Author: Ellen Bell

Our postman wrote us a letter. We found it in our little green postbox yesterday. It was in one of those windowed envelopes, our number and block name written in pencil on the front. Hello, it began and then went on to explain how ‘there’s been some changes at the office and I won’t be doing your round any longer’. He wanted to thank us for being such, and I can’t remember the word he used, for being such ‘nice’ customers? Are we his customers? What is our relationship? We were touched. And we’ve kept the letter. You’ll still see me around, he wrote. I hope so. There is a sweetness to him. He’s young with a young family. Always in shorts, naturally. He wrote the letter in capitals but so neatly. Bless him. He reached out beyond what is expected. Such relationships are small treasures, gifts to be savoured, I think.

Three students walked past me this morning along the north end of the Prom. I caught the tail end of their conversation. One was saying, when she isn’t drunk. When she’s a fucking bitch, another replied. No, no, responded the other.

On the shoreline a cluster of oystercatchers called through the dark. There was a fluster, a blustering of bobbing black and white bodies and a high-pitched peeping. They’ve massed on the beach and on the rocks these last few days, oystercatchers and gulls. Is it a portent of some change in the weather, or is it a protective mechanism? Sometimes they are totally silent, just pointing with their heads, either inland or out to sea, other times they fuss and call.

It was a mizzly morning, but mild. A mist hung heavy, though I could still see Aberdovey. The war memorial is still lit blood red. Is it to be so through all of November perhaps? There is a Christmas tree in Waterstones’s window. I missed my coffee yesterday. Tea is not quite the same, unless from a metal pot in the hotel in Aberdovey, then it is a real treat. He is to buy me some today. I yearn for Christmas coffee, just the thought of it, a special blend. But I know it’s all bollocks, just marketing.

All was chaos at work yesterday. They are putting in a new POTS studio. Boxes and crap and men in striped shirts on laptops everywhere. God knows how it will be today when I have an actual guest. Ho hum.

A real November day yesterday, the rain didn’t cease and then came the dark. At least with December you get the lights, I said. I’d happily dispense with the lights if it meant no Christmas, he replied. I know what he means. All that fuss, all out of proportion. All those expectations and yet, I get these little bursts of anticipatory delight at it all. It is just childhood programming, I know, but I love it. The snow scenes, the carols, the Xmas songs, the decorative lights, the smells, the cosiness. I think about just pleasing myself on Christmas morning. Will we have it to ourselves? The invitation is out there, if she wants it. She would be most welcome. It doesn’t matter, the important thing is to let them know, all of them, that you are there. That’s all.

I wrote it. I sent it. I don’t know if it is what he wants or imagined. It is often the way when I write something, it takes on a life of its own. So be it. I wrote what I needed to write for myself. It is enough. We shall see.

She smoothed out all the tension, my head filled with the held-fast toxins only for them to dissipate, just like that. She is good. And then, bit by bit it creeps back in. My default. To be tight, stiff, afraid. So be it. Let it be. Let. It. Be.

I read the strapline emblazoned across the Lidl lorry as it slowly curved its way around the roundabout, passing the station towards the retail park. We’re committed to keeping the highest of standards……yours, it read. With that pause of dots to create maximum effect as its meaning sinks in. It was a big truck. I thought of it and all the others that thunder up and down the mountainous roads to bring stuff to us here. And through the night, as this one had done. It’s all bumf, of course. (I had no idea that bumf was spelt that way, I always thought it was bumph, until it came up as a crossword answer.) Advertising twaddle. And yet, it is somehow comforting to read in the dark, wind and rain. Someone cares. Someone cares about what I think. The advertising industry sells comfort, safety, havens. It is not real. Nothing is. There is no planet, the voice said. I know. But then what is? What is real? Such are the conversations going on in my head as I walk. Today, of course, I was writing as I always do when I’m mid piece. Not yet solved, they niggle away at me, pushing for, urging towards a resolution.

