We’ve only recently had our windows cleaned. They are a bugger to clean – I can’t reach them and they have to be done with long poles. Anyway yesterday, or was it the day before, a bird, could be a seagull (though his old mate says that there’s no such thing) or a rook, whatever it was it shat on our tall upstairs window, a dribble of which went onto the one below. It’s a huge splat of a thing. I’m trying to see it as a gift, like my painful hip, a gift that is there to teach me acceptance. There is f**k all I can do about it until the window cleaners from Aberaeron come again so I have to look at it with what, grace? Yes. It is what it is, he would say.
He went to buy the tickets for the circus. Are you one of the performers? he asked the tattooed girl in the caravan-cum-box-office. Yes, she said, I do fire.
I alternate my morning walks, approaching the Prom from different ends each day. This morning I walked along North Road and then up past the back of Alexandra Hall. I like walking on North Road, it is slightly raised up and beyond the tennis courts, bowling green, odd little nonentity of park and the eye clinic you can see all the backs of the Prom hotels, B&Bs and halls. The houses are mostly huge and red brick with flowery front gardens, even the ones occupied by students. One house has a mass of teddy bears in its upper windows. They appear to be pressed against the glass. And they are the huge kind. It’s more than a little creepy. Is it a child’s nursery or nurseries? Or is it a series of rooms occupied by an adult with a fixation on teddy bears, such as Giles Brandreth, or nostalgia for childhood? I think I know who lives there and she’s a warm, amiable woman but there is a physical illness, I believe. And then there are the roses. Many of the front gardens on that road have them. They are beginning to spill their petals, some white, some pink, some yellow. Most have little or no scent much to my chagrin. I stick my nose in their centre as I walk by, no, no, maybe. The dog roses in the Castle park are the best. Sweet, heady and gorgeous. As are the wild climbing ones on our back path. They fill the summer morning with the smell of something like joy.
As I came down the hill alongside Alexandra Hall and tried to kick the bar (so cumbersomely these days) I noticed that an estate car parked nearby had its boot open. And someone was moving in it. They must have slept there overnight. There was a sleeping bag and several supermarket bags. It must’ve been cold but waking to the sound of the sea lapping must be lovely. Poor love, his bones are going to need a shake out. Then again it might be a woman. I saw a man/woman walking past the24 hour SPAR as I walked home. He/she had a beard and was wearing a black silk strappy dress, black doc martins and socks and was swinging a handbag rather half-heartedly. Perhaps he/she was trying a bit of cross-dressing out in the early hours to see how it felt. I hope it went OK and that they have the courage to have another go.
I’d taken a rather uncomfortable seat on a drain cover just facing the old tax office whose car park is currently inundated with Openreach vans, so as to draw it. It had been an unsettling morning (how easily I get unsettled these days, or perhaps it has always been so and I’m merely more aware of it now) and I was very discombobulated. I’d been meaning to make a drawing of it for ages and yet now that I was in front of it nothing was coming, I couldn’t find a point of interest. And then I began to feel the stinging under my thigh. It took me hours to work out what it was. Nettle stings. I was terrified of nettles as child, almost as much as I was of wasps and jellyfish. That threat of pain. Ridiculous really. If I’d cottoned on a bit earlier I would’ve found some dock leaves.
Walking along from the Avenue yesterday there was the most intense scent of elderflower. He even smelled it. Lovely.
His saying to me, shall we sit out? has become a summer feature. I’ve sat out on my own mostly so far. The sun has been intermittent and he wants it warm. So I go out alone to sit there on one of our fold-up chairs on the tarmac beside our car looking out across the wasteland that we affectionately call, ‘our garden.’ The rape has taken over, though it is beginning to die off now. But there is also white and purple clover, a big buddleia bush and grasses and foxgloves and further down the path a rambling rose, bramble and two different kinds of honeysuckle. I like it’s wildness. I like to sit and stare at it. Like our 104 year old neighbour does. Not that she can see very much these days, or hear the bees buzzing, or the dry leaves rolling and rustling in the wind. There haven’t been that many butterflies yet. It’s a waste of time. I don’t do much. I think, stare, and sometimes snooze if I close my eyes. Yesterday I had my hood up against the wind but it was snuggly nevertheless. I make do. I take the rest when I can. And it is fine. It is.
