has got me hooked. He sees this as even worse than the choclate addiction he is already aware of. (I havent told him that I have had to leave in my car some chocolate treats I have bought for little people I shall see in a day or so. Even the very little would notice if the packets had been opened already). As it happens, I think I may be 'hooked'. I haven't done all that well in the money-making stakes in my life. Maybe I could redress the balance at the tables. See you soon, if I am not weighed down by the little round chips I have been carrying with me.