Author: Ellen Bell

The radio is the fabric of my life. It weaves in and out, leaving behind traces of words, stories and ideas that resonate deep within me. Such as the artist Ken Howard this morning on Inheritance Tracks talking about his mother not appreciating his chosen career. His father was more sanguine. I haven’t any money, he said, so you’ll have to make it, and the only way you can do that is to become a Royal Academician. Just like that. I was exhibiting with them at 15, and joined the Academy at 19, Howard said. Is it that simple? To just want something and get it? His mother was a different matter. Even after painting (or was it meeting) the Queen, she still said, I wish you’d done something proper.

I fantasise about other lives I could’ve led. A baker, a cabinet maker or a cheesemaker perhaps. Something to do with the hands, some real, something tactile, something needful. And yet, this is what I am, this is what my mind does, and my hands. I loved making H’s quilt yesterday. It was rhythmic, absorbing. I thought of other quilt projects, something to do with using old clothes, a memory quilt, but using the collars, the cuffs, the buttons, the pockets. But it is so easy to lurch towards the mawkish, the maudlin the cutsey-pie with such things. I still think about making a project for the Foundling Museum, I have something to say in there but I need to get at it.

I am too many things. Am I not? That jack-of-all-trades.

Then another radio programme – From Our Own Correspondent – wonderful radio, wonderful writing. A women writing about the female rickshaw drivers in Jaipur. Jaipur the pink city. They get a lot of abuse from the male drivers. It takes courage for them to continue. Maybe we should do something else, one of the women tells the journalist, like sewing.

Is this what I am supposed to be doing? Is this it? Is this me?

Is it enough?

I can do more than five.

They are ahead of me on North Parade. A girl and a boy. She is barely dressed for the rain, jeans and a tiny red boob tube. He is broad, she is tiny. Every now and again she squats down and bounces up again.

I can do more than five, she is saying. Can we go home now? he replies, his voice betraying his frustration and tiredness. Only if you agree that I can do more than five, she says. There is a trace of something foreign in her voice, is she Polish? She looks like a dancer, I think to myself. Her movements are lithe, light, springy. Her voice wheedles, it is a child’s. You can do more than five, he replies, bored now. Now can we go home? She lets him take her hand and she swings it as they walk. I can do nine, she mutters.

She was clearly inebriated. I see more and more young girls in the same state. There was another one on the Prom. A beautiful girl who could hardly walk. She too had a gentle man propping her up. She looked at me as I walked by. She reminded me of someone. Three boys loitered under the canopy of the bandstand, out of the rain, hoods over their heads. I saw them later walking towards the castle away from The Angel. It’s shit in there, one of them said.

I walked home along Llanbadarn Road on the road, avoiding the now slimy pavement. A cyclist was suddenly beside me, cycling slowly. I felt a frisson of disquiet but he meant no harm, and I let him go ahead. Turning into St David’s Road I heard a man call out to him. There were two of them across the road. Hey, the man called, do you know where we are?

She is so much more confident on the phone these days. She chats away. She talked of her daughter who is due to go to a wedding today. Is she looking forward to it? I ask. Yes and no, she replies. We talk of her outfit, the navy blue dress and the pink fascinator and pink shoes. She worries about the little things, she tells me. Not the big things. She used to be rake thin, you know 10 to 12. Now since taking the pills she went up to a 14 and a 16. It makes her unhappy. And the food is an issue. I tell her to take something in her bag, a rice cake or that almond cheese.

I love her chattiness. Thank you for calling, she says. I want to know she is OK, that she is cared for, safe. The handyman came today, she said. He looked tired, I made him tea. He has his problems with his marriage. He is a friend.

I’m glad. Yes, I’m glad.

