Category: Writings

It so often happens. I use a word or a phrase, or one comes into my head, and there it will be that same day or the next as a crossword clue or answer. It feels like a subtle game, a play, a frolic with words. Someone or something connecting in with me. See we noticed, or heard you. You are not alone, it is not what you think. You are being acknowledged. You count. Is this fanciful on my part? Some would say yes. I like to think that there may be a possibility for such a connection. Beyond the veil, so to speak. He would say, why not, if it makes you feel better. Does it? Not always. Connections like those also require a responsibility, an awareness, a culpability for one’s actions. Either way, I remain open. Yesterday it was the title of my journal. To and fro.

The wind howled last night. Furious. I had to shut my window in the end. I don’t like doing so. I love the sensation of fresh, live air coming in as I sleep. But last night it was making me agitated. I remember our horses in the wind. They would chase around the perimeter of the field, legs kicking out, manes flying. Walking into it was hard going this morning. It is wild, frightening at times. It is abating now and the sky is blue. Though the clouds are still sailing by at quite a pace. The first morning with the heating on. Winter is coming. Too soon.

My writing is just as hard going at the moment. Sometimes it is like that, he says. Don’t give yourself such a hard time.

Listened to Peter White on the radio, in his Blind Man Travels the Globe series. I like hearing him so much. What must it be like? I rely on my eyes too much sometimes. He is so courageous. Or at least so it seems to me. He was in San Francisco. He gets to know a city by it sounds, it smells and its people. He talked to a homeless man. People are at ease with him. He asked why he was homeless. My parents sold the house, he said, and bought a SUV. Just like that. No self pity, no recrimination. He gets by. Bless him.

Dentist this morning. Then work. Another toing and froing day. Not much time to write today. Heigh ho.

It’s a constant, the to and fro between certainty and uncertainty, knowing and not knowing, strength and weakness. A constant adjusting of ideas, behaviour and endurance. Often it is down to tiredness, lack of resistance and fear. Certainty is rarely with me these days. Perhaps it has never been. I’ve always seen both sides. I am biddable, like a tree in the wind or a feather carried where it may. (There is a feather on my bedroom floor and however often I pick it up and put it in my dressing gown pocket it is returns to the same place as before.) And I am all too easily intimidated by what I see to be other people’s talents. I cannot match her in story or drama, but that doesn’t mean my story shouldn’t be told. Isn’t worthy of being done.

You don’t know what it is going to be yet, he says, with never a trace of frustration, even though we return to this time and time again. And he is right I don’t. I don’t know what it is going to be, if anything. I just need to write it. To see it through. Even through the turgid times like now when nothing is coming easily. Where every word is weighed.

Two last minute sessions yesterday which meant I didn’t finish what I’d intended. Frustrating though it is I must and do acquiesce. It is a necessary source of money and not a difficult job by any means. I am grateful. And I can read. Which I do, exhaustively.

A breezy morning. The sea was alive. It is exciting when it is like that. I could hear it from North Road. He is just gone out now in his big coat with its ‘lid’. No day off in sight. Not yet. And how I long to sprawl on that sofa. Though tea isn’t the same since turning wholly vegan. The taste isn’t right. Coffee meanwhile is better. I yield. I accept. And I am thankful for all things.

Meanwhile, I await the phone call.

He encourages me to be stoic. He is. He reminds me how he wakes each morning realising that he will never see properly out of his right eye again. It is all misty. It has gone, died. I have forgotten his loss. I have forgotten to remember how it is with him. I am sorry for that. There are his hands too, with both his little and third fingers bent and rigid. And the drugs that give him a belly that he doesn’t want, cannot bear, that brings him down now and again. But he does bear it. He is sanguine when I am not. He is my role model. He takes care with his appearance, makes the best of things. I shall do the same. He cannot see what the problem is, not really. He loves me as I am. Now isn’t that a good thing? And even as I fret I know of others’ problems. He has a friend who has to have dialysis, a man who has been unwell most of his life. He is stoic. He drinks a little too much but so what. That’s not to mention the starving, the disenfranchised, the lost, the needy, the dying, the poor, the abused, the incarcerated. I carry them with me and am ashamed of my smallness of mind.

