Category: Writings

Only a few stragglers left. A mere scattering this morning, some on the beach, some in the shelter. Lip Lickin’ Chicken was open. And a gaggle of seagulls were fighting and worrying over a discarded carton spotted with grease. Pier Pressure was also open. A girl and two boys were sitting on the shelf of the Prom, there legs hanging over the ledge, their bodies leaning into the railings. The girl was crying, one of the boys was trying to comfort her. She cried noisily. A young gull screeched insistently for its parent. Momentarily lost, abandoned, like a seven-year-old Japanese boy. Punished. To be punished. I told you so. A warning, rarely seen through, this time it was. He seems none the worse. A thumbs up in a picture in the paper.

Last week was busier. Just after exams. Lots of singing. Kids in the sea. Skinny-dipping. Let it go, a group of them were singing, just by the clock tower, let it go. All together, reaching a crescendo that reverberated all the way down Great Darkgate Street. The theme song from Frozen, I think. I am not up to date. Separate.

The weather has been glorious. The man across the way mowed his lawn twice. They grow brown that family. Always in the garden.

We sit in our seat. I peel off my clothes and lift my face to the sun. A baby dragonfly settles on my naked shoulder. It stays.

Coffee at the University café. It’s convenient for work. She’s a chatterbox. I can hear her. He can’t get a word in edgeways. Non-stop. She is a good woman, clearly, who needs to talk, to pour it out. She’s going away, yes, in the autumn, yes, to Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Not her cup of tea. I’m a farmer’s girl, she says, a day out at Aberaeron is more my thing. And again, yesterday, he likes it there, bringing the stories home. Liz said it was hay fever, he says. Oh, I say. Yes, she says she has it now, caught it off her husband.

Getting ready. I feel a little distrait. I can’t start things. Winding-down. It will do me good. The space to think, away from the need to do. I must just succumb. Place myself in another’s hands. Yield.

He talked about the old country custom of sewing red speedwell into the lining of their coats. It was thought to bring good luck.

No sun today, just a milky stillness. Nice.

The flower beds on the Promenade are full again. There’s petunias, geraniums and marigolds. They’ve been empty, just soil for so long now. Cutbacks no doubt. I love the neat rows. ‘Neat-and-tidy-bodgers’ Dawn used to them, gardeners of my persuasion (though I am no gardener), she preferred the wild, the haphazard. I do too, but the rows, the lines calm me.

It’s been a while. I’ve been busy on this and that. Not much to show for it. It’s all in my head, as usual. Lists. I still make the lists, on scraps of newsprint and post-it notes. Pink socks, reads one – referring to a pair of child’s socks I seen one morning abandoned on a bench, the form of the infant’s foot still preserved in their form. It’s been warm these last few nights and the beach is littered with little blackened mounds of stone and wood. Barbecues. The smell of smouldering embers hangs in windless air. I love it, slightly sweet, slightly acrid. The smell of summer. As I walk a police car slowly crawls towards the harbour, turns and drives back towards town. The moon, ah the moon has been lovely.

Any sign of Donny-don? he asks as we sit in our seat looking out to sea. Sometimes it is Donny-don, sometimes it is Donny-doris. Of course there are more than one. A whole school. A pod. Are they dolphins or porpoises? Does it matter? A couple sit in the cloudy gloom close to the sea’s edge on fold-up deckchairs. He is staring through binoculars. Any sign? Look there, and there. It is a marvellous thing. I get a lurch in my tummy.

The coast-guard huts are out. Another sign of summer. And the aroma of cut-grass. I find some strands of grass on our windowsill. Blown by the zephyrs.

The year is nearly ended. Exams nearly done. And the early mornings are noisy with students. Some swim, all carouse, their voices too loud, their bodies tripping, falling, too loose, too trusting. A man lies spread-eagled on the ground under the shelter of the new bandstand’s canopy. A space-machine from a bad B-movie it has a necklace of blue lights around its rim. A girl speeds down Great Darkgate Street on a child’s bike. Weeeeeee. A boy runs alongside her. She is too fast for him. He stops running, breathless now, his body doubled-up with the strain. A couple walk down North Road arguing. You’re not listening, he is saying. You’re not listening. He repeats everything twice. He walks ahead of her, not looking, just talking, his voice is flat, monotone, unforgiving.

A vase of dying purple carnations. The perfume of the honeysuckle. The peeping of the oystercatcher. The echoes of students carolling in the castle grounds.

It’s all about telling the truth. Simple really. Just tell the story. Be yourself, he says. Yes.

Poppies. Yellow poppies. Irish poppies. Breakfast. He is reading to me from an article. Apparently, farmers used to revere the poppy, he says. They were considered mystical, magical. Now they kill them with pesticide. Sometime they only last a day.

I remember such fragility. You can’t pick them. The petals with flake, fritter away. All it takes is a little wind. Brave flowers, they come anyway. A thousand rescued. A thousand. They seek hope. They seek safety. Brave flowers. Brave flowers.

They say that both Mercury and Mars are retrograde. They say all sorts of things can go wrong,  planes missed, trains cancelled, computers kaput. The good thing is, they say, is that one is forced to go backwards, seemingly like the planets, and re-visit the past. Go over things. Review, consider again. I’m doing it. I found myself doing it yesterday. Looking through notebooks, sketchbooks from two even three years ago. The same conundrums, the dilemmas, the same preoccupations. It was always words, Jeanette Winterston wrote, never the plot (I paraphrase a little). I’m a detail person. That’s always what I see in my mind’s eye. Up close. Personal. You need to get the overview, they’d tell me. Why? I should’ve said. This is what I do. Words.

