Author: Ellen Bell

It was from a podcast produced by two songwriters who interviewed other songwriters about writing songs. They were ordinary blokes. I can’t remember their names. Nice voices. Down to earth. They were talking to the presenter of Radio 4 Extra’s Podcast Hour about what they learnt from talking to the great and the good of the music world. That you’ve just got to keep on doing it. Get something down, one of them said, and not wait for the muse to strike. It’s a job. You never hear about ‘Plumber’s Block’ do you? he said. Fair point, well made.

It came. It fits. Finally my bed is made whole after all these years. I didn’t think I could manage it. I’d resigned myself to its denuded state. It came all the way from Virginia, USA. Marvellous. A little swirl ball. Tiny. Brass. And it fitted. I am cock-a-hoop. No more rattling.

We went into Boots. The pharmacist looked at it over his counter. A small man, pale skin, a little officious. I’m not sure, he said, it could be one of two things. You look like you like the sun, he said. Was he passing judgement? I felt a little defensive. Yes, I said, a little. Both of the possibilities are self-limiting, he said, they will go eventually. It could be a couple of weeks, months or years. Fine. I shall live with it. It is good for me this quiescence.

Still not sleeping well. I woke five times last night. I pee for England. I know it’s counterintuitive but you have to drink lots of water, she said.

The scene keeps playing over in my mind. Have I told you of my fascination with nuns? One of my soothsayers said I was one, once. I believe so. It’s from the Midwife, the last series. They are all at the Mother House. And its  the nun’s dormitory. It is winter, nearing Christmas but there is a breeze from an open window. Each nun has her own bed partitioned off by white muslin curtains. Everything is white. They all sleep in long white cotton nighties buttoned up at the neck. A nun comes in ringing a bell, they all rise behind their curtains which are opened at the front. Each nun, a figure in white with a white skull cap on her head, kneels at their bed. They chant their prayers in unison. It is stunning. The white curtains move in the breeze. My heart aches for such simplicity, and cool, silent acquiescence. And yet there are internal battles, always. Therein lies the dark. It’s about the ‘quarrel’, the soon to be new Mother Superior played by Miriam Margolyes (she is marvellous, marvellous, I saw her on stage acting out most of Dicken’s women, though he can’t stand her) says. The internal quarrel between what the body and mind want and what we are called upon to do. I’m a sucker for it all. Schmaltz and all. (Sorry, Brenda.)

Must be off. Drawers to tidy. Order to impose. And tea.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the radio play about Gertrude Stein. I can’t remember the playwriter, but it was stupendous. A solo performance by Angela Pleasance. She is talking about all the artists and writers she had known in Paris, and all the while making a cake. A Liberation Fruit Cake. I ate it up.

Now off with you.

It’s my first interrupted morning of work in a while. When there are countless other things to do, I long for such days, yet, when one comes I am a little daunted. There are no excuses, its just me and the work. I think about my writing as I walk. My fear of doing it badly, consumes me at times. But what is bad writing? I just need to write it, this constant judgement, of taking its temperature is not only debilitating for me but detrimental to the making of it. I just need to get the words down. It is that simple. All the tweaking is to be done later. I did still write yesterday, as I have done everyday for the last few weeks, even if I was interrupted and could only write in bouts. I did it. That’s the important thing – to, as Julia Cameron, says, ‘show up at the page’. And new, unexpected things are revealing themselves, as they will if I stay with it. I was listening to a radio documentary this morning about an Act-o-thon, a fifty-hour non-stop improvised performance. About three-quarters of the way through, when the actors are beyond exhausted, something that they called the ‘lizard-brain’ starts kicking in. Apparently things just come out that you have no knowledge of, or control over. I think I need to access this. Somehow.

We sat on a bench opposite the library in the sun waiting for my next appointment. Somehow threw some bread out of an upper floor window onto the patch of grass behind us. Four seagulls immediately swooped down. One bird got hold of the largest piece and swallowed it whole. Then it had to regurgitate it as it had got stuck in its gullet. Back it went, down its throat, the other birds crowding round, trying to snatch it. And there it stayed, a great lump sticking out of his neck. All the while he talked about an article he’d read in the local newspaper about people he’d known as a child. I love the hum of his voice, his pleasure in small things.

A few spots of rain then calm. I’ll work soon, but coffee first.

