Author: Ellen Bell

Geoffrey Palmer died yesterday. I cannot tell you how much I have loved watching and listening to him. I have a collection of actor’s faces and voices that fill me with pleasure – he is, was one of them, with that lugubrious, hangdog face, his seeming curmudgeonliness always suffused with warmth, he was a joy. Thank you.

I dreamt I had been asked to help with some kind of a performance, it could have been a pageant or a play, I am not sure but it involved making small round buttonholes for the insertion of stay ribbons. There was so much to do and I was frustrated that my hands couldn’t work faster. There were also some repairs to do. Shall I just sew it? I asked. No, a woman said, you have to cut it first. The stays was black and it’s bones were of metal.

I walked along Chalybeate Street and came to the corner Mill Street where the garage is and had to do a quick manoeuvre into the road. A man was standing just beyond the forecourt. He was a young man with long hair and wearing a loose sweat top with some sort of a slogan on the front that I couldn’t read. He was carrying something in his right hand. His arm was outstretched. It looked like a small baby wrapped in a faux-fur leopard skin all in one sleepsuit. It was a child and it was asleep. His partner or wife, a thin strip of a thing with long, lank blonde hair was standing a little apart with her back to them, texting. As a tableau it struck me, the strangeness of the hour (it wasn’t yet 4 am) and the location (perhaps they were buying food or fags or drink?) and yet I didn’t want to judge. The child was asleep, and clearly content. Let it be. I wish them well.

I finished Sanditon. I didn’t realise that Austen only wrote 26,000 words of it – that is eleven chapters. An Australian writer finished this version in 1975. I enjoyed it. It felt true. Her ‘apology’ in the back was offered with grace and due humility. Could I do something like that? I move straight into Sense and Sensibility with its preface by Francesca Segal. I nice intro. Reading Austen makes you want to sit more upright, she writes. Yes. Absolutely.

I’ve always struggled determining the shape of my life. What am I, what shall or should I be? There has never been one distinct path to follow. I wobble, I always have.

I got an email saying that there was a vacancy. Should I, shouldn’t I? I asked him. No, he said, I want you at home. (It isn’t how it sounds, he means, meant to be at home, to do my own work, to be with him.) I sent my CV anyway. I told him and he was cross, no not cross, frustrated. I don’t know that I want it. Perhaps I just want to determine if they might want me. I’ve thought about it all day. I would lose much to gain what? A sense of a life more noble. I’ve done this alot during my almost sixty years, this sending something out there to see what comes. Sometimes it excites me, now less and less. What will I do if they get in contact? I don’t know. I don’t know that I could do it. Will you guide me? What do you want of me? What do I want of myself?

Just be happy, he says. We have enough. Yes?

The town’s Christmas decorations have been hung. They are not on yet and won’t be till the end of this month, and even then they switch them off at night. How I miss seeing the lights as I walk. Heigh ho. They are a simple, understated affair – gone are the flashing santas and the bilingual Happy Christmas that used to hang over Great Darkgate Street. The tree is still to appear. The smell of pine is always comforting when it does.

Did you hear any fireworks last night? I heard a few. No large gatherings precluded any big displays. Everything it seems will be sobered-down this year. The sun is already out. Not warming us but still a cheerful sight. Thank you.

Sometimes there is too much swirling around in my head to pin down or even begin to make sense of. At the moment it is the residue of listening to Peter Curran yesterday on Telling Tales and of just having looked at Colin Davidson’s portraits of those affected by ‘The Troubles’. I don’t know what to say after reading such testimonies and seeing images of such care-worn faces. And then there were my dreams of going to the toilet in public, always in public, always on view, in a station with no cubicles and of a woman leaving behind her glasses and things and my trying to call after her. And him at breakfast being so agitated at the thought that Donald Trump might win a second term in office and not being able to read or concentrate on anything else. Look out the window, he said before he left for his walk, if you want to be cheered up. And I do and it is magnificent. The colours. The sun on the buildings facing the Prom. Warm reds, oranges and yellows. An Autumn delight. Sometimes these small things are all we have. If they indeed be small.

It’s fixed. The boiler is fixed. He came, that wonderful Welsh man with a name like a famous American singer songwriter (but pronounced differently being Welsh), and fixed it. Shouldn’t be a problem, he said, a common fault. And it’s done. My bath was a joy this morning and the house is toasty again. Thank you, thank you you dark haired youth.