I saw the milkman again in his truck. I thought about its shape. From the back it looks like a de-curtained four-poster bed on wheels. It rattled with bottle crates. He’s a little man, rather like a younger version of Bruce Springsteen. We used to see him in Morrison’s on a Saturday morning with a loaded trolley, sometimes with a couple of children. Does he like his job? Does he like being up early in the morning? There can’t be that many domestic deliveries these days. (Another crossword clue – Pinta deliverer? Long gone, these days. That sound, a clinking of bottles jangling, the peak cap, the jaunty air, or is that a TV perpetuated myth?) Sometimes I’ve seen another milkman delivering on North Road to the sheltered housing flats. That makes sense. Nice to wake up and it’s there on your door step, with the paper. A perpetual circle, a marking of time. Reliable. Safe. Known. So where does he deliver to, Bruce the milkman? The cafes in town, I suppose. All very jovial. They get their pitches, no doubt. I like the hub at that time, 7.00 am when they all open, well not all. I like being part of the work-a-day ritual. Shall we go today? Not today, work to do, soon. Just getting warmed up. Ready.

I borrowed his coat again. It was raining. It wasn’t a pitter patter on my umbrella, what was it? More like sand, grains being poured onto it. I stood still and listened. At the top of the little hill, from the top of which I can see the town stretched before me. It looks down onto Llanbadarn Road, the flats where we used to live, and the little blue door-ed house with the circular window. I know it’s inhabitants from work. A gentle couple, very Welsh, he would say. The house is much loved, cared for, even though it is flanked by student houses. I imagine their happiness in there. He with his tightly curled red hair, and her with that very singular way she has of blinking behind her glasses when she speaks. I see him sometime with their children, riding their bikes on the pavement. Is there two or three. I bumped into her once in Ruthin, at Rhug’s Bison café (rather off-putting that smell of charcoaled meat when you just want a cup of tea). She smiled and said hello, what are you doing here? I didn’t recognise her at first, it took a while, out of context you see. And I don’t expect to be known in Wales, not ever. Hardly ever. I got it eventually, and was touched. Her name is nearly the same as mine, but with an ‘i’ not an ‘e’.

Why do I get so scared of writing? Everyone does, he says, it’s because you want it to go well. And I do, but mostly I want to get it right, for me. That’s it. Right. And I will. And the restricted word count is good. It is rigorous. Sharp. Perfection is when there is nothing left to take out. Amen to that.

It was waiting there, at the harbour, purring loudly when I arrived. The lights outside the sea rescue centre were blazing but the truck cab was dark. How can he sleep with such a racket going on? The refrigerator in the lorry has to remain on, obviously, else the fish would go off. But such a noise. A purring sound, as I said, but from a large cat, a happy, satisfied cat, whose talons are digging into your thigh. No sign of the fishermen either. Have they been out all night? And in this cold? It was below freezing. The car had it at -5 at some point while we waited for the frost to clear from the windscreen. The cars in town were all coated with it. It glistens in the yellow light of the streetlamps. Beautiful. As is the hush that the cold engenders. There was no one shouting, no high jinks. A few shapes. Two men in black coats, hoods up, leaving houses in North Road. Different houses, but they left at the same time. It was rather dramatic. I caught my breath. Why leave home at 3.30 am? Where were they going? Even my double-layered gloves weren’t sufficient against the cold, my fingers stung with it. Into my pockets they went, making walking less free. It’s enough, just to be warm. Yet the cold on my face was lovely. And then I saw a tent. Someone was sleeping in a tent in the Castle grounds. A tiny little pocket-size tent, the curved type. It was pitched on the grass but even so. So cold. Is it by choice?

He called me from the car. The battery’s flat, I’ve called the AA, you stay in the warm. Don’t worry, I’ll sort it. It was amazing, he said later, he changed the battery, just like that in all that rain. It poured. Hard, sleety rain. From the radio London sounded dry and sunny. I listened to the Remembrance Day parade. Don’t call me, I said, I want to do the two minute silence. He did it too. I said that poem in my head, he said. I can’t remember it now, something like – in going down with the day, we will remember them. I said it in my head. I cried the day before, on the proper eleventh day, eleventh hour. It’s the brass bands, they always make me weep. I’ve cried in the street before now. We used to stand together in Cambridge, in silence, holding each other. Too easily moved, he and I. Too easy.

I think about going to see her. I’d like to. I want it to be good between us, or at least peaceful. He calls her a witch. She is not. She just saw a possibility for love, that’s all. I tell him of the plot line for Homefront. That’s a bit far-fetched, he says. How can it be? I say. It’s true. They are true stories. But to steal a baby like that, in broad daylight. It happened. It obviously happened. In war, anything can happen. Anything. I am humbled by the stories, as I was listening to the veterans on the radio. And that widow, the one whose husband killed himself to escape PTS. They are so scared that they are going to lose control and hurt someone, she said.