Niamh Cusack is reading an abridged version of Mary Costello’s Academy Street on the radio each morning this week. I am lapping it up, like a cat with cream. Costello writes so beautifully, though what I mean by that I am not so sure. The language is lyrical without being showy, it washes over me. Tess is a gentle being, so sensitive, so aware of emotions that go unstated by those around her. The way she feels about her father, her fellow nurses. And then the descriptions of the farmhouse, the radio not being turned on again after her mother’s death. And Cusack’s voice is sublime. Pure honey. I don’t think I can relinquish these twilight hours, for all my need for sleep. And walking at that time brings such a mix of fear and bliss. No, not bliss but a sense of peace. The world is holding its breath at that time. Yes, there are the drunks, the loutish shouting but there is also the bread being baked, the cry of the birds, the rush of the waves, fishing boats leaving the harbour and the approach of morning. And I am mostly alone. In Costello’s book she had Tess admitting to herself that she always chooses to do the night shift in the Dublin hospital for it is the only time she can be alone. I understand that. The woman with the bag was walking towards me today and she took a detour into the ‘ship’ to avoid crossing my path. I smiled to myself. It was clumsily done but I do understand. Catriona played Robert Schumann’s Songs of Dawn this morning on Radio 3 as I did my stretching. He called them Songs without Words, or was that Clara? Songs of Dawn are about the approach and awakening of morning. It was coming up as I listened. A beautiful morning today. There is sun, full sun already.

I know that I need to trust. I want to. She sounded a little brusque on the phone. How do they make a living? Will it be clean? Is it authentic? Will she be intuitive? Am I doing the right thing? I want to give it a try. And besides, who cares, I no longer give blood anymore, too many false starts.

The nurse again today. More pricking and prodding. I’d like to get beyond my body. Sail above it, floating.

I cannot eat coconut, it lies in my gut unwanted and undigested. And yet, I love it. I can picture so clearly those street-sellers in Spain with their barrows of it, the little jets of waters keeping them moist. So I buy products that smell of it, lotions and body washes. It’s the same with chocolate. And now there is to be no more onions. What is that smell? he kept asking, wrinkling his nose in disgust. I gave up garlic for him and now I must do the same with onions. So be it. He forgoes cooked meat for me. Fairs fair.

Not much time before I have to go. Half an hours writing. Better than nothing. Let’s not be precious about it. Workaday. Shall I buy a copy of Academy Street or perhaps they will have it in the library? Work now, sweetie.  

I walked back home from work, as I’ve been doing most Wednesdays after the pause for thought booking. She is such a sweetie. A lay preacher, who is almost skittish in her seeming shyness, her face pinking up as she speaks. I find it delicious. I asked what her subject was today. Boris, she said. I took the other way home through the University’s main entrance and down Penglais Hill. There were two rabbits on one of the lawns, one was black. They appeared to be a pair, eating close to each other, companionable. The campus grounds are awash with them. They suddenly burst out from under bushes when you least expect it, before scurrying away, their scuts bobbing up and down behind them. The sun came out and shone on my back. The traffic at that time in the morning was minimal. I could see a mist over the sea. This is a good life, I thought to myself. Perhaps not what I’d expected for myself, but it is rich. I am loved, cared for, I have enough and there is work for me to do. I am learning to write. It is enough, that. I need to always be learning. Always. And my marriage is a good thing, a wonderful thing. What a gift, eh?

I like the words that come to me during our crossword sessions at the table. De rigeur was one yesterday. Neither of us were sure about whether it meant the fashionable thing to do or the opposite. He was right in the end. I like to encounter words that I don’t know. It reminds me of the time when reading was a new thing. That deciphering of strange words, like images, like pictures, new to the tongue and mind. Cupidity was another one from yesterday. It means greed, apparently. I had come across it before. Not what you’d think. Is it specifically about greed for food, perhaps? And then later, one of the nuns, the posh, head-girl-ish nun in Midwife used the word furbelow. Yummy. It means trimmings, the edge of a petticoat.

It was excruciating, I had to grip the bed to manage the pain. She is good. She continues regardless of my tensing up. So Scandinavian. We call her The Brute. She told me of the baby seagull that she was feeding dogfood.  Go and have a look, she said. It was trapped in the space between the roofs, outside one of her salon’s windows. I could hear it calling. They aren’t helicopters, she said, they can’t fly upwards. Had they fallen out of the nest? For there had been siblings. They had died from starvation, hence the dog food for this one. I felt guilty, she said. I should have fed them. It turns out he (assuming he is a he) ate their remains. It made me feel a little queasy. Will his wings get stronger, will he fly his way out? Poor love. I hung a prawn on a piece of string, she said, hoping to encourage him to fly up to it. It didn’t work. His calls of distress echoed through the salon as she pummelled my poor body.

Time to work. A misty-ness has descended but it is still warm. The sea is a line of blue. I am blessed. Truly.

