Category: Writings

There is a hard frost this morning. It is on the road, on the pavement, a shimmering glister of slipperiness. I walk gingerly. A result of ageing, that vulnerability, the one that does all it can to stop the body falling. All that time taken up repairing, it takes too long. It is beautiful though and makes up for the loss of the Christmas lights. There is nothing to see in people’s windows, they are all gone. All that cheer. Just January and her bleakness and cold. The cold is strange this morning. There is warm air too. It smells sweet, like gas. Is there a gas leak in town? It doesn’t smell like it used to. They changed it. It used to be odourless, I think. Until people started gassing themselves in their ovens. Just like Sylvia Plath. Was it like going to sleep? She put blankets up against the doors to protect her children from it. How desperate. Poor love. To get to the stage where there is nothing. You can’t see anything worth staying for. Leaving. Leaving it all. So the air was sweet, first along the North Prom then down towards the harbour. It smelt like chocolate. Was someone baking cakes or biscuits at three in the morning? Some people believe that spirits conjure up smells. I read some where that someone kept smelling fried onions, or is that from fiction? Was it the ghost in It’s a Wonderful Life? Was a spirit haunting the Prom? Where was the warmth coming from?

Sometimes I don’t want to listen to things I see on the radio listings. I think I want one particular thing and then another offers itself. I think about doing a piece of writing/sewing where I just list what I listen to while I work. Anyway, I didn’t want to listen to the biography of Muriel Spark and then I did. It was great. A Vital Spark. The author writes about visiting her in Italy. She was famously impractical and moved in with her friend Penny, a sculptor who did everything for her, housework, cooking and typing manuscripts. ‘Writers are only half there’, she said. Am I less of a writer, artist because I do the other too? It is a perpetual question. The myth is of the obsessive, the one who writes/makes through the night eschewing food and sleep for the great work. I am too regular for that. I like my rhythm, I like a neat house, order. And yet, she was fascinating to listen to. A liver of life, certainly. And we had our leaving in common. I tried to do the best I could with my son, she said. Yes. A vital spark. Yes. That is good.

I am so edgy about tomorrow. So uncomfortable with the not knowing. The clumsiness of having to put myself in someone else’s hands. All will be well, at least it will be what it will be. Let it go. Let it become what it can and will be. Trust. That is all you can do, just trust.

The wind is bitter. An east wind that blows low along the ground. I watched it catch up a plastic bag. It had been lurking around a bin in the Castle playground. Then all of a sudden it was raised aloft, high into the air. It danced, dived and turned around and around before dropping hard to the ground. I stood for a moment by the hydrangeas, listening for their rustle before another bag, a transparent one, crashed sharply against the edge of the trimmed lawn. The wind stirs up the flotsam. It makes the ground white with cold. Dry with cold. The cold dry.

We were the first to arrive at the supermarket. The shelves were still bare. Shelf stackers stood in huddles unpacking vegetables and fruit. They talked of football and rugby. A restricted code of players names and tactics. Another language. Male talk. Male banter. This cold saps one’s strength, one’s resolve and desire to do anything but stay in, hot water bottle on the lap. But it is done. All unpacked and done. I like the routine of our week. The taking care of it all. Lists made, meals planned and then this glorious space in which to work.

I will write it. I will write it for me. I think about who I am writing it to. Myself, obviously but who is the reader. I write for him and for her, though I suspect she’d never want to read it. How would I have felt if my mother had done something so confessional? Would I have jumped at the chance to know her better? I believe I would. She revealed so little. I don’t know whether she was introspective. It wasn’t comfortable for her to be so, I suspect, as it wasn’t for him. I am not like my parents, I never have been. I am grateful for them. They have been the means of this experience of life for me. The conduit. Can I let them go now? Now that they are gone. Can I let go of the desire to please them? It is futile. A waste of energy. I think about where they are, and indeed who they are. I think their ties to us were slight, in life as in death. I am glad. I like to be free.

