Author: Ellen Bell

I reread Jenny Diski’s On Trying to Keep Still wholly mindful of the fact that I cannot. I try. But it is this moving, this doing that I must do, always. I want to be still. I keen towards those that are. Like mothers. Still mothers. Mothers who sit, watch, smile, returning inward to their secret womb. Diski goes to a wooden shack in New Zealand and a farm cottage in the Quantocks to be still. And yet it is more about being alone, being left to her own devices, to do as she pleases that she seeks. The stillness is a whole different thing.

Glorious birdsong this morning. 3.30 am and they were in full song along Llanbadarn Road. I don’t know them all, but I could make out blackbirds and blue tits. Layer upon layer. I let it surround me, enter me, take me over. I become nothing. A sounding board, a sponge that exists only to absorb their song. Nothing down by the Prom. There, there is only the occasional screech of a gull, the chitter of the starlings under the Pier and the now and then pip of an oystercatcher. It is like walking through a membrane of sound. Pushing through. Hard. Resistant even. I pull myself out of sleep for this. This connection, this forgetting of self. The swallows have returned, he said, reading from The Times’s Nature Diary. Apparently, he said, we’ll see them in the West and the South West.

I’ve begun the clear out. Out. I wanted to give my drawing board away. A great cumbersome thing. I remember it from Bath. My bedsit in Bath. Everyday dragging it from under by bed to lift it up onto my table. Then back again at night, under the bed. But he talked me out of it. He looked grave, cautious. He knows me. Hang on to it. You never know when you might need it. Drawings have gone. Writings have gone.  Sewings have gone. Making room. Today it is paperwork. Shred it. Shred it. He throws out clothes. Jumpers. Passing them on. The women in the charity shop are delighted. We love your things, they say, pulling them from the bag.

I want to lighten myself. To relieve the heaviness of the matter that keeps me here. Like a balloonist dropping stuff over the side of the basket. The lighter he is the nearer he is to heaven. Up and up he goes. Sailing upwards. Light as air. I felt light when I went to Norway. All my stuff packed up in storage. All I had was one enormous suitcase. I felt light. I felt unencumbered. I carried them in my head though. The things. And sometimes I longed for them. Thought about them bubbled-up in Mach.

My sister calls and I am thrown off course. The day’s plan momentarily awry. And yet, I love the love I feel. It pours from me to her. She has it. Whether she knows it or not. It is there. Uncomplicated. Love.

Just like I feel for her, and her, and her.

Is this work? I ask myself. This clearing out. It needs to be done but my mind wants to create, to plan. Hold fast. Wait. Make space. Be still. Still.

Six hundred miles. Over six hundred miles to see a rose tattoo. A tattoo in the shape of a rose hidden beneath a sleeve. Do you have any more? I ask. And she dips her head, lifting her hair from her neck to reveal a cascade of stars. Her movements are slow, measured, careful. She is tender. Any more? She smiles, catching his eye across the table. Just one, she says. A butterfly. To her they are more than beautiful, they are her right. Don’t tell, she says. I won’t. I won’t tell.

Six hundred miles. Neither of us slept. Not him, her. Churned up with joy at friendship and encountering such a well of loving. For all of them. I couldn’t rest, there was no peace in such feeling. A misted rain. In between a trying for sun. The ferry to St Mawes. Dozing in my hotel room. Two pots of tea, Assam then Yorkshire and a black vessel with its kiss of gold, to take home.

Coming home and all that re-adjusting, not there but here. Walking in the early hours and a boy coming out of the sea. I couldn’t work it out at first. So pink. What was it? A boy. A naked boy. His friends standing way off under the shelter, laughing, one with an apricot dressing gown spread wide waiting to enfold him. Making him walk, in the rain, barefoot and bare-bottomed along the Prom. He walked slowly, his hand over his genitals. I was behind him. Far behind him. I heard their whoops. Even when he got to them he didn’t rush to dress. Happy in his nakedness. Proud. Walking past them I saw he had a beard. A Christ-like figure. Neat in his youth. Perfected.