He read from The Times’ Nature Diary at breakfast this morning and apparently this week is the last time we will hear blackbirds singing till next February. How sad. But the robins will be starting their chorus soon and, as the writer says, it is beautiful. A rook was perched on the roof outside my studio window when I came in just now to begin work. It is a struggle to start. I long to play truant, to go on a trip, to fly away. But I cannot. I need this regimen. Write every day, five days a week. It is the only way. The only way to get it written, to get it out.

He seems perkier this morning, and went off for his walk with something like enthusiasm, wearing his bag and his shorts and looking like a young lad about to begin a paper trail. Is that what they are called? I seem to remember they featured one in The Railway Children.

The Midwife was harrowing last night, with such an unexpected twist. Inevitably I dreamt of it, my subconscious trying to making sense of it, ironing out the conflict.

All has gone quiet. Work had tailed off. It is good. I have no choice but to focus on my own work. Yesterday’s writing was a turgid, but I kept going. It is my job now, at least for the next twelve months. No genius required, just the turning up each day to write and tell the story. Am I being disloyal? I think of this all the time. What would she have thought? Perhaps she would’ve been flattered. Somedays I get lost with it. Will today be clearer? I only woke once last night. Good-o.

I hadn’t fancied it when they’d said who it was going to be last week but he was a joy. A real joy. So articulate. Words just tumble from him but not a in a jumble. He is careful how he chooses them. They resonate, burst like bubbles in my head. Gorgeous, gorgeous man. He’d been working on his list of discs for 60 years he said. And what a collection, Doo Wop, Ella, Elvis, Doris Day and Sinatra. His book was ‘Against Nature’ and his luxury ‘a boulder of opium’. He has that northern, Salford-esque fatality – ‘Desert Island Discs has all the finality of a suicide note.’ But what a note. His eloquence was halted when talking of the cessation of his heroin addiction. He came off it for others. And seems sadder for it. But he is writing again and loves what he is doing – ‘you have to be idle to write (poetry)’. What can I say but God Bless The Radio!

I passed a board outside a small hairdressers in town. It had been sign-painted with a list of presumably what was on offer, cutting, dyeing etc. But in between the prosaic and the expected were two other entries. One was ‘Listening’ and the other ‘All Day Standing’. You see, even in this wee, small town there is something to stop me in my tracks.

Has the drizzle stopped yet?

I didn’t sleep well again. Well, I sleep in between, for I dream. I know that. But I wake over and over again. Is it the humidity? Is it the heat? Is it my bladder, or my headaches? Who knows. But no more doctors. Not for a while. All has been shaken up, stirred-up. It’s been too much.

I need sleep but I also need to write. Just to keep ploughing on. Keeping it alive. Tea now. Then work.

I woke from a dream the other morning where I’d been climbing up some steps in a tube station, climbing up to reach ground level from the depths below. The steps were huge and deep, so much so that I had to use my hands to pull myself up. A woman was waiting at the top in a kind of booth to collect and check tickets. I spoke to her. Yes, she said, they are dreadful aren’t they. What about for old people? I asked her.

She doesn’t confide in me. She is close. I understand that this is her way of dealing with things but I long for a more open intimacy. And yet, when as I write it I do wonder. Intimacy both delights and scares me, a little. With him there is no hesitation. We know each other inside and out and it gives me comfort, pleasure and joy to do so. But with others, family members and friends I long for it but run from it too. For what would true intimacy with them ask of me? Could I give it? I have to learn to let people be. And that includes myself. And there is my ongoing discomfort with her. The other her, not the first. I cannot always like her and feel bad about this. There is something. I have felt rejected by her. Do I harbour resentment towards her as a result? We are so different. I can love her, I can feel compassion for her. I have done so, frequently but that day when I cried and she did nothing, did not think or chose to comfort me – I cannot, though I must, let it go from my mind. I suspect she does not love me, though she writes it unthinkingly. Isn’t it true that those with whom we are most at odds with take up more of thought-time?

I am still wakeful these nights and the headaches still dog me. The numbers were better yesterday afternoon. He is calmer about it.

Strong winds this morning but dry. I was thankful. One of the B&B owners along the Prom has put out sets of tables and chairs and an A-board announcing the availability of coffee, teas and cakes. The tables have been set out on a square of fake plastic turf. Next to them are two blue-striped deckchairs. Can he do that? I asked him at breakfast. I thought it was sweet. I think the man regards himself as something of an entrepreneur. He’s owned bookshops and cafes before now. Always branching out, in his small-town way. His wife’s French, you know, he said.

Let it be. I want to let it be. All those things, those minute unimportant things that I get so exercised about. I want to let them be.

See.

See how much better that feels already.

