Category: Writings

What is it about talking to her? Sometimes I don’t want to do it at all. Friday comes around and I am not resenting it exactly but less than eager to do it. It is just me and phones? Possibly. No, I think it is more the heaviness of another. Or at least, what I perceive as heaviness. In truth, the only person I have to ‘carry’ is myself. Sometimes she isn’t there. I always leave a message on her answering machine so that she knows that I haven’t forgotten. I’ve been calling her for years now. Age Cymru have long since stopped doing telephone befriending but I keep doing it. I tried to explain that the service had ended, giving her the option to drop out, to end her connection with me. But she didn’t respond. So I keep on calling. It has become part of my week. We talk for fifteen minutes or so. Sometimes, like yesterday, I can barely hear her. She has a soft voice at the best of times, and often I think she is translating from Welsh. Her words are laboured, slow (what I mean to say is). And then she is frequently out with the sheepdog, Bonnie, a refugee from the next-door farm. She arived and stayed. They provide the food. While she has moved in permanently. Taken refuge after the loss of her dog-companion. Bonnie herself hasn’t been well, suffering a stroke, was it last year? She cried then. I held her across the phone wires. We’ve shared much. She doesn’t talk of her inner life. It is mostly about her ailments, her daughter and Bonnie. Yesterday she told me of an elderly relative, a farmer, who’d been visited by thieves. He shouted at them and they left, she said. I think they were Irish. He was very shaken and it was only five in the afternoon, she said. It has shaken her too, clearly. I tell her (her daughter) that if we hear anything to just let them take it. Leave them to it, I say. She hasn’t been well, beset with a kidney infection. What with her being unwell over Christmas I’ve had to do more than usual, she said. I got a chill down my back. How old is she? With a daughter in her twenties she can’t be more than sixties, surely? So tender. And the daughter too. She gets uneasy, unsettled when I’m unwell, she says. I can see that. I’m sure she does, watching like he used to do with his mother for every symptom, every sign that they might go. Clinging too tight. I ask if she is warm. It’s an old house, we don’t have central heating, she says. We’ve got electric heaters and a coal fire. The antibiotics are kicking in now, she says. You’ll take it easy, I say. Yes, she says, I’m exhausted. I like to do puzzles, she says. Her voice always a little quavery when she introduces a new topic. Do you? I reply. Yes, crosswords, though not the hard ones, and the ones where you have to put in a missing word. Are they in Welsh? I want to ask. Though I don’t. Does she sound different, seem different when speaking her mother tongue? I didn’t used to know my mother when she spoke Norwegian. It frightened me sometimes. She became a stranger. I think of her with her puzzles, her Take a Break magazines, tending her garden with her carrots and runner beans. I tell her of the snowdrops I saw and she tells me of the daffodils in the next village that have been in bloom since Christmas. Her daughter drove her to see them. Just so that you can see that Spring is coming, Mam, she said.

I do it for myself as much as I do it for her. The first time I called she had to put the phone down after a minute she was so anxious. Now, she chatters away. Thank you, she always says at the end. Perhaps I shouldn’t try to make sense of what I do for her. Perhaps it is nothing. For me it is about engagement with another being’s life. I fall into it like a pillow, a feather bed. I see it. It is an intimacy. A lovingness. And I do. I do love her. I love the rise and fall of her voice, her tenderness, her uncertainty, her shyness. I think of her up there, exposed to the wind (I thought the roof was going to blow in), the snow and rain. A hilltop girl, born and bred. She doesn’t want to go or be anywhere else. A part of me. The inward, homed part of me. Soft. It is enough. There is a world there, in her voice. A world of experience. Of loving. Raising a child on her own, divorcing a husband who wasn’t kind. And then her accident. (I haven’t been right since.) And their various forays into alternative medicine. Her puttering as she calls it. Pottering, puttering. She takes time. She knows the landscape, the animals, her garden. Not small but big. True.

Poems are true, writes Peter Sansom.

