Author: Ellen Bell

I picked my first wild blackberries on my way back to the flat. They stained my fingers purple. Most are not ripe yet, but there were a few, just opposite M.’s window that were black and shiny. I had them for breakfast. They tasted sweet, but not too and soft.

There was a half-eaten fig on the path through the cemetery.

I saw the man with his rucksack again this morning. I think he sleeps rough. He walks slowly. A man with no intent, no aim, no goal but survival. I wish him warmth, food and safety. x

We’ve begun re-watching Amour. I’d forgotten so much of it. Though I remembered their kitchen. The smallness of it. The old-fashioned-ness of it. It’s a film that takes its time. As the old do. Details are lingered over. As are empty rooms, dark with shadow. She stands at the sink cooling his boiled egg under the tap. He’s at the table drinking coffee, talking about getting a handyman in to fix the front door. The drama begins when she has a kind of waking black out. Is unresponsive. Gone. You feel their terror. Both of them. Later he folds her now paralysed body into bed. Thank you, she says. Before all this, he said she’d looked pretty. Had I told you? he asked. Love. Old love. Slow love. Steady love. With the promise of loss. Can it ever be borne?

I found her writings through a radio programme about travelling across the US. The presenter mentioned her and I bought her book about the deep south. I begun another. This is her account of grief. Her grief after her husband died suddenly of a heart attack. Her writing is raw. There is no soft edges, no sentiment. It cuts. She is cut and we are cut. It is good. It is very very good.

It was her funeral yesterday. Tears came when her four sons wheeled her wicker coffin into the church. I miss her. But mostly its the sense of her being there, hearing the click of her stick on the wooden floor beneath my studio, and of going in to her flat to draw and talk to her. She had a long life and by all accounts a full one. I believe she was happy to go to her rest. I wish her peace.

I wanted to see the blue moon. It was cloudy. But then, for a brief moment, there was a glimpse of it through my studio window before I went out for my walk. Was it blue? It was certainly cooler in colour than yesterday’s yellowy-orange. I saw it again as I walked towards M&S’s car park on my way to the river and the harbour. And then it did look blue, a white blue with a smokiness to it. I made a quick drawing before the clouds came. As I drew I saw the insistent flashing blue of a police car sans siren on the other side of the old school building. What can be the necessity for all that luminescent hysteria? This a small town. Where are the criminals?

We’ve begun watching again. I’ve seen it many times, as have I read the book. A cliche, I own, but I do know it by heart. I follow its nuances like an old friend. The cinematography is smoky, hazy particularly in the Swiss scenes but it works. As does its dated-ness. It’s all in keeping. And it’s slow. I need that, crave that. Such yearning. It reflects mine. Always.

Another crane fly to be rescued. It was lying on the floor of my studio. Was it dying? I picked it up carefully and took it to the window and watched it fly away, seemingly undamaged. The fluttering of its life in my hand unsettles me a little, I don’t like it. It’s an intimacy I don’t relish. But as its deliverer, it must be so.

It on the wall of my bathroom. It had been there the throughout the running of my bath. Mostly still, it only started to skitter and skud across the wall when I got near. I opened my palm and, mindful of keeping my fist loose, I grasped it and closed fingers. I felt its fluttering and flapping. A heartbeat, urgent and scared. I opened the window and threw it out into the night air.

It rained hard yesterday afternoon. The postman rang the doorbell. He was drenched. He makes for a graceless figure, heaving his cumbersome body about, breathing heavily and barely raising his head in greeting. I comment on the wetness and how uncomfortable he must be. He grunts an acknowledgement and continues rummaging around in his back. There’s a letter as well, he says, handing it to me. I thank him and shut the door.

I’m still reading Simon Gray’s Coda. He is in Crete with his wife, attempting to escape (my word) from his dying. He doesn’t, can’t. None of us can. I like sharing his experience though, the good and the bad. I remember Greece, as I remember Italy and Spain. That’s what holidays become, memories, or at least a fictional account, a selective recollection. It doesn’t matter, really. It’s the sensations I revisit mostly. And he describes those so well – the food, the smells, the sounds, the air, the weather – all of it. Those places filled me up. I had time to absorb them. It was good. And I felt good.

He read in the paper that Graham Thorpe had killed himself by ‘walking under a train’. At least, I think that he is what he read. It doesn’t matter whether the verb as to walk or to throw or to lie. He took his own life, violently because living was more than he could bear. I think of him and his family. And I think of another who took her life in the same way. A beautiful girl with piercing blue eyes. She didn’t think she was good enough. Bless them both. Some say that we are given the lives that we can manage, I’d like to think that was the case. But I suspect, for some, it is not. So much pain and joy in one planet in one universe. How can any of us bear it?