Author: Ellen Bell

It began mizzling as I walked. A warm coating of rain, not unpleasant. I had brought my umbrella but didn’t use it. I like the rain on my face but not on my head. I’ve met many others who feel the same. Funny that. Someone had lit a fire on the beach and its smoke mingled with the misty wetness. Autumn is coming. A gang of youngsters speaking a language I didn’t recognise walked towards me along the Prom. I was invisible to them. They carried blankets.

I lay in bed last night unable to drop off and thought about my practice. My work is an inward experience. I don’t have the pleasure of being drawn towards socially-kind work. There is nothing noble about what I do. I just do it. I do it to learn about myself principally. Myself and my place here. It is my way of orientating myself through it. Perhaps there is something there that might inspire others. I do not know. I just wish to understand. To make sense.

I lay there thinking about performing at the NG. I want that rush again. That sense of being absolutely in the right place. A place where something magical can happen. I want to do it again, to prepare for it and do it again. This time with the tapestry. But I want to do it in a corset and crinoline. Another excuse to dress up? Maybe. If so, then so be it. I want to see, to test it. To see how it makes me feel. And how people respond. Why? There are always the whys. As it should be. It’s about associations. The nineteenth-century woman as needlewoman. The needle as pen. The amateur needlework obsessed with her berlin wool work. It is of the time that van Gogh painted his sunflowers, though that is of less interest to me. I want to see what happens. I will, of course wear it all day. How will it be to make my way through the tube, the streets of London? Am I crazy? It excited me. Just the thought, so much so that I couldn’t get to sleep. Shall I just go with this?

I catch my mind. Every second it is judging, weighing up, criticising, levelling, planning. I need to breathe, to zone out.

I will make today. Make her quilt. I want to complete it. A gift. A gift of love. I plan another visit. So brief, so short. Alas. Tomorrow we go to the hotel to talk. To talk practice. To practice talk. Nice that. I look forward to it. Work allowing. Always. Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed.

They’ve mended the deckchair, the giant deckchair that is sitting in the Prom paddling-pool-now-sandpit. The locals were in uproar, apparently, when it was vandalised. There were letters in the local paper and a picture of a group of children perching, rather precariously on its torn seat. The company behind ‘Advancing Aberystwyth’ were contacted but there was no reply. And now, there it is, mended. All is well with the world. N’est-ce pas?

It was very mild when I walked this morning, even the coat had to come off. Teenagers milled about, one lay asleep on a bench and another hobbled about in a ankle brace. Down along South Marine someone had left the fairy lights on in the  Shoreline B&B’s  breakfast room. A great chaotic flickering of lights in blue and green. And the sign up saying SORRY NO VACANCIES. Not so with Yr Hafod. He hasn’t been full all year. Why, are Shoreline’s rates a little cheaper? He takes such great care with it, always up and down with a cherry picker, painting. Towards the station I heard a woman’s voice shouting into a phone. An Amazon of a woman in a long summer dress with a kind of Aztec print. I was waiting outside The Angel for the both of you, she was shouting ( her strong Birmingham accent making the both of you sound like the both of ‘cha’), and you left me. You left me stranded outside The Angel.

I passed a young lad sitting on the kerb. Are you alright? I wanted to ask but then caught sight of his phone, he was reading messages, seemingly content. Shapes, bodies move around before me in the dark, sometimes there is eye contact, like the man with the glasses as I turned to go up the hill. A flicker of fear ensues after these encounters. Don’t follow me, please don’t follow me. I check to see his light is on when I reach the top of the hill. Yes. I stand for a moment, stilling my breath. Someone is watching me. I open my eyes. It’s a cat. She bounds down from the wall as I turn to face her and takes refuge under a bush. A pretty cat, black and white. The girl is on her computer again in the house on Llanbadarn Road, the overhead light in the room making it stark, cold. She is alone this time. I’d thought that they were running a chat line or something. The late hour, the fact that she has a telephone headset on her head, and that they were working together, side-by-side. They could be completing an MA or a thesis for a PhD. Who knows?

