Category: Writings

The space cordoned off for motorbikes on the Prom was full this morning. I don’t know much about motorbikes but they all looked like Harley Davidsons to me. They were pristine, all of them, clearly much loved, though last night’s rain lay, like a spray of tiny glass pebbles along the top of each of them. Five men stood outside The Marine’s entrance, talking and smoking. Where they some of the bikes’ owners? Where were the rest of them staying? Was it some kind of convention?

People are about these mornings, it’s probably the temperature or maybe the students are back for the final bit of the summer term. Three youngsters came down St David’s Road as I approached. I walked in their wake, the stink of one of their deodorants in my nostrils. An acrid odour, it smelt like Lynx or some such, and evidently liberally applied. Two more lads followed behind trailing a cloud of tobacco smoke. My sense of smell is keener when I walk.

What am I meant to do? I ask myself as I walk. I’ve always assumed that there would be one clear path, one clear thing that I would be able to dedicate my life to. And so far I haven’t found it. I do lots of things. Each I try to do well. My mind flitters, like a butterfly seeking nectar, from one to the other. Sometimes it is writing, others drawing, and then it is sewing. Should I just accept that that is the way I am? That life isn’t neat. There is straying and fraying and unevenness. I just don’t know.

A friend writes with the promise of gooseberries and blackcurrants from her garden. Wouldn’t that be something?

It’s been said many times by many people, but the body is a miraculous thing. It heals itself. If we let it. It is often slower than we would like but it does. My arm is getting better. I am doing more than I could with it than last week, even yesterday. But there are times when it still aches, hurts and throbs, mostly when I am tired. But it wants to get better. It wants to do what it did. It wants me to be able to stand on my head, to reach up to the skies, to put my arms behind my back, to turn off a light switch, chop up a sweet potato, and feel strong again. It wants this. But I must be patient. Always.

The mornings have been cold these last few days. No matter, the air is fresh and clean and the sea is marvellous.

Half the flat clean (our new Dyson only lasts that long, bless it). Now there is work to do. Tea for me, coffee for him, letters and then Austen. And then sun. Hopefully.

I woke to the sound of her laughter. It was a kind of hee hee, the way that laughing used to be written of in comics, almost akin to that of a hyena’s. She visits one of the flats across the way from us and on warm nights they have their windows open. It drives him mad. Me less so. It was after 11pm. But it’s nice to think that they were having a good time. I’ve never minded the sounds of others. It’s the benefit of living in flats – there is life. Life beyond oneself.

There have been a few that I’ve seen, left burning on the beach well into the early hours. I asked him if he used to do it as a student and he said no. So many do it now, setting fire to the felled trees or branches that the tide washes in or creating one from a cairn of pebbles and rocks. I love the smell. A sharp, acrid stink it also promises warmth and comfort and light. Perhaps its a primal thing, both they’re doing of it and my enjoyment of the smell, an innate longing to form a source, a focus of safety against the dark.

It was written on the back of a parked van on Queen Street. Knight on the Tiles it read. It bemused me a little till I made sense of both the drawing and the blurb that followed. Where they tilers? No, they are roofers. A Knight of the Tiles it should read, I suppose. How they laughed when someone suggested it. Kitsch but nice, eh?

It was alright in the end, I did it. And she was kind, it helped. As did he. Always. I’m tired this morning. The weather is enervating and I woke 5 times for a pee. Porridge the night before, you see, it’s a bugger. Heigh Ho work to do. Onward.

I heard a fox as I walked out. What does a fox sound like? he has just asked me (his hands on his hips, and still in his pants). Like a dog, I said, but not like a dog. I was thinking about how to describe as I walked down the little hill into St David’s Road. It was more like a rasp than a bark, harsh, metallic, brittle. I love the wildness that edges our seemingly soft lives. Let it always be so.

The day has been upturned. I have do to a rewrite. They are hard to do and I weep tears of frustration and the rude interruption of my plans. So be it. It must be done, if not for her, for her. I have no idea what I shall write. I rarely do. Let it come.

When I first venture out there are no birds and no bird song (though there are always seagulls – on a Tuesday usually ransacking the bins). On my return home they seem to be everywhere, in the trees, in the air and on the ground. I watched a blackbird scurrying along the pavement outside D’s house. It seemed to be rolling along, as if in on wheels – too fast for me to catch the motion of its feet.