She helps me pay attention beyond my self-serving, running-along mind. For that I am truly grateful. Keep safe and well. Till next week. x

It gave me a shock. For a start I thought I was alone. He’d come out of the shadows, probably having slipped through one of the side roads off the Prom. The sound was huge. A hard, echoing sound as if it were resonating from a deep cavern. I felt the hackles rise up my back. What is that? And then I saw him. A thin, rake of lad, stuffing his face with something from a KFC carton. He’d let out a belch and then resumed eating. No pardon, or acknowledgement of my presence. He just walked on by. Disgusting, isn’t it? he said when I recounted the experience at breakfast. I don’t know. Is it? I just couldn’t get over the magnitude of the sound and my reaction to it. She wrote about being scared of the dark. Was she, is she? I hadn’t known that. I am, was. I try to walk into it now but it clearly makes me super-sensitive, alert. And such shocks shatter something. Is it good to go through life so skinless?

There were lots of bodies about this morning. More than usual. I suppose it was something to do with the easing of the wind. I could walk the Prom this morning. I was glad to. I went without my ipod. In silence. I wanted to be open. A couple, arm in arm walked towards me along the Prom. Another were just clambering out of a car when I came down South Marine. And then there were the two boys in the doorway along Darkgate Terrace. I thought they were struggling to get the key in. I saw a flash of light, a mobile phone? No, it was a lighter. It worked. They both dragged on their cigarettes and walked on. There was an ambulance parked in the middle of Terrace Road. I watched as a boy stumbled and then dropped something. His legs almost gave way. A lad and girl were standing outside the Why Not? club. Nothing is going on. January’s torpor. Everyone tries to behave as normally as possibly, but there is just this gloom.

Daylight now. I’ve done my chores. She called them ‘chores’. I liked that. The sky is a baby-blue, its clouds yellowy. From our upstairs window I can see Elephant’s mother waving off her other two children. Elephant is resting on her hip, clinging. A zygote child, she has none of her parents extreme slimness. And she is bespectacled. Indulged though. I hear her shouting, crying, demanding. She often goes to Nursery School dressed as a princess, her pink Disney-like confection of a dress dragging along the ground. They’re not very friendly, are they? he says of them. He’s right, both parents avoid eye contact. Perhaps they just want to keep themselves to themselves, I say.

They haven’t collected the recycling. The bags still lie along pavements and in people’s front gardens. It’s unsettling such forgetting. It feels like the world is awry. Silly really considering the terror of so many beings’ lives. I hear of them through the radio, snapshots of war zones as I do my yoga. How do we live with such discrepancies? I think of what I don’t have and then of what I do. So much. It all boils down to love and being loved. I know this. Sugary or not. True. I am held. He catches me whenever I slip. There, always. Loving me. All that having is nought to that. Nought.

I haven’t long. There’s been too much to do this morning. Or at least I have set myself too much to do. Two loads of washing, ironing, washing the floors, vacuuming, shopping, changing the sheets and the dentist. We did fit in a coffee at Nero but even then I couldn’t wind down. And he was irritated by the crossword. They’re being too clever, he said. And that too gave me edginess. I’d chosen that crossword after all. Some days are like this. Do I just succumb to it? Let my heart race over nothing.

There are a group of Chinese students in the downstairs flat round the corner from ours and they’ve stuck various kinds of wrapping paper in the windows. Do they use curtains in China? The paper is shiny, metallic some of it, other pieces are floral. They have been stuck haphazardly. They are not Japanese, there is none of their finesse. They are smiley people though and friends with another Chinese family who live further along in a garden flat. They have a little boy who we saw crouching, his face concentrated. He was clearly having a poo and his mother whipped him away

I keep dreaming of eating out. Night after night. I am with different friends and acquaintances. I book tables, select restaurants. Sometimes I am late like last night. I speak to maître d’ hotels, waiters. I rarely actually eat, it is the meeting that is important and the selection of the place.

The wind was still furious this morning. I walked through the Buarth and then back through Llanbadarn. Rubbish dusted along the road. Bin bags lay in ditches, apocalypse-like.

Now rest.

