Author: Ellen Bell

Last time we saw her in the coffee shop she’d been unable to sleep because of her aching shoulder. It’s been a week since we’ve been in and yesterday the shoulder had been side-lined by concern for her sick cat, Socks. She clearly feels it. ‘I’ve had him since he was three months old,’ she told us. He can’t swallow.

We all have them, those things that hurt and trouble us, some big, some small. And meanwhile WW3 goes on for the Ukrainians. Yesterday the newsreaders were talking of the digging of mass graves and the request for UK citizens to offer a Ukrainian refugee a room, today it was the shelling of mosque sheltering, amongst others, children. It all matters. The dying, the dead, the fear, the homelessness, the starvation, the abuse, the frustration, the hopelessness and a sick cat. It all matters. And I hold it all, when I can, in my heart, hoping for a resolution, hoping for peace, and an end to suffering.

Amid all the horror that is playing out before our eyes and ears, and oh so near, there are moments of something like joy.

She was standing under the bridge that leads to the harbour leaning on pink scooter and singing. When I came close, she stopped, picked up the scooter and walked on. Then, as I approached home there was another. She was sweeping. An elderly lady in carpet slippers and a nylon pink and white gingham apron, she was sweeping the pavement and the road outside her terrace house. Just that square or oblong beyond her door, no more. Just that.

We don’t and won’t forget what you are suffering. I promise.

I read novels at breakfast while he reads the papers. There not actual papers but virtual ones, online. I sometimes glance over at what he is reading. Yesterday I noticed the heading of one of the articles. ‘Isn’t it time to start talking about Nuclear War’, it read. Is it? Is it really going to come to that?

I think about all the destruction, and how for the Ukrainian people it probably feels like it has already begun. What can we do? Let it take me if it comes. Let it be fast. I am sorry. I am sorry that as a civilisation we haven’t learnt to be kind. Maybe next time. Adieu.

I’ve been lain on them, photographed by them and swallowed in by them. Yesterday’s was the last of so many. My poor little body has had enough. It acquiesced, breathed in and out as the generated voice told it too. It obeyed, drank the water, filled its bladder and held it, and then allowed them to inject the dye, (‘It will feel like you’ve wet yourself,’ said the girl with the short fringe, ‘but you won’t.’) I was good. A good girl.

He was standing at the entrance to the hospital by a sort of padded wheelchair-like contraption. We didn’t know him but he smiled at us. ‘It’s good news,’ he said, ‘it isn’t cancer.’

It goes on. Women crying through the radio, despair in their voices. They are being deprived of heating, water, food and being shelled as they try to escape to safety. Oh, let there be an end to it. Let their hell cease. Please.

They run parallel, the horror of what is happening to the Ukrainian people, the pain in my hips and the kindness of those around me and those whom I have yet to meet. I feel her heartbreak, she has been worn down by the lack of care from the hierarchy. It is time for her to rest and begin again, somewhere new. I wish her success, though, as I wrote I will miss her.

How do we carry it all? (Though as that journalist wrote this is not about us.) I think of them all day and when I wake through the night. Such courage and such nationalism. He showed me the video of the wedding of the two reservists. Light in the dark. And oh, so necessary in our human story.

One more to go. And then back to drawing and then a rest.

There are all these levels of human experience that seem, especially at the moment, to exist in parallel with each other. The trauma that the people of Ukraine are going through plays out before our eyes and ears while we work, walk in the sun, eat, laugh, drink and sleep in warm, safe beds. I struggle to make sense of it. Perhaps there is no sense to be made. And then I think of all those who lost dear ones during the height of the pandemic. And then of my sister in law having to cope with the death of her husband and the stroke that took away, at least for a while, her capacity to walk, speak and be independent. She has responded to the cataclysmic upending of her world with such fortitude, humour and stoicism that at times I am moved to silence by it. Her much-loved home has been sold and her life is now lived out in one room in an old people’s home (along with her 100 teddies). She is cheerful enough. He called her at the weekend. Can’t talk now, she said, I’m off to Bingo.

There’s still this holding of breath and then those heart-rending news clips of Ukrainians imploring us for help. And then the 8 month pregnant woman crying out for her husband she had to leave behind. (And always through the medium of a translator who’s usually measured voice begins to falter.) What will be the end of it? Yesterday there was a glimmer when they told of anti-war demos in Russia. So brave. Will it work? Will Putin be ousted?

Oh, let there be no more. Let there be peace. Please.

I heard the news at 3.00 am and how President Zelensky is asking NATO to impose a no fly zone in place over Ukraine. They are suffering such torment. And he accused Europe of standing by and watching. I understand his pain. I do. And yet to go to war with Russia which is what would happen is too terrible to contemplate. The suffering would be astronomical. And yet. How difficult it must be for those leaders to stand by, seemingly powerless. And now Putin is stopping all, what he calls, fake news reaching the Russian populace. How will they know what is going on and why the sanctions are in place? Such chaos. And then there is Syria, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Somalia – it goes on and on. Have we learnt nothing?

Save us, for we know not what we do. I am adrift.

We talk about the invasion, about Putin. We try to reason through the unreasonable. We cannot. And I try to remember their plight every hour, every minute. Life plays out here and the real has become unreal. I go to the dentist and endure the drill and think of what they are enduring in the same moment. I feel the ache and discomfort in my bones and want to erase my inner and outer moanings at them. For my bodily injustices are but nothing in comparison.

He had made a 100 sandwiches for those fleeing the conflict. A 100 sandwiches.

We mustn’t forget the kindnesses. The kindnesses of strangers at such time. That is the gift in the horror. That. Let it bring solace.

‘You definitely have arthritis in your hips,’ said the consultant, ‘both hips.’ This was said as if he was merely confirming what I already knew. I didn’t. It was a bit of a jolt. He pointed to the X-ray of my femur, ‘see here and here, that’s arthritis. But the white areas, here, we don’t know what this is.’ So it’s more tests. Bloods and a CT scan. ‘What now?’ I asked. ‘No, you have to fast first,’ said the other consultant, a baggier man but also, it turns out, Egyptian. What a bugger. And I’ve so much work to do. And what an afternoon. It was interminable, as was sitting, being forced to listen to, virtually the whole of Jeremy Vine’s radio show. That dreadful mix of the horror of what is happening in Ukraine and Vox pop responses, interspersed with his choice of music. And all the gung Ho machismo.

And before that there had been my big gaff and the pain of irritating her. I tread such eggshells. And then the interview with that gentle being and longing to begin my writing of which I am so a feared.

I am growing old. No, correction. My body is growing old. And I no longer know it.