The first day of June and both of the Lifeguards’ huts have been pitched along the Prom. I walked along the harbour and heard a banging below the edge and then an engine starting up. It was a small fishing boat with only a single green light. It turned the corner was soon gone.

There’s a poster advertising the latest picture on at the cinema in Bath Street just by the now shut Cooper’s Arms on the corner of Llanbadarn Road. The latest one is a film called A Quiet Place starring Emily Blunt. I know nothing of the film but I like the title. I live there, in that quiet place.

To compare lives is an insidious and painful act. One mustn’t – it devalues what is, the gift of what is. And besides, we can never know another’s life. We only have our own and if we look closely enough there is beauty and the promise of peace in it. Always.

The sun is here and we are to have our first trip in a long while.

I listened to the DID of Amanda ( I cannot remember her surname) the head of Christian Aid yesterday. What a bright human being she is. She talked of her struggles to find work when she came here, a trained lawyer from Zambia and how she ended up working in care homes. I was broken by God, she said, gracefully broken.

He and I talked of a night light to counter my fears of darkness. I remember that I had them as a child. They were a comfort. I cannot remember what they looked like, sadly. I think one was something to do with a Disney film but that may have been of my younger sister’s ones. I lit my candles for the first time this morning since I fell. It was nice to do so.

Town was quieter this morning. A few night-time wanderers, that’s all. A child’s scooter had been left in the street. Was it forgotten or abandoned? Does someone mourn its loss? A sign telling of missing cat lay on the pavement nearby, its Sellotape fixings all mangled. Had the cat been found? There was a rail replacement bus waiting in the bus station by Wetherspoons. A man with a pony tail and ruck sack sat on bench waiting for it no doubt, though there was hours to go. A single black rubber glove had been dropped in the road.

I was shat by a seagull on while I walked, spots of white spraying my coat and trousers. Is it still good luck?

I refer to them as kids when I tell him of the ones I see roaming about town at 3.30 am. They’re not kids they’re adults, but they seem young to me in their recklessness, their drunkenness and their noise. This morning was no exception, in fact they were more present than ever. Most are visitors, I think. They talk loudly, seemingly unaware of the sleepers in the houses and flats that they walk past. At the end of Mill Street where it joins Bridge Street a group of maybe 10 or 12 lads had gathered. I felt the threat of them. Was there going to be a fight? I heard one Birmingham accent and another lad (all were white) called another ‘bro’. There was much posturing, a bigging-up of shoulders. They made a square then a circle. It was like a dance or a choreography from West Side Story. There was even a kind of uniform – all wore dark colours, mostly black, with t shirt sleeves rolled up. Neat, taut and aggressive. Nothing happened. There was a peace-keeper in their midst. M was sitting in his stockinged feet outside the block of flats watching them. I no longer greet him. There is no point he looks straight through me. Bless him. A troubled man, I think.

Some days I wake and I do not know what or who I am. It lingers. All I can do then is focus on details. The floors are now mopped. And the sun comes.

The Podcast Radio Hour on Radio 4 Extra featured John Holmes who has produced a podcast called The Skewer. It involves a marvellous sophisticated ‘mish-mash’ of sounds and sensations. It made me think about how I love collage. I love bits of things – the way they burst images in my head. I feel the same way about text. In my seeking of first pages of novels I read those of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Marquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude and Ovid Metamorphosis. Each caught me, whether it be by a word or a sentence. I need to delve me but the tastes were good.

A crane fly has been caught in a spider’s web in the corner of our big window. My heart bleeds for him.

I listened to a programme about William Carlos Williams the poet yesterday as I worked. I’d intended to listen to it for a while now. I’m glad that I did. ‘The local is always universal’, he said, meaning that as an immigrant he paid attention, noticed the detail of his American life and valued it. A doctor and poet, both of which he considered full-time jobs, he observed things. Things struck him. Like the red wheelbarrow or the number 5 on the fire truck. It was poetry that ‘just named things’, there was no narrative, no presence. It was about ‘thingness’. I love it. Everything pared down.

I saw the Chinese girl yesterday. I was doing my yoga by the big window and saw her come out of her front door below and re-hang some clothes she’d put on an airer. It was 11.00 am and she was still in her pyjamas and dressing gown and slippers. She made me think of an animal rising from hibernation or a nocturnal one like a badger or something that lives underground like a mole. Her eyes blinked in the light. Is she lonely?