I’ve begun to read about the poet Anne Sexton. It’s one of her daughters’s account. It is a harrowing tale. I find a blog that someone has written about this book and they admonish her for writing it, her sister, they say, hasn’t written a word. Does she have the right to write it? Is she not allowed a right to have her say, to tell how it was for her? Her mother is dead. Her father too, I suspect. It is a tricky one. So much is being revealed, truly uncomfortable things, but she clearly needs to articulate them. The question is is whether a published book is the best place to do it. I cannot answer it? I am caught in the same dilemma.

You don’t have to read it, he says when he drops me off after work. I know. I know I don’t but I want to, I want to learn how you write such things. I want to learn about that process of detachment. For that is what it is, detachment from the core of it. The pain of it. All because you want to see it more clearly. She, the daughter admits to not being sure that she always has the truth of an event and then quotes her mother: ‘what actually happened is not nearly as important as how you feel about what happened‘. It’s a tricky one. After all who owns the real truth? And is one person’s truth more valid, more right than an others? None of these things come easy, perhaps they are not meant to do. I am looking for catharsis, an end to something, a neatening. Perhaps it won’t come, perhaps it cannot be.

I just need to write it, as honestly as I can. That is all.

The woman with the bag was back this morning, walking ahead of me towards the harbour.

The fairy lights the hang from the ceiling of the sea-front breakfast room of the Shoreline guest house along South Marine Terrace had been left on. I could see them flashing green, pink, yellow and red from Castle Point. They cheered me.

Time to work. Jobs done. Coffee first, then write.

I dreamt of a volcano. Or at least there was one in my dream, just to the side of where I was walking, in the distance but near. I saw it as one sees a mountain in a Japanese print, slightly stylised. It was dormant, a curiosity rather than something to fear. I was walking up a muddy track with a group of other people, one of my sisters was with and friends from Norway and the US. I was carrying a ceramic bowl in my hand, I think it was the Rupert Spira one that I have upstairs. I believe, or at least I thought in my dream that I was in Hawaii but it was cold and wet. Then we were all inside a large house. My sister went outside for a massage. I don’t know where she went. She was as she was when she was a young woman. I kept to myself. My friends were at a distance to me emotionally.

I’ve an early shift. A paper review. Everything must be brought forward. All done now. Just waiting for him to shave then he will take me up there. We will breakfast apart. Me from my tupperware and he in the coffee shop getting butter and jam all over his fingers, sweet love. I’ve taken him his pills and two oatcakes to have with them. I takes my ministrations willingly.

A lovely walk. My legs though full of water felt stronger today. I only saw one man, no two. The first walked behind me, the soles of his shoes clattering and then scraping against the paving stones. I’m not comfortable with people walking behind me in the dark. I walk faster. I haven’t seen the woman with the bag for life for a few days now. Our neighbour was at his window again when I returned home. I felt my heart sink and I was sorry about it.

A busy day. Let me find time to breathe.

As I walked I thought of emptiness. Is it so frightening? Must I always try to fill it? Why not try and let it be?

Our neighbour is standing at his bedroom window when I return home from my walk. It is not yet 4 am. He is a night owl. He sleeps in the early hours waking in time for lunch which he has with his hundred-year-old mother around 12 pm. He is smoking. I see him as I climb the stairs at the end of the raised walkway. I have to remove my headphones from my ears. Good morning, I call, not too loudly so as not to wake the other flat dwellers. I prefer it when I don’t see him. Don’t get me wrong, I like him. He is amiable and was kind when he fell. But I prefer not talk to anybody at that time. I am in my head, my thoughts and having to make small talk is an effort. As I am sure it is for him. He asks how my walk was. I tell him it was a little breezy but at least it didn’t rain. He says that there are flood warnings in other parts of Wales, but that they seem to have missed us. I say that is it set to be fine today. And that he’s at least had his bit of sunshine (he’s just come back from Crete). Yes, he says. You’re lucky, I say as I put my hand on the door handle, see you later. Cheers, now, he says.