I wanted sunlight yesterday. It shone so warmly, a red light on the roofs. But when I went out into it it was cold. I leant against our car and closed my eyes. I let it touch my face willing it to warm me. I wanted to do so much, to walk, to stride out and yet I also wanted to sleep, to lose myself into unconsciousness.

My dreams have eluded me the last few days. I like to remember them. I get a sense of spaces, of how spaces feel but the details have been lost. One came back to me as I walked yesterday. An image of South Marine Terrace with all the houses shot through by Storm Eleanor. Their walls were punctured and stuffed with a cotton wool-like substance. Did it unsettle me? I don’t think so. The damage was being dealt with. Everything was a little surreal, even in the dream.

I think about her as a mother. She is so capable, so steady, a changed girl. I am so proud of her. Such a gift.

It is ten past six in the morning and her lighted window is the only one I can see in the darkness. As in a Hopper painting, what I can see through her window provides a narrative of her life. I’ve seen her many times, awake like me, in the early hours. I imagine her to be a nurse. There is something no-nonsense yet bustling-busy about her. She is a rounded woman with bright scarlet hair that has been scooped up into a bun. This morning her ample body is swaddled in a white toweling dressing gown. She seems to be talking to someone sitting at the other end of the kitchen, by another window that is curtained off. She stands over a table chopping or preparing something. It is a cluttered room. As is what I can only imagine to be her bedroom where the shut curtain drapes over several piles of books haphazardly placed on the windowsill. I like to watch other people’s lives. I find it immensely restful. Just to observe, not participate.

Town is still quiet. My walk was lovely. Chilly, certainly, but not as dire as they’d forecast. My hands didn’t sting and the wind was nothing. There was a girl outside Pier Pressure shouting. I couldn’t make it out at all. Just a stream of swear words but lyrically linked. Was she Irish? And I fuckin’ did an’ I fuckin’ said an’ he said an’ I said will you fuckin’ listen an’ he said……A man was standing before her trying to calm her down, another was just staring. She was a tiny thing, wiry. There was almost an insanity to her. Is it just booze? Does she need help?

I thought as I walked. I need to let go of it all. All this worldly stuff, this constant seeking. The achieving of them, those goals, makes no earthly difference to my state of mind. Nothing does and nothing will. Ever. It is merely gratification, empty. That candy floss again. He wrote about sitting on a park bench for days and months, just staring. How attractive that sounds. Not because I long to be lazy but for its potential for opening up, shedding and getting to the nub of it all. She said that the course will culminate in a day of silence. How will that be? I want to be able to do it on my own. I try to do without stimulation, that great avoiding. I walked sans music today. I am in silence still. Four hours of silence. Of being alone. And yet, I’m not, not really. We talked about that lady for whom the ambulance was late. She died alone. She must’ve been so scared, he said. But they were devastated. Of course they were, it is their job to save, to make better, to provide succour. They let her down. They left her to die alone. She told me that her friends mother insisted that she wanted her own way. To be left alone. I was on my way to my mother. She died before I got there. An hour, that’s all. Would she have preferred it? The final goodbye spoken to the wall. Did she think of what she was leaving behind?

I am a little anxious about Wednesday. It is all new to me. Do I ask too much, will it be possible to produce something professional? All I can do is wait and see. And ask for help.

I must leave it now. I am rather like a terrier, I always want things done. Done and dusted.

I send her love. My love, longing for sleep. I remember the weight of it all. And he, he too needs sleep. Let it be so.

I regard her as a gift. Not just for the love and awe her tiny little form excites in me but for the way in which she has brought her mother and I closer. At least it feels that way to me. I sat with the phone held close to my ear relishing every breath, every pause. For a moment I lost my self-consciousness with her. We just talked. It was prosaic stuff, of no real import, but there was a naturalness, an ease between us that was manna to my heart.

