Category: Writings

I find comfort in going through my old sketchbooks, though often, as with this one, I can remember where was but not what the words, or as in this case, the list refers to. Where did I read about Winifred Nicholson and her belief that ‘artists accepted the discomfort of poverty out of a desire to live differently’ for instance? It too is a comforting thought. Find your heroes a medium told me years and years ago, meaning find people who are like you, who live like you, it will comfort. I keep thinking of James Joyce with his second-hand coat, failing eyesight and other deprivations he went through for his writing. Ah, but he believed in his talent. Doesn’t that make all the difference? I keep finding little sparks of something – a residency, a writing residency. Just up your street, he says. Yeh, I reply, but they want people who are living in London. Let it go. You already have much ahead of you this year. Wait. It will come. Where is my belonging?

My research begins to take root invading my dreams. Mothers in seventeen-century France literally throwing away their babies. Motherhood is a social construct, claims the author, and only fed by a society that sees its worth. I long to fall into it, to let it swallow me up. There is so much to find there. I think this is important, and yet I want to run from it too and find something impersonal, ordered, regimented, straight-lined to do instead. But it hounds me. Over and over. It must be written. Be steady.

She has it easy, a friend had said of her. Maybe so but I like to be around her. I like the ease of her, the soft meringue-like aura around her. She does have troubles, has had, who hasn’t, but she chooses not to dwell, manages, holds it all together. There is such a peace to her. I hope we can meet. Speaking to her on the phone was nice. Can I own that I need more women like that in my life? I need the care. Truly.

I was shaking with the shock of it for over two hours. Alone, on the floor. Two women’s voices came through, hers and my sister’s. Comfortable women, with a strong sense of self, home-owners, beautiful, feminine – I yearned to have them near. I cannot make such things for myself. Never have done and can see it happening now. What do I have to offer them?

I wrote about streetlights in the forest. Was I still in Norway then? I remember the lights, such a comfort in the dark.

A letter in the post. You’ve won, it reads. And I have £25. That’s nice. That is a shining thing. Some days are….

If I make myself lighter might I just blow away?

The day collapsed.

I’d got him up, as I said, in my insistence on trying to ‘keep things normal’. And we’d done the shopping, though he kept veering towards the pavement. Everything felt surreal, as if all the threads were unravelling. And yet I still kept noticing the details. Like that chatty girl at Morrison’s who usually does the flowers calling out to a colleague and saying that she really must change her perfume. I’d joshed him in front of our friend on the till saying that, of course, he, being a man, had the cold symptoms much worse than I did. She’d laughed and nodded. Then we’d returned home, again as I said, and I’d worked and then, just as I was getting ready to go up to the Library to do my research I heard him calling me. Had he called before? Had I ignored it? And there he was lying on the floor.

He succumbs, he gives in. He always has. He isn’t a fighter. I couldn’t raise him. Try as I might. He wouldn’t help. Grab this, hold onto this. Nothing. It must’ve been an hour of trying. And then, out of frustration more than anything, and out of a desire to not see him on the floor, so degraded and helpless, I tried to yank him up. And I heard it go, I felt it wrench, something in my back. I cried out in both pain and fear. What had I done? Then the unravelling continued. I went to a neighbour for help. I had to knock on his 100-year-old mother’s door. She was up, he was not. She was in a dressing gown having a late breakfast listening to the radio. Deaf and not good with her sight, she peered to the left of me, her head on one side like a bird. I noticed a fly on their easy chair. Their living room-cum-kitchen-cum-dining-room smelt of fried food, unaired, trapped. He’s strong, she said of her son, he’ll help. I felt awkward waiting at her threshold so went back upstairs to wait for him. He was still on the floor, his face hard against the floorboards, unmoving. The neighbour couldn’t help. He just kept sliding. A dead weight. I called 999. They came, two big men in green. So kind. He was somnolent, his body leaning to one side. He’s got a temperature, one said. They tested his blood pressure, asked for paracetamol to give him and chatted away. One asked me about a picture in our hallway. What is it? he said. Then he said, Do you have a shop? They took him away and I went upstairs to lie on the floor, in pain and  incapacitated, I wept and slept and texted and called cancelling the trip to see friends in Bath, spoke to my darling sister, longing to have her near. They sent him home in a taxi four hours later. We make shift together. He is asleep. And I am slowed. I will cope but I am slowed. Brought down and grey. I fell again last night, he said, when I woke him for breakfast. Why didn’t you call me? I said. What could you have done? he said. It took him an hour but he solved it. He got himself up. Love and anger. Compassion and frustration. I see him on the ground and know this is a harbinger. This is my future as it is his. And I am lost. Today I am lost.