He noticed it when we were having supper. I hadn’t felt it till he mentioned it. It was the same last time, when the optician said I ought to get it checked  out. It could be a sign of high blood pressure, she said. And it was. And it is now. Not as high but climbing. He gets scared, edgy. I am more sanguine. Don’t let me be incapacitated, that’s all I ask. If it has to happen let it be total. Gone.

It won’t happen though. They’ve told me, all those soothsayers I used to go and see, that’ll live to an old age. My palm says it too, apparently. Not sure that I want this. But it is not in my gift to decide. At least that is how I feel at the moment.

Eleanor’s story came to an end on the radio this morning. I have been so moved by her. And am only half way through the book. Goodie. I love the way she is inching her way towards intimacy.

He said yes. He said he will come with me. It will be tight, but cosy. I am happy to forgo sun, for rest and ease and familiarity. I must be getting old. I’ll be reaching for those elasticated trousers soon.

I got drenched this morning. Still no sign of the street-fooders.

Her cat has had kittens. She is delighted. They’re all ginger, apparently, though she couldn’t recollect seeing any ginger toms about. We talked of the rain. The land needs it, she said. She sounds better, her voice is lighter, more animated. What a gift this connection is. Bless her. And bless you. So kind.

The mornings are growing darker, slowly but it is happening. As I joined St David’s Road the lights from a vehicle came round the corner. It was the milkman, the one who looks like Bruce Springsteen. It was early. The van (it wasn’t a float like the old days) is an open one with a frame around the back. The milk bottles jiggled in their crates as he turned into our estate. I remember the milk man who used to come to Nanny’s flat in Wilmslow. (She wasn’t our grandmother but my father’s old nanny, and she became a Nanny manqué for all of us offspring and I loved her dearly.) Her milk man came on a horse and cart. I would hear him arrive through the open window of her bedroom – that same chinking of glass against glass. His horse wore blinkers so that she didn’t get distressed by the traffic. Slow, methodical, cheerful work, it seemed to me. He’d arrive like clockwork.

These fucking spots, he said scratching his head at supper, and you don’t need to write about them again. OK, I won’t. He was a little tetchy this morning. It’s the weather, he can’t decide what to wear against the possible downpours we are promised today. I try to advise but he just snaps. I do understand, truly. You snap away, if it helps.

The air is close and heavy. A thunderstorm may help.

He bought me a present. I don’t often desire things. I’m a shedder at heart. But she looked so calm and graceful and so pure in the window of the junk shop that I allowed myself to want to her and told him of her at breakfast. If you’d like to buy me a present, I said. She might take £15 for cash, I added. He returned with a crestfallen look on his face. It had already gone, he said. Then TA DAH! he pulled her out of the bag. She is ceramic when I thought she might be plastic or fibre glass. A Grecian head with a thick top-not of hair, all in white. What shall we call her? he asked. It will have to be something traditional, Victorian and simple. Edith, I said. I like her being there, looking like butter wouldn’t melt.

Tired again today. And I slept through my first alarm, falling into a dream where I was advising a young girl how to ready herself for her performance. She had two cold sores on her face and I suggested she get some concealer stick, but she didn’t seem to know what they were. Go and have a shower, I said, blow dry your hair put on the concealer stick and you will feel much better. I can hear the cars already, she said. Hurry, then, I said, you’ve got 48 minutes. Then my second alarm sounded.

I didn’t know him from Adam. In fact, I didn’t even catch a glimpse of him. But for some reason they were all calling his name. They were in a cluster, a straggly group outside Chicken Lickin’. A big boy was the first to start the calling, almost like a chant, or a child whining, clamouring for attention. Sion, Sion (or was it Sean?), he was saying. There were possibly four of five of them, girls and boys, a little drunk, trying to get Sion (or Sean’s) attention. How must it be to be so popular?

When I’m reading a book it is hard for me not to become utterly subsumed in it. I become it, the characters. There is often no dividing line between where I start and they end, so much so that I not only dream of them but looking in the mirror I think I see their face instead of mine. Eleanor Oliphant is my present obsession. Is it an obsession? I just empathise very deeply. And that Mummy of hers is so deliciously awful – wince-making. There is a vaguely autistic feel to E’s behaviour. She is outside of feeling. She watches, trying for clues as to how to respond. And yet her capacity for caring and being moved is huge. She is out of sync with the banal, the ordinary, the loved.

The phone woke me from my sleep. I shook when that automated voice began to tell me of the possibility of credit card fraud. It was too late. I’d gone so deeply under. I resolved it in the end, sitting on his bed (he’d heard me moving about and had come to investigate) calling the credit card call centre. Be patient, he said, as another automated voice told me to hold the line. All this, all this fuss for a wee brass ball. But it will be nice to resolve it.

The clouds are lifting and the blue is beginning to come through. I need lots of tea today.