I need to clean. To sort out. To sort out my studio. Too much stuff. I need to clear a space. Space. To begin again.

Why do it? she asked. A good question. I mull it over. I gnaw away at it. Be all that you are, he says. You have so many talents. Listening to Marian Keyes on the radio I am thrown. How nice to be just one thing. One perfect thing. Not me. I am magpie-like, searching out the shiny. So be it. Write it out. A sewing diary. Write it out. Stories about women. My women. I see their details, not their whole. So be it. Write it out. Begin.

There is power in the beginning, Goethe said. So begin.

The rain hadn’t come when I walked. Just a few spit spots. I hear them on my coat, my hood. Spit spot. I like the smell of the air just before rain. And the pavement tarmac, anticipating the wet. It is sheeting now. Rolling rivulets on the windows. Why does heavy rain unsettle me? I feel a little unsafe. Is it memories of our flat roof in Cambridge? And seeing the rain collect in pools. Weather defies us. Particularly here. It erodes, eats away at our bricks. We forget our humility, our vulnerability at our peril.

We’ve been watching Castaway. We watch films in bits. Bite-size bits before bed. Over three nights we watched him, Tom as Chuck. It was gripping. At least the island bit. The end was rather schmaltzy. Four years on an island alone. It is seductive. That aloneness. That simplicity. That doing nothingness except surviving. And yet, he didn’t want to be there. He didn’t relish the island’s beauty, its remoteness, its bounty. I’m good at the surviving bit. I like playing house. I did it a lot as a child. We made dens. I made them inside and outside the house. The simplicity of finding shelter, finding food, heat and rest. It is when it is forced upon you, that is the issue. We want to chose. To chose our peace.

A fug. I’ve been in a fug. It follows me, lurking just to the side of me, turning everything grey. I try to fight it, feigning fun. What would happen if I yielded? Went to bed and hid. I love to go to bed in hotels. Afternoon escapes. Hiding. Where no one can find you. Playing Scrabble on a rainy afternoon in a hotel in Amsterdam. Double pneumonia, sang Lloyd Cole. Time standing still. Dead time. Empty time. Holiday time. Seeking nothing. Finding nothing. Nothing. Being nothing.

The fug makes me touchy. Snappy. Behind-glass wary. Snap out of it, she would say, or I’ll give you something to cry for. What is it? Lack of sleep, menopause or the winter blues? Why fight it? Go into it. Know it. Embrace it. It is sensation after all. Feeling. A you-are-alive feeling. We expect to be happy.

I walked before the rain. The back way because it is Sunday and the bakery is shut. Not that I buy bread, I just like to come down the hill and smell the bread. That’s all. A treat. I have my landmarks, my stopping points. The top of the little hill into the Castle Park where I stand still for a moment and watch the hydrangeas swaying in the wind. And think of my mother. I don’t know why. She comes to me then. Though she has gone. Is no more. Is nothing. All that pain, hers and mine. Gone to nothing. I am emptied of it. The back way takes me past the station. Before I get there a girl and boy walking together ahead of me. I cross the road and pass them. She is in pink trousers, a wide-hipped, Botero-esque, red head. She wears a white t-shirt with a small strawberry motif on her chest and the words, BITE ME above it. Good evening, she says in a quiet, warm voice.

Yesterday, walking past The Angel at pouring out time, there were a black couple. Their bodies leaned against the railings surrounding the stairs leading up to The Academy. There was an awkwardness, a newness to their physical interaction. I’m the shyest girl ever, she was saying. Her hair in oiled ringlets hung about her face, her lips wet with gloss. Everything shiny in the darkness. I don’t really understand why you’re talking to me now, he replied, his fingers teasing at the chipped paint of the railing. A-wooing amidst all the hubbub. Another girl holding court with a group of grungy roadies outside The Angel. If I had a beer now, she said, I’d get really excited.