We turn them an eighth every day for two months, she said. Thousands of bottles of Cava in a cellar in Catalonia. We keep them lying still for seven years. What a commitment of time. A time of waiting. Waiting to see.

I am to start writing today. There is power in the starting, said Goethe. So be it. I have the first line. Just remember how much you love to do it. Waiting for the words to come. Just start. There is time. There is time for it to happen. For the story to appear. Go to it.

It’s the first Christmas decoration I’ve seen this year. Seen, through a window, at Alexander Hall. A string of red tinsel looped around a window fitting in an upper floor kitchen. An afterthought. Perhaps it was worn around someone’s neck first, for a night out clubbing. My mother used to have some lovely tinsel. She kept it year in year out. It wasn’t that cheap thin stuff but thick and lustrous. Fat coils of red, gold, silver and white. Let me! Can I, can I? I loved decorating the tree, I loved decorating the table, I loved putting out the little Nisser hut. I had to stop myself from tearing open the boxes, so eager was I to get my hands on them. It has always been so, a mixture of impatience and a wanting to go slow, to savour, to treasure the touch of something. She kept all those decorations with such care. The exquisitely thin glass baubles, circles, stars and bells, the Nisser figures in wool and wood, the angels, the snowmen. Each one tenderly wrapped in tissue. The tiny, tiny ones in cotton wool and squeezed into a Tampax box. Ugh, said my father, dropping it with disgust. Where are they now? Who has them now? I don’t know.

Where’re you going? A girl in shorts running from the Pier Pressure nightclub along the Prom. She stops in front of young man, putting her body in front of his, halting his progress, her hands on his chest. Where’re you going? she shouts, her voice carrying in the wind. What’s it fucking matter to you? he replies, his face jutting at hers, tight with anger.

Walking home past the station I hear a beer can rolling and crashing against a bin, then the smash of a glass bottle as it is blown off a table outside Weatherspoon’s.

I prayed for her last night, if pray is the right word. The papers talk of her torment. He husband on the TV, in a news interview, talked of her anguish and how it has made her unable to walk. I asked for some kind of action. For someone to do something so that she may be released. They have the power, it could be done today, this moment. It is all about diplomacy. Let it be so. In my mind I am in that cell with her. I offer my hand. Let her be released. Let her come home.

It will come. The story will come. The fear is of the unknown. When I’m sitting in front of the white space ready to tell my story it will come. It always does. It is only 500 words, I write that everyday, here in this space. I let it come and it does. Always. I dreamt I met Clint Eastwood. It was meant to be Robert Redford but in my dream he’d died. So Clint Eastwood was standing in for him. He looked a little lost, was waiting for filming to start. It wasn’t his face. He was warm, funny, easy to be with. We talked of the weather. He was in a place I knew well. The sunny end. The summer end. It was a nice dream. I felt special, singled out.

The wind was strong this morning. A howlin’ gale, he always calls it. It’s blowin’ a f*****g howlin’ gale out there.

I want to do the other one. I am into it now, at ease with the flow but it feels right to keep them all going, all alive. I will find my pace with it. And if I don’t do it I will feel bad. There is no way round it. Do it.

Brooklyn tonight. We are both lapping it up. A glorious film, soft, tender. We go slow, savouring it, unwrapping it like Mum’s glass baubles.

Shining.

The rain was relentless.

I’d borrowed his coat. I felt like a child, tiny under all that weight. It was warm though, and it kept out the wet. The wind was too strong for an umbrella, though I’d brought it anyway. It was his umbrella, a long, golfing one from out of the car. It’s just about endurance, walks like that. One is buffeted, pummelled. Relentless. I think about explorers, Scott, Fiennes, trudging through impossible icy terrain. Head down, just getting one with it. It isn’t personal, it’s just weather. It isn’t designed to piss us off, or hinder our progress, it just is. That’s all. Don’t go, he said the night before, stay. Come back to bed with me, he says. But I want to be out, out in the air, so accepting it as it is is the only way. There is a calmness in that.

Few people were out. A couple without coats walking along South Prom. Then on my way back, a man ahead of me, swaying along Mill Street. Lurching and then kicking and punching at doors. Along the street, just bashing them, his legs flailing about wildly. I hung back, weighing up my options. I crossed the street, walked slower. He seemed to have gone. A police car, Heddlu, drove past. I started to breathe again, taking it slow. Two lovers ahead, their heads touching. Up the hill, striding now. Then home. You been away? asked our neighbour from his window, his fag nearly finished. No, I said, last week, yes. Oh, I covered for that, didn’t I? he said. No, it’s just I saw they’d left a parcel at your door.

