Category: Writings

There he was bold as brass pissing onto the pavement. Not in broad daylight but in the semi-light of the street lit early morning dark. He was talking as he pissed to a girl who was huddled under a white jumper against the rain under the eaves of the Prom shelter. He let out a laugh as the arc of yellow continued to spring from his flies. It had taken me a moment to work out what it was. It looked rather beautiful. And then I realised. Was I shocked? Outraged? No, I was curious, even a little delighted at his audacity, for there is still a police watch outside the hotel just 500 yards away. He was drunk clearly. And I too like to pee in the open air. Is it the same for men? Probably not. Peeing makes the male organ rather innocuous I often think. That’s all it is, a peeing tube. That is all. All that fuss over such a small thing.

I tried to keep the anxiety at bay as I walked, or at least under a leash. Let it be, I chanted to myself as I sat still for half an hour last night. Let it be, I said to myself as I walked, as each little potential worry rose up to unsettle me. Let it be.

It rained. They’d promised a dry night. So be it. I went and got the big umbrella from the car. Listen to the pitter patter on its taut canopy, rather lovely. And then later as I stood for a moment at the top of the little hill I heard the drip of raindrops falling of the leaves of the shrubs and trees. There is never complete silence, there are always the hums of generators, the clunk of heating systems, the dripping of downpipes, the piping of oystercatchers and the rush of the tide. Sitting last night in silence I could hear the pulse of my blood in my head. I sat in the sun, the sun coming through my studio window and became almost nothing. For a moment. Just nothing.

Will it all be done soon? Will there be peace then? Will she let us go?

They never get it right. The tea pot was huge but there was no extra water. We thought that someone wanted weak tea, said the waiter with a grim face, two tea bags in that pot is going to be really weak. Can you bring some more? I asked, and some hot water? Why is it so difficult to explain what we mean? he said, when the waiter had gone. Who knows? It was lovely anyway. And I talked and talked. Talking it out and coming up with a plan, a way to keep going, to fire up my work. The other guests dozed in the sunshine that flooded the lounge. We spoke quietly in our corner while he munched on shortbread. Afterwards we too sat in the sun. My back’s tightness eased and I felt almost high. He had celebrated me, cherished me and anything felt possible. Coming home to a text and having to rush off an email in response and my bubble was soon burst. But that’s OK, one can’t float for long, that’s gravity. And now I have to put it all into place, make it manifest. I send off emails and messages. Might you be interested? Can you help? Are you still out there? We shall see. He is proud of me. I am not used to it. It is a lovely feeling. That inkling of limelight.

He told me he found it excruciating. I didn’t know. I hadn’t seen – too wrapped up in myself. I honour. I take it on board. I will not ask it of him. Not any more.

I waited in the car while he went to buy the papers. A man came along the street. A figure from antiquity. A ragged man, hunched, his hair in dreadlocks, a dirty anorak on his back and his feet in too-big boots that curled up at the toes and no socks. He carried a carrier bag, that looked too-modern, too incongruous for this nineteenth-century figure. Spying a piece of paper on the road he suddenly dashed out and snatched it up. Scanning it briefly he shoved it into the pocket of his coat and shuffled on. Where was he going? How does he live? Was he old or made aged by destitution? Who was looking out for him? How can people be so alone, so bereft in our modern age, in this first world country?

What can we do?

Halfway down North Road and there is a distinct smell of TCP. A smell of my childhood. A cure-all, a clean-all, the smell was insidious, once opened and applied it never went. And yet, it is comforting, a smell of caring, of fastidious motherhood and bathroom cabinets.

My work is my life.

Why do you paint? Manet asks Berthe Morisot in the radio programme aired this morning (and I paraphrase them). I love it but you don’t appear to, he continues, why do you do it?

Because I have to, she replies.

Not sure why, but I’m always more comfortable using black and white images for these posts. Colour is almost too much for me. (This brings to mind a programme I was listening to this morning while preparing breakfast. It was based on the letters of the Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot. Her mother had encouraged her artistic talents and arranged for her to be tutored. Her tutor had taken her to the Louvre to ‘copy the masters’. But I want to be out in Nature, she cried in exasperation. Nature will be too much for you, her tutor replied.)