Days before, I encountered a couple pushing a small, red pushchair down the hill into our courtyard. 4.30 am, pushing a baby. Scurrying, hurrying, rucksacks on their backs. A flit? A train to catch? The first train doesn’t go until 6. A coach maybe. It was an expensive pram. High off the ground, and small.  A newborn perhaps.

Reading Jenny Diski all about her escapes to stillness. New Zealand and the British Countryside. Was it Devon? She writes with a brusque, almost ruthless clarity. I read it in bits. Bite-size, enough to fill my mouth, and chew. She is so easy to read. It is luscious, a falling into softness for me. And yet, she is hard-edged. She writes about Heimlich, notions of home. The despair of being away from it. Not it, the real thing, but the idea of it. I know it. I know that despair. The bleakness of that house in Baerum. No peace. No sanctuary. They were not to blame. I was lost. In the wrong place.

The rain has stopped. Sunday and it is my Proust day. I have him in French now. I must order the material and begin another. Where am I going? God knows.

Coffee and the Archers. One foot in front of the other. And small pleasures. It is enough. Until there is more.

 I woke wanting to yield. I woke with the intention of succumbing to what is. I woke wanting to be good. But then came the wind. I felt like nothing. A non thing, a no thing. A leaf, a piece of jetsam, tossed. I couldn’t kick the bar, it was too strong. It jammed me against the wall of the Alexandra Hall. Hard against the stone. My legs became jelly. I stayed on the pavement side and crept, hands stroking wall, clutching. I am determined. I am resolute. Watch out for that corner. It is like a wind tunnel that one. The one just by what used to be the Aber Diner and is now something called The Electric. The scaffolding on what used to be the Town Hall rattles. It comes in gusts. I am blown thrown, jostled, nudged, battered and bashed. I have no gravity. My feet do not hold the ground. By the castle I have to crawl along clasping, grasping at the rail. Enough, I shout. Cursing. I used to shout on my bike to school. Shouting at the wind. Yesterday, when it was there but less violent there was a young man dancing. He was dancing on what we call the ship. It is a little balcony overarching the beach and looking out to sea. It looks like a prow of a ship. Hence, the ship. And he was dancing there at 4 am, his hands in his pockets. His feet doing all the work. Round and round like a helicopter seed. An eddy-ing. Head down, absorbed.

Under the bandstand canopy lies an umbrella, capsized, water-logged, its frame broken. One spike pointing upwards, the rest kaput.

I couldn’t walk to the harbour. I almost cried with frustration. My feet couldn’t move. I was scared. I was thrown against bins, cars, grabbing at wind mirrors, drainpipes. So undignified. You promise me you’ll be careful, he says to me. You promise? I do. I do. So I give up and I am devastated. I want to walk. I want to walk my path. And then I remember the vow to yield. To succumb. I take the back way home stopping for a moment on the crest of the little hill looking down on Llanbadarn Road. A wild night still. No one is out. Except me. I like it that way. That is what I seek. I walk beyond the turning for our road. Down towards Llanbadarn. The wind is still strong, even here. The trees whirl about, pulling at their roots.

Yesterday, outside The Angel, a student in a toga on a mobile phone.

Looking out of the window of my studio as I write I can see the wind is dying down. The fir trees jostle and the birds have taken to the sky again. Earlier there was none. None flying. They’re not stupid.

I have them in every room. Hyacinths. I want the smell. Sometimes sweet, sometimes cloying, sometimes almost rancid. A visceral smell. I love it. I love the first sweetness of it.

There are things I must do. Paperwork. All the evaluation stuff. Important work, but in this fog of bleakness hard to get to grips with. I will do it. I always do. Meanwhile, he has a bad back. He is not resilient. He takes to his bed. I cajole and try to cheer him. Be kind. Always be kind.

I forgot she’d died. Jenny Diski. I mourn her all over again.

It’s been a while since I written this. I’ve been busy. First the workshops, then the performance and then all the writing about it. That took longer than I’d thought. And it was hard. But good. A good process. And she liked it soooooo much. He’s tickled pink. What a generous love. And now? I am a little bereft. There is still stuff to do, inevitably but that push, that hint of panic has dissipated.