If the big picture is too much to deal with concentrate on the details, the small things, for they are there, as they have always been, to delight us, to distract and comfort us. I wanted these to smell, that gorgeous almost too-sweet smell of lilywhites but they didn’t. What are the sweets that smell, and indeed taste, like small narcissi? Something to do with squirrels. They were red, came in a little plastic bag, and were like hard nipples. I loved anything small as a child. I would curl my hands around such things, making them mine. They’ve begun serialising The Miniaturist on the radio. I listen to it as I make breakfast – not sure about it yet but the image of that dolls house stays in my mind. I know a woman who spent years making tiny samplers for dolls houses, and I knew another woman, the mother of my sister’s friend who had a dolls house shop. How I longed for a dolls house. I never articulated such longing. I wonder why? Perhaps I knew it couldn’t be sated. The theme of the book makes me want to make small things again. There is something safe in the reduction of real life. The articulate re-making. I miss making. I miss having a reason to make.

He would say I was cruel. And perhaps I was. I need the structure. I need to have my working time. I know that I am rigid. I just want to rely, to know that he will be as steady as I endeavour to be. He cannot. We are made of different stuff. I remember his frustration with his mother when she was unwell, and the countless references, tongue-in-cheek style, to her ‘stoicism’. He is cut from the same cloth. I was raised differently. I recall a very particular day at sixth-form and knowing I was unwell and wanting her to notice and take care of me. But no, it was the no-nonsense mother that greeted me at breakfast and that sent me off on my bike, only to receive a call from me at the phone box down the road, doubled over in pain. She didn’t relent, or say sorry, just took me home and put me to bed. But there have been times when she was marvellous, kind, patient and tender. I mustn’t forget those. Ah, she is in me. I forced him out. We did our chore and now he is back in bed, and I have softened. It has been a grey time. And I so want to see our friends tomorrow, but I hold my breath.

It was surprisingly pleasant to be in the National Library yesterday, once I’d got over my new-girl nerves. The light, the peace, and those windows with their prospect of the sea. Marvellous. And I’m beginning to find some interesting data. Lovely. Data is the wrong word. Resonances is better. I am off again soon, though today I have to take on the hill. So be it. I shall find my strength, as always.

The third day in and I’m feeling a little more like myself. The cocooning is still present and my head is thick with it. And he has it now. His face was like a smacked arse when I went in to wake him. He softens though. Stoicism isn’t his forte. So be it. I walked this morning. I was glad to get out of bed, my dreams were hallucinatory and my heart raced. Best get up be out in the fresh air. It was sharp, the air, a frosty dampness that caught at my face. It was quiet, no one about. January stretches ahead. I catch my fear. It’s the size of it, the commitment of it. Can I do it? Can I do it alone? I can see the small details, the occasional chapter but the whole still alludes me. All I can do is put one foot in front of the other. I’m going to the National Library to do some research today. A beginning. I often think if I just do what others do, ape their behaviour it will come. Will it? Why am I so unbrave?

I didn’t walk. I reset the alarm and had another hour and half in bed instead. Then I dreamt about Brian from The Archers and J from the writing course (who for the purposes of my dream were married) walking in the Swiss Alps when all I could do was sit and watch. They came passed me twice as I sat on a chair with all the other residents of that Swiss village, looking all smug and self-satisfied. I missed my tramping. Though I don’t feel strong. My voice is going and my chest is hard and resistant. I must see it through and accept the rest it is insisting I give my body. I dreamt frequently in that in and out time between when I normally wake and that later time. I had to wash and get dressed but the clothes weren’t mine. And M was there in an awful shirt. Did I want to have his bath water? he asked. No thanks, I said, I’ve already bathed. Did he believe me? Did I really care?

I have to adapt my application. Of course, I do. I must be steady and act on his advice, it was, is, well meant. Do it for the other people involved. Let them benefit. I shouldn’t have told her. Shouldn’t have put it that way. I am shamed by it. Keep it to yourself and question all things. Remember the mind is not always to be trusted.

One baby step. I’ve ordered the books at the Nat Library and all being well with my chest I will begin my research tomorrow. I know so little. Let the adventure begin. Let it unfold. So much is in the dark. I am working in the dark. No safety. And yet I am safe. I am choosing all of this. Did they miss me? The seagulls, the starlings, the police patrol, the milkman, the late-working students in their windows – did they miss me this morning?