So many questions. My back and the rash on my arms are alive with it. The heat of it, the discomfort of it.

Today we are off to talk. To sit in the hotel, pray it is open, and talk it out. Talk it out. Get it out. Whatever it is. This fight inside. I’ve never really accepted what I am. I don’t have a shining skill, I can do lots of things moderately well. Isn’t that enough? I don’t know. I want the glory of being a master at something, and yet I don’t want to be confined, to be restricted to just one thing, one kind of creator. I want to write and make. Make and write. And to be a good wife, friend, mother, grandmother, sister, worker, provider, home-maker, lover, believer and being. To be good. I want to be good. I WANT TO BE GOOD. Ah, but will you recognise it when you are?

I worked on the quilt for my darling H. It is getting there. Lots of mistakes. Well, not lots, some. But it is taking shape.

The clouds bubble up in the sky, gorgeous, white fluffy ones. What is that a sign of?

What’s it like out? He asks each morning. Colder, I said.

I dreamt deeply, lots of layers. At one point I was out walking in the dark and saw two homeless men sleeping on a bench by a path I wanted to walk down. It was so cold I was surprised they were still alive. They were for I could actually see them snoring. One had something over his face (a blanket or mat) that rose and fell with each out breath. I was scared of them. They looked roguish, feral. And chose to not go that way. I was disappointed, it felt like giving in, turning back.

What shall we talk of? Embroidery comes in the post. A sumptuous array of skill. Alice Kettle to name but one. I think about having such skill, such knowing. Would that feel good? To wake each morning with a definite purpose, a thing to achieve, something huge, beautiful and crowd-pleasing. I don’t know for that is not what I am. I think about all I want to make but they are things that would please me, not others.

Will there be wisdom in our discussion? There will be tea, certainly. Tea from silver pots. So nice.

A nice old mirror. That’s what the label says. A nice old mirror, for sale in the bric-a-brac shop.

It began mizzling as I walked. A warm coating of rain, not unpleasant. I had brought my umbrella but didn’t use it. I like the rain on my face but not on my head. I’ve met many others who feel the same. Funny that. Someone had lit a fire on the beach and its smoke mingled with the misty wetness. Autumn is coming. A gang of youngsters speaking a language I didn’t recognise walked towards me along the Prom. I was invisible to them. They carried blankets.

I lay in bed last night unable to drop off and thought about my practice. My work is an inward experience. I don’t have the pleasure of being drawn towards socially-kind work. There is nothing noble about what I do. I just do it. I do it to learn about myself principally. Myself and my place here. It is my way of orientating myself through it. Perhaps there is something there that might inspire others. I do not know. I just wish to understand. To make sense.

I lay there thinking about performing at the NG. I want that rush again. That sense of being absolutely in the right place. A place where something magical can happen. I want to do it again, to prepare for it and do it again. This time with the tapestry. But I want to do it in a corset and crinoline. Another excuse to dress up? Maybe. If so, then so be it. I want to see, to test it. To see how it makes me feel. And how people respond. Why? There are always the whys. As it should be. It’s about associations. The nineteenth-century woman as needlewoman. The needle as pen. The amateur needlework obsessed with her berlin wool work. It is of the time that van Gogh painted his sunflowers, though that is of less interest to me. I want to see what happens. I will, of course wear it all day. How will it be to make my way through the tube, the streets of London? Am I crazy? It excited me. Just the thought, so much so that I couldn’t get to sleep. Shall I just go with this?

I catch my mind. Every second it is judging, weighing up, criticising, levelling, planning. I need to breathe, to zone out.

I will make today. Make her quilt. I want to complete it. A gift. A gift of love. I plan another visit. So brief, so short. Alas. Tomorrow we go to the hotel to talk. To talk practice. To practice talk. Nice that. I look forward to it. Work allowing. Always. Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed.