Storm Doris passed by without incident here. A few roof tiles shattered. A smattering of road closures and men in hard hats armed with chainsaws near some swaying fir trees. Sky News were here nevertheless, with a reporter in my coat. The impossibly expensive coat. Do you remember?

What else? I have a pile of post-it notes. Aides memoires. Shorthand. A list of titles. Memory joggers. I try to commit them to memory as I walk. A young man coming out of The Angel in the early hours. (It is always the early hours for that is when I walk.) His hand reaching down to pick up a traffic cone. He lurches to the right and then lifting the cone off the ground he puts it on his head. He walks forward a little till it tumbles off. Cursing he lets it fall. A girl walks towards me, her face is bruised with crying. I feel like I am behind glass, watching from such a long way away. Nearing home a owl howls in the darkness.

I don’t have to do it. And sometimes I want to stop. And yet she seems so happy to get the calls. I shall sit by the phone, I told myself this morning, she said, so that I don’t miss her. Sometimes it is just the answering machine. She is out walking with the neighbour’s dog, or she hasn’t heard the phone. I can feel relieved, but then disappointed. It isn’t what we talk of, that is inconsequential, mostly. It is the connection, the separating out, the making her feel special. And she is. I want to fall into the cosiness of her. We talk of feeding the birds, of a wren that comes to her bird table. She has not been well. I walk at sea, she tells me. It takes a while before I realise she is talking about vertigo. Do you have a stick? I ask

There have been bats. In the mornings before dawn, bats lured by our headlights. Bats shooting in front of our car. Tiny swooping black things, like giant moths. Watch out. But they always miss.

A girl in pink tights and a lime green tutu is leaning against the railings of The Academy. Her companion, a young man in black, picks at the peeling paint and says, Elin, Elin, Elin, I’ve just said it now, word for word. His head hangs low. He is frustrated, irritated. She looks down at the pavement, listening but cowed. On Great Darkgate Street, another girl in the exact same outfit, waits, staring. Another girl comes towards me, part of the great surge after closing time. She is beautiful. Dusky-skinned with large almond eyes. Her sense of personal space is to pot and her face brushes close  tomine. She belches. Close to home a student in a hoodie is leaning against a doorway, is he asleep?

My sensibilities are keen in the early mornings. Smells are acuter and sights are almost wondrous. Walking up the hill behind the Alexander Hall, my reverie is cut into by a figure coming out from one of the many alleys. I hear her before I see her. Gazelle-like, she is skittering down the path in high heels and a short silk dress. Something shiny hangs about her shoulders. A sequinned bolero jacket. We are both equally alarmed. It’s the suddenness. A thief in the night. Her eyes stare. Accusing.

I catch the tail end of radio programme hosted by Paul Gambiccini about the Oscars. He plays excerpts from Twelve Years A Slave. Harrowing. The director, Steve McQueen talks about the importance of showing the horror. I cannot watch it. I know such atrocity but do I need to watch them? A violence to the soul. I can imagine and it is terrible. Some people’s lives. I cannot understand. All I can do is feel for them. Know their shoes.

So what of it? I am pleased with it. I am pleased to have done it. To have seen it through. There was power in it, for me. My ideas manifested. Getting them outside of me. I’d worked hard. There’s power in that.

Time for rest. If I will take it. We shall see. For today, there is just Proust, peace and porridge for tea.

They stack up, all those happenings that I want to commit to memory. To capture on the page, just in case. In case of what? In case I forget? Forget the richness of this life. The richness of its detail. Like today, this morning. Seeing a girl in a white dress, the white so sharp against the black of the early day, flashing stark as she ran down the steps. It is an acknowledging of minutia that I may lose amongst the caught-up-ness of my daily life. They stop me still, if only momentarily, these things and that is good. To be still. To pay attention.