I saw two spiders, enormous ones. One was by my walking boot and the other by the front door, hiding behind Bry our draft excluder. I don’t shriek like I used to. I don’t want to hurt them. Off you go, I say, run along, you freak me a little, but your life is safe with me.

He was cooking bacon for breakfast downstairs. It is an overwhelming smell yet, for all my veganism/vegetarianism it isn’t unpleasant. I like the other life-ness of it. Life is going on, separate to mine. There is comfort in that.

The walking eased my anxiety. Clarity came through. Just finish them. Finish them all. All those hidden in the drawer projects. And write. Sew and write. Write about Mum, about Norway about being an au pair for the second time and sew. Sew and write. Finish some. See how it feels. Then judge, if you must. Though better to just do the work.

She doesn’t want a review, there isn’t space for it. Shall I leave it then? But then, I thought as I walked, I want to write about it and I like writing for her blog. So I’ll offer it. And another thing. I thought about what I loved, what I have loved during this barren period. Performing. I’ve loved performing particularly in the NG. So I shall persevere. I could go every year. Why not? A tapestry a year. And stay a day. See what comes.

What of today? Order the pieces, those straggly pieces then sew. I want to see it through, leaving a few stitches left to complete before the painting. It is a plan. It is enough, for now.

On a Friday, just before I make lunch Radio 4 Extra has a programme about podcasts. I catch the tail end of it. Yesterday they had one from the Empathy Museum. I’ve never heard of it. It has a collection of shoes and the idea is that you put on a pair and listen to the ‘story’ of their owner. Walk a mile in my shoes is the notion. A good one, I think. They played one from a sex worker (though she preferred to call herself a ‘sexual healer’). She was Australian. It obviously got under my skin for I dreamt about her pushing herself upon him. He felt obliged, I told another woman in another room (one that I’d escaped to, after not being able to bear to be beside them anymore). I don’t think so, she’d replied. I woke from it feeling agitated. Why had it taken me so long to kick up a fuss? He laughs when I tell him of my distrait. It’s a dream, he says. He always says that. It’s just a dream. I know. I know. But what is it trying to tell me? I want the wisdom of it, not the fall out.

I wrote a little of the book yesterday and felt better for doing so, though there are many decisions I don’t feel able to take. I need help. In this and so many things. I went upstairs and put on the radio and the word ‘daughter’ came up on the screen. It was a woman talking about making a podcast about her mother’s life. She doesn’t need to make a spectacle of it, she was saying.

I am still a little raw. Skinless. I feel ticked off by people, by life, by my family. I can’t seem to get it right. What is right? Went into work early. Another slot about Putin. Will you make waffles for breakfast, I ask her afterwards.

House cleaned. But I didn’t sew. Perhaps a little after lunch, just to feel better, to re-connect with it.

I think about that space to hire. Two days. What would I do? Make it white. Clean it. Be in the silence. Wait and see? Could I suggest that? I search for projects. Anything to get me out of this stuck-ness. Will it help?

I caught the moment it took hold. That sharp tightening of the back muscles, making them rigid, iron-like, an armour of resistance. I’d suddenly thought of a writer that he used to know. He writes for radio and TV mostly. A kind man, a modest man. I used to see him too. I’ve been listening to one of his adaptations over the last few days. It’s rich, funny and cleverly crafted. And warm. I was running my bath when it came in, that overwhelming feeling of awe at another’s skill. To have made it. To be in the lime-light. And yet. How good it is to write it out. I should do it more often, every day in fact, over and over. It is abstract this. All of it. This imagining-up of other people’s lives and then using those unrealities to judge mine. It is all about accepting. I accept. So easy to write, so easy to say. Is this enough? What is it that you want? To be valued, to be heard, to be noticed? Or is it more about valuing yourself? What would that take?