They’ve mended the deckchair, the giant deckchair that is sitting in the Prom paddling-pool-now-sandpit. The locals were in uproar, apparently, when it was vandalised. There were letters in the local paper and a picture of a group of children perching, rather precariously on its torn seat. The company behind ‘Advancing Aberystwyth’ were contacted but there was no reply. And now, there it is, mended. All is well with the world. N’est-ce pas?

It was very mild when I walked this morning, even the coat had to come off. Teenagers milled about, one lay asleep on a bench and another hobbled about in a ankle brace. Down along South Marine someone had left the fairy lights on in the  Shoreline B&B’s  breakfast room. A great chaotic flickering of lights in blue and green. And the sign up saying SORRY NO VACANCIES. Not so with Yr Hafod. He hasn’t been full all year. Why, are Shoreline’s rates a little cheaper? He takes such great care with it, always up and down with a cherry picker, painting. Towards the station I heard a woman’s voice shouting into a phone. An Amazon of a woman in a long summer dress with a kind of Aztec print. I was waiting outside The Angel for the both of you, she was shouting ( her strong Birmingham accent making the both of you sound like the both of ‘cha’), and you left me. You left me stranded outside The Angel.

I passed a young lad sitting on the kerb. Are you alright? I wanted to ask but then caught sight of his phone, he was reading messages, seemingly content. Shapes, bodies move around before me in the dark, sometimes there is eye contact, like the man with the glasses as I turned to go up the hill. A flicker of fear ensues after these encounters. Don’t follow me, please don’t follow me. I check to see his light is on when I reach the top of the hill. Yes. I stand for a moment, stilling my breath. Someone is watching me. I open my eyes. It’s a cat. She bounds down from the wall as I turn to face her and takes refuge under a bush. A pretty cat, black and white. The girl is on her computer again in the house on Llanbadarn Road, the overhead light in the room making it stark, cold. She is alone this time. I’d thought that they were running a chat line or something. The late hour, the fact that she has a telephone headset on her head, and that they were working together, side-by-side. They could be completing an MA or a thesis for a PhD. Who knows?

I saw two spiders, enormous ones. One was by my walking boot and the other by the front door, hiding behind Bry our draft excluder. I don’t shriek like I used to. I don’t want to hurt them. Off you go, I say, run along, you freak me a little, but your life is safe with me.

He was cooking bacon for breakfast downstairs. It is an overwhelming smell yet, for all my veganism/vegetarianism it isn’t unpleasant. I like the other life-ness of it. Life is going on, separate to mine. There is comfort in that.

The walking eased my anxiety. Clarity came through. Just finish them. Finish them all. All those hidden in the drawer projects. And write. Sew and write. Write about Mum, about Norway about being an au pair for the second time and sew. Sew and write. Finish some. See how it feels. Then judge, if you must. Though better to just do the work.

She doesn’t want a review, there isn’t space for it. Shall I leave it then? But then, I thought as I walked, I want to write about it and I like writing for her blog. So I’ll offer it. And another thing. I thought about what I loved, what I have loved during this barren period. Performing. I’ve loved performing particularly in the NG. So I shall persevere. I could go every year. Why not? A tapestry a year. And stay a day. See what comes.

What of today? Order the pieces, those straggly pieces then sew. I want to see it through, leaving a few stitches left to complete before the painting. It is a plan. It is enough, for now.

On a Friday, just before I make lunch Radio 4 Extra has a programme about podcasts. I catch the tail end of it. Yesterday they had one from the Empathy Museum. I’ve never heard of it. It has a collection of shoes and the idea is that you put on a pair and listen to the ‘story’ of their owner. Walk a mile in my shoes is the notion. A good one, I think. They played one from a sex worker (though she preferred to call herself a ‘sexual healer’). She was Australian. It obviously got under my skin for I dreamt about her pushing herself upon him. He felt obliged, I told another woman in another room (one that I’d escaped to, after not being able to bear to be beside them anymore). I don’t think so, she’d replied. I woke from it feeling agitated. Why had it taken me so long to kick up a fuss? He laughs when I tell him of my distrait. It’s a dream, he says. He always says that. It’s just a dream. I know. I know. But what is it trying to tell me? I want the wisdom of it, not the fall out.