She rang you back, he kept saying. She rang you back. She saw who’d called and she rang you back. She wanted to speak to you. Yes, I said, she did. I think of all those mothers I interviewed, the life coach in particular, with her tears coming in great wracking, noisy, boo-hooing sobs. She wanted to know her grandchild. Her daughter had informed her by email of his birth, had sent her a few snaps but held complete control as to when or indeed if she would be allowed to meet him. I stood outside of her pain, watched and tried to make sense of what it was that grieved her the most. Not being ‘normal’? A normal grandparent in the eyes of the world. Was that it? Or was there genuine pain at not being able to interact with the child of her blood. It was so hard to decide without asking her directly. We all feel differently. I am detached. I know this. It makes it all bearable. The grieving was impossible to live with. It had to stop. There is glass between us. Until, that is, she is in my sight. And now it is the two of them. They are of me. It is that simple. No one can take that away from you, he says, no one. Does it matter? Does this blood-ownership matter? It’s an ego thing, this needing to matter to another. She has so many who care for her, and I am glad of that. I want her to be safe, to be protected, guided and loved. I ask no more. I am a child when I do. And that is not her problem. She has done nothing wrong. Have I? I cannot say. She won’t tell me. I did the best I could. That is all. That is all.

I asked her. I plucked up the courage and asked her. She seemed delighted, he said afterwards. He’s right, she did light up. I touched her arm. I don’t know yet what it will bring. All I know is I need this interaction with real human beings. I want to hear their stories. Record and work with them. It is about the ordinary, at least as it seems on the outside but I want to find the extraordinary, to show the uniqueness, the idiosyncrasies.

Town is still quiet. Hardly any wind this morning but the air was chill. I felt the difference on my face, though it was not unpleasant. She replied saying, yes, you must come and stay. We will walk by the river. I am touched. I want to see friends this year. To stay with them, be in their sight for a little while. To connect, E. M. Forster wrote. And to see the two of them. My two little girls. Soon. February she said. Soon.

I miss it when I don’t manage to write this each day. Not always uplifting, I nevertheless need this blurting out of thoughts. Town is still quiet in the mornings. The revelling is over. All is flat. Grey and flat. Sombre even.

And the sea, too has calmed down. The other day is was lashing over the Prom. It is an uneasy sensation watching it seemingly reclaiming the land; taking over, with its dirty, swirling mass. The shops along Terrace Road had their sand bags jammed up against their doors. It is a messy, murky business. The water is pernicious. It creeps in, seeps under, cold and muddy. We drove down Pier Street in time to catch one of the waves as it smacked hard against the Pier. A triumphant arc of durge capped with white foam, that flung itself high into the air before coming down hard and spilling along the pavement. People were out with their mobile phones held aloft. It is captivating, enthralling, like watching a lion hunt a wildebeest, you want to stop it, stop it happening but you are transfixed by the terrible inevitability of it. It is so much more than we are, thank God.

We’d planned it for days. A little respite. A seminar. A talking through of my proposal. Should we ring to check? No, he said, I’ve looked on their website and there’s nothing there about them being closed. But as we climbed the drive it didn’t look good. There were great lines of muddy tyre marks along the tarmac and part of the front entrance was cordoned off. Sorry for any inconvenience, stated the sign, while we’re building two new luxury self-catering chalets. There’s a note on the door, he said, you stay here. Shut, he said on his return. Shut till January 14. It’s the second time this has happened. Can you blame them? Not really. They want a break. Christmas must be so demanding. But I wanted the comfort of their sofas, their tea in metal pots where the handle gets hot. I wanted the white linen on the tray. I wanted that stultifying silence. I wanted to see which puzzle one of the guests had started and to talk, talk to him about my ideas. We were thrown. Do we just drive straight home? Or find somewhere else? We decided to stay and parked the car in a small car park round the corner from an inn we’d been to before. The last time was terrible. It was almost the end for us. Both at the end of our tether. Grief, uncertainty, I cannot speak on his behalf. I’d come back from Norway empty. His mother was teetering towards death and he was just as lost. We couldn’t talk it through, make any sense of it.

