He calls her every afternoon before we eat supper. I have watched and listened to their relationship getting richer. It is a lovely thing, and one borne out of compassion for all that she has lost, and love, yes it is love. And I think she knows it. They were talking about childhood magazines and I asked him to ask her whether she’d taken Girl. No, she said, I read The New Elizabethan. Neither he or I had heard of it. He looked it up on Google. It was called The Young Elizabethan and published in response to the Queen’s Coronation. It was no giddy comic but a journal based on uplifting stuff such as book reviews and suggestions, competitions (one of which had a pony as a first prize) and extracts from Molesworth. I asked him afterwards if his mother would’ve bought it for her. No, he replied, my father. He was a real self-improver. When he spoke to her again she said that she’d really hankered after The Beano and The Dandy like the next-door neighbours’ kids read. It’s good to hear her laugh.
There was a dead badger on the road when we drove to Aberaeron yesterday. He was huge and still perfectly in tact. Had he been dumped there after some god-awful badger baiting, as Cynan Jones in his book implied happened hereabouts? What killers we are with our cars. And what a noble, magnificent and innocent creature he was. I bleed over and over.
Madonna has had a hip replacement. I think it helps, a little.
There was a bright blue surfboard poking out of an open window of a camper van along the Prom this morning. The campervan was called Violet.