Sometimes I walk with music in my ears. I don’t really approve of it, preferring to be open. Open to the sounds of sea, the birdsong, the chatter of voices, the occasional snatched conversation. But sometimes, like the last few days when the wind has roared I’ve wanted comfort. The sounds of familiar music. I always put it on shuffle liking the serendipity of it. Today it was Tracy Chapman, Neil Young, extracts from Proust’s Swann Way and Clarissa Pinkola Estes performing her version of the Sleeping Beauty. I’ve been waiting so long, says the Princess on awakening. For him, the Prince asks himself, or to be awakened. He will never know. I walked through Llanbadarn village while I listened. Sometimes I find her embellishments a little too much, preferring the Grimm’s early Puritan style, but today I liked it. It worked. It was apt. What with the wind and ‘all. But the other problem is when people speak to you. My headphones are hidden under hats and countless hoods and can’t be seen.

I’ve noticed him lots of times as I walk down Great Darkgate Street. Watched as he pressed the buzzer that lowered the platform on the back of his truck. I heard the rattle of his cages of bread and sandwiches as he rolled them across the road to Gregg’s shop. He spoke to me today. I couldn’t quite hear so I stopped walking and edged closer. Excuse me? The assault, he said. I read about the assault. Yes, I said, but it was at the weekend. Yes, he replied, Sunday morning. I come from Birmingham, that kind of thing happens every day of the week, but Aber? I know, I said. But it’s still a safe town. They arrested them then, he said, clearly wanting to talk. It must be a lonely job, no one awaiting his arrival. A thin man, very tall with a large bulbous nose. He’s on the mend now, I said pulling away. You work on the doors, don’t you? he asked. The doors? I asked. Yes, in one of the pubs, you’re on the doors? No, I said, no I don’t do that. Oh, he said. Bye, I said, and take care. Will do.

Clusters of snowdrops are beginning to appear in the front garden of one of the semi-detached houses on Llanbadarn Road. I moved in close and touched a hanging bloom. I planted some in Cambridge and in Truro. Do they still appear? Such a joy. I tell him of my discovery at breakfast. Marvellous, he said. The wind has blown all the recycling bags into the road. Well, virtually all. All so neatly tied up. Citizen-like we do as we are told. Like in my dream where I try to find a chair in a hotel and people have left their belongings on them, bagsy-ing them. Bagsy? he asked when I told him of it. Yes, we used to say it at all, I don’t know where it comes from. We used to say it too, he said. Bagsy, bagsy.

There was another rogue Christmas tree in the front parlour of a house in Llanbadarn, fully lit and sparkling.

I touch the outer wall of the church and turn back.

He gets an email from him asking to borrow some money. He’s lost his cards out there and needs to pay his hotel and get himself home. I worry about it. He is so chaotic. He’s getting quite doddery now, he says, he’s always losing things. He will help him. I have no choice, he says, and he is right. Help and trust. He’s in Malaysia, working, existing and seeing his love. He loves the exotic, the louche. And in between it all he writes, somehow, I don’t know how. He is not precious about it. He just gets on. Getting getting on.

I sent the application and then felt shit about myself because I go the email address wrong. Why can’t it all be smooth and perfect? Because this is not heaven. I do the best I can, always. There is nothing more you can do, he says. Nothing. Nada. Nil.

No going on the Prom, he said last night. You promise? The wind is too strong. Forty miles an hour they predicted, though since I’ve been out in it I’d say it isn’t that much. I miss it when I can’t walk by the sea. I miss that sensation of being blown through. I tried to go and look at it, creeping gingerly along the path from Laura Place to sneak a peek over the wall. But it was too strong. Just there. I was blown back and had to clutch at the Old College wall for ballast. So I wandered around town. Up hill and down dale. Up past the Old Library, past G.B. Fishing Supplies, then up past the Tan Shop, The Treehouse health food shop and the rows of solicitors, rental agencies and then Vaughan’s the electrical shop on the corner. I wound round Laura Place then up to the top of High Street to see if they’d taken down the police tape.