I’m glad we went in. It was empty except for two men sharing tea and scones in the window. We pushed through into the public bar. A small wood fire was trying to burn. The cleaner’s tray was still one of the tables. She had a bob of shining black hair and was singing. You’re singing, he said. Oh, don’t mine me, she said laughing, I’m just the cleaner. We shared tea and water. I put on the tape recorder and we laughed as every possible extraneous noise began to happen. The main telephone rang and the man behind the bar answered it, all very loudly. Then his phone went, it was a woman from Planet Organic ringing about his enquiry for Jason Mouthwash. This took at least five minutes. Ten minutes later another woman from the same firm called back. Just confirming your order, she said. Then our tea arrived. A jingle jangle of  pots. Water? Oh, the man replied, it’s just coming. Then he had to reignite the fire. If I can just squeeze by? he said. I was sitting right on top of it. Nevertheless progress was made. You’ll have to make it more coherent than that, he said, looking serious. I have to tell you what I think, be tough. Yes, you do and I love you for it.

I’ll get there. My mind is working on it. I want it. But mostly I want to do myself and ideas justice. That is all I can do, the best I can do. Always.

The pub smelt beautiful. It smelt of wood smoke and wood polish. I’m glad we went. Glad we went back. Thank you. Thank you for everything.

It was enough. It was enough to get me panicking. Is it a wart? That spot on my forehead? That spot on my forehead that refuses to disappear. I felt queasy at the thought, assailed by folkloric images of witches, hags and gnarled fingered wise-women. I tried to be sanguine. They happen. They are just a part of getting older. It’ll go. Put some stuff on it. Which I do, only to then read that it should not be used on the face. I then try to peel the it off. I succeed eventually and am left with a bleeding circle. A perfect circle on my forehead. Like the red sequins that Asian women attach to their forehead, their third eye. Is it a red sequin (I always thought it was) or is it a spot red henna or cochineal? Now it looks like a spot, he said triumphantly. And it’s just what I would’ve done. So there we are. No closer to the truth. The scab which eventually replaced the bleeding was still there this morning. A spot or a wart? Who knows?

We always approach the supermarket shop, twice weekly, separately, with separately trolleys and separate lists. It’s faster that way and wandering around one pushing the trolley one giving directions used to make me feel a little uncomfortable. Memories of childhood and shopping with my mother perhaps? I’d finished before him on Monday and I spied him at the other end of the shop talking to the cleaner. Apparently he too had had a cold. Couldn’t do a thing, he told him. No energy, no energy. Shame he couldn’t take the time off. He was laughing when he got into the car. Do you know what he said when I asked him how he was, he asked. No, I replied. I ‘ate January, he said. I ‘ate January, he repeated. And before I could reply, he said, and I ‘ate February too.

I haven’t made my resolutions yet. I haven’t felt inspired to do so. There is too much I want to change and that concerns me. And yet, I know in my heart of hearts it isn’t about external change but internal. A small tweak and all will feel better. It is just these low dragging spirits. The dark. The endless dark. See, it’s past eight am and it is still dark. And yet, I know that it isn’t personal. The darkness has its place too. I need to cease judging, weighing up good against bad, just let it be what it is.

Anyway back to resolutions.

(1) to accept what is. That’s a big one but instrumental in achieving the second.

(2) to be content.

(3) to pay attention and

(4) whatever else be kind.

I could flesh them out with all those little details I obsess over. But essentially that is it. That is my promise for 2018. Begin today. So I shall accept the wind (which is still howling), my spot/wart, my cold (though it is improving), my jaded spirits, my wobbliness over my work, the dark and all the precious gifts that this life of mine brings. By accepting all those things, which I shall judge as neither good or bad, I will be content. My back won’t stiffen, I will breathe steadily and calmly and I will smile. I shall pay attention to every job that I do today. Whether it is intellectual, practical or domestic, each will share equal weight in my attention. I will watch myself doing things, paying attention to my hands as they type, as they prepare food, or clean or hang out the washing. I will feel my inner body as I move, as I breathe, aware of every breath and the absolute miracle of it. I will taste food as I’ve never tasted it before. And I shall be kind. Kind in thought, word and deed. Letting the negative and unkind thoughts and actions that come unbidden float away unacknowledged. That is my work. This is my work. All else is inconsequential.