She came in on Saturday morning. Just for five minutes, visibly relaxed in a grey velour leisure suit, she came in to talk about Donald Trump. It is either Trump or Putin these days, she’d said, laughing. Such nice people, she’d said, her ever so subtle American voice turning wryly ironic. Now I’m off to make waffles for the family, she’d said afterwards, taking off her headphones and shaking out her hair. I felt a pang. One Christmas she’d brought me home-made shortbread.

I found it by accident. A story. A children’s story on the Radio 4 extra’s category list. Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden. I have a vague recollection of it from childhood. Had I read it at school. Lovely. A lovely story. Just like National Velvet, which the radio also inspired me to borrow it from the library. Children’s books written by adults who write for all. For themselves, for the child within. Velvet and Carrie are such bold girls, fiery and passionate girls, but kind too. Their lives are transformed, they are empowered. I am humbled. Humbled by fiction as I am by life.

It was quite a noise. It took me a while to work out where it was coming from. High up. High up in one of the student rooms above the Promenade. The window was open to the night. She was shouting rather than singing. Her voice straining, forcing out the sounds. After she’d finished there was a pause, a silence before I heard her say, I really like that song.

Small things and large, impossibly important things. A tube of Bonjela on the ground, squeezed out. Snowdrops, little clusters beginning to appear, and daffodils. A fingernail on the floor of the toilet in the Harbourmaster Hotel, perfectly severed. The flies circling the ceiling of his attic studio. The cold, the dust, the armchair with the union jack. Making coffee to create warmth. Feeling gentle towards him. Wanting it to be alright for him and for me. And him, reading the paper in the armchair. And the flies, buzzing. The pictures looked pristine. I remembered. All those years ago the lights, the reflector, and him clicking his fingers, nervous energy pumping. Other sights. A group of students climbing into the children’s playground in the dark. Up to no good, my mother used to say. Up to no good. And the ship lit up like a fairground just out from the sea line. The lights too big for its size. What was it? I asked him at breakfast. What could it have been? A dredger? It looked like a toy ship, or one of those in an animated film, the scale awry. All out. All out. Small things, big things. The chiropodist telling me about her Red or Dead shoes and her father with Alzheimer’s. I can’t run in them she says. And he? He is getting worse. Though I gave him a little sherry at Christmas and he was good as gold. Good as gold. I shouldn’t have, I know. Good as gold. And big things. Someone on the radio telling the story of Rabbi Maximillian made a saint. Rabbi Maximillian in Auschwitz who surrendered his life for another. Rabbi Maximillian who offered to go into the room with the others in place of man who clung to his wife. Rabbi Maximillian who went into the room with the other men with no food or water. Rabbi Maximillian who was the only one who didn’t die but took the pill willingly when the prison guards wanted the room emptied. Gone. All gone. Clean away. To yield to the inevitable, to accept, to walk towards one’s end, that is true stillness. True grace.

I prepare for next week. And a calmness comes over me.

He was sitting outside on a windowsill high up over North Road. He was black, a kind of soapstone, I think. A Buddha, fat and smiling the dark. The early morning streets of town has been full of students. Clubs open. Is it Reading Week? The scratchy, scrabbling, chattering noise of the starlings under the pier echoes the sound of the kids gathering outside the Why Not club and The Angel.  Most wear no coats. The girls are bare-legged. One teeters in enormous platform shoes. She wears a gold ra ra skirt.

There is still a Christmas tree, still bedecked, in a bottom flat along South Marine Terrace.

Yesterday and I find a young man face down on the pavement. I bend down to touch his shoulder. Are you alright? Is he dead? He takes a little while to come round. He raises his head and stretches out his fingers. I’m fine, he says, groggy. Can I help you? I say, offering him a hand. No, he says, fingers splayed out, off the ground. Small hands. A pixie-like face. Dark. No, he says, I’m fine. I’m OK. I walk on. He is ashamed. I don’t turn round.

