Should we interfere with Nature? Or what we call Nature? In cases like these, I always think of L. P. Hartley’s Shrimp and the Anemone. I did it anyway. There was a cat, a small black one that I saw on the other side of the road, just below the rock under the castle. It was teasing something with its paw. I walked over and saw that it was a tiny field mouse. I raised my stick (I walk with one sometimes as my hips are a little stiff in the mornings) not to hit out at it but to scare, the cat that is, away. The cat was most reluctant and the mouse seemed too much in shock to move. When I looked back it had gone. You won’t eat it, I told the cat, nor do you need to (though it did look a little skinny). It looked at me with what I read as scorn. It was certainly cross. I had denied it it’s plaything. I walked on.
The sea was a gentle lapping and I could see the lights of two boats in the distance. The lights were still but strong, where they collecting lobster or crab pots? Two men were outside the Marine Hotel, one stood, the other sat. The sitting one called out Good Morning to me. And I replied in kind.
She walks everyday, breaking her tour of the estate with a sit on her seat (that is, a pile of railings and bricks on the, so far, abandoned building site). Sometimes she sleeps and other times she stares, or thinks or prays, who knows? She is locked inside herself, deafness and virtual blindness must do that. But I don’t think she is unhappy, merely waiting out her days (it cannot be long, she is 103 this year).
I keep drawing. I ask much of myself. I know when they work and when they don’t even in the doing of them. It’s a life, an energy, sometimes it just isn’t there. Yesterday was a challenge, I’d grown out of the habit of drawing things and people in motion. And I was self-conscious. Will I improve? Practice makes perfect, someone said in my head.
