Author: Ellen Bell

I have a thing about found shopping lists. I love how they are a microcosm of someone’s or a family’s life. I love the succinctness of them, a kind of shorthand of needs. That jumble of requirements, only they know what they mean. A private code. But I also just like handwriting. It is becoming a rare thing. I wish I’d kept some of hers. And hers. What would they say?

He is suffering from spots on his scalp. Who knows what it is? It may be the mix of medications he takes, or it may be hormones. Anyway, he uses medicated shampoo to try and ease them. (The fact that they never really disappear is a constant source of frustration for him (along with, in no particular order, selfish parking, seagulls and their shit, fellow residents not shutting the door into our foyer/hall and bad bin management.) The smell of it pervades the house following his shower last night. A smell of tea tree oil and carbolic soap. I don’t mind it. There is a secure, safeness to the smell that resonates from something in childhood, not from home but from school perhaps, or another family’s home. It smells of care.

I’d been thinking of the scene myself before he mentioned it. Our thoughts so often match. Do we spark them off in each other or is it something more esoteric that does it? The scene was from Victoria Wood’s Dinnerladies where Celia Imries’s character Philippa’s mother had arrived uninvited to a ‘Bring Your Parent’s to Work Day’ at the canteen. Her presence clearly unsettled her daughter and she immediately began finding fault with her job and her appearance. Oh, Flip, she said, pulling at her blouse, you haven’t ironed between the buttons. Oh, Flip why does it ALWAYS have to go wrong?

We sat outside the University café waiting for time to pass till I had to go to work. The sun was out. It was a Graduation day. In the distance I saw a girl in a bunad. I felt a pang of homesickness. It looked so unusual. To her it is natural to wear her national costume on high days and holidays. Her family was with her. No doubt so proud.

Town was full of revellers as I walked. Students back for Graduation week and living it up for the last time with their friends. A couple were sitting on one of the huge deck chairs in the sandpit snogging. Another couple were doing the same on a bench just beyond Pier Pressure. Walking towards South Marine Terrace I watched as a girl appeared to push a boy outside the front door (she was in the glassed porch in her underwear). She raised her finger to her lip when she saw me. He looked resigned and slumped against the wall. Approaching The Angel , a gaggle of boys talking ten to the dozen passed me. At first I couldn’t catch what they were saying. They talked fast, excitedly. It was just a noise. However, in a brief lull I heard one of the one’s at the back of the group say: ‘No wonder I was so fucking out of it this afternoon’. A ginger cat dashed across Llanbadarn Road as I neared home. There was a dead seagull smattered across the tarmac, its wings still in tact raised as if in flight to the sky.

We sat in the sun for an hour or so before work on a bench over looking the bowling green. Some people were playing tennis on the practice courts and a man was spraying insecticide along the edges of the wire fencing separating the courts from the green. I could do that job, he said. While waiting for him to park the car a couple had passed me. She was in leggings and a garish long t-shirt, he wore baggy shorts and sandals. They were probably in their sixties. I’d nodded my head and greeted them. Warm enough for you? the man said in what sounded like a Yorkshire accent or was it Lancashire? Yes, I said. He was a portly man with a rolling walk. I watched them walk away and noticed that there were still marks on his ankles from where his socks had been.

He was tired and tetchy this morning and his ears were blocked. It’s probably the weather, I said. He’s bucked up now. Good-o.

He’s just called the health food shop have let him know they’ve got fresh gooseberries and blackcurrants for us. And my lovely friend is sending some. I shall have a glorious glut of soft fruits!

She writes to tell me it will cost $19.50 to send that tiny ball for my brass bed from the US. I feel a little silly and tell him so. Do it, he says. And I thought she was a man. How wrong can you be?

Do you think that is what a baby hears inside the womb? I asked him at breakfast. I was washing up and thinking about the watery, echoey sounds my pumping heart had made on the machine yesterday at the hospital. It will be a little noisy, the radiographer warned me as  I tried to get comfortable on the bed, do you want me to turn the sound off. No, I said. I lay there on my aching hip and listened. It was like an underwater sound, globby and far away. Is that mine? I wanted to ask, feeling a little detached and otherworldly. We get so used to seeing and knowing our bodies from the inside out. It was amazing. We forget the workings that go on day in day out just to keep us alive. I asked him what he saw from his seat behind her. He couldn’t describe it other that that it was like an ultrasound image, lots of illegible dark shadows. He is always present with me in these investigations. I don’t need him there but I like him to be there. He bears witness to so many things in my life, why not these? I know you feel a fraud, he said as we walked back home, but don’t, it’s important to rule it out.