The morning tries to break. The second wash is done. He lies abed resting. All is well. Thank you.

I didn’t walk this morning. I feel rather bereft, strange, as if something has been lost. A moment. That coldness on my face. Bearing witness to another kind of life. The night time life. The dark.

He insisted. You’re not going out, he said. It won’t hurt. Just once. Though he is threatening the same stricture for tomorrow. Not in that wind, he said. You’re not. It’s a play. A playful bullying, born out of kindness. I know this. And I know that I sometimes need to be cajoled into obeying.

Virgo are rigid, I read yesterday as I glanced over some internet astrology sites. Stuff and nonsense, I know. And I stopped myself reading before I went too far. I used to enjoy it all that prediction stuff. I wanted to know the future, to know that something marvellous was on the horizon. You see, all that romanticism that is bound to failure. It doesn’t work that way, and nor should it. What is, is now. And that is all. All there is. I believe in pure astrology but it is the interpretation of it for the mass market that is rather dubious. I think this year will be significant for me, it is a multiplication of sevens after all, but the real significance will be internal not external. For that is the only true reality. The rest is like candy floss, of no fundamental substance.

Are we rigid? I don’t like to think so, but perhaps I am. Yes, I know I am. I need to do what I set out to do. To not stray from my course. And yet, to sleep as I did this morning for an extra three hours was so nice. I feel better for it. Going out into the dark at this time of the year is so hard. I know it isn’t the Arctic or down a pit, but the wind can be ferocious and the cold bitter. But I am cleansed, cleared out by doing so and I need to move.

This dis-ease externally is merely a reflection of what is going on internally. I welcome it. It excites reflection. One becomes intensely aware of one’s body. Its edges, its bones, its skin. Everything is felt, everything computed. Smells come intermittently, as if slightly delayed, and tastes are more about feel than flavour, hot is very hot, cold if very cold. And the shivering. Again a gift. One feels one’s vulnerability, one’s tenderness. And still I get this desire to solve, to re-address my issues with my work. To unravel it. To heal it as I heal myself.

My morning dream was so prosaic. I had to laugh. I was in an enormous M&S. He and I were due to take a journey, though he wasn’t with me then. I thought I would try to find a sandwich for him. A ham and mustard perhaps. But there had clearly been a run on the sandwiches. Almost all of them were gone. Women stood in my way so I couldn’t see what was what. I felt irritated and tried to redeem the situation by seeking out some yoghurt for myself. Again, nothing doing. Just ones with fruit in them. Then I found a seat and waited. My sister arrived and I stood up to greet her, thinking that she would be leaving with us. Oh, no, she said stretching out her hand to a woman sitting at the table next to me, I’ve still got a full day’s work to do. I’m her sister, I said also stretching out my hand. So I gathered, said the woman, offering me the wrong hand to shake. I then thought about a chest of drawers in the place that we were leaving. I’d imagined I could just take it with us without unpacking it. But I saw in my mind’s eye that it’s lower drawers were damaged and knew what I’d have to empty it and leave it behind. Besides, the things inside weren’t mine. Weren’t ours.

Prosaic yes, but revealing. Most revealing. I have much to do. Begin writing. What I don’t know. Just make a start and it will come. I avoid it. It’s like facing that white space and actually walking into it. A fearful act or an opportunity. Let’s see, eh?

Poets always notice the details, he said. Nina Bougin’s hens scratching circles in the white dust.

Always the details.

The homeless man was sleeping under the castle this morning. That cavernous space where I’ve sometimes seen the dancing boys. He was curled up on the one bench, his rucksack at his feet and his trainers placed on the ground before him. Self-contained, neat even in such dire circumstances. I remember the same. The same need to clean and order. How is it to sleep rough? How is it to hear the sea, feel the wind throughout the long live night without cover? His head was pulled inside the sleeping bag. A snail withdrawn. Closed in. I hope he is safe. Does he sleep? They say that life expectancy on the street is only a couple of years. It is hard. We are not designed to eschew warmth and comfort. Does he choose this?