I have a slither of fear, like ice in my belly. I want to write it. I have asked to write it. But there is always this fear of the nothingness. The starting from nothing. There is no escape. Just take yourself to the page, she says. And just write. I will. I will.

He tells me of her father. She talks as she does his feet. His podiatrist, mine too. It helps her to talk, to make funny stories from the heartbreaking tragedy of it. Her father and his Alzheimer’s. He’s in a home now. His wife, her mother, has been a saint. She usually goes in every day but has stayed away due to a cold. I thought you’d finished with me, he said, when she turned up the other day. My father was such a gentleman, she told him, never swore, never any sign of temper or violence. When she went to see him in the home recently, he shouted at her. Your grandfather’s upstairs so pull your fucking finger out.

It’s that dog again. I hear it before I see it. NO! I shout, my hands out ready to fend her off. I turn full circle keeping my eyes on her as she skids into some wet leaves, crouched down ready to pounce. What does she make of me, all that shouting? I get so edgy. I don’t want it. I don’t want her jumping up at me. The owner walks over, avoiding eye contact. Two neighbours, with whom he’s been chatting, are standing by the steps. She only wants to play, the woman says, smiling. What a fusspot. I can’t help it. Such feral-ness is beyond my comfort zone. He’s trying to train her, he says later. I saw him outside the other day. He’s doing his best. Yes. I should try harder. Relax a little. She’s only a pup.

She was out with the dog when I called. Bonnie, a sheepdog is nearly fifteen. She sounded better. It’s started to rain, she said, and I’ve put the washing out. Still better out than in. She walks in wellies, she tells me. Wellies that make her infected ingrown toenail sore. She sounds better, more alive. I like to hear that she is walking. Bonnie likes to be out, she says. Bonnie has adopted her. It’s been over two years now. She came over from the farm and stayed. She has a bed and a blanket in the passageway. How can I say? she says. It’s her little quirk. How can I say? With a mother tongue of Welsh, English words sometimes take a little time to come. I like to speak to her. There is a calm in it. I like her. I am warmed by her. Thank you for calling, she says. It is kind. A good woman, a gentle woman. Modest. She has much to teach me.

He was an ex-work colleague of his. We met him in the street as we sometimes did in Cambridge, years ago. He’d just retired and was off to live on some remote Scottish island with his partner. His subject had been English Literature and he told us how he was going to use his time to read all of Shakespeare’s works. A course of study. It has a nineteenth-century sound to it. Men of private means did it, women of leisure did it, at least those who had access to their father’s or husband’s library. A course of study. There is so much I want to learn, to immerse myself in. To learn for the sake of it. To educate oneself. He read a quote out loud at breakfast from the paper. I can’t remember the exact wording but I remember it was from Aldous Huxley. Something about the only thing you can change is yourself. Does education do this? Partly. I love to learn. I love to stretch myself, even if there is fear in the doing of it. By taking it on, after all, one is admitting to not knowing. There is a vulnerability to that. An exposure of nothingness, a nothingness waiting to be filled. But I do love the stretching, the encountering of ideas. Though it does highlight my smallness, always.

Two mornings running I’ve seen the milkman. He drives a truck not a float. An open truck, rather rickety. He was ahead of me on Llanbadarn Road when I walked home. I swiftly mounted the pavement. He was on the wrong side of the road with his lights off. It took me a moment to work out that he’d been delivering. I’m sure that I’ve talked before about Nanny’s milkman and how he used to arrive on a horse and cart. The horse was inevitably called Dobbin. I loved hearing him coming down the hill. You could hear him through the shut window. A slow pace. No hurry. Taking time to chat. That chink of glass on glass. Housewives on their newly washed front steps, slippers and apron still on. The milk was cold. The cream from the top of the milk on my cereal. I loved it. All homogenised now. And the punctured bottle tops in the winter, from the birds. Blue tits mostly. It seem to me then to be straight out of a Janet and John book. How I loved her. I loved her stillness, her it-will-be-alright-ness. You’re a born worrier, she used to say. Never with her. Never. She wasn’t our grandmother. She was my father’s Nanny and became ours by proxy. They didn’t really get on, she was too stuck in her ways as far as she was concerned. I can see it now, it must’ve been difficult coming from a foreign country to all that. I wish I’d been kinder back then, tried to understand, even just a little.