There is a round patch of it on his bottom sheet but no sign of scratch or scab on his back. I try not to make him feel uncomfortable about it while I wrestle with what to do it. ‘Just leave it,’ he says, ‘it doesn’t matter.’ And I know that he is right, it doesn’t. It’s my blood, it’s not foreign. Just leave it until it’s the usual time to wash it.’ OK.
We always smile about it when he recounts his mother saying about his family that ‘we’re not big bleeders’, as if bleeding a lot or not bleeding a lot was some sort of genetic trait. We smile mostly because she was wrong. He is a big bleeder (not in physical size, I might add) and has been for as long as I’ve known him and even more so now that he takes his daily aspirin. These things, as they say, are sent blah blah…..x
I couldn’t work out what it was. It was a really strong beam. A circle of whiteness that appeared to be static. Was it another Welsh Water van parked up on North Road with it’s headlights on? But no, it couldn’t be because this was only one light. It seemed to be getting nearer. Or was it that I was just walking towards it? Then it became clear. It was a bicycle light but a very strong one, particularly as it was almost day. An elderly man was riding it, fitted out in all the gear – high vis jacket and waterproofs and helmet. He was cycling at a very leisurely pace, much slower than my hobbledehoy walk. Good morning, he said as he glided by. Good morning, I said.
I like the uncanny-ness of what I notice during my early morning walks. I like that inexplicability of them. Like the man I saw apparently mending his motorbike (or perhaps he was putting it back together again), in the street just outside his door at 4.00 am in the morning. Or the Welsh Water vans that I saw again this morning, this time near the back of M&S, and that other van, the ice pigging one, parked up beside them. Or the girl I saw through the window of the student house with the billiard table in the living room, fast asleep on a couch under a blanket. Why aren’t you in bed? I wanted to ask. I smelt bonfires as I walked along the Prom. The tide was right out and the sunrise a salmon pink.
The ex-butcher now eBay trader extraordinaire who lives in the elegant house on St David’s Road has a series of cars. Some are his, some are his children’s and his wife’s. One of them is a Ford Capri. We used to have one. It was lime green and our mother’s favourite. I remember you had to step down from the pavement to get in. Anyway he saw the ex-butcher on the Prom the other day and they discussed the car. He doesn’t like it. The ex-butcher does and told him how much it cost. And then he told him that when he’d driven it along the Prom a group of men (where they Asian, Chinese or maybe from Japan – I forget) walked over to where he was parked and struck up a conversation about it. They clearly were much enamoured. As they were leaving one of them turned round to him, the ex-butcher, and asked, in all seriousness apparently, ‘Are you a pimp?’
I see things that mystify me, particularly in the mornings when I walk. This morning it was a flock of Welsh Water vans, with their headlights blazing, all parked in a gaggle on North Road. The men were silent as they gathered around the mouth of a drain. The only sound was the hum of engines. Then returning home I saw some markings in the road, obviously made with a spray can. TEMP WWU, it read. And just before, as I’d walked past those humming utility vehicles, another van had driven past me with the phrase Ice Pigging emblazoned on it. What does it mean? And was it snow or ice I’d seen melting on the corner of St David’s Road. Snow and ice in June? Surely not.
He is kind. It is his kindness that makes me love him the most. I just popped downstairs, he said when he returned with the last lot of shopping from the car. Downstairs is our neighbour, now 103 or is it 104. She is on her own and doing fine. He is better with her than I am. He is kind. She is deaf and virtually blind, though if she peers she can make her way with her stick around the estate and take her rest on the pile of waste materials in the wilderness that we refer to as our garden. From what he reported back she clearly appreciated the gesture. Pop in any time, she said.
The moon stopped my breath this morning. I’d seen it through my studio window at 2.00am and it had been pretty stunning then but walking out onto the Prom from the riverside it was before me, squat, huge and orange. Is it a full moon today? I asked him at breakfast. He googled it. Yes, he said, it’s a full strawberry moon. Like this. And he showed me a picture. Ours is more orange, I said.
Being a Tuesday the seagulls had been at the bins. Do they know it’s bin day? They make a god-awful mess. Litter, plastic bottles and foodstuffs are strewn across roads and pavements. I picked up a pizza box from the middle of the road and took it to a pile of recycling waiting for collection. The rest I couldn’t bring myself to handle. It is too much. They are the very devil but they are just doing what they do.