The water gathers in my legs. I try to find ways of combating it sleeping with my legs in two pillows in bed, whenever I am standing still I stand on one leg or clench buttocks or stand on tiptoe. It is quite a challenge, like trying to rub your tummy and pat your head at the same time. I watch it keenly. I do not recognise parts of my body anymore. Is this what getting old is? Before she died from lung cancer, the marvellous author, wit and critic Jenny Diski went from 8 stone to 11 stone due to treatment. Her body changed immeasurably. She called it her fat suit.

I know it is nothing to compared to what so many people have to endure. But sometimes I get frightened of losing control of it. Of drowning. I listen to From Our Home Correspondent to give me some perspective. So many tales of strife from Afghanistan from Costa Rica. Poor loves, I listen attentively. Their stories must be told and acknowledged.

Blue sky this morning with white tall clouds. We shall sit out later, he says. Yes.

A child’s face in a sea of red. A sea of red cloth. She stares back at the camera, unsmiling. What dignity they have those who have nothing. Their colours: the colour of life, blood, power, energy, earth. The colour of Aborigines. The colour of belonging. The colour of something vital that we have forgotten. They cross the sea in search of food, of safety, of home, though they leave that behind. What will they find? Will we be kind? We who have so much and yet do not have what they have. Can never have it. What must we smell like to them? What sense can they make of us? The photographer takes his picture. Making something nice, something beautiful that is beyond the kind of beauty we know or seek. All that order, neatness, cleanness, a perfumed nothingness. They see more, have seen more, than we can ever see – war, hunger, disease – and they come to us for succour. Us. What can we offer them?

‘Jesus was beggar, he was rich in grace.’ Joni Mitchell.

If nothing more may I learn humility and the capacity to see and feel beyond my neat orderly world.

And please, let us, let the world be kind.

They were in a dream a couple of nights ago. I think I’d conjured them up as a result of listening to a radio adaptation of book by a poet and novelist who wrote about visiting summer snow as a way of managing his grief over the loss of his wife to cancer. The book or its dramatisation involved texts and phone calls back home to his daughter who was alone in the house. A house that had become slowly infested with hornets. So there they were in my dream. It often happens this borrowing of imagery from things listen to or seen during my waking hours. The writer talked about not wanting to kill them, but his daughter was becoming increasingly unnerved by their presence in her bedroom. In the end her brother, the writer’s son was brought in to exterminate them. In my dream they were a distant fear. They were in the house somewhere, the possibility of threat. He and I talked in the dream about how it was the landlord’s responsibility to do something about them. Then I was walking in the street (it looked like somewhere in Cambridge – too fancy for this scruffy town – besides I never ever dream of here) and saw that the landlord had in fact taken the wall down of our house and replaced it with glass revealing the hornets for all to see. They looked so unthreatening, almost sad though huge. They looked like the caterpillar who sits on a mushroom in Alice in Wonderland.

He offered to do my job for me. What a sweetheart. He’d been thinking about it. So that I’d have more time to write, he said. I’m so lucky in this love. It is kind. I refused his offer. It is complicated. I think I need to do it, for the time being. I need to earn my way. To step outside of my head sometimes and encounter the outside world, even if at times it is unpalatable to me. The earning thing is important too, my self-worth is tied up in it.

She helped. She helped me. Though I cried. It is the gentle care of her, it makes me weep. She’s given me more tasks to do. Clench your buttocks when you walk, she said, and pull in your stomach muscles. Let’s see the full five feet five of you. Five five? she asked. Five six, I said. At least I was.

A gentle walk this morning. No rain.

He bumped into the husband of an old friend the other day. Well, it wasn’t really a case of bumping into. He’d seen him before and had avoided him but small town that this is there he was around another corner. Something had to be said, pleasantries shared. He told him of his sister in hospital with heart failure. She is full of water. He told him she was ‘drowning from the inside.’