My dreams have been so lucid these last few nights. Last night, an old woman encased in glass being given an award for her part in a theatrical production. She stayed the course, kept calm, kept steady, was a peaceful presence. It was enough, she was chosen for the accolade. He gave it out, gave a speech. She was a small woman, grey-haired. She looked familiar. An accolade for calmness, for diligence, for staying the course, for being at peace. Imagine that.

Time to go. I’m glad I got a chance to write. She is right, I miss it when I don’t .

A blowy day, big clouds. Cleaning done. I am at peace.

I shouldn’t do it. It feels naughty. It breaks the rules. I think it has something to do with when I fell. I prefer the flat, and it has been recently tarmacked. The pavement is all higgedly-piggedly. Awry. A patchwork of paving slabs, manhole covers, gravel and tar. The road is even, trusty. In the dark I walk in the road.

It was a good day yesterday. Two discussions, one in Café Nero and the other at the hotel in Aberdovey. I taped them both, wanting to capture every nuance. Mostly of what I said, to be fair, I need to hear my sensibility, my truth. Though much of what he said also surprised me. I trust you, he said. I trust that when you are your studio you know what you are doing. I trust you. It felt good to hear. There was a woman in the hotel lounge doing The Times crossword when we arrived. The seats in the window were free. I hesitated. She was sitting on the sofa right next to them. I cleared my throat. Would you mind? I asked. Were going to be doing an interview, would it disturb you if we sat here? No, she said, looking up. Not at all, we’re leaving soon any how. Don’t be silly. An afterthought, tagged on on the end of her sentence. Don’t be silly. An adult talking to a child. She looked discombobulated after she said it. Uncertain. When I told him of it, in whispers, he said, what did you say? Nothing, I said. Nothing. Don’t be silly. She used to say it. Often.

The sun poured in through the window, warming me. We drank tea. Lapsang Souchong. I complained about the size of the teapot. Can we have a large one? I asked the waiter. Saying nothing he turned on his heel and left the room. Returning with a larger one, he said, that’s the size of pot we’re told to use. Regulation. I tried to appease, to ameliorate the situation. It’s my fault, I’m demanding. I like it just so. I look forward to it. I want lots. I want it to last and last. He thawed, asked about the tea. I’ve never had it, he said. It smells smoky. It is smoky, I said. I’ll try it sometime, he said, leaving us to it. I drank to much. It makes me a little high. Gobby, he says. No, more, he said, you’ll get too gobby.

Later, I couldn’t sleep. I lay there between worlds. A voice in-between what he calls jumbly thoughts. A voice, clear and strong saying my name. Ellen, it said, there is no planet. Simple. A statement of fact. There is no planet. Calm, even reassuring. There is no planet. What to make of it. And then the dreams that followed. In my mother and stepfather’s house (though not one that I recognise) trying to shut an array of curtains and blinds, trying to keep someone out. Someone I knew, someone who always brings chaos. I fretted over the workings of the blinds, they were complicated, was I getting it right? And then the other dream about Italy, a landlady renting out rooms to tourists. An AirB&B perhaps? She was found guilty of feeding them tadpoles.

So much milder this morning. Lots of kids out. Two girls, bare-legged in mini-skirts eating pizza from boxes. A man in a tigger suit and another walking down Great Darkgate Street in a romper suit. Before then a man in a dress talking to a girl.

I think it was joy as well as the tea that kept me from sleep. Our discussion made me value myself. So much work I want to do. It was glorious to talk about it. To make plans. He gives it time, he bears witness to it. To me. I am eternally grateful. I am blessed.