I have a cold. It came on swiftly. It cocoons me. I feel slightly out of this world. And it is back to work time. To all that regularity and frustration. I need to let it go. I didn’t get tense walking this morning. My hazy sensation left me outside looking on. I didn’t have to go. I wanted to sleep. I always do but something takes me out. That need to keep moving. He doesn’t understand, would take the rest if it was offered. Why can’t I? We talked about writing. So much fear. Fear of doing it wrong, of failing. Jeremy Deller on DID talked about a retrospective in which he included some of his failures. Interesting and so bold. I liked listening to him. I can’t do anything, he says. I was never really good at art. To be so confident, so clear. Can I have some of that? What is my fear? That I won’t manage it? That I won’t be able to write it? Who knows?

Town was quiet. A few wanderers like me. The decorations are down but the town tree still stands but its smell has gone. The ice rink has also been dismantled. January stretches ahead. A crossword clue last night suggested that the 13th January is the coldest day. A mythic belief perhaps? The papers are full of diets and fitness regimes. The same old same old.

I wanted to do a nice thing for her. I like her. She said it was so. I’m glad. I worried over it. I watch myself too keenly. Let it go. Take a leaf out of JD’s book. Be that clear. As clear as a bell.

Did I tell you about the hyacinths she bought me, all those years ago? Almost eight now. Hard to believe. Do they ever think of me? I doubt it. I passed through, that’s all, three months of tending to their house. A flicker in their busy lives. But the hyacinths were kind. I watched them grow, drew their progress as I waned, grew greyer.

It was a name this morning. Nick Boulevard. What’s that about? It made him laugh in the shower when I told him. It’s good to hear him laugh, that open kind of full mouth laugh, it’s been awhile. I’d been thinking about how authors find names for their characters and perhaps that’s what sparked it off. A name. No narrative. Just a name in my head before I woke.

Her name was from a sixties song. Or was it a sixties singer? She told me about her when we met for that cup of tea and her Chelsea bun (I love Chelsea buns, she said. Can I have some butter?) I’d never warmed to her as a child. We were a similar age. What was it about her that I didn’t respond to? It shames me when I feel that way. Perhaps she didn’t warm to me. Anyway she told me she’s in a nursing home. It was a throwaway comment, perhaps she thought I already knew. I did not. She had a brain tumour, she said, though I think it must’ve been an aneurism and she’s paralysed in both legs and one arm. Her husband is very good. We talk in that kind of shorthand. There isn’t room for the pain, the despair, the horror of it. Did they have children? I asked, in that noisy station café while I surreptitiously and guiltily watched the clock for my train. No, she said, they tried IVF and all sorts, but perhaps it is for the best. And then she tells me that her mother, the mother of this girl, now woman, is also ill, with only a few days to live. Her two other children have moved in with her, she tells me. She doesn’t want to see me, she says, those tears still unabsorbed on her face, she says it will make her cry. Is she in pain? I ask. Not so much. She manages to get about, she says. She told me on the phone that she’d made the trifle for Christmas. She’s my best friend, she tells me.

It’s all in the details. We just do our best, keeping our heads down, keeping it small, else it would drown us. I walk my hated dark and I’m sorry that I do, hate it. For it is just the flip-side of day. I walk those shadows and long for light. Let it be. As it is. Just as it is.

So often I wake from a liminal space between sleep and wakefulness and a phrase is there in my head. Like this one. What is the fantastic option? What does it mean? Fantastic as in marvellous or fantastic as in over-the-top, magical? There is a lightness, a playfulness to this voice though, no doubt a twin to the grinning mouth of the other day. I also dreamt I was at my old teaching job. He was with me and we went downstairs to it. Familiar faces didn’t seemed pleased to see me and the other people who’d come with me. Coffee and tea was made but there was a confusion as to who’s was who’s. There was ice in one cup. They were those glass, Duralex cups.

I slept on the train. A gorgeous letting go kind of sleep, waking only when my head lolled forward. A woman was talking to a man across the aisle. Twenty-three quid to get to Wrexham. I could do it for eight pounds in a car, she was saying. I’m going to visit my ex-boyfriend. He’ll have to re-imburse me. Twenty-three fucking quid. Silence. Then. I ‘ate travelling, me, she said.

She came. And it was fine. She was shining. For all her grief, and the tears stayed on her face, not absorbed by her skin, she was shining. We sat in the same café he and I had sat in weeks before. I wasn’t sure she’d like it. But it was fine. She talked of her death, the months leading up to it. Her driving off. We were going to a concert, she said. And we’d gone to the supermarket to get some food in so we wouldn’t have to cook. Just get some of those Warburton’s currant buns, I said to her, she said, and she was fine then. I love the detail of her life. Her neatness, compactness and the way she holds my hands. I don’t know her well, but how I love her.