I’ve found out what it was, he told me at breakfast yesterday. A second year student from Cardiff was found unconscious on the ground. Three men aged twenty have been arrested. They were all talking about it at work too. One colleague said that she knew his mother. I heard the helicopter at five am, she said, they were obviously taking him to the Heath. His mother says he’ll pull through. But they had to relieve the pressure from his brain. They were all talking about it in the canteen too. One of them had a picture of him on her mobile phone. Apparently, he’s a second cousin or something, he said. That’s how gossip works, he said.

You alright? she asks as she brings us our coffees. She doesn’t run on so as she used to. She’s more relaxed with us and doesn’t need all that nervous chatter to fill the gaps. Cold ain’t it? she says. Windy, he says. Yeh, she says, I had my washing out yesterday, it was blowing lovely. Have I told you how much I like her? I cleave to her and to her and to her. It’s the big upper arms. She’s unflappable, capable. Got it all shipshape, she says. I never stop. She and her Gareth.

I finished it. I finished it in two sittings. All day at work. I was exhausted. Shot through. I need to tell her.

I walked up through The Buarth again this morning. I wanted to see if the yellow room was still lit. I saw it on Sunday morning. A stark room, lit from a naked bulb hanging from it’s corniced ceiling. There were two immense paintings hanging on opposite walls. A grand room, a front room without curtains. A gallery of art. A house of art. Restrained, puritan, sparse. But no, it was dark. There are lots of house lights on as I walk on the early hours. Mostly with drawn curtains. Are they students still cramming for exams?

I will finish my application to the Open today. Just the statement to do then let go. Pay and let go. I’ve tried. That’s all.

The wind scatters rubbish bags across the road. Should I pick them up? I like to walk without engaging with what is around me. To just observe. Bits of paper, plastic bags flutter. A foiled-up johnny. I saw a still-lit Christmas tree in one of the windows, will it be there all year? I understand.

A girl skittering along on heels, suddenly buckles at the knee, tumbling, crumbling into the gutter. She falls back in slow motion, raising her legs to the sky. Her face is bemused but no untroubled. For fuck’s sake, Alex, shouts a man running towards her. She lets herself be helped to her feet.

I got drenched yesterday. His coat was sopping. I remembered another walk years ago in Cambridge. After a row I walked in the afternoon. A summer downpour. Rain in my shoes. Squelching.

All these resolutions to learn, to get better, to understand more, to gain talent, knowing, skill, aptitude. To know. A poem a day. That’s what I intended. Where to fit it in? You want to achieve more in your one life than most people achieve in six, he said. All those years ago as his Siamese purred and miaowed in the background.

Where’ve you come from? the police woman asked me, did you go under the tape? Yes, I said, I thought it was only for cars. This wasn’t strictly true. I knew I was misbehaving but I thought I could just slip through without being noticed. What harm could it do? Where do you want to get to? she asked. She looked a little stressed. A small woman, petite even. The station, I answered. Well you’ll just have to go back the way you came, she said, I need to keep this contained. Has something happened? I asked. She didn’t reply and I turned round to go back under the tape, before taking the steps down under the bridge. A little bit of nothing in our small town. What had happened? An incident of some kind, clearly. A stabbing, the discovery of an unexploded WWII bomb, an escaped criminal, a heist, a hide-out? It intrigued me for a moment, then it was gone. I’ll tell him when I get home then let it go. Forget it. You naughty thing, going under the tape, he said. Yes, I said, aren’t I?

In the end it was nice.

I didn’t want to do it. I was dog-tired. It’s the carrying of all this tension. It shatters me. And when the tightness finally leaves, my body feels bruised and battered. I didn’t want to do it. All that way. All that way to sew on some beads. Why had I signed up for it? Because I had been beguiled by her sweetness, her openness and her simplicity. I wanted to continue to be a little in her light. I get like that with people. I am sponge to what I see as their loveliness. I want to be in their umbra. So I’d put my name down on a whim. Twenty-five quid, certainly. I’d love to. Two and half hours it took. Dog-tired both of us. A pot of tea helped. A pot of tea with a brown and orange pom pom tea cosy. We ordered another pot. Do you want the same cosy or another one? asked the hyper-camp man from behind the counter. No, let’s stick with this one, I said. I love your dress, said the girl making lunches in the back room. And I love yours, I replied. Which was true. I’d admired it. A lovely, fresh dress, a full-scale print of a summer’s day, blue sky and everything. And I haven’t got a dress on at all, said the camp man. Next time, I said. I like him. I remembered him from my last visit. I like to hear him talk with his high, melodic voice. And watch his walk, a rolling, hip-swinging one, with his pinny tied high up his waist. I love it that he can be this way without restraint. Marvellous.