Was it Advent? Was that service in Bath Abbey a celebration of Advent? I remember it was cold, so cold and the church was in darkness. That was the point, of course. At the end of the service all was light and the great door opened and there was the tree in the square beyond. Undecorated but lit. I remember I cried. I was low then. Lower than now. Low and lonely and scared. I went there for solace. I kept going but didn’t find it. An austere kind of faith. All hard edges and the church always so cold. That night it was packed and I couldn’t sit in my usual pew, at the front with Winifred and Hugh. Did they see me, did they wave? Winifred for ever frightened of the snow. And her middle-aged daughter with anorexia. Won’t even eat beetroot, says its carbohydrate. I cried from loneliness, for the darkness and for the beauty of the lighting-up rite. The gradual, one-by-one lighting of candles. All hand-held, with cardboard circles under the stems to catch the drip of wax. Inch by inch the church was lit. I burst into tears. I think I even let out a cry. I was pressed between couples, between families. Did they notice? The warmth of others around me. I felt it. It comforted as well as generated my grief. And it was grief, even before the real grief years later. There was magic in the service. I felt as others have felt for hundreds of years, that longing for light in the darkness. She feels it out there and I long to comfort her. I have felt it too. We give it names, talk of special lamps yet it is our condition, it is a dying and all we can do is succumb, make the best of it. Lie low. Light candles. And wait. Wait for the returning of the light. I miss going there. I miss the early Sunday morning services. Just a handful of worshippers right up by the altar. No singing. No frills. Two readings, a lesson, a sermon, prayers and communion. We all sat apart. Apart in our worship. No chatter. No Hugh and Winifred. Just a waiting, a longing for comfort and the taste of the communion wine in my mouth as I walked home.

There was a girl sitting on her haunches on the Prom this morning. Just sitting there, well, perching. A baby bird in neat ankle boots. She stared ahead at the sea, at the darkness.

They are going to shut Bodlondeb. Bod they all call it. The local council-run old people’s home where his mother died. A shabby place but kind. The staff were kind. She had a tiny room. She wasn’t meant to stay, she needed more care than they were able to give but they let her stay on regardless. To move her wouldn’t have been kind, would’ve speeded up her demise. He clung on, knuckles white. They even had a mattress on the floor, for him if he needed to stay. I remember the tea trolley. It was always being pushed round. Tea, biscuit? She a tiny bird, no flesh, no teeth, in a nappy, crying out when they had to turn her. They were kind. What price kindness, eh? And the wipe clean board downstairs at the entrance to the canteen with its menu of the day and a weather report underneath. Chicken curry, spotted dick and custard, tea, pineapple upside-down cake, sunshine and showers. In the hallway was a locked glass cabinet displaying hand-made crocheted doll toilet paper covers to buy in support of the Bod fund. Are they definitely going to close it? I asked her. Yes, she said, her face glued to the screen. When? I asked. Next March.

He told us about an ex-student who spent the whole three years writing short stories in the style of Raymond Carver. Raymond Carver is my favourite writer he’d said, picking up my book, all those years ago, when he came to house to interview me. It’s a good way of learning, he said. A way of learning the craft. Shall I do the same? Immerse myself in short stories? I want to write stories. I have ideas and I want to dispel this idea that I’ve told myself that I am not a fiction writer. I can be what I want to be, can’t I? I want to write about a woman who cross-stitches. I thought about it as I walked. I want to write my way into understanding why women do it, the time they invest in it when they could be doing other things. I remember the story that that historian (I forget her name as I forget so many others, she’s nice with a round, open face and a penchant for leather) told of the eighteenth-century woman who made laced, tatted, sewed, embroidered her way through a loveless marriage. Did she write a diary? Might I seek it out? A contemporary take would be interesting. I want to explore such a woman’s mind-set. Mine, too?

Today we go to talk and have tea. I shall tape it, listen to it back. Write it up. He is generous, generous with his time, his tea and sympathy. The blessing is ever present, even in the sadness. The moon is dwindling and I am sorry for it. I have welcomed it’s light. Off soon. Till tomorrow.

I visit my averageness. Taking out the reports my father had saved from when I was between eleven and sixteen, I visit my averageness. Some surprise, others merely tell me, reflect back to me what my mind already believes. Without question. I feel detached. It is a detaching process such revisiting. What am I looking for? Confirmation of something deeply understood. Or is it more a search for relief, for permission to let it be? I was no shining star, when I have shone it has been for brief moments and it was never believed by me. Not really. I test such accepting. How would it be to live with the averageness, embrace it rather than fight it? I worked with ‘industry and application’ but still only got 37/60. Is that so bad? I worked with industry and application. I remember. I did. So frightened of failing. So frightened of not understanding. Of judgement. And it is with me still. I will explore this. Not to be maudlin but to gaining a better knowing. Is that not a good thing?

The seal was still there. I thought it had gone but it has merely been moved further up the beach. The bleeding flowers had gone. So had its head. Decapitated. There is no dignity in death. A carcase. Something has begun to erode its form.