I expected revellers. I had heard the fireworks through my open window and clocked that it was probably nearly twelve. I thought about J and her family attending the New Year’s Eve party at The Marine. Her and her family go every year, she told me, without fail. I’ve only been in once. It was one Christmas and nothing else was open. We sneaked a look in at the ballroom. A huge space with a specially-made dancing floor. This morning the lights in the bar were still on. A man stood outside smoking, his bow tie undone and hanging round his neck. Teams of people spilled out of Pier Pressure. Young and old. A barefoot girl, skittering along the pavement, called out Happy New Year to me. I was, for some reason, inordinately pleased. Happy New Year to you, I called back.

My cold is making me feel crook. You should rest, he implores. I know. I know. But I need to walk. I need to continue. I may have to give in. Not yet. Not yet.

A large woman in a wide tulle skirt and bolero jacket looking like some Botero odalisque walks ahead of me, her arm linked through her partners. He has his hands in his jacket pocket. Lip Lickin’ Chicken is doing a roaring trade.

The moon is a perfect circle. White today. Pure white. I walk in its light. The street lights are on in St David’s Road. And I am momentarily thrown, expecting darkness when there is light. Is there an anticlimax after all this revelling? I can’t remember, it has been so long. I thought of being 21 and travelling down to London to be with D. Trafalgar Square was a sea of people, surging. I felt scared, out of control. And then going from strange house to strange house, D leaving me for hours on end. Or so it felt. Was it fun? I was alive to my desire, certainly. Waiting to be saved.

The starlings still chattered, the stink of their guano was the same. Nothing has changed. Another day just different numbers.

Now remember a virus can bring you down, he said at breakfast. Yes. But I don’t want to write about it. Not today. I am trying to revolutionise my way of thinking. Throwing it all out. It takes courage and stamina. Both of which are in short supply for the moment.

Just don’t look at it. It will only irritate you. It doesn’t irritate me. It unsettles me. She does. Always has. And yet, there is love and this overwhelming compassion. I won’t. I won’t look at it. Just once  a week to check for messages. That is all. I promise.

Shall I ask her today? It isn’t a concrete way of learning, she said to me. No. This is. I want this. This human one-to-one. If she’s in I will ask her. Make a start. There is power in beginning, said Goethe. Amen to that.

My path isn’t clear.

Has it ever been?

Ordinariness is a sin, a crime, said the Indian prince who died alone.

I think about notions of success. What is it? What constitutes a success? The making of a lot of money, a change in circumstances? Public recognition? Or a job well done? I thought it would come in a rush. I’d hold my breath waiting for it. Just around the corner, surely. Soon. But it didn’t come, at least not in the way I expected. The stuff I was expecting was like candy floss. A nothing, a sticky, fluffy nothing. And a denial of what is. What is now. I look out of the window and there is the moon, a yellow shape against the black. It’s not round, not oval, a misshapen pizza base. It stills me. As does the brief power cut we had during breakfast. Nothing is real. No thing is real. It is all illusion. Even the moon, sent to steady us with its seeming constancy. And yet, for all this, it is hard to let go of the expectations. My spirits sink just before I come in here. I want to do anything but sit here and face it. This letting fall of fantasy, of wanting to be saved, to be lifted out of mundanity. And yet, what is mundane. What is ordinary? We require so much distraction. Anything to avoid looking at ourselves. And yet when we do it doesn’t have to be harsh. It can be kind. Compassionate, even. Try it.

I attempt to write without thinking about it too much. To let it come out. To blurt. There is freedom in revolutionary thought. A momentary frisson of excitement before the idea of having to put it into action drags the feet. You don’t have to do anything, he says. I fight against it. Not wanting the prison door to be opened. But it is. It is. And I want to walk out. I do. Honest. I see them in their semi-circular grouping. All those whose judgement I fear. All the while knowing it is imagined. Most are too wrapped up on their own lives to give mine a moment’s thought. And besides, they would celebrate the freedom of it. Conceptually, at least. It’s like Eleanor Oliphant and the imagined weekly telephone call from her mother long dead. Such vitriol. It’s not real. I am free to do what I choose. Let it be. I want to concentrate on this small aspect of practice. To delve into the ordinary. So be it. Let it be. No one cares. This is a chance to begin at the beginning. All those colouring books. Where was I in those?