I wrote a little of the book yesterday and felt better for doing so, though there are many decisions I don’t feel able to take. I need help. In this and so many things. I went upstairs and put on the radio and the word ‘daughter’ came up on the screen. It was a woman talking about making a podcast about her mother’s life. She doesn’t need to make a spectacle of it, she was saying.

I am still a little raw. Skinless. I feel ticked off by people, by life, by my family. I can’t seem to get it right. What is right? Went into work early. Another slot about Putin. Will you make waffles for breakfast, I ask her afterwards.

House cleaned. But I didn’t sew. Perhaps a little after lunch, just to feel better, to re-connect with it.

I think about that space to hire. Two days. What would I do? Make it white. Clean it. Be in the silence. Wait and see? Could I suggest that? I search for projects. Anything to get me out of this stuck-ness. Will it help?

I caught the moment it took hold. That sharp tightening of the back muscles, making them rigid, iron-like, an armour of resistance. I’d suddenly thought of a writer that he used to know. He writes for radio and TV mostly. A kind man, a modest man. I used to see him too. I’ve been listening to one of his adaptations over the last few days. It’s rich, funny and cleverly crafted. And warm. I was running my bath when it came in, that overwhelming feeling of awe at another’s skill. To have made it. To be in the lime-light. And yet. How good it is to write it out. I should do it more often, every day in fact, over and over. It is abstract this. All of it. This imagining-up of other people’s lives and then using those unrealities to judge mine. It is all about accepting. I accept. So easy to write, so easy to say. Is this enough? What is it that you want? To be valued, to be heard, to be noticed? Or is it more about valuing yourself? What would that take?

I talk to myself endlessly when I walk. Not out loud by internally. Weighing it all up. Shedding. I want to shed this skin of ego-wanting. I wanted to shed my sense of an artist self. I wanted to make anonymous work. To step out of the lime-light. Remember? What has happened? Why the seeking still? What is it you are after?

Will it always be like this? Or is this a crossing point? I lay on the couch succumbing to the massage and began to compose a poem. Well, it wasn’t quite like that. That sounds far to grandiose. I am not a poet. I just want to form a series of words. Its been bugging me for months, years, I need to write it out. A morphing of mother into daughter using the images of wasps. I began that short story at the start of my course, what was it three or four years ago. It cooks away inside of me. It needs to come out. You see that is part of it. I don’t know where it is destined. I’ve always had a destination of sorts. I don’t now. So can’t you work with that? That blankness. I think of other artists who’ve reached this stalemate. Michael Landy burning everything and then making those drawings of London’s weeds. So simple. So different from what he did before. Art for art sake. The work is it. Why not just do the work? Why do you need an audience? Why do you need an audience, Ellen? Is it really about the work?

I did my seven times table as I walked. Fifty-six and I am nearing my eighth period of experience. Can I shed? Can I shed my ego skin? What would it be like to be skinless, to be free of it? The glory will never come. It is unreal, it is not real. There is just this, this internal experience of being. That is all there is. And it is enough. Therein lies the richness, the wisdom, the yielding to the not knowing and being grateful for that. Think of your death, he says. Summon it up. See the unreality of it. The fiction of it all. You are nothing. No thing. Just experience. A minute spot. A thought. A moment.

Perhaps there is nothing to understand. Do the work. Write it, write the poem. Sew, write, perform, walk, eat, and breathe. Or if you like just breathe.

It rages in me.

What it is is hard to fathom. Do you want to talk about it? he asks, so kindly. Not now. Not really. It would be opening a lid that I don’t think I’d be able to shut again. But we do. A little. And I cry, a little. It is everything and nothing. Everything and nothing. What is it? My work, the trip to Spain, all that re-visiting of her pain, her bitterness, her locked-in-ness and mine. It is simple really. This is where I am. Here not there. In this life. A small life, mostly, but inside it is infinitesimal – enormous, gigantic. And mostly I am sated. It is enough but there is still this raging. Something isn’t right.