I talk to myself endlessly when I walk. Not out loud by internally. Weighing it all up. Shedding. I want to shed this skin of ego-wanting. I wanted to shed my sense of an artist self. I wanted to make anonymous work. To step out of the lime-light. Remember? What has happened? Why the seeking still? What is it you are after?

Will it always be like this? Or is this a crossing point? I lay on the couch succumbing to the massage and began to compose a poem. Well, it wasn’t quite like that. That sounds far to grandiose. I am not a poet. I just want to form a series of words. Its been bugging me for months, years, I need to write it out. A morphing of mother into daughter using the images of wasps. I began that short story at the start of my course, what was it three or four years ago. It cooks away inside of me. It needs to come out. You see that is part of it. I don’t know where it is destined. I’ve always had a destination of sorts. I don’t now. So can’t you work with that? That blankness. I think of other artists who’ve reached this stalemate. Michael Landy burning everything and then making those drawings of London’s weeds. So simple. So different from what he did before. Art for art sake. The work is it. Why not just do the work? Why do you need an audience? Why do you need an audience, Ellen? Is it really about the work?

I did my seven times table as I walked. Fifty-six and I am nearing my eighth period of experience. Can I shed? Can I shed my ego skin? What would it be like to be skinless, to be free of it? The glory will never come. It is unreal, it is not real. There is just this, this internal experience of being. That is all there is. And it is enough. Therein lies the richness, the wisdom, the yielding to the not knowing and being grateful for that. Think of your death, he says. Summon it up. See the unreality of it. The fiction of it all. You are nothing. No thing. Just experience. A minute spot. A thought. A moment.

Perhaps there is nothing to understand. Do the work. Write it, write the poem. Sew, write, perform, walk, eat, and breathe. Or if you like just breathe.

It rages in me.

What it is is hard to fathom. Do you want to talk about it? he asks, so kindly. Not now. Not really. It would be opening a lid that I don’t think I’d be able to shut again. But we do. A little. And I cry, a little. It is everything and nothing. Everything and nothing. What is it? My work, the trip to Spain, all that re-visiting of her pain, her bitterness, her locked-in-ness and mine. It is simple really. This is where I am. Here not there. In this life. A small life, mostly, but inside it is infinitesimal – enormous, gigantic. And mostly I am sated. It is enough but there is still this raging. Something isn’t right.

You’re drifting, he said, switching off the TV, after a brief watch of Lark Rise with Twister and his tiny twist of his head. So beautifully done. That’s a nice kind of re-visiting. I love this programme, he says. It is easy on the eye. No sex, no violence (at least not graphic). And the acting is subtle and sublime. We watch on his bed and he strokes my feet. Glorious. I want nothing more, then. But during the day I feel worth-less. Less. Less and more than less. What am I doing? What has happened? Do I just need to let go of all expectations? Do what you love, he says.

You do not have to be good, the poet says, you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. What does it love? Making, forming, using its hands, writing, being still, sitting in the sun, walking by the sea, the smell of the morning air, the smell of baking bread, wearing Miss Dior perfume, silence, whiteness, lying in white sheets, being absorbed, listening, capturing, reading, being captivated, enraptured, transcending. Let it be, I want to say. Wait. Wait for what is to come. Not by anticipating but being in the what is, now. So you are lost. Be lost. How does it feel to be lost? Let it be and you will find your way.

What about your drawer full of projects? he asks. Yes, what about them? What if I just see them through. It is ego stuff this pain. An ego that needs recognition, to be valued, noticed. Let it go. How would it be to let it go? To just do for the sake of doing. Get up and work. Get up and work. And let the doing be the reward. Not the ending. The ending is beyond my control. So do them. One a week, alternating. See them through. Let that be the reward. Seeing them whole. It is just time. And you have it. Become immersed. But stay a little detached. Watch, notice, pay attention and write. You are not one thing, you are moving, always, changing, always. Spirit, not flesh. So be it.