The air was balmy and gentle as I walked. The sky a Titian blue under the clouds. Just white fluffy ones, nothing ominous. He read a piece from the paper that claimed that we are to have hot weather way into mid September. Today he has gone out in shorts. After lunch we sat on the bank surrounding the cricket pitch and watched the groundsmen mowing the grass, one cutting and the other one following behind collecting it. Both were on mini tractors. A woman was eating her lunch on a bench beneath us. A seagull stood just ahead of her playing it cool and pretending he wasn’t waiting for scraps.

Last night I was sure that I heard the peep, peeping of the young robin we’d see earlier, beneath my bedroom window. May it survive the Kray Twins.

She is always so friendly, they all are, even on a Monday morning. Her hair used to be long and purple. A pretty girl. Now her hair is green and short. And she has a lovely voice. I think it is Welsh, but soft with a lyrical timbre. A bright girl, clearly. She has rings everywhere, in her nose and ears. She handles our goods with such care and method, she never seems bored or discontented and it can’t be much fun sitting there all day listening to the beep of the sensor reading the barcodes. I always feel a little better for having seen her. The other day she was still waving at us as we sailed down the escalator.

I was assailed by anxiety yesterday, I couldn’t work out why. Something had crept in and I couldn’t shake it off. Do you want to see someone? he asked. Perhaps do CBT? I don’t know. I know he wants to help and I’m not averse to seeking support but it opens it all up again. And sometimes it is too much, particularly as I struggle to separate it all out. Writing helps. It does.

It’s milder today. The air was almost balmy as I walked. The peep peep of oystercatchers and the sharp keening of young gulls echoed across the water and the town. We saw a fledgling robin as we walked to the car to do our shopping, it’s feathers still mainly down, it hopped rather than flew. The bakery smells were sublime. Sometimes it has to be enough.

I’ve no little post-it note prompts as to what to write about this morning. So be it. The sun is out. And I saw the moon from my window, though when I walked out I could no longer find it. Town was noisy with youngsters, the pavements splashed with vomit. I never realised that I could see the sea from my studio window. It looks a grey-ish blue and without the white horses of yesterday. A gentle day today. I always look forward to it, the listening and sewing but inevitably my unsettled mind will do what it can to unsettle me. I had to get up to pee several times last night, at one point, I think it must’ve been almost 9 pm, the sun was out and burnishing the trees and wasteland outside my bedroom window a golden yellow. I struggled to get back to sleep after seeing that. South Marine smelt of bonfires, so perhaps people had barbequed on the beach late into the night.

Her email described the terrible things her daughter has had to go through but it isn’t cancer. And they are grateful. And she tells me that her book club is to read Jane Eyre. She is a marvellously resourceful woman.

He bides his time till he can go out and walk before the coffee shop opens. He has always wrestled with Sundays. I like them, now that I no longer god to school while he, a retired lecturer can have all the Sundays he chooses. I hope he finds some peace today.

We spoke of her yesterday. He asked about her. And she came forward in my mind. She was always laughing. Well, that’s not strictly true but together we laughed a lot. I never felt I was enough for her but there was an intimacy, an understanding. And I loved being with her, in her mother’s kitchen. She died so many years ago. I told him of the burning. I don’t know the real details, they were passed on second-hand. I didn’t go to her funeral. I didn’t know of it. I found out later. She was a darling. It is good to think of her. And the coincidence is that it would have been her birthday today.

Town was chaotic this morning as I walked. Lots of kids who weren’t students. Foreign tongues. Hello, mate, someone called to me from the doorway of The Angel as I walked past. I didn’t respond, or even turn. Not now, I thought, I don’t want to be part of the mayhem. No. They raised their voice. Hello, they shouted. HELLO, making the word sound silly and childish. Shouting it at me as I walked on.

A cluster of motorhomes were parked by the harbour. I decided not to tell him when I got home. It makes him seethe. But what harm are they doing? All was still. All were sleeping. And they are neat. The neatness of them appeals to the little girl inside of me that would like to carry her home with her and be free. I get what it feels like. Utterly.