You’re drifting, he said, switching off the TV, after a brief watch of Lark Rise with Twister and his tiny twist of his head. So beautifully done. That’s a nice kind of re-visiting. I love this programme, he says. It is easy on the eye. No sex, no violence (at least not graphic). And the acting is subtle and sublime. We watch on his bed and he strokes my feet. Glorious. I want nothing more, then. But during the day I feel worth-less. Less. Less and more than less. What am I doing? What has happened? Do I just need to let go of all expectations? Do what you love, he says.

You do not have to be good, the poet says, you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. What does it love? Making, forming, using its hands, writing, being still, sitting in the sun, walking by the sea, the smell of the morning air, the smell of baking bread, wearing Miss Dior perfume, silence, whiteness, lying in white sheets, being absorbed, listening, capturing, reading, being captivated, enraptured, transcending. Let it be, I want to say. Wait. Wait for what is to come. Not by anticipating but being in the what is, now. So you are lost. Be lost. How does it feel to be lost? Let it be and you will find your way.

What about your drawer full of projects? he asks. Yes, what about them? What if I just see them through. It is ego stuff this pain. An ego that needs recognition, to be valued, noticed. Let it go. How would it be to let it go? To just do for the sake of doing. Get up and work. Get up and work. And let the doing be the reward. Not the ending. The ending is beyond my control. So do them. One a week, alternating. See them through. Let that be the reward. Seeing them whole. It is just time. And you have it. Become immersed. But stay a little detached. Watch, notice, pay attention and write. You are not one thing, you are moving, always, changing, always. Spirit, not flesh. So be it.

The sky was clear. The stars alive in the black. And the moon beginning to wane. Few were about. The cold was a shock. A couple of people stood outside The Angel. A girl’s voice. A girl with pigtails, wearing a vest and glasses. A loud, confident voice. So basically, she was saying, he said ‘what yer doing on the beach on yer own, yer drunk and the tide could come and take you away. Well, said the girl to her companion, you know my sense of humour. So I said to him, ‘Well they’re worse ways to go’.

I walked down Great Darkgate Street, hearing her cackle ringing out.

They say she has anxiety attacks. Who wouldn’t. Let her go. Set her free.

I am a routinous person. And many of those routines border on rituals. I have rituals when I walk. I choose to walk past the two bakeries in town so that I can catch the delicious smell of baking bread as I go past, I go up the hill past Alexandra Hall or cut through the Prom, alternating the choice, I stop at the end of the Perygyl and stare out to sea and I stop just below the Castle, by the hydrangeas, just for a few minutes to slow my breath and feel my feet on the ground. I like the silence, I like to hear the hum of the generator by the public toilets and to see if the lights are on in St Michael’s. It’s like a kind of mapping, but it also eggs me on as I move from landmark to landmark.

I got ready to stop beneath the Castle this morning when I heard barking. It was pitch black and I couldn’t see where it was coming from. A dog, clearly. Then a man’s voice. I gave up any ideas of standing still and continue walking. The man with the dog was ahead of me. The dog was still growling. The growling increased as I near. The man was young with a large set of headphones clamped to his head. He called the dog to him. Was he saying shut up? And again. Then the dog, a sizeable black, hairy, rather non-descript mongrel promptly leapt into his arms. The man stood there cradling him as I walked by. The Angel and the Why Not? were open. A few stragglers hung around underneath the town clock. A girl in a black and white striped satin sleeveless top stood before a group of people. I wish, I wish, she was saying, well stating. She shouted rather than spoke clearly vying for attention. There’s no place like home, she continued. And again, there’s no place like home. Then I heard her say, who said that?

I think about notions of home.

