The shock was her’s not mine. Her voice was remarkably different when I called yesterday. I could barely hear her. And there was the sun shining, and the sky so blue. I’d expected her to be out and loving it. Poor love. She is shaken after that fall. It takes its toll. It’s gone to her chest and her voice is a mouse squeak of a sound. We didn’t talk for long, it was too much for her. Life is a see saw. Up and down. Up and down.
I didn’t go into to town to draw and missed it. I drew him instead and our ‘garden’. Another warm day is promised. The sun will be good.
I drew down by the harbour yesterday, sketching one of the boats still in dry dock and then the lifeguards hut along the Prom. It was busy with sauntering couples, families and dogs. So many dogs. (There was one – one of those toy breeds, bald and with long hair about its ears – who’d been dressed up in a t-shirt and shorts. Bless it, it looked utterly ridiculous.) One of the lifeguards, in a red towelling gown, asked me if I was drawing and wanted to see. Cool, he said. Can I take a picture of it when I get back? (He was off to do some surfing.) And then, further along the Prom just by the Crepes stall, a man I know from old also called out to me. Is it a Turner or a Monet? before walking over to look. Oh, he said, disappointed, you’re drawing that man over there. And then promptly went over to him and told him. For all the busy-ness I liked being out there, people were having a nice time (though the sun was a liquidy-thing). On my way home I picked blackberries.
A slight feral-ness gives it away. There is something, a disorder, a chaos hardly perceptible but it is there. I saw him from a distance. I think he came out of a block of flats. There was a dog with him. Initially I thought it was on a lead but it was not. Perhaps that was the first inkling of disarray, the dog being loose. I wanted to give them both a wide birth. I kept to the left hand pavement but then he began to cross the road towards me. I lurched to the right and he did the same. It was a dance. A dance of avoidance on my part. I smelt a wildness, a non-honouring of politeness, of order. I expressed my irritation. Did I make a sound? He noticed it. Drunkenness (for he was clearly inebriated) doesn’t make you blind to instinct, it just makes your responses awry. He changed his mind and kept to the right pavement instead. His dog however had other ideas and came towards me. A black bull dog cross with his ears flipped back, he sniffed at me. I kept walking, trying to maintain my composure. He called the dog away. And it went. I suppose my choosing to walk in the dark opens me up to such encounters. I don’t want them but they are part of the idiosyncrasy of my behaviour. It was nothing but at the same time it wasn’t. Am I always safe? I was surprised at my flash of anger (for I think it was anger that I expressed) for I rarely feel it these days. Perhaps it saved me, though from what I’m not sure.
The loss of the Americans has touched us both. They’d thrown a handful of peanuts on their step as a parting gesture for the birds. It has hardly been touched. Are they sad at their departure too?
I forgot to say that we picked blackberries on the way home yesterday. When I got in I noticed that my thumb had been stained purple.
Town was quiet again this morning and the moon was still visible though shrinking. 3 boys were standing around a sooped-up sports hatchback outside the Pier Pressure club. It’s lights were on and one of them was bending down to look at the tyres. Further along 2 girls were sitting cross-legged on the pavement smoking and talking, a thermos flask by the side of them. One, a girl with a strong Irish brogue and slurring a little, was saying, ‘…it’s the commitment’. Before I’d climbed the hill I’d seen an elderly woman in what looked like pyjamas (at least there was a kind of Disney character motif on the front – Daffy Duck or Bugs Buggy, I’m not sure, it was too dark) pushing a ‘walker’. I smiled at her but she gave me a grimace and continued her slow inching. Another elderly person (not sure sex-wise) was sitting on a similar walker (some come with flip down seats) on the Prom. He or she was hunched over. I thought I might have to go and see if they were alright but when I passed her or him, I could see that he or she was looking a mobile. Up in the Castle park someone had clearly slashed away at the hydrangeas for several of its heads littered the path. Why?