I woke from a potent dream. It doesn’t make sense when I write it but when I lived it, dreamt it it was. There were three goddesses and I was one of them. And at one point I stole the scalp, a long head of hair, from a dead one. I pulled it from her, out of the water that was keeping her fresh, embalmed, I suppose. The crowd let out a shocked cry at my audacity. Then I was reading from a manuscript, a list of rules, spells even. Then I wanted to go on my way but it was blocked by a bridge, a kind of checkpoint (perhaps it is sparked the police cordon on the Prom), I had to go the long way round. I was outside. My dreams have been out in nature recently, a new development. There were too many details. A Simon Callow character featured. He was a friend whom another wanted to me to invite to dinner. I can’t, I said, he lives in Sweden. Where do such details come from?

I lay in bed trying to remember it and promptly slept beyond my alarm. I was sanguine. It is OK. The sleep was a gift.

Outside it pours. Flat has been cleaned. Work now. A bientot.

I didn’t see him at first. He was sitting on the ground just outside the toilets down by the harbour. He called out to me in the dark as I walked by. I couldn’t hear what he was saying against the wind and rush of the tide. I stopped walking. He was wearing a white woollen hat pulled low over his face. Pardon? I said. Again it was hard to distinguish his words. Was he getting a little frustrated? Chips, he said, do you want some chips? He ate as he spoke, his hand digging into a white paper bag. I was touched. No thank you, I said, you enjoy them. I couldn’t see his response. Did he shrug?

I’m a Martha not a Mary, said the character played by Emma Fielding in the radio play The Organist’s Daughter. She was Buxtehude’s daughter, destined to marry the man who took over her father’s position. Martha was Mary’s sister, the practical one, the one that did around the house.

I’m a Martha not a Mary.

I dreamt of people beginning to gather for an event. They sat in pairs, singly or in groups of three on a grass bank. Some ate, some talked, some looked at mobiles. Waiting. Waiting for what?

Off to work now. They called finally, and with two. I am grateful.

She promises a good day today. We shall see.

There he was bold as brass pissing onto the pavement. Not in broad daylight but in the semi-light of the street lit early morning dark. He was talking as he pissed to a girl who was huddled under a white jumper against the rain under the eaves of the Prom shelter. He let out a laugh as the arc of yellow continued to spring from his flies. It had taken me a moment to work out what it was. It looked rather beautiful. And then I realised. Was I shocked? Outraged? No, I was curious, even a little delighted at his audacity, for there is still a police watch outside the hotel just 500 yards away. He was drunk clearly. And I too like to pee in the open air. Is it the same for men? Probably not. Peeing makes the male organ rather innocuous I often think. That’s all it is, a peeing tube. That is all. All that fuss over such a small thing.

I tried to keep the anxiety at bay as I walked, or at least under a leash. Let it be, I chanted to myself as I sat still for half an hour last night. Let it be, I said to myself as I walked, as each little potential worry rose up to unsettle me. Let it be.

It rained. They’d promised a dry night. So be it. I went and got the big umbrella from the car. Listen to the pitter patter on its taut canopy, rather lovely. And then later as I stood for a moment at the top of the little hill I heard the drip of raindrops falling of the leaves of the shrubs and trees. There is never complete silence, there are always the hums of generators, the clunk of heating systems, the dripping of downpipes, the piping of oystercatchers and the rush of the tide. Sitting last night in silence I could hear the pulse of my blood in my head. I sat in the sun, the sun coming through my studio window and became almost nothing. For a moment. Just nothing.

Will it all be done soon? Will there be peace then? Will she let us go?

They never get it right. The tea pot was huge but there was no extra water. We thought that someone wanted weak tea, said the waiter with a grim face, two tea bags in that pot is going to be really weak. Can you bring some more? I asked, and some hot water? Why is it so difficult to explain what we mean? he said, when the waiter had gone. Who knows? It was lovely anyway. And I talked and talked. Talking it out and coming up with a plan, a way to keep going, to fire up my work. The other guests dozed in the sunshine that flooded the lounge. We spoke quietly in our corner while he munched on shortbread. Afterwards we too sat in the sun. My back’s tightness eased and I felt almost high. He had celebrated me, cherished me and anything felt possible. Coming home to a text and having to rush off an email in response and my bubble was soon burst. But that’s OK, one can’t float for long, that’s gravity. And now I have to put it all into place, make it manifest. I send off emails and messages. Might you be interested? Can you help? Are you still out there? We shall see. He is proud of me. I am not used to it. It is a lovely feeling. That inkling of limelight.