It was nice to sit there sewing. There were eleven of us in all. All women. Wouldn’t it be great if a man turned up, I said to the woman on my right. I don’t think she understood what I meant for she made no answer. I should’ve explained. You know, anything to break the gender stereotyping, but I left it. I didn’t want to make an exhibition of myself that day. Just be quiet. She was lovely, lots of hugs. I hope she likes the article. I want to be kind. It was nice. Companionable, just to hear them chatter. The woman with her wheezing breath breaking the sometime silence. Oh, God, I sewn it to my skirt, exclaimed one woman and her friends laughed. Then half and hour later, the same woman to her companion, are your hens laying? I learnt a little but it wasn’t really about that. It was just something different. Three hours of gentle, orderly distraction and using my hands.

I’ve begun her book. We talked about it in the car. The listening to Chopin mostly. He struggles with her. He sees through what he thinks is a pose. I am not sure. I think she is genuine, earnest, true. I feel such compassion for her. I think she is at odds with the world sometimes. I want to hold her. I always have. There is something like vulnerability in her that is hard to witness.

Oh, the fear, it continues to assail me. Will it help? Can I help myself? So much fear. Fear of every step. Just do it. That’s all you have to do is do without fear of failure. The black bag. Love that failing part. As you love the failing light, the failing moon, the failing breath. Ring those golden bells soon, eh? Soon. And let there be rest.

I only have a moment. This will have to be a quickie. I’m always chasing my tail. It’s become a little out of control. Even on holiday I’m doing it.

I chanted them all the way home from my walk this morning. I wanted to remember every nuance, every breath, every rest. The first was heard outside the Pier Pressure nightclub. A man with no coat on making large gestures with his hands as he spoke. What he said was lost to the wind. The woman he was speaking to was another matter. A broad woman wearing a large, outsize navy blue parka. Shut up! she was shouting. Shut up, no one is speaking to you. She too made big expressive gestures with her arms. Be gone! she shouted. Be gone. Past it. Gone. The second was outside The Angel pub. I didn’t see her. I just heard her voice, soft, feminine, imploring and ending her sentences on an up, questioning. I know it’s not my fault, she was saying, but I can’t help blaming myself. The final part of the sentence was more like an enquiry than a statement. I didn’t hear his reply.

They are back in force. The students. They were everywhere this morning. Was it the wind? I’ve seen horses go wild in the wind. A girl was standing outside the telephone box opposite Slater’s Bakery. She was reaching down into a voluminous handbag. A trickle of water was running from the under the phone box. Had she, or someone else peed there? It doesn’t bear thinking about. She looked at me rather sheepishly. So perhaps it was her. Desperate measures.

Off. I must be off. Work then Cwmbran. A bientot. What is the French for or?