I intended to write about living other lives the other day but forgot. I write these notes for myself but sometimes I get caught up with other things. I walk past the Pelican Bakery most days and think about how it would be to work there. How it would be to be a baker? Getting up early would suit and working alone in those small hours too. I would love the smells too. And the sense that what I was doing had a purpose, a routine, a rhythm. And the warmth too, especially in the winter. But I’ve no doubt it is a hard job. All that standing. Yet, it is simple, a contained employment. You do it, there is an outcome, an outcome that people want. So neat, so perfectly apt. I can dream can’t I?

The writing came fluidly yesterday. I wrote and wrote. More than my quota. She was better too. We talked of her garden, what had fared well and what hadn’t. I asked about the cockerel. Normally I hear him, I said. Then we talked about what she ate for breakfast. She was a little groggy, had gone back to sleep, to snooze after the alarm went and hadn’t had her walk yet. She told me of the feral cat who’d come to live in their barn a year ago. She’s getting so fat, she said. She might be having kittens, but it’s ages since the toms were around. Bless her. She always thanks me. And yet, the pleasure is all mine.

It was a strange day yesterday, everything felt out of kilter. I was tired. My sleeping over the last few days has been fitful and though I tried to work it was slow going and sludgy. And I had an appointment with the nurse, which always cuts into the day. I walked into town too early and sat with him while he read the paper in a coffee shop. I dozed in a chair and listened to the pattering thumping of the toddler who comes in most days to run around while his grandparents drink coffee. He is a sweet thing but not peaceful. He had a plastic toy lorry that he kept jetting across the room, or he’d dance round and round till he fell over overcome with dizziness. When we left he was sitting underneath the high chair quite content spinning the wheels of his now upside down truck.

I felt uncomfortable in my state of torpor, that doing-nothing-but-staring-state and tried instead to think over what I’d written earlier and make notes. To no avail. Best just stare and pay attention. I did so. I smelt the soap on the nurse’s hands, I felt the prick of the needle as it went into my vein. A good vein, she’d said, admiringly but had then said, I thought it was deeper than that, when the blood took a while to come. I forced myself to watch. A gloriously deep red. Has that come out of me? Does blood always look the same? Then I caught the stink of stale cigarette smoke on the clothes and mouth of the woman ahead of us as we left the surgery, the one who had answered to ‘Malcolm’ in the surgery’s chemist.  

I gave in and slept for an hour before going upstairs to make lunch. I dreamt. A dream that replayed what I’d written that morning, though it also featured a key (but too small) and an old woman who’d massaged my neck and back.

I have a whole day ahead of me and need to get down to it, though my way with my writing is not yet clear. It will come as I write. But coffee first. Coffee first.

I’m reading, in between my research, Robert McFarlane’s book The Old Ways. A friend had said that he’d been one of his tutors on an Arvon course and that they’d sat up into the early hours drinking whisky together. (When McFarlane walks he carries a flask of it with him.) And I’d mixed him up with another Scottish writer, a novelist who wrote a story about Northern Norway, I think it was called The Summer of Drownings. It wasn’t him. But then I heard an audio of McFarlane’s book on the radio. It was entrancing. So now I am reading it. I love the old language terms he slips into his texts. The old words for paths, hedges and waterways. I can never remember them but I love to read them feel them in my head and on my tongue. He writes of the past walkers, Victorians like George Borrow many of whom walked to manage their depression. ‘The Horrors’ Borrow called them. They walked hundreds of miles. I just do the same circle each day. I used to be an adventurer but not any longer. The mind still dreams of it but the body is not what it used to be. McFarlane writes how he walks the paths he’s taken in his mind when he can’t sleep. I should do the same. I could walk it through my encounters with smells. How good the earth smelt this morning after the rain. A sweet, clammy humus-like moistness. The honey-ed scent of the buddleia had gone slightly bitter in the wet, as had the elderflower. I didn’t mind. It is so evocative of summer, even so. My head is sludgy. I am not sleeping well. I sleep but it is wakeful. And I am forgetful and clumsy. I shall try to write. Do a stint. But I fantasise about an hour’s sleep in the cool of my bedroom. We’ve been shopping but I forgot all my citrus fruit. What a twit. All my oranges and precious grapefruits. He is so patient. He goes back for them. And then I realise I’ve also forgotten the pineapple. Will I be good for anything today?

He was brave. He mastered it. I was so proud of him.