I found one, I told him in the car on the way back from work. I found a house in the Shetlands that I could afford. I need this, I tell him, or did I just think I told him? It’s a fantasy, I know this. The house is  a mean little thing, cluttered and probably badly put together. But just for a while I think about making it mine. Everything just so, just as I wish it to be. Shall I buy it and make it mine, for later? And yet, such an action would go against my principles. Houses should be lived in. I am troubled by the idea of second homes and the impact they have on communities. Communities, particularly small ones like the ones up there, need people. A white, uncluttered space away from work, from difficult relationships, time to be, to unravel and put myself back together again. Shall I do it?

Shall it be my secret?

Neither of us like them. They unsettle. Everything is up-ended by them.

We got to the supermarket early and were waiting by the door with a bunch of others. S. was there leaning on a trolley and wearing a pink baseball cap. S. is short in stature and wide of girth. She has that energetic cheerfulness that makes me like her. He is less favourably inclined, re-telling the story of her move from the COOP to Morrison’s and what she said to him when she did. I sense a kindness in her that he doesn’t see. She told us that she was planning to do some shopping before her shift started. He said something to her. She knows him name. I might be a mystery shopper, she said. We know the other early shoppers but not by name. The man with the lump of his head asked if I’d gone to the Festival. He meant the one in Lovesgrove where there had been a tribute band 3-day concert. No, I said, it’s not really my thing, did you? I was being silly, but he laughed, not my thing either, he said. J. ex-Tree House, now seemingly not ex,  turned up, his only concession to the sharp wind was a grey woollen tank top over his short-sleeved shirt and shorts. He wears shorts the whole year round. He doesn’t feel the cold, apparently. He collared me near the apples and told me that he hadn’t realised it was a bank holiday. I could’ve stayed in bed, he said. And I was just off to the Tree House and it’s shut. And then he told me of his daughter ringing up yesterday asking if he could give her a driving lesson. Her partner has just got a job at Ultracomida, he told me, leaving the one he had here. So the lesson ended up in here, he said smiling ruefully, using up his discount card. Another impossibly optimistic person. How can you not warm to him?

I enjoyed my walk this morning. The wind was slight and town was hushed. There was a man in waterproofs hurrying past on the opposite side of the road, then an elderly man with a white beard who’d dashed out of his flat along South Marine and dumped a black bin bag of rubbish next to a town bin. I saw the woman who smokes and carries a carrier bag, and another man later, who stood reading his phone in red shorts and vest by Slater’s Bakery. Was he one of the bakers? His arms were choc-a-block with tattoos. So often, I find, people who prepare food have unsavoury, unhygienic appearances. A few cars drove about and there was the single police officer on watch outside the Belgrave. Other than this it was quiet. Two youngsters walked towards me past what used to be Lilley’s café. The boy had a strong Northern Irish accent and she had a pretty face and wore an opened Parka. And plus, he was saying to her, we don’t know that they won’t take it…She interjected with, I know but.

I told him of my wish to buy my own home. Someday. He accepts it. Knows me. It eases the ache to talk about it. It may never happen. It may not be possible. But I can live it, if only virtually. It all came on because I looked at things on John Lewis’s website. I am not avaricious. I don’t need things. It’s just sometimes I long for the beautiful in our home, a la Morris. I want to pass on those wooden bookshelves and get him a decent bed and chest of drawers. They are so cheap and tacky. There is an alternative me who is living in light-filled elegance. Everything is immaculate from her body to her living space. There is no building site outside, her furniture is not bashed-about IKEA stuff. Her clothes don’t have wool-pile. And her work is exquisite. Not a foot is put wrong.

Another me is a baker. But that is another story.

I shall dream it up.

I listened to Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Hotel by Elizabeth Taylor on the radio. It was superbly read by Eleanor Bron. So moving. I love the detail, the minutiae of her small concerns. The immensity of her small concerns, her love for the strange boy who became her grandson manqué. And I sewed. I want to be at peace with it. To see it as an interim. I don’t know what to do so I do this. I will do. It is a track to follow. As I walk I judge and my back tightens. Let it be. Be in that space of not knowing, of foolishness, of hopefulness, of blankness, of grief.

I thought of her again last night. I sat in her cell with her. Gently, being present.