The answer to the anagram was shape-shifter. Something that takes on an animal form. A shape-shifter. The stuff of fairy tale. Women who become seals and vice-versa. The sailors thought they were mermaids, sirens of the sea. Those eyes. Icelandic tales of women whose husbands hide their skins so that they cannot escape back to the sea.

A homeless man is sleeping under the castle. It is a kind of meeting place, built under the castle’s ramparts. There is a mosaic of dancing people on the wall. It is dry, that is all. But cold. Open to the elements. Open to the wind. He is a sleeping mound, looking just like the decapitated seal with his blanket pulled over his head. I am shamed. What have I to feel sad about when he must be so cold. Is he cold? Do you become inured to it? Or do you just stop expecting to be warm? Is he hungry? Is there some kind of relief in having nothing? Time and time again whenever we stopped for a pee in the motorway services there would be this picture of that African girl on the back of the toilet door. The advert wanted donations towards a scheme that helps girls like her with sanitary products. She has nothing, no family, no home, nothing. And now she’s got her period, it read. Nothing. To have nothing. No thing. No comfort. I stand still with that thought before the wind buffets me again. Returning me back to my selfishness, my self, my minor inconveniences.

They were wrong about the weather. There was wind and there was rain. Five times my umbrella blew inside out. Five times. I swore. I was cross, even after seeing the homeless man, I let my crossness prevail. It buffets one, the wind. My body aches with pushing into it. But I want to return. I want to return to standing in another’s shoes. What can I do? Shall I bring him food? Shall I bring him a warm drink? Does he want to be alone? What can we do for others?

I am cross too often. My sadness makes me imperfect, uncharitable. I ache for peace and know it is there. If I just let go. Accept what is. Accept this. Take it. My gift of averageness.

Betty, our neighbour’s cat has jumped on his car. Get off, Betty, he says laughing, wanting to drive away but can’t. I call her. She comes eventually, jumping down off the bonnet with a tinkle of her bell. It’s the warmth of the engine, I’d said, when he told me a few days ago about her doing the very same thing. Our farmyard cats used to the do the same with Dad’s jags. He hated it. Bloody cats, he’d say, trying to wipe off their muddied paw prints with his handkerchief.

There was a dead seal on North Beach this morning. Washed up, it’s immobile body dotted with red flowers of blood. Just like flowers, the fake ones that magicians use. Flowers of blood. Flowers of death. Do you think it was attacked? I asked him at breakfast. Probably, he said. By porpoises or dolphins, I asked. One of the other, he said. It looked so heavy. So heavy in death. Will the tide reclaim it? I asked, or will someone have to come and take it away? I don’t know, he said, clearly wanting to read his paper.

The back of truck read ‘Salt Dogs’. It had a kind of funnel mechanism on the back. A salter. Do you call them that? A small truck, salting the road. Pink salt. They said there would be frost. It was just two where we are, she said as she passed our goods through the scanner. I don’t mind the cold, she said, its the snow.

The grief always takes me by surprise. It pours out. And then more. It was the love in his eyes, his concern and care that made me start all over again. And then the next day I wonder what was all that about. Just do it. Just do the work. All this thinking. And yet, that is what I do, think. Think away the concern, the failings, the insecurity. And I feel so tainted by it. The grief. Tawdry. Ugly. I need to go back. My dream told me that. I was in a large department store and someone, a girl, an irritating girl, was helping me fill a trolley. I was buying clothes for a child. And then when we got to the till to pay she lost the trolley. So we had to start all over again. Start all over. Some of the clothes were exquisite, made with filigree and diamonds. Diamonds on the soles of her shoes. (The Desert Island Discs guest yesterday kept quoting from songs, too.)

Is such grief a madness? Is this disquiet, this unpeacefulness a madness? They told her she has a mild personality disorder. What is that about? Are our personalities so fixed, so rigid, so determined that they can’t wobbled, can’t become disordered without seen as an illness? They told another girl the same thing. A beautiful girl with sharp blue eyes, deep blue eyes and auburn hair whose name I always confuse. They told her the same. Incarcerated her for a time. When they let her out she threw herself under a train. Is such grief at not being good enough a madness? Not fitting in. Not feeling right? May she rest in peace. Forever.

Did you hear the fireworks? he asked when I went in to wake him. No, I said. Oh, good, I did worry. They were quite loud and seemed to be just outside. Just here. No, I didn’t hear them. Dead to the world.

A milky sky.

Still.