Author: Ellen Bell

I’ve been going out drawing most mornings this week so haven’t had a chance to write this. Things that I want to write about or mention or just remember then begin to stack up and what ought to be a lyrical, spontaneous musing becomes more like list. Here goes:

1. The man who stopped me on the Prom the other morning at 4 am asking if I’d seen the fires. He had a jumper or some such thing tied around his head and was carrying a whole honeydew melon.
2. Looking at the scan of my body on the consultant’s screen at the hospital and marvelling at my little form up there, seeing my ovaries, my genitals, my ribs and watching the flow of arteries from my aorta. Fascinating and more than a little surreal. Is that me? I kept wanting to ask. And the best of all bests? No more tests. Shall we just leave it then? I asked him. Yes, he said. Good, I said.
3. The Pelican Bakery is shutting. It shut yesterday. The baker wants to spend more time with his family. I’m sad. I love the smell in the mornings. Now our ugly (very shabby at the moment) little town is sans bakeries.
4. The man the ex-butcher referred to as ‘Cock’ has died. It was rectal cancer apparently. And the house he was building for his in-laws is not yet finished. I am sorry. And then thinking about him as I passed his home a huge lorry came round the corner (a great shining silver thing) with his name blazoned across the top (well with an added s to be exact). A nice bit of synchronicity. Rest in peace.
5. A man was standing opposite the 24hr SPAR having clearly spent the night sleeping in the doorway of Barnado’s. He was shouting. It wasn’t at me. He held a bottle in his hand. He had a Irish brogue. He shouted that someone was a traitor. Did he say Jesus?

The sea was barely moving as I walked this morning. The calm after the bank holiday rumpus was lovely. I soaked it in. Three young people had opted to sleep on the beach, and one was kneeling over a makeshift fire and trying to blow it alive again, while the other two were endeavouring to drape a sheet over themselves.

My first interview in over a month today and I struggle to let the intensity of my drawing practice go. But it must be so. Both elements of my work require my full attention. For now my drawing must take second place. Oh, the ache of it. You see there is still so much to do……

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.

I thought about her yesterday, I’m not sure why. We talked about the hotel in town she and her family (ostensibly her and her parents when they visited from Swansea) used to run that is now boarded up. She was lovely, is lovely and as smiling as ever when we bump into her occasionally in the M&S café I go to draw in. A pretty woman, the sun shines from her like a misty beatific radiance. The hotel always felt safe in her hands, she was unshakeable, professional, steady. She is another woman I would add to my ‘wanted as a mother’ list. No question.

The deluge came as we walked. We’d gone prepared in full waterproofs and it looked like the rain might hold off but it didn’t. We sheltered, he and I, under one of the castle’s arches. I liked it. I felt like I was sixteen again. A girl with a boy. A new love. We talked and listened and watched the rain. I rarely do that. Nothing, that is. It was strangely restful and the air was clean and sharp. I loved him then as I do now but it was new and tender. We got soaked anyway making a dash for the car and sat in there prior to my drawing stint in the coffee shop, melting. I’m edgy, the project looms and I am still scared. T’was ever thus.

I have neglected this journal woefully. I have been drawing, over and over again. The project looms and I am frightened. All I can do to quell the fear is keep drawing and drawing and drawing…..

I’ve foraged for blackberries twice now and there are still lots more to come. What a lovely feeling it gives me. Such a simple delight. And so sensual. There is no smell, like there is with blackcurrants (hot, dusty and green) but the sensation of delicately releasing the berry from its stem is gorgeous. They stain my fingers, those fingers already, and now perpetually, stained with Indian ink.

There were two flashes of lightning over the sea this morning as I walked. There was a mysterious magic to it. Did anyone else see it?

We were just getting our little deck chairs out of the car like a couple of old codgers on a day out to the Peak District when we saw one of our neighbours (they live in one of the big houses round the front of the estate) coming up the back lane with three Tupperware containers in her arms piled high with blackberries. Are you going to beach? she shouted. No, I said, bold as brass, we’re going to sit here. She showed us the blackberries. They were just from the lane, she said, and there’s lots of red ones so more are on the way. We watched her walk off, her arms laden. Then he began his tirade about the cheek of it, her taking all of them and so on. It was semi-serious, semi-joking I believe. It makes me laugh. They are lovely people. And she is so cosy in her neat smallness. I’m off to make some blackberry and apple crumble, she said as she left, not for now but to freeze for next year. It’s like watching another life (we can see all their comings and goings from our upstairs window), one that I could never live out. It both warms and chills me such spectator-ing.

I think that I am invisible and mostly I am but these days people are engaging with what I am doing as an artist. ‘The artist lady’, one man called me yesterday. And then there was Barry the Busker wanting to photograph my drawings of him for his FB site. I’m not sure how I feel about it. It increases the nerves, certainly.

They promised a meteor shower this week. I looked at the sky as a walked. I saw a moving light but I suspect it was a plane. I will persevere. Shooting stars always give me a fillip.

He, and what we presumed was his wife, were sitting at the table across from us in the coffee shop when I noticed that he was making drawings. He seemed to be drawing me drawing. It reminded me of all those years ago in the Royal Festival Hall when M and I were doing the very same thing. He looked like him too. He had the same loose linen trousers, the linen shirt and the beard and he was using what looked like hand-made sketchbooks. But there was no pipe. Maybe he had one in his pocket for later. When they got up to leave he came over. He had a trace of accent, was it German, Swiss or Dutch (hence Wolfgang). He talked about taking life-classes. He showed me his drawings and asked to see mine. You are a painter, he said. His response to my work was kind and genuine. It made me feel good. And he asked me to show his wife too. Oh, she said, that’s me.

The man sitting outside Matalan yesterday who asked him for change was sitting outside Smiths this morning as I walked. Good afternoon, he shouted, adding, any change? I explained that I didn’t carry any money. Have a good evening then, he said, unphased. You too, I replied aware of the ludicrousness of such knee-jerk responses. What’s wrong with your leg by the way? he called after me. I stopped and turned round to face him (his face lit in up in the dark by his iPad) oh, it’s just a bad hip, I said. Is it arthritis? he asked. I was going to explain, touched by his care but he’d lost interest and had turned away. I carried on walking smiling at his lugubriousness. I told him the tale at breakfast. I liked him, he said.