Author: Ellen Bell

A young man is shouting at his girlfriend. They are walking along North Road. It is 3.30 am. She hugs herself as he shouts, lagging behind, head down. Who is it? he is shouting. Who is it?

Just beyond the Bandstand I pass a couple. The man wears an England football shirt. He is making big expressive gestures as he talks. I can do all those things better, he is saying. I don’t mean to be rude, but I can.

Further down the Prom, sitting on the steps just down from Pier Pressure, another man is shouting. …..is a cunt! he shouts. I don’t catch the name. A few yards away a diminutive girl breaks from a conversation she is having with two friends to exclaim in reply, yeh, fuck him man, before returning her attention to her mates.

Yesterday I’d watched as a group of foreign students had encircled a parked University Security van with traffic cones. It had clearly been a case of high spirits. They worked fast, giggling as they did it. I’m off, said one of the girls. And they all scarpered. It was a harmless enough prank. And they were so utterly delighted with themselves.

This is why I get up at this ungodly hour, not to observe all the shenanigans that the students get up to in their cups, but for this dark silence. It isn’t easy, its a truthful hour, a stark time with no hiding place. I often very nearly fall asleep, particularly when I have a hot water bottle on my lap and my little fire on. It is too cosy. Sometimes there are lights on around the complex (is that the only word I can come up with to describe where I live?). I imagine them to be nursing staff, particularly the girl who lives across the Quad from us. I can see her window, more often than not lit, from my studio one, Is she just back from work? What does she do with her time? I sometimes muse about retraining as a nurse. Could I do it? Not the training,, that would be OK, but the all day on your feet sort of stuff, being told what to do and remaining detached. Could I do all that? I know that I would be efficient but as to stamina, I jut don’t know. Until one knows what it is like to do something, be someone else, one can only imagine, encourage romantic ideas about how much easier it would be. But it wouldn’t. It would just bring an different set of problems. I think it is the feeling that I would have done something worthwhile, a day’s work. I remember that sensation when teaching. I was so exhausted by it, particularly by the end of the week. But this is my situation, this inner wrangling, this search for authenticity.

I crave meaning, said the man on the radio. I only caught the end of the programme. It sounded like he had a stroke of some kind and was talking about his life post-paralysis. He was a violinist and was re-learning how to play. I crave meaning. So often I catch phrases from the radio that resonate with me. I crave meaning. It’s true. I want to find work to lose myself in, to surprise myself with. To be busy with. But I need to find out what that work is. I began writing yesterday. It is hard. It is not just writing about my practice but of myself too. What am I about? What am I doing it? Where is it going? And on and on.

Ho hum. I must get back to it. Something is coming through, I’m not sure what. I need to be brave, to admit, to recognise what is gone, and what can never be while being open to what is possible. Go to it. Go. Go, Ada, go.

It was last week, before I went away, that I saw them. I was doing my usual morning walk on the Prom and they were standing outside The Marine Hotel. There is a kind of platform outside the main door that is raised off the pavement, almost like a balcony. They’d clearly attended a wedding and were still, at 3.45 am, in their wedding attire. He had on DJ and white shirt and untied his bow tie hung round his neck. She was in a wide-skirted taffeta dress. He stood one end of the balcony, she the other. He was leaning over the rail, she stood staring at him. No communication. All spent. All said. The tension was palpable. It was just a momentary glance. The story was told.

I only took one book with me in the end, though I had struggled to choose only two in the library. So many I wanted to read. Another time. It is good to be left wanting, yearning, I think. I took Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy. It is a narrative spent entirely in the protagonist’s head. Beautifully written, so much so that I had to stagger it. Saving it for later. A little now, that’s enough. I read some over my lunch at Pret a Manger in the departure lounge and then a little more on the plane, finishing it on my flight back yesterday. A dark book. Not erotic, too graphic to be so, at least for me. But deeply, deeply sad. A dystopian, bleak kind of sadness. It made me think of the couple outside The Marine, where is there to go after such a silence?

The hurricane, for she told us at the checkout that it was officially declared a hurricane, had not wreaked as much havoc on the Prom as I’d expected. There were the usual stone and shale on the road and pavement, but much had been swept into orderly piles. The waves were big, he tells me. They may have been. There were twigs and stones on the South Prom, so perhaps it was there that their magnificence was most evident. But it was calm today, this morning. Cold, though. Winter comes. A clear sky. A panoply of stars.