I saw a falling star yesterday morning. It looked so close. A fireball, a burning coal of orange-yellow fire. A meteor? A comet? I don’t know. Did anyone else see it. Or was it a spectacle the Cosmos staged purely for me? A police car patrolled town. Then I saw the milkman in his truck. Well, he’s Bruce Springsteen really. Our neighbour across the walk bridge has put bubble wrap around her plants.  Against the frost, no doubt. She told me once that it was the nearest she got to a garden. The downside of flat-dwelling, I suppose. I listened to Maigret’s Christmas on the radio, read by Derek Jacobi and I ached to be in Paris, in his apartment drinking Madame Maigret’s sloe gin.

It was good to get away, to be somewhere different. I walked around the Market Hall. I loved it. So much stuff. So much cosy endeavour, people in puffa jerkins chatting over mugs of tea, and the smell of bacon, cold fish and pasties. I read and drew. A good day.

As I walked out this morning I was over-taken by the smell of wood-smoke. It followed me all the way along North Road. Was it from wood-burning stoves? I love the smell, that burnt, rather black odour that is so evocative of clear, cold autumn days. I took the mince pies, and the hat and scarf that I’d intended to give him for Christmas – all wrapped up, a surprise, something for him to open. But then he’d gone. Was gone for those festive days. So I couldn’t. I carried them in a W H Smith’s bag and left them against the wall of the shelter, while he slept under that distinctive orange blanket. No sign of the standing man. I saw a torch light on the beach. A square block of light shining in the blackness. Why is it sinister to see a light like that? I like to feel that I am alone, but I am not. A police car crawled past, on patrol. When I got level with the light I could see a man then another with fishing rods on tripods, their lines cast far into the water. One was hunched over a box of some sort, fixing his bait no doubt. They worked in silence. A communion of sorts. It was cold, -3 apparently. My feet crunched on the sandy gravel that still spread across the Prom. Coming back the back way up the steps I saw a large girl in a pink tracksuit. She stopped when she saw me. Why? I thought. Morning, I said. She had those tattooed eyebrows that hold of look of slight surprise. And there was an unlit cigarette in her mouth. Nice morning for a nice walk, ain’t it, she said, rooting around in her pocket. For a lighter, perhaps? Is that why she’d stopped, to ask for a light? So many do. Yes, I said, cold but nice that it’s dry. See you later, I said, knowing I wouldn’t.

I woke from my dream trying to catch my thoughts before they brought in the gloom. A voice and then an image of a disembodied mouth smiling with its teeth showing. The details will take care of themselves, it said.

He told him we coped. Coped. We cope, he told me he said. Such an unsexy word. Coping, keeping heads above water. It is all part of it. The growing up the letting loose of all romantic notions of being saved, of escaping of becoming something other than what one is. We cope. Is it enough? Is it epitaph enough for myself or our relationship? They coped. She coped.

We watched it again, as we do, over and over. He likes it and I do too. And there he was before me on the screen stirring up my desire body. I didn’t bid it. I didn’t want it. I’m in coping, keeping-my-head-down, mode after all. What is it about him that does it to me? It’s not a chaotic, crazed kind of desire but a gentle awakening. Sunlit. Not rapacious, ravenous but an awareness of an appetite for something specific, something rarefied. He is so much younger than I. His skin is honeyed. At least it was then. What is it about him, that particular actor? It’s intriguing how he does it to me. So few do, these days. It’s all locked away.

I need to let go. I walk and plan. I walk and fret. I walk and try to catch hold. Let it go. Let it happen. And it will somehow or another. Can’t all the solutions have their own satisfaction? Let go the rigidity. Let it be. I chant it as I walk.

I was going to bring the last of the mince pies but wanted to check if he was still there, after all it was a cold night. A clear sky and 0 degrees. He was there but so was a man, who I mistook for a coat. He was standing leaning against the wooden wall of the shelter as the man slept. Was he watching over him? It gave me a shock. It felt sinister. Was it?

Reading through my sketchbooks yesterday stays with me. Impressions of drawings I made and the places I took shelter in. I mostly recall the sensory sensations. Whether I was cold or hot, wet or dry, whether there was good coffee to drink and somewhere private to sit. Another drawing from a favourite coffee shop, a chain, but still decent, near Bygdoy Alle and the tramline. I wanted so much then. I hoped for so much. Then.