Today a youth in a baseball cap and striped tracksuit is shouting at the closed door of The Angel. You fucking mong! You fucking wanker! He shakes his fists. The clumps of students surrounding him ignore him. It is as if he isn’t there. You mong! It rains. A girl in a strappy leather dress hugs herself for warmth. Lines of taxis wait outside New Look. A man smokes a cigarette in a doorway. I find a black purse in the road. I walk away at first and then go back for it. It is empty except for a bank debit card. I post it through the NAT West letter box. May its owner soon find peace of mind.

I don’t mind the rain. It’s OK when you are in it. It is warm and the wind is gusty. There is an aliveness to it.

I listen to the sound of sewing. Calming. Therapeutic. I sew Proust. Word by word, letter by letter.

How will it feel to spend the day in crinoline? To sit in crinoline? And sew. On and on. I feel too separate from it. A little scared. There is so much I cannot contain.

We sat in our seat in the wall warmed by the sun and he talked of my goodness.

She used to buy me hyacinths. The second, not the first. Hyacinths, I think they were called swibel over there, but I cannot verify this. I saw the word on a flower stall in Majorstua, I bought one for a friend. I am sure they were called swibel. She bought me single hyacinths, in a pot. I spent a week drawing them. I put them in my room on the windowsill. Even when it snowed I opened the window at night. I love the smell, even when it gets too much, too heady.

Too much. Too much to recall. As I walk I try to commit it all to memory. The broken yellow pencil on the path by the castle, just the rubber end. The globe light still lit high up in the Cambria, like yellow moon in the darkness. The metallic tick ticking of a rock pipit as I stand on the Perygyl, torch off, sensing the sea. I want to sense it, rather than know it. To be it. I make myself transparent and the sounds pass through me, the waves, the birdsong.

Seagulls circle the promenade, gliding in the air, gorgeously flashing white under the streetlamps.

I call him a boy scout. He wants to be useful, to stick his neck out. He calls about the unlit streetlamps on the Prom. Which ones exactly? he asks and I try to remember. Third, fourth, fifth and sixth from the Bar. He rings Aberaeron and asks for Doris. Doris isn’t here, a woman says, but I can help you. We all deal with the lights. She asked me to ask you which ones exactly, he says afterwards. I don’t know exactly, I say. I said you’d say that, he says.

They’re fucking wankers, shouts an Irish girl halfway up Great Darkgate Street. Her shirt has come loose from her jeans and her belly is exposed.

She was back yesterday. I was pleased to see her. My stomach gave a lurch of pleasure. I surprised myself. We have missed her. She is still in pain. I’m off the morphine, she says. Just cocodamol now. It was the sun, it blinded her and she drove into the back of another car. Oh, is that what it’s called, she said, I call it Penparcau Hill. His was a Merc, she said. He was bloody furious. I couldn’t speak. It was the shock. My trolley sets off an alarm, and tutting she hobbles over to switch the button. I am mortified. Pain makes you tut. She didn’t mean it. We are the same age, she and I. Is she bored in her job? Is it a nice to be so contained and unchallenged? I like to know what I’m going to do each day, said Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer. Her tone is flat. Emotions are cool, in check. The red-haired checkout girl in green. See, she says pointing at a badge pinned to her tunic, it arrived. Finally, she says, after all this time, they’ve got my name right.

My head is full of words, put there by literature. Words from the radio and Amanda Vickery’s Voices from the Old Bailey, words from Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and now from Cynan Jones’s Cove. Words from the crosswords we do together. Words. I write in my head as I walk. I am trying not to. I want to be empty. To be transparent. To be emptied. The words burst like ripe blueberries in my head. Glorious, rich language. The language of the seventeenth, the nineteenth centuries. I am just a sponge. And I need to relay it, to write it out so that I can be emptied. To write it out without judgement. An observer. Caitlin Moran said something about observers in her chat with Kirsty Young. She was like a machine gun rattling away. I love to write, she says. She is not afraid. To be not afraid. To be empty. I am fed, nourished by language and yet I want to be beyond it. To feel the wind right through me, to smell the odours of the earth from the inside out, to be not separate but part of it, yet shapeless, unformed. Spirit. And Elisabeth Bishop the travelling poet. Observing. Not judging, being there but not there. So it was with Norway. I couldn’t get inside. I wouldn’t eat the food. He made me cry. I wanted the language but they wouldn’t speak it to me. I wanted in but couldn’t manage it. It was so dark. Even with the white snow. And cold. I remember his sweetshop. A grocers really but for us it was always the sweets and the big bars of chocolate with whole hazelnuts in. Adult chocolate, I thought. So grown up to be eating chocolate with whole nuts. A shy man. I remember him dying in that hospital cot, grown so small, and trying to smile.