I don’t know where to begin. I said I’d write that so there I’ve done it. I am lost. Discombobulated. I always am after travelling. I get so absorbed, so taken over by the place I’m in and the people I am with. I soak it up, consume it, as it consumes me. I feel like one of those snow scenes, all shaken up. Floating. Not settled. Not settling. I need some time at home, at my desk, in my studio.

I don’t know where to begin. So just make a start. Make a list. It helps to focus the mind, sort out the important from the not so. I have to deal with life stuff first. VAT, my accountant, chasing invoices. They all help in the grounding. All help in the reestablishing roots. I am ready to write, to make, to begin again with whatever it is that will take me to the next stage. It’s just an energy thing. I haven’t slept well. Waking every two or three hours. Checking my alarm, needing a pee, just being over stimulated. It was an important thing to do and worth all this shaking up. It a love thing. That’s all. A need to reestablish an intimacy that was always shaky. I love her. As I love them all. We are so different. I watched her endlessly. We share the same blood. See that skin, it is the same as mine. But our approach to living is so different. She, seemingly so fearless. Scratch the surface and it is not so. Of course not. Be vulnerable, I say. Let it be so. Let it go. It is easier said then done. And I know I am talking to myself too. Is it not always so?

I don’t know where to begin. So just begin, at the beginning.

I like your dungarees, she said, stopping at our table on the way to loo, I don’t wear mine. She’s rather like the catering assistant up at the University canteen, talking is a nervous thing. They rattle the words out, like a machine gun, not stopping to weigh up the impact. They hardly take breaths in between the words. Like children desperate to maintain a parent’s interest for just a little longer. Children talking about nothing, losing the thread, just longing to communicate. For these two women, I sense it is less about communication, there is no two way channel, but more about not being comfortable with silence, with a vacuum. I like her. I like them both. They have spirit. One, the first, a scrawny, long-legged woman, hippy-like, with a strong Northern accent (is it Yorkshire or Lancashire, I never know?) and a penchant for colourful leggings and clashing patterns. The other, is from the Bush, as he calls it, a farmer’s girl, I suspect. A warm, open-faced woman whose round shoulders appear to carry much. He gave too much away yesterday. It slips out. Whereas, I am more close, holding our story close to my chest. I like it that way. I remain on the outer edges, an observer rather than participant. The curate knows me however. He asks about work. He’d broken his arm. My fingers are still numb, he says. His body is a swollen barrel. He is always breathless. A magnet, a wit, he is forever surrounded by a coven of Welsh women, cackling at his bon mots. I recognise some of them from work but the names have gone. I smile but for the moment I am unrecognisable. He likes it. It is a radical. Shorn, even. She does her best but I think I scare her. It is fine. Not beautiful, but striking. Will that do?

I am edgy about going tomorrow. It unsettles me the prospect of travel. So many unknowns. Yet, I am excited too. It has been a long time since I was there. And to have her in my sight. Will we get on? We are such different creatures, though we share blood. She has so much energy, it scares me sometimes. How will I keep up?

It rained this morning. It shouldn’t have done, he said on waking. No. Two girls were sitting on a Prom bench in the drizzle. I don’t want to be like this anymore, one of them said. Further down the Prom, by the bandstand walked three couples. One of the men had his arm around his girlfriend. She was crying.

It’ll end in tears, she always used to say when the three of us got out of control. Usually giggling. Over-excited. It was the booze, I suspect, with the crying girl. It gets me that way too, I either cry or sleep. That layer of sadness, its membrane punctured.

I think about ways of generating income. No not just for the money but to get my work out there. I’d like to write about my experiences in Norway, as an au pair. I want to get to the heart of it. Confess, I suppose. But how to do this without hurting others. It is perplexing. It’s my story but it crosses into theirs. It will always be the way, I think. I need to find a way of managing it. Be strong but kind. Is it possible to be both?

No answer regarding my requests. Is this a good sign? People are generally slow to reply to most things. I must learn patience, or, even better, how to let go of things. To not hold so tight. All that is mine will come to me. Let it be so.