It was a crossword answer. The clue was something like ‘the perspective of non-interference’ or was it ‘practice’? My memory is so elusive these days. I have something in there and in a flicker it is gone. I write little notes for myself all the time, little yellow post-it notes litter my notebooks. Laissez-faire the art of letting things be. A kind of graceful detachment. Well, that is how I interpret it, others might see it as not caring. I try to let things be. To not change what is. And yet, there is so much that I cannot agree with. But who am I to interfere? The rubbish strewn across the road from the early morning gulls ransacking. I leave it. Is that indolence or is a wish to live lightly in this world? When should one interfere? When another is in danger or hurt? Of course. Detachment is an interesting state. Like the young seagulls I see about the town and up at the University. One was hovering by the door at work yesterday. They look so lost, so abandoned, letting out little squeals and squawks in the hope of rescue. We must just leave them. Leave them. Nature will take care of them or not, as the case will be.

I was woken by a call. An early morning booking. And then I couldn’t sleep. As a consequence I am sleepy and jaded today. It worked out in the end though fretting about it in my bed was what kept me from sleep. She helped me. In her usual flurryingly-busy way she helped me out. And I was grateful, genuinely. People are rarely unkind, but they can be incautious or clumsy, as I can be, all too often. How do I come across? Am I a little sharp at times?

I read voraciously these days. It helps. I am learning about how to tell a story, how to keep a pace going. I have been fascinated, drawn in, may I know the same skill.

Our geraniums grow ragged, leggy and parched. I long to prune, to start again. But there are still a few buds yet to open. I must give them a chance to see out their role, their potential before cutting.

It was barely lapping when I walked along the Prom this morning. A vague whooshing as it rolled gently over rocks, that is all. The air didn’t move either. The clouds hung heavy. No one was stirring. My legs are moving better, my hips are less stiff. I do feel old. Older at least. But that is OK. A fishing boat was all lit up ready to go. Oh, it does gladden my heart to see it. Those bright traffic light lights shining out of the dark. I wanted to see it take to sea but it was stalling, no doubt awaiting its crew.

He is wobbly again. His confidence is so brittle. He will see the Doc today. I hope it helps. He seems a nice man, patient and compassionate.

I need to be prepared to listen, to pay attention, to be steady for him. To keep the momentum of our life going. For as long as he needs me to do so. It is enough. Some days it is absolutely enough.

And an American company reacted positively to make request to forge a new brass ball for my bedstead. I am so pleased. Cock-a-hoop. I love their ‘can do’ attitude. Fingers crossed, eh? x

The acrid smell of smoke from our downstairs neighbour’s cigarette had snaked its way through my open bedroom window. It was there when my alarm woke me. There is no escaping the odours generated by other people. Sometimes it is his bacon, that he, a keeper of ungodly times like me,  fries in the early hours. Or it is the sweet sticky stink of Chinese food from the family who live on the corner next to him. I don’t mind. I am used to it. And I like to been amongst, though not amidst, other people. We keep to ourselves but we are there if needed. As he was, so kindly, when he fell. Though there are more preferable smells – freshly brewed coffee or baked bread. The Hot Bread Shop is my current favourite – it never lets me down with its aromas though I have to walk out of my way to get them.

I see the woman with the ‘for life’ bag regularly these mornings. The last two she has tried to avoid passing me. I think she is shy or depressed and wants to avoid eye contact. She turns into what we call ‘the ship’, a kind of prow-like shape on the corner of the Castle end of the Prom, or the little circle-like shape further along. She pretends that she’s looking out to sea or onto the beach. I am sorry that she feels the need for this rather pathetic subterfuge, I would never force an intimacy, however small, on her. She is like a mole, a night time creature. She always wears the same clothes. Though yesterday she’d swapped her pink sweatshirt top for a burgundy one. Her hair is dark and lank and her leggings are tucked into socks and large walking boots. She rolls from side to side as she walks, a fag always in her hand and a Tesco bag in the other. Sometimes I catch her on the way to the 24hr garage, her empty bag swinging in the wind. Other times she is walking back, her bag full of provisions. What does she buy there?

The Shoreline guest house on South Marine had the ‘no vacancies’ sign up on Saturday night. Today it has been changed back to ‘vacancies’.

Some words are toxic. It wasn’t his. He was just repeating what the fisherman had said. And he related it verbatim to the policeman. No wonder he wasn’t sympathetic. I would’ve been the same. It wasn’t his word. It didn’t sit comfortably.

I struggle to like her and her. Can I love them instead? Love is different. Love can come from an inexhaustible source of humanity of compassion of care of attention. Liking is ego-driven and so often much more about how that person treats you. I can let it go. I can love them. Yes.