We fight over it. No not fight but we are fractious. And both of us are scared. He of losing me and me of losing control of my body. Death is not a concern but incapacity is. Most of the time is it manageable but some days, like today I am made leaden with it. We must just wait and see and both be prepared to hear him then each other out.

But this morning it is about my knees. Will she help? My legs do not feel like my own. They talk of detachment. We are not just our bodies. They are frail. Our spirits are strong.

I could hear them behind me. I didn’t look round. Sometimes I don’t when I am walking in the wee wee hours of the morning. I feel vulnerable. Well, not all the time. Sometimes I am outside of myself, my body, intent on moving forward or lost in some outer experience of air, wind, rain and sea. Then encountering other people can be almost disorientating. I don’t want it. I don’t want to engage, to feel obliged, to go through the social rigmarole of being aware of how to be or how I should be. Other times I am just fearful. Of the dark of my fragility, my lack of power.

So I didn’t turn round. I just heard them. I was nearing home. They were behind me on Llanbadarn Road. And they were laughing. I think there were two of them. Men, I would say. Young men, students returning, perhaps. Their laughter was loud, raucous, almost maniac. Maniacal like hyenas. They were close. There was a chaos to their merriment, something had been let loose. The sound echoed down the road, bouncing off the terraced houses. They couldn’t speak, just this guffawing, this explosion of glee.

It is natural for me to serve. Not to be subservient, but to attend, to care, to prepare, to make order on others’ behalf.

‘It’s not what you do everyday but the thoughts you live with.‘ I heard this quote on the radio this morning. It was from a novel called Reef. I cannot remember the author.

My love affair with the radio continues. Documentary maker Cathy Fitzgerald talking on Telling Tales late yesterday morning about how she centres herself before an interview. ‘I feel my feet on the ground, smell the air around me…..’ I paraphrase her, but it was about being present, really present ready to engage fully in another person and their life. I know this. I know this way of being. It is deeply immersive, almost intrusive sometimes. I fall in love with my interviewees, she said.

I didn’t write yesterday. I just read it. I needed to do it. It needs a lot of work, it is still a jumble but not yet. Write it out first. It is a juggernaut. A massive task. More reading today. Write at the weekend. When I am ready to begin again.

Some of the gloom has lifted but I still look for the signs, it may come. Will I be stronger then?

It’s been almost a week. I’ve missed writing this. The off-loading-ness of it, the ordering of, the making it mine.

She’s been lobotomised. Well, partially at least. Poor love. My poor little laptop. She holds my world, or at least the written part of it. Some writers prefer to write by hand, pen or pencil on paper, Joanna Trollope does on her kitchen table. And I heard Paul Merton say on the radio that he doesn’t own a computer. Just for a moment I thought what bliss that would be but I know that I write best this way. Here, on this machine.

I’m trying to get her back, to make her recognisable to me again. Slowly. Breathe.

I made scribbles on post-it notes, such as the man I saw early one morning wearing a black t-shirt inscribed with the words: Still European. And that fact that I saw a shooting star. It was that cloudless morning a few days ago and I thought wouldn’t it be amazing if I saw one and there it was, falling, a white flash, gone in a blink, before me. It’s a comet, isn’t it? he said when I told him later. I’m not sure, I replied, aren’t they major events, like Halley’s Comet? Isn’t it a star, a planet falling? We agree to disagree, both aware of our ignorance. Do I have to know it to appreciate it? I think not. And there was my dream. My dream of shoes. They were pale brown patent leather brogues with laces. Shiny. I’d just bought them and kept thinking I’d lost them and had to keep checking the plastic bag. Then I thought I might have bought the wrong size. I read the label. 4:30 it said. Time, I know but in my dream world it made perfect sense. Surely they were too small. I panicked and took myself back to the moment I’d tried them on. They had fitted.

The dream dictionary states that dreams about buying shoes suggests that you want to change your life.

We’re human beings not human ‘doings’, he said.