The sky was clear. The stars alive in the black. And the moon beginning to wane. Few were about. The cold was a shock. A couple of people stood outside The Angel. A girl’s voice. A girl with pigtails, wearing a vest and glasses. A loud, confident voice. So basically, she was saying, he said ‘what yer doing on the beach on yer own, yer drunk and the tide could come and take you away. Well, said the girl to her companion, you know my sense of humour. So I said to him, ‘Well they’re worse ways to go’.

I walked down Great Darkgate Street, hearing her cackle ringing out.

They say she has anxiety attacks. Who wouldn’t. Let her go. Set her free.

I am a routinous person. And many of those routines border on rituals. I have rituals when I walk. I choose to walk past the two bakeries in town so that I can catch the delicious smell of baking bread as I go past, I go up the hill past Alexandra Hall or cut through the Prom, alternating the choice, I stop at the end of the Perygyl and stare out to sea and I stop just below the Castle, by the hydrangeas, just for a few minutes to slow my breath and feel my feet on the ground. I like the silence, I like to hear the hum of the generator by the public toilets and to see if the lights are on in St Michael’s. It’s like a kind of mapping, but it also eggs me on as I move from landmark to landmark.

I got ready to stop beneath the Castle this morning when I heard barking. It was pitch black and I couldn’t see where it was coming from. A dog, clearly. Then a man’s voice. I gave up any ideas of standing still and continue walking. The man with the dog was ahead of me. The dog was still growling. The growling increased as I near. The man was young with a large set of headphones clamped to his head. He called the dog to him. Was he saying shut up? And again. Then the dog, a sizeable black, hairy, rather non-descript mongrel promptly leapt into his arms. The man stood there cradling him as I walked by. The Angel and the Why Not? were open. A few stragglers hung around underneath the town clock. A girl in a black and white striped satin sleeveless top stood before a group of people. I wish, I wish, she was saying, well stating. She shouted rather than spoke clearly vying for attention. There’s no place like home, she continued. And again, there’s no place like home. Then I heard her say, who said that?

I think about notions of home.

I found one, I told him in the car on the way back from work. I found a house in the Shetlands that I could afford. I need this, I tell him, or did I just think I told him? It’s a fantasy, I know this. The house is  a mean little thing, cluttered and probably badly put together. But just for a while I think about making it mine. Everything just so, just as I wish it to be. Shall I buy it and make it mine, for later? And yet, such an action would go against my principles. Houses should be lived in. I am troubled by the idea of second homes and the impact they have on communities. Communities, particularly small ones like the ones up there, need people. A white, uncluttered space away from work, from difficult relationships, time to be, to unravel and put myself back together again. Shall I do it?

Shall it be my secret?

Neither of us like them. They unsettle. Everything is up-ended by them.

We got to the supermarket early and were waiting by the door with a bunch of others. S. was there leaning on a trolley and wearing a pink baseball cap. S. is short in stature and wide of girth. She has that energetic cheerfulness that makes me like her. He is less favourably inclined, re-telling the story of her move from the COOP to Morrison’s and what she said to him when she did. I sense a kindness in her that he doesn’t see. She told us that she was planning to do some shopping before her shift started. He said something to her. She knows him name. I might be a mystery shopper, she said. We know the other early shoppers but not by name. The man with the lump of his head asked if I’d gone to the Festival. He meant the one in Lovesgrove where there had been a tribute band 3-day concert. No, I said, it’s not really my thing, did you? I was being silly, but he laughed, not my thing either, he said. J. ex-Tree House, now seemingly not ex,  turned up, his only concession to the sharp wind was a grey woollen tank top over his short-sleeved shirt and shorts. He wears shorts the whole year round. He doesn’t feel the cold, apparently. He collared me near the apples and told me that he hadn’t realised it was a bank holiday. I could’ve stayed in bed, he said. And I was just off to the Tree House and it’s shut. And then he told me of his daughter ringing up yesterday asking if he could give her a driving lesson. Her partner has just got a job at Ultracomida, he told me, leaving the one he had here. So the lesson ended up in here, he said smiling ruefully, using up his discount card. Another impossibly optimistic person. How can you not warm to him?