I saw the Americans getting into a taxi at 5.30 am. He’d told him he was going (though much of what he said was unheard), that they had to due to their visa expiring but that they intend to keep on the flat for a bit in case they can return. I am saddened. Not that were knew them very well but the birds and the local vegan shop have all come to rely on them. As have I in my small way. I liked their gentleness and slow politeness. And seeing the birds that come to their balcony. Must there always be change?
I’m later writing this this morning. I’ve been out drawing, on a kind of ‘pub crawl’ of cafes in town sketching people queuing or sitting down drinking. We’ve sat in three cafes, all chains (they are generally better, I say generally, the first was, other two not so). I worked hard and watched the ebb and flow of my energy and my concentration. It was cold, the wind a sharp one. He read the paper and chattered to me, intermittently. He partners me in everything I do, patiently accepting and cajoling where necessary. There was a nice flurry in Caffé Nero and P was there, unexpectedly as we thought he gone to Newquay in Cornwall. I’m moonlighting, he said with the lovely twinkly smile of his. It took me a while to warm up with my drawing, I know when it is working but I carry RS in my head and know I have a long way to go.
I noticed the sign for the gift and tack shop just off the Prom and how the letters have either worn off (through to wind and rain etc.) or fallen off. So what should say AMBASSADORS now only reads ADORS.
We saw the young mother today who had hung her washing out along the hand rail. She was bending down over a pram trying to clean out the food that the child had deposited there. I’d called out to her yesterday through the window advising her against using the safety rail as a drying facility. I’d tried to do it gently. We of course thought she’d moved here permanently, with her three kids, but no, she told us she was only here for two days visiting her father who works in the hospital and that she was going back to Birmingham today. My train goes at 2, she said.
I saw the first law-breaker mobile home down by the harbour today. I mused over the fact that such flouting of the rules unsettles me. What harm are they doing? He gets quite exercised.
The slug trails along the pavements glisten quite beautifully in the moonlight.
I keep making marks on my furniture. I haven’t got much and what I have, though not expensive or particularly marvellous, I am fond of, if only for their aesthetic and utility. The first is my table. You got this in Bath, he said the other morning, I remember you getting it. And the second recipient of a stain is the red tool cabinet in my studio. Mostly they are water marks. The tool cabinet is where I rest my tea pot. I woke from a dream thinking that T Cut polish might do it. Alas, my table is not so fortunate. Most of the varnish has now gone with all the scrubbing I’ve done of it over the years. Much has been eaten and made on that table (the whole of my East End show, at least). I need to learn to accept the marrings, they show experience, I suppose.
My current JA book talks of stoicism, namely that of Anne Elliot but also Austen herself. All that making the best of things, of acceptance, fortitude and silent endurance but with resource. I have much to learn.
Oh, yes. I did draw yesterday, him mostly and they were appalling. He read out crossword clues and I drew. I know his face too well to make a good sketch of it. He is patient. Stop being self-indulgent, he says, just keep doing it and you will improve. Heidi was a better candidate, though she never keeps still. I drew her, when I could, when he’d gone, watching her catch flies and yes, eat them. This is her replete with tinkling collar bell. What a sweetheart, though painfully shy.
I wake fretting sometimes. Last night a dream set me off course. I shouldn’t allow it to be so. Their only dreams, he says. Yes, but their disorientations shadow my day. There was an old man, a mix of people I know, who had dementia and the whole house (where I also lived) had to be turned upside down and consequently where I was sleeping was unfamiliar to me (as were the things inside it) and the walls had holes in them.
I copied yesterday afternoon, though unsuccessfully and it brought me down. Can I really do this? I will try again today. Keep going. Just keep going. The click will come.
A little blue car stopped at the corner of Llanbadarn Road to let me pass. We did that kind of dance – do I wait, will you go, no you go. I was touched by their politeness and solicitude. It felt nice. The town was alive with noise. I could hear boys’ voices from the shoreline. Come on, let’s go, was one of their cries. And then the sound of splashing. Lights were on, squares of yellow against the black night. A girl with a ponytail got out of a car and rushed across the street. The car lights stayed on. An alarm was sounding in a block of flats. It makes one edgy all this wakefulness.