No one about this morning. A few cars crawling through the streets. The University security van. No one walking. A body in a sleeping bag perched precariously on a bench in the shelter by the Pier. And a man, his face lit up by his mobile phone, as he read, sitting on the adjacent bench with his bike leaning against the frame. In the shelter opposite The Marine Hotel my eye was caught by a pair of boots. Was there someone sleeping there too? The shins were brought up close to the body. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or woman. The clubs were shut this morning. The calm before the storm of New Year’s Eve. Eerie. Lip Lickin’ Chicken was open. And the lights across Terrace Road were lit.

She wrote that it was the hardest thing we ever had to do. It wasn’t. It wasn’t for me. I was glad to do it. To set her free. She’d gone anyway. Long gone. I am uncomfortable being spoken about like that. She means well. She thinks she gets it right but she doesn’t. I feel for her. I do. An uncomfortable love at times. She is so like her. The laugh, the one that reveals discomfort. That is spot on. I hope she gets what she wants. I will do what I can to ease her burden.

I see and know my blessings. But there is so much I cannot know. Let that be. Let that rest. To just not know.

Just a scattering of youngsters this morning. They weren’t students, I could tell. Their faces were small, naïve, made blank by alcohol. A scattering, a smattering outside The Academy and a clustering around the town clock. One, a girl, in a cream sequined mini skirt and maroon Dc Marten boots and another in a halter neck top and trousers and white platform shoes. I watched her cross the walk street from The Angel to a doorway under some scaffolding. A boy followed her. She looked triumphant, proud, until moments later he left to join his mates huddled by the pub’s entrance. She remained where she stood and stared, boring into his back. A line of taxi cabs, their engines idling, waited outside New Look. Down by the harbour a car parked, its headlights shining hard against the railings opposite. The tide was high, waves crashing onto the road, spilling salt water everywhere. A lad got out of the passenger seat and ran across to the railings, leaning over them to look at the water. He stood as if counting. Then it came. A huge wall of water, up and up then down breaking its fall unrelentingly upon his back. He crouched and curled inside himself taking the lashing of wet for some seconds before scuttling off back to the car. Was it a dare? He would’ve of been drenched. But even so I understood it. It is magnificent. Such power. A potent force. Just to be part of it, baptised by it. I understand.

It was a throwaway remark delivered as I laid our shopping on the conveyor belt. Did you have a good Christmas? I don’t celebrate Christmas, she replied, stone-faced. Should I of left it at that? Why not? Are you Jewish? I asked rather apologetically. Her face remained dead-pan, hard to do when your hair is a home-dyed tinge of green and there are fat, metallic braces across your teeth. No, we just adhere closely to the Bible. I try to find my bearings. Are you a Jehovah’s Witness? No, I think they celebrate Christmas. I tried a few more, Quaker, Mormon, Non-Conformist? She was having none of it. Cagey. Do you go to church? I continued. No, she replied, it’s just me and my family. She thanked me at the end for showing an interest. Was she in truth rather irritated? Should I have let it go? Most people aren’t interested, she said. And I was, am. In the car he tells me of an occasion a week or so back when he been in there and looked for an open till. This same girl had been available. Oh, you don’t want her, one of the staff had said to him, she’s hopeless.

It is only difference. That’s all.

It’s about the ordinary. Embracing the ordinary. Seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. It seems that if I could let go of my need for public approval or recognition I, and my work, would be much happier. I shall do it for myself. All of it. The writing, the making, the performing. I am the only audience, the only recipient. It is enough, isn’t it?

I feel a bit crook today. Don’t go for a walk, he said, stay at home with me. But I can’t. I must keep going. First a booking then it was cancelled. Did I wake you? she asked. That’s OK, I replied.

See the detail, the beauty. Change your perspective. Breathe. Let the work be what it needs to be. It is enough. You do not have to be good.

But you are. You are.