I have words to cut. Words to cut for a workshop. Hundreds of them. A monotonous task but sometimes it is all I ask. Is it nice to be so contained and unchallenged? How can I know another’s life? How can I presume?

I prepare breakfast listening to Madame Bovary. It was boredom. Is it nice to be so contained?

My neighbour is still awake as I set off on my walk. I hear his cough before I open the door, and the radio. Later, he will cook bacon, its smell pervading through the floor boards, up into the bathroom. He stands at the window coughing and smoking into the still night air. It looks cold out, I say, always struggling with the small talk. Yes, he says, but you look well wrapped up. Sleep well, I say. Sleep well.

One of the bakers from Slater’s Bakery is standing outside the shop, one foot raised up behind him pushing against the wall. I hear the metallic click of his lighter. His long white apron is stiff with flour. Under his apron he wears jeans, a white t-shirt and trainers. On his head is a light blue hair net. He keeps his head down. No eye contact. No good morning. It was the same with the boy in the great coat this morning. A small youth, his coat, long and grey with flashes of red lining. He kept looking ahead, separate, self-contained.

It makes me anxious all this un-knowing. It is all so new. I have no experience. Just ask for what is in your head, he says. It sounds easy. Yes, of course. And yet, what is in my head is not the same – it cannot be. There are no strictures in my head, no pitfalls. Still as I write this I know that even this isn’t true. I want it to be right but there is too much going on, too many voices. I need it to be simple. Clear. Just the sound of sewing. It is enough. I like it. It is the only bit I genuinely like. The rest is too much of me, too much of my stumbling, my awkwardness. It might work for someone else, a stranger hearing it, but not for me. It needs to be simple. Cut it back, cut it right down. Pared-down. It is right. I think.

A pair of red trousers, neatly folded, have been left on a the little bench on the hill above Llanbadarn Road. On the prom someone has draped a blue cardigan over the rail.

As I walk back home along Llanbadarn Road I can see through a window in top floor flat a Christmas tree still lit and dressed. Twelfth night is long gone but I understand. The lights are a joy in all this terrible dark. On North Road too windows are decorated with garlands of fairy lights.

Sunday morning early and I see a white dog running into the entrance of the Pier Pressure. A girl is shouting, I can’t hold him. Several people crouch down and try to corral him into a corner. He wags his tail joyfully. A man arrives, lead in hand, the dog bouncing up to greet him. A couple are ahead of me making their way to their parked car. Behind them is a girl. I watch her. A large, rounded body of a girl in a sleeveless dress. Her feet pronate outwards, the heels of her shoes worn down either side. She rolls as she walks, struggling, slow. I pass her with ease. Don’t overtake me, she implores, turning her lovely big-eyed face towards me, I’m going so slow. I smile and notice the sprawling spider tattoo on her arm.

A sign in the window of Harry Daniels Funeral Directors on Mill Street reads, this business will be closed from January 6th 2017 due to retirement and unforeseen circumstances.

A robin jumps in front of me, a flash of black.

A man with a beard lumbers down the hill, walking in shadows, headphones clamped to his ears.

The tearings of a green fishing net lies as jetsam on the promenade.

Storm remains. Christmas remains. What remains.

The old man in double-breasted suit and watch fob talking passionately about a bill nobody cares about. He too rolls as he walks, his shoes, curling at the toes. Later a neat little body of a woman in tight zipped-up jacket with pink collar is hoisted onto the stool to face the camera.

No wind this morning. A light misting of rain. I stop to hear the sea. What remains?