Author: Ellen Bell

I was outside drawing when he got back from his walk. I saw his head first as he climbed up the back lane hill. I fell, he said as he approached. Apparently he’d caught his shoe on the edge of the kerb as he came out of the avenue and went, as he said, “arse over tit”. He thought he might have grazed his knee but there were not cuts. He was just shaken. He laughed later when he recounted it all to his sister on the phone, particularly when he was describing the rather large woman on the bench opposite who saw him fall but clearly dithered as to whether to get up and give him assistance. Are you OK? she asked, eventually, as he just about managed to get himself up. Poor love. I wish I’d been with him. It’s the humiliation, he said to his sister, who readily concurred, and the struggle to get yourself up again. To this she also agreed, knowing it all too well.

I haven’t been able to go and draw in the coffee shop for some time now. I miss seeing the familiar faces. He tells me about the ‘goss’ as he and his sister call it. ‘Posh and Becks’, as some of the regulars in the coffee shop refer to them, are still together and seemingly happy. He bumped into them on the Prom and she asked him his name. He, in turn asked her hers. “I’ve just been writing them in the sand,” she told him. Ah, how lovely, I said, when he told me. That’s just what I said, he replied. I’m happy for them. So what if people think its doomed. They are taking some sort of happiness for themselves. And that’s good enough. Bless them, both.

I love these still mornings. And with no chance of rain. I walk lighter. The students are back. I see evidence of their pre-exam revelling through the kitchens in the various halls (though more like houses) of residence along the Prom, in the bottles of spirits, alco pops and beer crowding the table tops, the disturbed chairs and unwashed dishes. I hear them too. Shouts echo across the town from open windows, taxi ranks and this morning from halfway up Penglais Hill. It’s like we live in a parallel universe. I watched two boys pour out of a taxi outside a house on Northgate Terrace. They walked a few steps then crashed into one of the front doors shouting. The door opened and they were soon inside. It’s the noise they make. It shatters my calm as I walk. Earlier I’d seen a lone skateboarder along Terrace Road. All in black, he sped along, head down, no eye contact. There was that noise too, the sound of small wheels on grainy tarmac. A pulling sound. I brings me back to the nowness, and out of my over-thinking head. Not a bad thing, I suppose. The birds are noisy too. But I love their calls. I walk further just to extend the song.

There was a beautiful star-lit sky as I walked this morning. I kept going longer because it was so beautiful. No moon, just stars. And a few seagulls ripping open bin bags and flapping over dustbins – well, it is Tuesday, bin day and they are creatures of habit. I love the peace of being out there. The sea was as gentle as a millpond despite the east wind. I feel better today. He said it wasn’t so bad after all. And there was calm in that. He is so kind. He said he’d read it twice over last night. A few favourites will be ‘murdered’ in the process but I have to accept that. I just want it to be right. And compelling. It hurts to do things badly.

I think about him in that prison. Twenty-five years. And he was so brave going back to Russia. Ah, my heart bleeds for them, the fighters, the courageous, those who put their lives on the line for others. I am not so brave, my interventions are tiny ones. Tiny. May there be relief for them all. If not now, soon. x

Reading about dementia is a moving experience, and frightening. one. Our brains are such fragile things and yet they hold the whole of us. Without them we are nothing. No thing. Nothing. Sally Magnusson writes about her mother’s Alzheimer’s which seems to be a kind of loss of normal wiring, every thing becomes a mass, a jumble, a tangle in there. “I’ve lost myself”, one of Alzheimer’s patients in 1906 said to him. Loss. It is all about loss. And what remains? And then there was the article he read out to me while I prepared supper about the two daughters who took their mother to Dignitas in Switzerland. She’d had massive stroke and was left with no quality of life whatsoever. She wanted to die. They helped her. And on their return the police were waiting. Life seems so topsy turvy at times. And then there is P, and C&C, all experiencing some kind of hell. And yet, some would say, there’s still life. C wants to take C to her favourite hotel. They are out and about in the way that P cannot be. She has lost almost everything. She has her books, and a treasured things to crowd up her room, and her two loving sons. There’s still something but not enough, I suspect. My heart aches for her and them and them and them…..