I’ve been thinking, I said to him at breakfast. Does he dread it? Those words. I say them so often. It’s the walking. It excites my mind instead of stilling it. The movement, the pace, the wind. It is my time for ironing things out. Working through fear. So when I bring them to our breakfast table, those thoughts of mine, they have been through quite a process. I try them out on the imaginary him as I walk. Testing his responses and my replies. What do I fear? He is a reasonable man. I love him for that. For to be able to reason without threat of one or other retreating into high dudgeon is a valued part of our relationship. But only if I bring such ideas to him calmly, he is more prickly if I come to him agitated. Who wouldn’t be? So the walking is an ironing, a smoothing, a calming process. I’ve been thinking, I said to him at breakfast. Perhaps we should be open to perhaps trying for a mortgage. And why not? He hates change, I know that, and mostly so do I, though I instigate it far more than he. There are lots of fors and againsts. We have so much space. There is a lightness in renting, the roots are not so firmly established. But it is a lot of money. Most of what we bring in, in fact. Perhaps, economically it would make sense. As I walk I fantasise about a little garden, re-hanging my pictures, a mortgage that is soon paid off. My own home. Our own home. Not technically our first but it would be one that we bought at the start together. At least it is a sign that I am ready to commit to living here, I said to him. It must be so. It isn’t the place I would’ve chosen for myself but he needs to be here. It is a small thing and there is always, always the sea. We shall see, I yield to what can be, to what is possible. I had too little sleep last night. Work called. A late one. TV. It must be so. I appreciate the money but it ate into my sleeping time. A little before and a little after. It will tell later. Take it slow. Take it slow.

She was lovely. Cosy. Motherly. Her neck wobbled as she talked. Her hair, a soft blonde. I’ve met her before but this time she seemed more vulnerable. They know me as a strong woman, she said of her sons. I had to keep going after losing Aled. She came into to talk about ‘The Evil Triangle’. Boy racers, she said, in North Wales. She’s been a member of the charity BRAKE ever since her son Aled was killed in a car accident. She couldn’t give in. I asked if he’s made contact with her. Oh, yes, she said, several times. They’d left me alone in the morgue, they’re not supposed to, but they did. This medium, who was in training, told me about what I saw. No one could’ve known. This is what I’ve been given, she said to me, so I might as well tell you. It doesn’t make any sense. But it did. It did. It’s the detail, I said. Yes, she said, it’s the detail. He helped her down the stairs.

I saw a boat leaving the harbour the other morning. How I love that. It wasn’t a fishing vessel but a sailing boat. The tide was in and high. I love the lights, seeing the inner nest of the craft. One man sailing it. I saw his dark shape as it rounded the Perygyl, bouncing, tossed by the waves as it moved from fresh water to sea. Glorious. I watched for what seemed like an age as it turned into Cardigan Bay. Where was it going at 3.45 am? Let him be safe.

My sense of smell is returning. I get flashes of it. Subtle nuances. A room freshener, my perfume, fruit. In and out. I’m getting better.

He has said yes. He does want a piece of writing about my performance. Maybe even a few. To track its progress. That is good. Now I only have to write it. Next week. After my trip.

Today we take the chair. The first of our small changes. A reupholstering. I look forward to it. And what a surprise that they are together. Who’d have thought it? Not me. Small town. Small town stuff. The washing calls. A bientot. x

I’d expected rain but it didn’t come. It was blustery but I like that. It is real, alive. The wind buffets me along, dragging and pushing. Come on, it says, waken up, feel the power of me. Come on. And the sea takes its cue, crashing and pounding. It is good to be part of it, blown about in the same way. The same jetsam. Part and parcel of the same experience. It erodes the me, the personal. I like that.

Two hours. Two hours before we have to go. So I said I do some work. What kind of work? he asked. Oh, admin and stuff. You know, emails. Is it work? Is it proper work? It oils the wheels. I feel like I am doing something in the real world. It is recognisable as work. I sit at my computer. I send stuff. I do figures, my accounts. All the peripheral stuff. It isn’t hard, it isn’t physical, it isn’t creative. It is merely about dealing with things. Ordering. Sorting out. Making room, making space for the real work. And yet that real work doesn’t bring me an income.