I’m trying to find my language again. It’s almost like re-learning to speak, to write. There is no right way, or right line but I know when it is – right for me, that is. I do get disheartened. I wait for the click (it’s the same when I right, or make work). It’s rare but marvellous when it comes. It was hard going on the Prom, everything is in motion. And my brain tells me I can’t do it. I am finding it hard to write and draw, the drawing or my need to get it right dominates. There’s that right again. I know what I mean. This scanning of them helps, I get outside of them and can survey with less judgement.
I noticed so many things that I didn’t capture – like the couple (he with a very large head) washing their feet after being on the sand at the public shower by the bandstand. He had rolled up his shorts. She wore a mohair cardigan. They both had dyed their hair, her’s was red and his brown. She fussed and he attended to her.
I dreamt of crocuses pushing through the soil and thought but it isn’t even September.
Yesterday was my drawing day in the Museum. I didn’t hold out much hope for much to study, and I wasn’t far wrong. A bloke stood at the bottom of the stairs asking for names and proof of booking. Ah, will spontaneity ever return? The admittance was limited, as were the rooms that were open – just the one floor. We are trailed behind each other, masks on (which doesn’t aid the study of faces) – umming and ahing over the exhibits that I’ve seen countless times. And it is so dark in there. I did draw – such as the petulant girl who kept slumping down on chairs, evidently determined to show how bored she was, and there was the little boy too, all tousle-headed with his Dad. I heard his voice echoing through the hall (somehow they had managed to get upstairs).
He was in the café across the street while I drew, ‘happy as Larry’ with his paper and coffee. I joined him eventually and drew in there. I’d spent the morning copying intentionally, trying to learn from Ronald Searle’s mark-making. It helped, I think. I drew with more speed, trying to just keep going and not judge. One step forward and umpteen back.
There was an L-plate on the pavement outside the corner shop. And packs of kids seemed to roam the streets (since the clubs have opened), three girls arm-in-arm first and then a hoard of them spilling out into the road.
The Arts Centre was empty, well virtually. I had had to book online to view the exhibition (presumably to keep the hoards from contravening the now wobbly social distancing laws) and yet there were just four of us in there (soon diminishing to just two). So I followed them around. It was awkward. And the awkwardness made my pen slow and my brain even slower. I will have to surmount this somehow, for there will be long periods of seemingly nothing happening in the galleries I aim to study too. I know this, I’ve been there (willingly) when they were both empty. This particular woman whom I followed appeared quite demanding, she asked things of the gallery adjudicator and then later of the waitresses serving in the café. She’d come in with her husband (he, sporting a very dapper red and white gingham shirt) but he had left her to it. She looked at every piece, slowly and deliberately, her hands clasped behind her back. Her grey linen coat/dress was amorphous and floaty and her hair wild and fluffed out, which made drawing her challenging, there being no defined lines. A tall, neatly-clipped man had been in there before her. He wore trainers too and spic and span jeans, ironed and crisp. He also gave the exhibit (an open-call to the public to submit art inspired or produced during lock-down) its due. I found it grey and depressing. I struggle to look at such a hotchpotch, though I celebrate the intention. And it was cold in there, it often is. I drew from the balcony afterwards, watching the people sitting at tables in the café. I saw at least three women wearing dungarees, two of whom were pregnant. Walking home it was as if my eyes had been opened-wider, I saw colours (such as an azure blue stripe on man-hole cover) with increased intensity.
I dreamt I was travelling and sitting down on a pavement I began talking to some people who asked where I was going. I told them I couldn’t decide which friends to visit – and that I had one in Zurich. And they told me that Zurich was just down the road. They watched me take out a small plastic bag with a tiny doll that I had made to give to my friends (though I knew that I’d already given them one). I saw their fascination and heard their praise. Then the alarm went off.