We had a tiff he and I. It rarely happens. The flashpoint, when it does happens, tends to be over something technical. We are both technophobes, scared of what we don’t understand. And we don’t understand technology. We get by. He with his iPad and iPhone and me with my laptop and current forays into film-making. It terrifies me. And the worst thing is I feel so stupid about it all. I believe he feels the same and it makes us squabble. This time it was over the DVD. We were watching the closing scenes of Andrew Davies’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice before going to bed. We’ve seen it loads of times. Countless times, but for some reason, this and our last ‘screening’ of North & South, have been hugely enjoyable. You notice the nuances in the endless re-seeings. I like that. You can take time with it, go back, as we do, several times. Well, when we turned the DVD machine on the picture went green. I’d cleaned the house yesterday so the inevitable, you must’ve touched something, followed. I am so careful. Always. Anyway, I got up and fiddled about. Careful. Any good? Yes. Finally. But then the picture started to stick, just at the moment when Lady Catherine de Bourgh came to bawl out Elizabeth in the Bennet’s little paddock. Shall we just leave it and it may right itself? I asked. No, I’ll take it out and clean it, he said. He did so and then it wouldn’t read it. Whirr whirr went the machine. I think it’s bust, I said. No, it’s the disc. It keeps saying ‘error disc’. I try another and now it won’t open. In the end he accuses me of being silly. How that word gets under my skin. Am I ever silly? His mother used to say it. I would bite my lip, knowing her goodness and his tenderness towards her. Don’t call me silly. Just don’t. I go to bed in a huff. He comes in with a desultory kiss. Then I wake in the early hours and remember our discord. He feels it too and comes in a second later. Sorry. No, I’m sorry. We were just tired. Yes, we were. Two things kaput. First the tyre with a nail and now the DVD machine. What next?

He sent the film. I cannot say what I think of it. I like it’s simplicity. But what others will make of it, I don’t know. I cannot say. I just cannot. But it is made. I am fascinated by hands. Hands working. What is that about?

Another frosty morning. But now, at 9.15 the sun shines yellow and orange on the rooftops. He is at the chiropodist. How prosaic. He cannot feel his feet. Sometimes he loses his slipper under the table and doesn’t know for minutes. Poor love. He needs to have them tended regularly. He is seventy now. Sometimes I have to pinch myself. How I love him. How I love him. This much, this high, this big.

I did it. I wrenched it out of me. And it was fine. It usually is. All that worry exhausts me. You look so pretty, he said afterwards, now the strain has gone. We were sitting in the Arts Centre, me with a cup of coffee and he with some water. Come back at 10.45 he’d said. Go and have a cup of tea. Time goes so fast. I wanted to sit with him, bask in the relief of it. I did it. Well, he did it really. He set it all up. It was all ready when I arrived. We did it last night, he said. It took half and hour to set up. The camera, the monitor and a chair draped in black. Perfect. Three-quarters cordoned off with a screen. It was perfect, except that is for the cold. My hands barely worked. The sewing was crap but I loved watching my hands move on the screen. He did it. But I did it too. If organising it, conceiving it and doing it counts. We stood in his office watching him begin to edit it on his Mac. I wish I had your technical skill, I said. I taught myself, he said modestly. It’s about not being fearful, I suppose. It crashed. Even that didn’t throw him. He was sanguine. I know what you want now. So we left him too it.

I did it but I’m not sure how to judge it. Will it do? As an experiment in what is possible, certainly. Shall I enter it for the Open? I want to offer all three options. Again, that will be an experiment too. Can they see the possibilities? Are they Open at the Open? I’ve nothing to lose, except the £25 entry fee. It is all part of taking myself onwards. I’m making this mine, this funny new practice of mine.

I only managed to write one word in the fifteen minutes. Itself. That is all I managed and the even then the f was a bit dodgy. But it isn’t about the sewing. It isn’t about the craft. It is about the doing of it. And that, at least to me, looked beautiful. Disembodied hands. Articulating. Creating. Writing. Forming. Reading.

A frosty morning. It glittered on the road and paths. Do you have snow? I asked her as she gently placed my apples on the counter. No, though they are promising sleet showers at Devil’s Bridge on Monday. She tells me her cottage is cold. We’ve only got storage heaters. We just use blankets, she says and laughs. I hate being cold, he said this morning. I know. I know my love. The flat is artic at times. Bryan, our draught excluder-cum-dachshund, doesn’t. Draught exclude, that is. Come on Bry, he says as we stand in the hallway putting on shoes, buck up. Now the sun shines. A beautiful day, despite the cold. She said she is going to take her little daughter to the pantomime. Cinderella. Her son and her husband will stay at home. A boy’s night in, she says, with a curry. They sound such a nice family. I cleave to her, and her, and her.