Can we talk over coffee tomorrow? I asked him. Of course, he said. A seminar. I need to air it, this realisation. No, it isn’t a realisation, not really, more a question. Is it alright? Is it alright that I don’t make money from my art? What a question? And am I asking him or myself. We have enough he will say. And we do, though my voices would say, how much is enough. Is it alright to labour over something that brings no monetary reward? I want to ask them, all those artists how they feel about this. Does it eat into their sense of self? Do they feel less worthy than others whose labour is rewarded financially? Oh, people say, it must be lovely to have a talent. Look at me I have none. Except, except your innate ability to command a high salary. Something that makes them potent, notable in our society. I feel shame sometimes. I bring in so little and every penny that I do earn is noted, felt. Others make it seem easy, they are laissez-faire about it. Confident.

It’s not a moaning, it’s more about trying to make sense of it all. I haven’t been brought up to value work for work sake. For that is what this is. Just that. A need to make, to communicate, to perform, to feed my soul. A need to make work that unsettles, challenges, steps out of the banal, the ordinary. And yet, what is it? Who is it for? Does that matter? Ostensibly it is for me. It has to be. But it is the doing of it, the performing of it that seems to matter, much more, much much more than the result. I am paraphrasing what they said on the radio about graffiti artists. They are making their mark, scenting the ground, like dogs. I’ve been here. I was here. Is that all it is? An ego trip. I recognise my need, my urge to perform, but it is also about seeing, feeling myself in a place. Being present. Being present in silence. It is interesting this. I am invisible but it is a potent invisibility for people are energetically not engaging with me. Like the girl in Baron’s Court. It’s like an ironing out. Even at this ripe age, trying to find out what I believe. A making sense.

A gaggle of students outside the Why Not? club. Before that two girls all in black walking along the Prom. Large girls, tall. One with a hole in her tights, at the top of her thigh. Rubbing together as she walked. Even in the dark I could see the skin squeezing out. A fleshy circle of white. Noise outside the Why Not? club. A girl’s voice calling, Keeley! And halfway down Great Darkgate Street a couple rowing. You told me to fuck off, so I’m fucking off, he is saying. I’m sorreeeee, she replies, her cardigan slipping down off her shoulder, voice slurring. You’re responsible for how your treat me,yeh? he replies. I dodge the vomit on the pavement. Three instalments. I don’t need to shut off my nose for I still cannot smell anything.

You smell nice, he says when I go in to wake him up. Do I? I say.

We’ve begun the last film. I shall miss them, they’ve brought me joy, laughter and encounters with new worlds, stories and ideas. This one, The Light Between Oceans, is a beauty. Schmaltzy, of course, as one would expect with DreamWorks but well done, so far. Michael Fassbinder is a pleasure to watch, as is the actress who plays Isobel.

7.03 and it is still pitch. Ho hum. Such is the onset of winter. The leaves are gorgeous though, such colours. Such colours.

It was a ridiculous clue. Something like ‘a folded piece of paper, usually decorated’. Notelets, I said. Notelets? he replied. Yes, the sort of thing women of your mother’s generation used as thank you cards. I know, he said, but to describe them like that, honestly. I remember them. I loved them as a child. They made me feel grown up, so much nicer than plain paper and an envelope. I had all sorts. They came in plastic-lidded boxes, and sometimes the motif on the front would be replicated on the back of the envelope. I have some that she sent me when she was a wee girl, about the same age as she was in my dream last night. A golden-haired child, sunny. I made no notes today. There was nothing to report. No kids, no policeman. Nobody. I had the place to myself. A thin coating of rain. No Perygyl. And in the silence a tiny revelation.

I’d sunk a bit, you know like a going cold soufflé. I had felt better yesterday afternoon. I’d solved the Twitter issue and was feeling pleased with myself. And the calm had continued, thanks to Aurum 10. But this morning it was the thought of working today. Sitting here, in my studio, and having to construct another working day. From nothing. Nil. It was that. I felt my worthlessness. A tangible feeling and the gloom descended. It hurts him. He asks so I tell him. To him I am far from worthless. I know this. It is not rational. My importance to him does make me worthy. But it is the deep down stuff, the not having learnt to value my gifts. What are they exactly? I am organised, I try to be kind, I have ideas, I can write sometimes, well sometimes (whatever that means), I notice things, the detail. I am trustworthy, worthy of trust, I serve. I like to do this. I am diligent. I try to do what I say I will do. The rest is and has to be in the eye of the beholder. My goodness. What is that? I wish it to be so, but it is a transient feeling. My capacity for empathy is legion but whether it is useful or not is a question. You see the core is wobbly. Nothing is cast iron. Nothing is steady. My self, the one beyond the outer, the doing me, well she/it is sure, steady, a brim with goodness. But she/it or maybe even he is beyond this reality. She/it/he merely dips a toe.