I enjoyed my walk this morning. The wind was slight and town was hushed. There was a man in waterproofs hurrying past on the opposite side of the road, then an elderly man with a white beard who’d dashed out of his flat along South Marine and dumped a black bin bag of rubbish next to a town bin. I saw the woman who smokes and carries a carrier bag, and another man later, who stood reading his phone in red shorts and vest by Slater’s Bakery. Was he one of the bakers? His arms were choc-a-block with tattoos. So often, I find, people who prepare food have unsavoury, unhygienic appearances. A few cars drove about and there was the single police officer on watch outside the Belgrave. Other than this it was quiet. Two youngsters walked towards me past what used to be Lilley’s café. The boy had a strong Northern Irish accent and she had a pretty face and wore an opened Parka. And plus, he was saying to her, we don’t know that they won’t take it…She interjected with, I know but.

I told him of my wish to buy my own home. Someday. He accepts it. Knows me. It eases the ache to talk about it. It may never happen. It may not be possible. But I can live it, if only virtually. It all came on because I looked at things on John Lewis’s website. I am not avaricious. I don’t need things. It’s just sometimes I long for the beautiful in our home, a la Morris. I want to pass on those wooden bookshelves and get him a decent bed and chest of drawers. They are so cheap and tacky. There is an alternative me who is living in light-filled elegance. Everything is immaculate from her body to her living space. There is no building site outside, her furniture is not bashed-about IKEA stuff. Her clothes don’t have wool-pile. And her work is exquisite. Not a foot is put wrong.

Another me is a baker. But that is another story.

I shall dream it up.

I listened to Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Hotel by Elizabeth Taylor on the radio. It was superbly read by Eleanor Bron. So moving. I love the detail, the minutiae of her small concerns. The immensity of her small concerns, her love for the strange boy who became her grandson manqué. And I sewed. I want to be at peace with it. To see it as an interim. I don’t know what to do so I do this. I will do. It is a track to follow. As I walk I judge and my back tightens. Let it be. Be in that space of not knowing, of foolishness, of hopefulness, of blankness, of grief.

I thought of her again last night. I sat in her cell with her. Gently, being present.

Neil Ansell in his book The Last Wilderness writes about losing his sense of self when he is alone in the landscape. Reading it makes me yearn. Truly yearn for that solitude. To be away from judgement, from social responsibilities. And yet, I know that I don’t have his practical skills for survival, or indeed his resilience. I like my daily bath, my warm bed, my warm food and clothes. And yet, and yet, when I am out in the ‘wildness’ here, that is the wind and rain and at the far reaches of the Prom along the Perygyl, I do get it. I too lose myself for a moment and it is glorious. Life feels to me about learning to free oneself. Day by day the tethers become more and more embedded, as I grow towards death I long to let them loose. Is it just romance, fantasy, this desire for solitude, my own space high up North? I struggle with the dark, the lack of sun, the cold and yet here am I longing to go up there. It is nonsensical. But the feeling is strong. And what of my melancholy? And my liking for being around people? How will I satisfy that, or escape and manage the other? I am at odds with myself. I always have been. Nevertheless, I am enjoying reading him. I walk with him. Safe.

I told him about my pleasure. I shared my lowness with him. I told him of my fears. It’s just copying, and yet there is something there I want to pursue. I wrote of the pleasure of it. The pulling of the wool through the aida, the colours, the time spent. Then I wrote of wanting to impress my individuality upon it, perhaps ‘mess-up’ the colours – fauvist-like. It is all just flickers. Nothing concrete. And sometimes the possibility of stopping altogether. I wanted to when I went to Norway. But I couldn’t let go. Perhaps that is what the Norway/Au Pair book should be about, wanting to let it go. To start afresh. I just got ill, and I missed him. My house, the one I fantasise is mine alone. I live there alone. I don’t want to buy one here, even if we could. It needs to be mine. No compromising. My space, my magical haven. Is it disloyal? Would he understand? My natural state is solitude (I paraphrase) writes Ansell, so is mine. So is mine.