Despite the cold there were several people about this morning. Girls mostly. Students probably. Last minute exam nerves? We saw lots of them yesterday in the canteen. Foreign students doing their last minute cramming. One, a Chinese girl, mouthed the sentences as she read. Shorty John does that when he reads, he said later at supper. That’s OK, I reply, sometimes that’s the way some people learn. Yeh, he said, but he’s nearly eighty.

I saw one man at 3.30 am this morning smoking outside the King’s Hall. He had on a woolly hat, trainers, tracksuit bottoms and a navy towelling dressing gown.

They’re featuring an abridged version of Colin Thurbron’s (is that how you spell his name?) travel book about Siberia. What stunning writing. It stops me still. This morning he was writing about how the fifty years of atheism in Russia has virtually been forgotten. Faith is rife. It delights and warms them. We had icons in our home, one of his interviewees, now a priest, tells him. That’s how I know about our religion. It was never forgotten. Never lost.

I dreamt of her last night. I’d met her at a station. A big, cavernous affair. We talked, walked, looked at food halls (one had wine made from tuna fish, what is that about?). I asked about her daughters, her book (though my questions about the book prompted questions from her, did she know that I hadn’t read it yet?). She was dismissive of her achievements, made getting a Leverhulme grant sound like a nothing. Then she asked me.

What I don’t understand is, what you have come for?

Do other people feel like this? This bleakness, this closed-in sensation? The darkness comes down over me like a shroud. I do what I can to defeat it. I light candles, I keep busy, I hug water bottles, wear big jumpers. Anything that is cosy, warming, softening. He has gone back to bed. I could do that, god knows I hate to leave it when my alarm goes off. But doing seems to be what I need to do. To keep busy hoping that it will pass. That this gloom, this ever-descending bleakness will pass. I walk out into it. It is hard to do that. Every cell in my body shouts out against it, don’t do it, stay in, stay warm, stay in the light. I often dream that my torch doesn’t work. That it’s beam won’t come on. It is never as bad then. Always worse in prospect. How like life. Walking into it makes it manageable. Then I become scared of what awaits me on my return, what the daylight will bring. What is it that is bringing this anxiety? Is it merely symptoms of SAD or the menopause perhaps? Or is it some deeper ennui?

Doing something new. I’m doing something new today and I’m completely out of my comfort zone. And having to rely on another. I cannot direct, cannot take charge, I have to acquiesce, to give in. It doesn’t come naturally. He is gruff, cross at times but I can manage that. I like him for all that. We’ll see. I trust him too.

I asked about her burn. She rolled back her sleeve. A nasty one. I felt it. I felt the heat of it, the sting of it in the pit of my stomach. She doesn’t rattle on as she did. She is calmer with us, with me especially. Respectful. I like her. She warms me, makes me feel wrapped up, cossetted. She is the kind of woman, mother who makes everything all right. And she loves her husband. My Gareth she calls him. He started her car for her so that it was all warm and cosy for when she got in. Everyone needs a Gareth, I said. Yeh, she said, he’s terrific. She is dismissive about her burn. Mind you, you should’ve heard me, she said. It was New Year’s Day. I wanted to do the same meal I’d done for one son, for the other. It was alright, I put Vaseline on it. She has big arms. Farmer’s wife arms. Everything is just so behind the counter. She is proud of her neatness, her order. A worker. She works hard. Is open. And loving. I can see that.

I fret and fret when I am bleak like this. How to be, how to behave with strangers. They wanted to cancel the booking because I wasn’t available for the next guest. It didn’t feel right, I stood my ground. Have I alienated them? I need to trust, all will be well. What is for me will come to me. Always. Always. Let it go. Breathe and let it go. Give the day over, be present but detached. So easy to write, not so easy to put into practice.

A man walked across the road from me. He, like me, seemed without purpose, a stroller. An early morning perambulator. I had my music on and watched the forecourt attendant in the 24 hour garage shout a greeting to a customer. I couldn’t hear the words. He was mopping the floor at the same time. Sometimes the music makes me feel separated. But I have it low. I could still hear the birds. The blackbirds. The robins. They were all in full song.