So I keep busy. I’ve walked, made breakfast, ate it, shopped and now I sit here expunging and it is not yet 8.00 am. More to learn today. When some days I just want to do something banal. I know it is a fantasy – sitting behind a till in M&S, making sandwiches in Chives (I didn’t even get an interview) – such jobs must have their strife, particularly the low pay. But the learning is good, and rewarding. I just need to lift myself up to it. So put the video on YouTube. Do it. It went OK with Facebook – 21 views yesterday. It is something. Such spaces are my theatre now. I need to learn how to use them. And I sent off the email requests. Nothing may come of it. But it is a start. There is power in the starting, to paraphrase Goethe. I’m excited by it, he said. It is exciting, he said. Yes. It is. I just need to find my courage. Or perhaps not. Do it as you are now. However, you feel. What does the Nike advert say, just do it? So be it. Amen. Enough.

The sun yesterday was pure joy. Thank you.

I saw the torch beam first. A strong beam that made me turn my face away. It moved about, following the line of the Promenade railing then down onto the sand. I was coming closer. A figure in black. A man, large build. No coat, a navy jumper. Morning, he said, how are we today? A policeman? I still couldn’t be sure, not in the dark. There seemed to be a kind of insignia on the chest of his sweater. A nice voice, a reassuring voice. I let go my fear. It must be a policeman. I was tempted to ask what he was looking for but held back. None of my business. None.

We’re doing fine, thank you officer. Well actually we’re not. That is we, as in me. Got maudlin last night. It’s the bleakness, it feels like it will never lift. Is it just a seasonal thing? It didn’t happen in Spain, he said, or in London. No he is right, it didn’t. But you see I’d escaped then. Run away. You’re always running away, she used to say. No I’m not. Am I? I want to. I want to live in hotels like the de Winters did. In pensions in the South of France. Free of ties, free of responsibilities, free of the need to be static, of me. And yet, what am I trying to escape from? I don’t have to go down the pit. I have enough food, money, I am warm, safe and loved. It is just this deep down innate sense of worthlessness. I cannot explain it any better than that. And yet, even as I write it I am ashamed. Others have such trials, so little. The radio is invaluable for us self-centred souls, it shows us other lives, other struggles, ones that are way beyond our present, or indeed future experience. Yesterday there were stories of those struggling on the new Universal Credit. One woman had only received something like £140 pounds over the last six weeks. Others talked about being in homeless hostels, where families are having to share beds in cramped conditions. And then there was the tale of the Sudanese boy who wanted to play football for Arsenal and was prepared to pay people smugglers to enable him to do so. He wants to travel to Italy but to do so must first traverse deserts and encounter numerous other hazards. I cannot know what it is to be him. Even when I too was low, I knew that there were people I could go to if all was lost. And it never was. Never entirely. That is the light in me. It flickers, it is down low at present, but it is there nevertheless.

Lots of kids about this morning. Must’ve been the mildness and the absence of rain. Music pounded from Pier Pressure. Thudded. A seagull sailed over a streetlight, a flashing of white.

She thought the medium was called Stephen Spender. Speed, I said. Spender was a poet, I think.

I felt in pieces. I feel in pieces, though less so now after a remedy. It calms me, detaches me. A not unpleasant feeling.

I can’t put images on Twitter. A frustrating occurrence and one that I cannot, as yet, resolve. I get het up over things technical that I don’t understand. It will have a simple explanation. I just need to get there. Shall I ask John L?

I think it is to do with sites. I need to place myself in sites, in situ. And then? Perform.

6.55 am and it is still pitch outside. Black as yer hat. Impenetrable. It brings me so low. It is like something heavy coming down over my head, my eyes, blocking out all the light, all the sun. I manage it. I keep moving, keep doing. Keep busy. But it is trudging work. It helps to articulate it, to write about it here. I am a coper. I am routinous. It helps me to be so. It gives me a framework within which to function, though the impulse to just step out of it, at times, is strong.  Patience Gray when describing Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas’s eating a particular fish for every meal while staying in Italy, talked about writers as liking monotony. I’m not sure that I would chose that word but regularity, certainly. Uniformity, possibly. Any kind of creative endeavour is a challenge, it takes its toll on one’s courage. The rest, then it seems, needs to be less so. One’s outer rim of experience needs to be safe, familiar by comparison. I think, anyway. I am steadied by domestic work, the weekly flow of demands to clean, order and arrange. When I feel like this it is a drag but when it is done, there is some modicum of peace to be had. It was the ironing and the washing this morning. The first batch. Order. I’ve done it, put one foot in front of the other. It is enough, for today.