I dream of my disquiet. It translates into imagery. We were buying a cottage. I wanted to see what improvements I could make and ripped off some wallpaper that was damp and peeling. It revealed an enormous window. I was so pleased, more light but then discovered that the window was unsafe that the wind was trying to blow it in. We’ll have to ask the landlady, someone said, but it is mine. Still need to get permission. Even in dreams. That was yesterday afternoon. This morning I woke from another detailed image-filled dream. I was trying to find a café that I’d been to many times. I found it once but couldn’t locate it again. It was inside a mall of some kind. I found another but it was more like a beauty salon. I was with H. Then someone was showing me how to feed a baby with automaton dolls. They ended up fighting each other. They’re farmers, someone said. Open wide, someone said.

It was all about the wind this morning. A man was sleeping in a cardboard box on one of the benches in the Prom shelter. A lad was being sick in the bus station as I walked past, surrounded by his mates who chattered to him as he puked. Eeerghhh…then coughing. All out? one of them asked. Then joining Llanbadarn Road I could see a blonde girl with a boy. Go away, she was shouting at him, her voice, petulant. Fuck off. Steph, he called, whined. Step. Then it sounded like he was crying.

The wind makes them wild, off course. I remember our horses were the same. I like the spirit of it. There is much going on. A clearing out. I want to be alone, to think, to lose myself, to escape. Always. But it is not possible, not yet. And I want to care for him too. He needs my steadiness. Though he would survive.

She is back in prison. I think of her as I go to sleep. Bless you. Remember the joy of seeing her. Hold fast to that. We are one and the same. Your pain is mine, and your joy is mine. Hold fast. You will be freed. As will I.

She was in a chatty mood. Sometimes it can be tricky to bring our conversation to an end. I like it when she is bright. We talked about her going shopping with her daughter who has a wedding coming up. I don’t think it is going to be a very fancy wedding, she said, they’re all going back to the farm for the reception. There’s a marquee. She says ‘how to say’ a lot. I think it is because she is trying to translate colloquialisms from Welsh into English. It is a hinter world I can never enter, that Welsh one to which she and her daughter and many of the people I encounter at work dwell within. I felt the same living in Norway, I couldn’t get under the skin of it. Always on the outside looking-in, a restful place to be most of the time, but sometimes I long to belong. She talked about the navy dress her daughter opted for in the end, so that she can wear it again. The pink fascinator would be just the thing to make it special. Not a bright pink, she said. Dusky? I replied. And she found some shoes in exactly the same colour. Dorothy Perkins and Debenhams. So cosy. I like the inconsequential nature of our chatting. It is light, easy, and she is in a good, safe place. And I am glad.