Dreams. The moon is no longer wholly full but the night images are still rampant. I was trying to find him. He was in a hotel but I couldn’t remember it’s name or its location. I went to a cafe and ordered breakfast but it was ostensibly a plate of meat. I tried to eat the rest but couldn’t and took it to the waitress at the desk to explain that I was vegan. We laughed about it, she was very forgiving and offered me a refund. Oh, I couldn’t, I said. Then I was trying to find him again. Sometimes I was with him, other times we were speaking on the phone. What was the name of where he was? I knew it. Then my father was there. I have a heart condition, he said. And a daughter of an acquaintance had given me some red wine. I didn’t want it. Then I spilled it and remembered a dream from the previous night (while I was still dreaming) of a purple stain and there it was. She poured me another gigantic glass. It’s low calorie, she said. And then my line manager was there telling me about her house next door to me with its floor to ceiling window. So much. Excuse my relaying it all here – I just want to remember. He pays no heed to his, for me they tell me things. Sometimes much, much later.

The big tides have thrown sand on the Prom and bits of flotsam lie on the beach, a child’s rucksack and a huge branch. Three lads stood talking, hoodies up, outside the bandstand.

The doorbell that fell off when the Asian girls took the flat round the corner still lies on the ground outside two months later.

I’m trying to be sanguine. He is better at it than me. Our boiler has bust. No hot water, no heating. My bath this morning was a thimble-full of water boiled in the kettle and in pans on the stove, all ferried downstairs. Back and forth. I am unsettled, such breakings always discombobulate me. I catastrophize imagining all sorts of horrors. Nevertheless I get on with things. It’s all I know how to do. The flat was still cleaned, breakfast made and here I am ready for work. People will have to come in. And I don’t know when. They are nice enough, of course, it’s just the thought of it, at the moment. And all the time I think of the two men sleeping in the shelter on the Prom, hardly protected against this fierce wind, and the refugees living in those camps and the winter coming on. At least I am dry, I have food, shelter, a space to call my own. It’s just that it reminds me of direr times, times when all was chaos and I was scared. My vulnerability is so near the surface. And I think fear of cold, of being cold is my biggest concern. And of destitution. For I’ve experienced both of them, to my shame.

Sometimes I am but a speck. To him I am more. But sometimes……

The early morning weather was more clement than I’d anticipated, or that the BBC forecast had foretold. I walked. I walked on the Prom and down by the harbour and on the Perygyl. The rain held off mostly, just spits of it. And the wind though gusty along North Road was manageable. I was pleased. I like to stretch my legs and move. I need it. A few clusters of students hung about in doorways. No Halloween festivities for them at the Pier or SY23. Bless them. Not much of a student life these days. I saw a few pumpkin faces on doorsteps and in windows. Are they to ward off evil spirits? A piece of pumpkin lay smashed in the middle of the road opposite Mill Street petrol station.

Earlier in the day yesterday I happened to look out of our upstairs window and saw the little Eastern European girl (are they Polish?), the one who is looked after by her father while her mother works. She and her father were just coming round the corner into the Quad and she was dressed up in an all in one black bodysuit with a white skeleton embossed on it. She had clearly forgotten all about her unusual attire (the way only children can do) and was running about as usual, wrapping him around her little finger, no doubt. He is sanguine about it all. Hello, he always calls after us, bending his head down to her to encourage her to do the same, she never does.

A lad was perched on the railing of North Prom as a I walked by. He was sitting inside it, facing the sea in just a tee shirt and shorts. He looked sad. On the back of his tee shirt the slogan read: Into the Mirror Black.

I dreamt of a swan, but I’m not sure of the context. Did I see one? I know that in the end it was a dream about problem-solving and I’d decided to make a flip book using a swan as the image. I was pleased with my resolution when I woke. My father was there too, somewhere, but again I don’t know what he was doing. A presence, that’s all and not particularly relevant.

The moon was shining strong into my studio when I woke. Just lovely. It gives me such a lift, that white silvery light. And then it was gone. The wind gusted as I walked. The harbour is strewn with seaweed, there must’ve been big tides last night.

Tracey Emin has cancer. He was reading an interview with her yesterday at breakfast. It sounds like she is riddled with it. Her bladder, parts of her bowel, lymph nodes and vagina have all be removed. Poor girl. Poor, poor girl. She cracked a joke. She must be scared. I wish her well. She has been an influence. A light.

I’m reading Sanditon. I wanted to see if the adaptation I’d watched recently was true. It is not. Why do they mess with something that has merit, as it clearly does? Why introduce all the skullduggery, the suspense that they did? Not to mention the sex. Why? Aagh. Austen is too subtle for them.

The rain is relentless. I got soaked. Heigh ho. Winter approaches. My spirits need much to raise them.

I recognised the smell, that sharp sweetness that always used to make my tongue water. It was in my bathroom. It came from nowhere and didn’t last long. Some say that visiting spirits carry scents with them, or at least smells that evoke memories in us. Pear drops in paper bags measured out in the sweet shop up the road from us. Pink and yellow hard-boiled sweets dusted with icing sugar that made your mouth pink. It made me feel a little happy that smell.

A new commission just when I thought everything had stopped. It pleases me more than him. I want to contribute, to be useful. My own work must be put to one side, just for the moment. And that’s OK. It’s always been about a balance.