What is it? I asked. We were on the M4, there’d been a hold up. A restriction, the warning signals called it. It can’t be a seagull, it’s too big. It’s a swan, he said as we drove over it. We had no other choice, nor had the umpteen cars who’d also done so. A white mass, bloodied, lying in the middle of the middle lane. How had it got there? Had it fallen from the sky? Been shot? We’ve just passed a river, he said, it had probably come from there and strayed onto the motorway. I was saddened by it. Such destruction. Such irreverence, I thought, shuddering as I felt a wing clang against the underbelly of the car, towards such a noble, majestic beast. We had no choice, he said. We’re all going too fast. In the past they would have seen it as an omen. Such whiteness. Such a mass of whiteness, bloodied and spoilt.

My cold lingers. It’s a nasty one, he says, as I splutter and sneeze. Still no taste and no smell, though yesterday I did catch a hint of some floral residue on my leather jacket. It almost smelt like talc.

A rainy and windy walk this morning. Shouting at the wind as it blew my umbrella inside out.

Saw the woman with the bag again this morning. I usually see her at the South end of the Prom. She walks, like me, in the early hours. She is huddled over, in either a sweat shirt or like today, an anorak. Her gait is a lumbering one, her feet splayed out like a duck. She never looks at me, no, she did once, but it is rare. She is inside herself, though out. Sometimes she is smoking. She always carries one of those bag for life plastic bags. It looks empty, blowing in the wind.

Walking home on Llanbadarn Road I walked behind several gatherings of students. One girl was dawdling, a rose head held to her nose.

Sitting in a Starbucks just off Saville Row on Wednesday morning, I watched as a tiny strand loosed itself from a turquoise ostrich feather decoration on a Japanese girl’s handbag. It was suspended for a brief second, held still in the warm current of the sunlight shafting through the floor to ceiling window. Then it was gone.

I’ve much to work through. It’s exciting, he said. There were some lovely moments. The American woman with the suitcase, stopping to say, that’s nice. And the other middle-aged woman on the tube, smiling at me. And then the little Chinese girl in pink at the National Gallery, gazing, rapt. I was engaged. I was taken up by it. It feels like it has potential. Is that enough? Shall I go forward? Might something be found?

She was tender, much warmer than the last one. My breast squeezed between Perspex feet. Let me know if I trap bone, she said. Tell me when to stop. I’ll stop there. Good. The other side. That’s it. Now relax. Soon done. OK? I’m OK. I count how many times I will have to have it done before I am seventy. Will they stop then? All the prodding? What would I do with the knowledge if I knew it? Who knows? The morning has risen but not the grey. It remains.

Patience Gray has cheered me. At work from 6.30 am on a grey wet Sunday morning and she gives me the Mediterranean. But it isn’t just the warmth, its the detail. The detail of how she lived, worked and cooked. I soak up her rhythm, slowly like the dried chickpeas in the pignata pot. She reduces life down to the minutiae, which is, in reality, enormous in consequence. She notices, pays attentions, takes time. And I, in turn, as her reader, do the same. My sorrow is lessened. Still lost, I am a little found, by her, by the gentleness of her rural experiences. She makes me want to form the ‘little ear’ pasta, that she claims is too fiddly for the uninitiated. I want to cook dried beans for four hours doing embroidery while I wait. I want the domestic life she writes of, its focus on a few ingredients, its making the best of, its white-washed pared-down-ness. I want to be held, contained, and in the sun.

Yesterday was grief-filled. I reach a wall and the blackness descends. And I can’t move forward or back. He talks to me. Quietly, calmly knowing the drill. All your life you’ve had this, he tells me, assures me. All your life. It is nothing new and yet each time it feels like it is. Have I learnt anything? Am I any stronger for my experiences. He lists my merits. Talks of love, of being a good wife. A wife. She was that. A good housekeeper he called her, whilst ruing that fact that she would no longer share his bed. He spat it out. Another friend of his, called them drones. It is hard to value such things, and yet reading Patience Gray I find that I do, really. I seek it. I seek the simplicity. The serving. The service. I calm down with the detail. Looking in close. I can do that, it is the bigger picture, the whole world staring down on me, that is what quells.

