Author: Ellen Bell

I don’t well in it. Does anybody? Some do, apparently. I remember the man who used to work in the Health Food shop saying he loved it. A Yorkshireman, he’d wear shorts all year long. I think he died recently, but I could be mistaken. My body ceases up. My bones go rigid and my skin resistant. I need warmth and this flat doesn’t or won’t provide it. There are no snug corners, just a wide open openness, which is pleasant in the summer but not now. And then I think of all those people in LA watching their homes being razed by the wildfires. I have nothing to complain of, nothing.

I know that I am guilty of it. He bears it, sometimes acquiescing, other times kicking out at it. I want control. Control over myself and him. I need things to be in order, to be what I want them to be. It is appalling really. I hear my voice, and feel the tightening of my chest. I want to control something, somebody that isn’t me and that I have no right to dominate. I know this and am ashamed by it. And yet, I persist. Bless him for what he has to manage. And make me softer, more yielding. Please.

Have I always been fearful? I think so. A worrier, certainly. I welcome challenges but they frighten me too. As do deadlines. Though I have always met them. Yesterday was a struggle. I couldn’t get to the nub of what I was trying to say. Have I made it clearer yet? Is what I’ve been working out in my head going to work on ‘paper’. I shall have to see. Soon.

They’ve come down. All that sparkly stuff has gone. The house is bare. And I like it being so. Christmas is over, and that attempt at brightness is no longer appropriate now that it is January. I must face her, in all her bleak, cold starkness.

The body is a demanding vessel. It is hard to step out it. To deny its needs and desires. I walk in the cold, my fingers stinging in it. I find myself thinking of little else but making them warm. They call up all of my attention. I want to stop, remove my gloves and draw. I try it, but not for long. It is too much. My hands refuse to work, to submit. My body has taken over. I am lost in its forces.

Holidays in her home, as in the wider world, means that the usual happenings are put off, dispensed with, until everything is back to normal. People living in institutions and reliant on others for the fulfilment of their routine are, understandably, unsettled by the uncustomary lack. She wasn’t in her room when he called her. He tried several times. She called him back in the end. She had texted him, saying that she’d be away. One of the carers had offered to wash her hair. It needed it, she said. This carer is a kindly one. She often brings her fruit, bought with her own money. A hair wash. A simple thing and yet a big thing. A small act of kindness writ large.

More musings on home. And I think of how fiercely attached Emily Bronte was to hers. Of course, I cannot know the truth of this. I can only go on how it is portrayed in subsequent biographical writings and filmic presentations, as with To Walk Invisible. In this, her connection with the Parsonage, and with the surrounding moors, is almost savage. I have never experienced such an attachment to place. Perhaps I lack her depth. I move more lightly through my life, I think. I can but admire such passion. As I do.

Happy New Year. x

An article on Home. This journalist wrote about making one in Wales. It made me think about how I feel about living here myself. Life isn’t neat. What one imagines may happen rarely does. I’ve lived here for over twelve years now. It’s hard to believe sometimes. It was a place I would’ve chosen. He wants to be here and I said I would stay. So there we are. That’s it. It’s actually easier, I find, to please someone other than yourself.

As I ponder over notions of home a friend writes to tell of his house’s subsidence. Everything is falling in, sliding down, moving. He sounds so distressed. Who wouldn’t be? I try to tell myself it’s only a house. It’s not. Is it? And there’s the family down the road. And their big house, unlit this year. No Christmas decorations or tree. After 28 years of marriage the parents’ have separated. He’s left. She stays. It’s all an undoing of some established order. And it unsettles.

There’s been a couple of newspaper pieces on peoples’ notions of home, prompting me to think about what mine. I was floored. There isn’t any one dwelling, that I can remember, that I would say epitomised home for me. Home is primarily safety for me, safety and privacy, and warmth and where I have autonomy. I cannot think of any spaces in which I have lived, either as a child or adult where I felt all of those things. It needs more consideration….perhaps….