Those gentle touches of synchronicity warm me. The mention of the word Hausfrau in the book after it was a clue in the crossword yesterday. The turning up of the word burgeon and then mushroom, after I’d thought of using them in my article. Is it a gesture of connection? We know you, we are near you – such serendipidity seems to imply, or am I being fanciful? Who cares?

You break my heart with your toils and struggles but I do love you. All of you. And you.

I had just over half an hour outside yesterday, between writing and domestic chores. It was bliss. Not exactly warm, the sun was still life-giving and benificent in its rays. And the birds sang and sang. Someone had a radio or stereo on. I didn’t mind. It was part of it – that outsideness of being with the birds, the occasional butterfly, men cutting lawns and kids with music blaring. A stab at freedom, I suppose. I drew and it took longer than I’d imagined. So much so that I didn’t have long to sit and do nothing, which is what I really wanted to do. Five minutes to close my eyes with the sun on my face. It was enough.

They are ubiquitous dreams. And I had two in row. In the first I was partially naked, in the second, completely so. I realised I was, so that was something but it hadn’t been intentional, it was an oversight, a brief forgetting until I saw people staring at me. They were sparked by what I’d been reading and watching, I know this now. Sally Magnusson’s book about her mother’s dementia is a moving one. I’ve read it before but now, in this second reading it is sharper. She recounts how, when she and her daughter and her mother were staying in a hotel on Mull, her mother had locked herself out of her room and come to their room without her pyjama bottoms on. It had sunk in that. And that was my dream though I was at OD and needed to draw. Anxiety dreams, self-exposing dreams, they are ubquitious and yet also telling. I am like a sponge, a thin membrane. Sometimes it is good to be so, others not.

I cried for you last night. For the you I carried and no longer know.

I managed to secure ten minutes yesterday afternoon to go and sit in the sun. Are you going to draw? he asked. No, I’m just going to sit, I replied. I wanted to do nothing but sit and listen and close my eyes with the sun on my face. I did it. The bird song was wonderful, as were the smells of heat of wet on earth. Though it wasn’t really warm. I sat there on my deckchair muffled in a thick coat, gloves and hat. It wasn’t enough, that resting. It never is. And when I do stop all that tiredness that is yet unspent comes to the fore threatening to comatose me. It lifted me though. The sun does that. Always.

Many people would say it was all hokum, but I’m a pre-enlightenment, superstitious kind of girl and am open to all sorts of unproven, unscientific theories about life, bumps in the night and so on. And numerology, at its most simplistic, is one of those indulgences. So days that add up to 5 always make me wary (I feel much the same about Wednesdays, by the way). And yesterday was one of them. A scratchy sort of day. The weather was, for want of a better word, shit. He was scratchy and I was scratchy. Me with the stress of unresolved work and he with frustration at not being able to walk and feeling cack-handed by age. It culminated in him falling up the stairs with his arms full of drycleaning. I could hear him foul-mouthing himself and the coats that he was treading on from my studio. I left him to it for a bit, hoping that the anger would pass. It didn’t and I got it both barrels soon enough. Heigh-ho. He was sorry afterwards. He always is, as indeed am I when I am equally irascible.

I trod in something on my way home. I suspect I did it coming up the back lane in the dark. It didn’t really smell, so it couldn’t have been a dog. And it’s rather orangey hue suggested a cat or even a fox perhaps. Though, I’ve no real idea what fox poo looks or smells like. (Though I’d rather it had belonged to a fox. I like them. Yesterday I dreamt of trying to save one.) It was a mucky job cleaning it off my boots nevertheless, much wrinkling of my nose. Serves me right for all that dark-time walking, eh?

She replied. It had taken her some time. Had she worried over it? Shouldn’t I have asked her? It was too late. I had. She doesn’t want to do it. She says she hates being photographed so being drawn is out of the question. I liked the fact that she felt she could refuse me. Though I am sorry if I gave her discomfort. She says not. I would’ve liked to have drawn her. I like her querrulousness, her thinness, her arthritic hands, all gnarled and lumpy. I like her strength, at least what I have seen of it, her individuality, her willingness to keep going. I don’t know her of course, all this is mere projecting, speculation. She asked me to come round for a coffee. I will go, when I’ve time. Talking will do.