He told me he found it excruciating. I didn’t know. I hadn’t seen – too wrapped up in myself. I honour. I take it on board. I will not ask it of him. Not any more.

I waited in the car while he went to buy the papers. A man came along the street. A figure from antiquity. A ragged man, hunched, his hair in dreadlocks, a dirty anorak on his back and his feet in too-big boots that curled up at the toes and no socks. He carried a carrier bag, that looked too-modern, too incongruous for this nineteenth-century figure. Spying a piece of paper on the road he suddenly dashed out and snatched it up. Scanning it briefly he shoved it into the pocket of his coat and shuffled on. Where was he going? How does he live? Was he old or made aged by destitution? Who was looking out for him? How can people be so alone, so bereft in our modern age, in this first world country?

What can we do?

Halfway down North Road and there is a distinct smell of TCP. A smell of my childhood. A cure-all, a clean-all, the smell was insidious, once opened and applied it never went. And yet, it is comforting, a smell of caring, of fastidious motherhood and bathroom cabinets.

My work is my life.

Why do you paint? Manet asks Berthe Morisot in the radio programme aired this morning (and I paraphrase them). I love it but you don’t appear to, he continues, why do you do it?

Because I have to, she replies.

Not sure why, but I’m always more comfortable using black and white images for these posts. Colour is almost too much for me. (This brings to mind a programme I was listening to this morning while preparing breakfast. It was based on the letters of the Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot. Her mother had encouraged her artistic talents and arranged for her to be tutored. Her tutor had taken her to the Louvre to ‘copy the masters’. But I want to be out in Nature, she cried in exasperation. Nature will be too much for you, her tutor replied.)

So many questions. My back and the rash on my arms are alive with it. The heat of it, the discomfort of it.

Today we are off to talk. To sit in the hotel, pray it is open, and talk it out. Talk it out. Get it out. Whatever it is. This fight inside. I’ve never really accepted what I am. I don’t have a shining skill, I can do lots of things moderately well. Isn’t that enough? I don’t know. I want the glory of being a master at something, and yet I don’t want to be confined, to be restricted to just one thing, one kind of creator. I want to write and make. Make and write. And to be a good wife, friend, mother, grandmother, sister, worker, provider, home-maker, lover, believer and being. To be good. I want to be good. I WANT TO BE GOOD. Ah, but will you recognise it when you are?

I worked on the quilt for my darling H. It is getting there. Lots of mistakes. Well, not lots, some. But it is taking shape.

The clouds bubble up in the sky, gorgeous, white fluffy ones. What is that a sign of?

What’s it like out? He asks each morning. Colder, I said.

I dreamt deeply, lots of layers. At one point I was out walking in the dark and saw two homeless men sleeping on a bench by a path I wanted to walk down. It was so cold I was surprised they were still alive. They were for I could actually see them snoring. One had something over his face (a blanket or mat) that rose and fell with each out breath. I was scared of them. They looked roguish, feral. And chose to not go that way. I was disappointed, it felt like giving in, turning back.

What shall we talk of? Embroidery comes in the post. A sumptuous array of skill. Alice Kettle to name but one. I think about having such skill, such knowing. Would that feel good? To wake each morning with a definite purpose, a thing to achieve, something huge, beautiful and crowd-pleasing. I don’t know for that is not what I am. I think about all I want to make but they are things that would please me, not others.

Will there be wisdom in our discussion? There will be tea, certainly. Tea from silver pots. So nice.

A nice old mirror. That’s what the label says. A nice old mirror, for sale in the bric-a-brac shop.

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.