I’ve begun Neil Ansell’s memoir about his four trips to the North of Scotland. He writes of his encounters with wildlife. I feel like I encounter something similar when I walk the Prom in the early hours. The other morning there were five bodies stretched out on pebbly beach just by South Marine Terrace. They were silent, utterly still. Were they dead? No, one, a girl’s, ankle was turning in  circles. Where they watching the moon, as I’d been? I walked by. And then today a mass of happenings. Again on South Marine, walking along the Terrace, I noticed that at least one of the B&Bs were full and then I saw a young man, a skinny man, begin to climb up onto one of the houses’s porch roofs. Had he locked himself out? Should I say something? He moved silently, except for a bashing noise as he hauled himself up. Once up he just turned about and sat down. He was still sitting there, high up, as I got to the Harbour. Prior to that I’d walked behind a couple. He was a huge man and she was small and stocky wearing  silver lame top. They’d been holding hands when I drew close but after a few minutes the hand had been dropped. Don’t, she said, as I neared. But I thought, he was saying in a tiny, weasly kind of voice, and burping and then belching. DON”T! she hissed again. Before then, two men has been standing outside the Pier Pressure nightclub, both had been in shorts. I’ll just have one more, said one, swaying imperceptibly. And then, prior to that (not sure why I’m doing this backwards) I’d watched as man walked up to another man sleeping on a lurid blue mat on a bench in the shelter and leaned over him. What yer doing? the sleeping man had shouted. I want to give you a kiss, the interloper had said. Then there had been the two lads with their bikes on the Perygyl. I’d heard their voices in the dark, as I’d approached. They went silent as I walked past. The moon had gone behind a cloud as I stood at the end. Wanting to be still and quiet. But they have a much right to be there as I, so be it. They’d turned their music on again as I made my way back. Rap music, most deliciously profane, emanated from one of their bikes. Hiya, said one boy to me. Hiya, I replied.

The author Jason Reynold was being interviewed on Radio 2 last week and he admitted to crocheting in his spare time. It’s not unlike the discipline of writing, he said. I think about wanting to interview people about their practices. I like the notion of time-consuming works, how do they sustain themselves?

She was let out for three days. What gorgeous photographs. What a smile. What a smile, he says. I wish her well, I wish her more joy like that.

I hope she goes to the carnival.

On your tod. It was one of her sayings. She used them a lot. A kind of vernacular, learnt parrot-fashion, who from I don’t know as I don’t remember my father using them. Tod. A nice word. Like Bod. Bod was an illustrated cartoon character I remember from the TV of my youth. There was a farmer too, was he Barleymow? He’d been given a funny walk where his right leg raised up slightly as he walked. All uneven-like. TOD was the first three letters of a registration plate I saw on a old Morris Minor as I walked this morning. I can’t remember where now. Was it behind South Road? I went a different way, to get away from the wind. What a clattering down by the harbour. The boat rigging was jangling, the vessels jostling and the tarpaulin fluttering. It is quite a cacophony. And eerie in the dark. The howling becomes a song, a siren’s song. How must it be to out at sea in it? Do the boats go out in the wind? he asked when I went in to rouse him. I don’t know, I said, I haven’t seen any for weeks. And it’s true, not a sign. Has the lobster season ended? The pots are all stacked up. The smell of them catches my nose with its stink. Primal. An inner, almost sexual smell of hot salt, sand, and brine.

I keep going over it. Have I said enough? Have I done the poems justice? I thought about the notion of being good enough as I walked. It is an unsatisfying, discomforting way to live. Shouldn’t it be about doing the best you can and then stopping? This is what I had to say now, the best I could. There is more, there is always more. Always room for improvement, as they say. Of course. Why this constant seeking of best-ness, of being the best. It’s all about insecurity. Needing reassurance. How about just being this, this messy, awkward, sometimes brilliant, often clumsy being? Can you live with that? No doubt she will come back with it and I can make changes. But mostly, as in all that I do, I need to learn to leave it. To not fiddle. To let it be.

Coming down that dark street after the bus station and then towards the little hill that takes me down to Llanbadarn Road I saw two figures wrapped in a blanket. They were standing utterly still. The light from a streetlight illuminated them from the front. I couldn’t see their faces or determine their sex. They were a tableau, almost biblical, prophetic. Then I heard a ping. They moved. They moved as one beginning to ascend the hill, one of them looking at a phone. The other being took it and dialled. Hello, a feminine voice said, We’re not going to stay. There was a pause. Then she started to speak again. Only if you come for us. The stress was on the us, as if there were others to be considered. I strode passed them. Still unable to make out if they were two girls or a boy and a girl. They walked behind me. A single unit wrapped as if in swaddling.

A simple day today. I shall sew, ground myself, listen to the radio and wait for clarity.

The tickets are printed ready. The thought of it hollows me out.