Author: Ellen Bell

Something is rattling on our roof. It is impossible to get up there to find out what it is. I’ve tried looking from the outside, but the angle of the roof is such that nothing of it can be seen from below. I think it is a stray branch, dropped, no doubt by a gull, when building its nest, which they do frequently up there. Whatever it is it the wind catches it. I don’t mind it. In fact, I find it rather a companionable sound. He doesn’t.

They spoke on the news of secondary school teachers washing their pupils school uniforms. Teenagers hygiene in this country is a real concern, apparently. Bless them. We need order, don’t we. Someone to feed, clothe, warm and keep us clean. Someone to provide order, regularity. Jeanette Winterson wrote of it. And I agree. I had it, and needed it. Love, really. That’s it. I wish it for all. The young and the old. Let it be so.

It goes round and round inside my head. There’s so much uncertainty. I find it had to stomach. I um and ah. I waver. I am uncertain. I listened to her rules on ethics. They are good ones. Steady, kind. I want that. Them. But how to do what I wish to do. Without harming others. That is the key. Can harm be done tacitly, unknowingly? I don’t know. Intention not to do so., clearly isn’t enough. I must and wish to tread carefully. To leave no trace.

I read Austerlitz. Such sadness.

I woke from the first and my alarm broke the second. In the first I was going to die. He was driving too fast down a hill and the car we were in plunged straight into the sea. It was deep and dark. I knew that we couldn’t be saved. That we were to die. I thought about how that might be, through lack of oxygen or drowning. I reached for his hand in the dark. I didn’t want him to panic, to feel frightened. I wasn’t. Then I woke. The second was much more convoluted. I was in a foreign country and had a philosophy class to attend. I didn’t know where it was and S. said that he would show me. H. was there sitting on a stool. I looked at his hands they were tiny, a doll’s hands. I touched him and felt his pulse through my palms. Then I was at the reception of this institution, not with S. but with a woman. We went into a canteen and another S. was there. I asked the woman who was sitting next to me, and who appeared now to be one of my sisters, if she’d ever read German Literature. I was still worried about this class I was supposed to be attending. Then I was outside, here, in the car park where a man with a small van was cremating bodies from his boot. On a Sunday? I asked.

I stole a quick walk in the afternoon after writing and drawing most of the morning. The mist was still heavy, the colour of the day distinctly gloomy. But the smells were gorgeous. Leaf mould, damp earth, moist air – I think I could even smell the mist. They filled me up and my head spun with unbidden memories of kicking my wellied feet in drifts of fallen leaves, of the smoky scents of burning wood, of melancholy weekends, of moping and happy to be so.

It’s a mystery. There’s always one. Just one. One of his T-shirts that is always inside out in the dirty washing pile. He can’t explain it. And nor can I.

At breakfast he started to read out the Met Office’s explanation for this glut of cloudy, drizzly days. It’s apposite weather. If the articles he reads out and the comments I see on Instagram are true, it’s an apposite reflection of the emotion that seems to hang heavy over the globe at the present moment. It’s hard to raise oneself above it. The sun is coming, apparently. But is it? We seem to have learnt nothing from our wars, our famine – poverty is still rife, people starve, meanness, cruelty and gross inequity abound. Nothing has been resolved, no lessons learnt. How can we change? What will bring this about? I am at a loss. Lost.

Someone posted a quote from Gandhi on Instagram yesterday. It said, and I paraphrase it here, that there has always been tyrants and murderers but that, in the end, they always fall. They always fall. I wait, as does the world. A breath held.

Another dream that I thought I’d lost on waking but one that came back to me about half an hour later in the bath. I was staying in a house, a stone cottage and several of M.’s sons were there. Water started to come in, it wasn’t clear from where, but it began pouring out of the fridge and cupboards. As sanguine as ever M.’s tall sons were unfazed. I started trying to save things, clothes, objects and so on. But I was calm. Calmed by their calm. I went around the outside of the house and from there nothing was awry. No water, no flooding. Had it stopped? Was the interior now dry? I woke without finding the answer.

I dream of journeys. Journeys on trains, on escalators, in cars and on foot. Last night I woke from one in which I was walking along a narrow isthmus. A sea haar hung heavy above and around it. My way wasn’t clear. I came to a house. It had been my mother’s. It was empty now and though I had been intending to stay there, I couldn’t bring myself to. The windows were too dark, too exposed to the elements. So I kept on walking.

A cat came and sat by me this morning as I draw in the Castle Park. I’d heard a noise, and thinking that it was some distant voices on the Prom, ignored it. The noise came again, louder this time. I looked down and saw the cat. I couldn’t see her very well in the still dark. I saw the white ruff of her chest, (I assumed she was a her, she was slight, too slight for a tom) and the dabs of light on her paws, but that was it. She mewed and miaowed at me. I spoke back to her and she stopped. And began cleaning herself. When I finished by drawing I called to her. She followed me up the hill for a while but stopped and sat down staring at a gate in the wall.

It’s a wall. A wall of fear, even panic at times. I want to get to the other side, give my work an opportunity to flourish and be experienced in unusual ways, but the wall stops me. I cannot visualise myself using the software necessary to make these, what are to me, huge technological leaps. What am I so scared of? Being seen as foolish, stupid even? Of failure, of messing-up? And if that is all, so what? So what? That is what I should be saying to myself. Who was the American president that the journalist was quoting yesterday, in the piece that he read out to me as I prepared supper? He was the one who set up the New Deal in the 30s – Roosevelt? Anyway, he spoke of trying something, anything, in order to find a solution. And, that if it fails, admit to it, and try something else. It sounds simple. I come a long way. Remember that. And be brave. If you can.