I go out into the world tomorrow. You’re just going to try it out, he says. Try it out, perform in public, on the tube, in stations. And I suddenly feel self conscious. Particularly about performing in the National Gallery. How would you feel if you didn’t do it? he asks. Shit, I say. There you are. I have no choice. We can cancel it. Go another time. You are not well, he says. No. I must see it through. There is a chance. A chance for joy, some kind of yes, some kind of success. I will not know unless I try it. I just feel adrift, unsafe. Ungrounded. The domestic roots me. I know it. My hands know it. I have always needed it to be so. And yet, I know so little. She talks through the making of pasta. How lovely. I would like to try that. Repetitive, forming. The delicacy of lace making. Taking time. You have time, he says. You can do what you want, he says. Yes, but what do I want? Dylan Thomas in the film being a shit. A shit to everyone. Believing he’d lost it. I haven’t written anything for ages, he bemoans. He drinks, he whores around. Don’t leave me.

I will try it all. I will be brave. It is just a trial. A trial. The reality is in the detail, the noticing, the caring, the kindness, the loving. I know this. Do you?

This cold has stolen my sense of smell and with it the ability to taste. The coffee I’ve just had was mere bitterness. And my sleep last night was fitful, almost hallucinatory. Scenes from A Poet in New York, the film we are in the middle of watching, kept weaving themselves into my dreams. The actress playing Caitlin and her anger, and that stabbing of the muddy beach. Over and over. Yet before I went to sleep I had this exquisite sense of aliveness. The breeze from the window gracing my cheek, the heavy warmth of my bedclothes, that falling in and out-ness of sleep, all were exquisite. I went into to him for paracetamols thinking it was late. It was 7.30pm. The film is absorbing. And Tom Hollander, exemplary. They would lock him in his shed so that he’d write.

More kids about this morning, pouring out of the clubs and pubs, talking loud. Seemingly so self-assured. So basically, a girl is saying to friend, I drank it, it was disgusting but I feel fine. And another girl crossing the road to Pier Street, is shouting to her girlfriends, I’m literally fucked. My knee is killing me. Later, walking past The Angel, a group of girls, one saying, I’m shitting myself.

Snatches of the vernacular. Bravado. Postulating. It is tough for them. Freedom on a plate but how to manage their place in it. I watch from a distance. Committing their sayings to memory.

Have I spoken about her? She works in one of the University canteens. He likes to go there to read his paper and have coffee. They all know him. Sometimes they come over with morsels of food, a croissant, a muffin. I shouldn’t. Oh, go on. She’s a chatterer. You know the kind of person I mean. Talking ten to the dozen, as my mother used to say. She hardly takes breath. It all pours out, all the detail. A machine gun. Rat-a-tat-tat. He told me he saw her yesterday talking to a 60 year-old woman. They were talking away, apparently. When the woman left, she came over to his table. She’s a welshie, she told him, then pulled a face, pursing her lips and leaning her head to one side, and a les. I know I shouldn’t say it, she said immediately afterwards. No, you shouldn’t, he said. I know. My Gareth always tells me off, don’t say those things. But I can’t help it.

My mood is as grey as the sky. I know I was born to it, this greyness but I do struggle with it. No light. No sunshine, just a blank, rainy blankness. I always long for something to happen on such days, anything. Some gift, some unexpected joy. It never comes when you long for it though. It has to be so. I’m reading Patience Gray’s Honey from a Weed. It soothes my soul. A cookbook-cum-journal, it takes me back to the Mediterranean. The simplicity of sun, food and hand-crafted work. I know I’m a romantic and such a book feeds it. The life she describes is hard, there is much poverty and little certainty. I know this. But nevertheless, I’ve such longing. And there was that programme on Radio 4 Extra. The Gentle Art of Tramping, I believe it was called. For people who wish to escape the normal, the humdrum. And yet, that too is hard. A vicar saying that in the end they come to her in Pilston saying they can’t do another winter on the road. It is too hard.

He says its the cold. I need to rest. I know this too. An opportunity, permission to do so. And yet, I must ready myself for next week. Tomorrow. Tomorrow.