According to Charlotte Bronte (and according to Mrs Gaskell) Harriet Martineau kept early hours. Rising before dawn to bathe, breakfast etc. so that she could begin writing early. A singular woman by all accounts, not unlike CB herself. A singular woman with singular habits. In the Spring it makes sense. Dawn rises now as I walk. No longer the pitch black, thank God.

Solitude. Melancholy. What is that clue a mournful lament? God knows. God knows. Made sick by it she was. All that heavy Victorian solitude. And when she do go and commune with people she got headaches. Poor love. Poor C.

The warmer evenings and early mornings keep them from their beds. The young. The youth. Exam-time. A time of hysterics and winding-down. At 4.00 am the town is teeming with them. Towards the pier a young man in a still crisp white shirt is shouting as he walks alongside two girls. How do you think  the fuckin’ people on the Titanic felt? he asks. Seagulls screech overhead. The tide is out. The harbour silent. Walking through the Castle gardens I see what looks like an elderly white man in a wheelchair, seemingly being accompanied by a young, slim black boy. I live just down there, the old man is saying pointing towards Laura Place, in one of those terraces. I pass them and say good morning. The young lad calls out, hey, wait, and runs over to me. The man in the wheelchair stops and turns to watch. What do I feel? Is there fear? I mumble something about having to get back for work. His face is up close. A nice face, open, smiling. He reaches out to touch my chin. Gentle, stroking. Staring into my face he speaks softly. You look hot, he says. I smile. And move to walk away. Let me learn your name, he calls out. I tell him. Nathan, he shouts in return. Nathan.

Nathan Jones you’ve been gone too long, hums in my head all the way home. I am laughing too. Me, hot in all this wet-weather gear. Hatted and gloved. Hot. Hot. Nice. I tell him my stories over breakfast. And get irritated when he is being literal. I’m old, he says, I thought he meant you were too hot, you know with all those layers. It’s what they say, I reply. I know, he says, I know NOW.

Work is quiet so I do my own. It is good to have this time. Thinking time. Making time. Creating time. I think about being still. Keeping still. A forced stillness. A forced being at home-ness, like C. Sometimes she couldn’t write. A turgidity overtaking her. I read through some of my notebooks from Duras, those two weeks I went there alone. What a rush of pleasure it gave me. Is there something there, something authentic? A forced stillness and the needle remembering the freedom. What is mine? What is genuinely mine? It can be for me. Just for me. The paradigms have shifted. Let it be so.

The baker from the Pelican Bakery, in black linen shorts and apron, slips out of the shop. A smell of hot, salty yeast suffuses the morning air. Sublime.

I love to come across new words. Gewgaw a trinket or gaudy bauble. A crossword clue. Is it an eighteenth or nineteenth century word? I don’t even know how to pronounce it. Sounds like a noise a donkey would make. Are the donkeys still in Borth, in the field by the railway track, resting in readiness for their summer stint on the Prom? All those, mostly wary, children hoiked up onto their backs, clinging on and calling or waving to Mummy. I did it, not here but on beaches around the country. It felt good to be up high, surveying the world from a different level. I was nervous but awed. Look at me, I wanted to say, but didn’t for no one was looking anyway.

The cherry blossom is almost gone, blown like confetti along the pavements. Specks of white sticking to the soles of my shoes. The magnolia too. Replaced by fresh green. The warm mornings have been infused with the smell of honeysuckle and mock orange. Fuggy sweetness, glorious. The warm mornings bring out the youth too. Or it makes them linger longer, reluctant to go home. They sit on benches, legs sprawling, their voices too loud. Girls trip barefoot across the stones, brave boys swim shouting at the cold of the water. Exams have begun and after each one there is euphoria. I pass a group of lads. I literally fell, one of them is saying, and it was like……

Getting her onto the stool was a little tricky. The mugginess of the day had made her sticky. Can you feed the microphone up through your dress? I ask, handing it her. Breathing heavily, she proceeds to pass it through the buttons. I get a glimpse of tights. A toilet czar and medium, I am disappointed when I discover she’s come to talk about the former. What can one say about toilets? A piece to camera. They have to find something, something to fill the air, the screen. She is a warm woman, a gentle woman, but there is nothing, beyond common sense, to say.

Serendipity some call it. I don’t know. I send out a request and it is granted. Small things, inconsequential things. A Lord Peter Wimsey on Radio 4 Extra. And then more subtle connections. A book, two books I recognise. Read before. Re-visited. Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping was one.  Mark Lawson interviewing her. She didn’t write again for 23 years. What do they do, creative people, when they cease creating? I am interested. I am interested in the spaces in-between. A topic for study? It’s lucky they got me today, the woman is saying, I’m on annual leave tomorrow. Going anywhere nice? I ask. Don’t know yet, she says, though I’ve got to be back for me slimming club on Saturday. There’s a weigh-in.

The barista in Starbucks is a chatterbox. It is unceasing. Ebullient, flowing over, her voices carries across the canteen. There are no full stops, it is constant. Beyond the need to converse, she isn’t interested in replies. On and on. She’s talking about her colleague who has an ear infection. I can hear her talking to him. She’s a one an a ‘alf, she is saying.

It was colder this morning. The sea was still, benign. Walking up towards the castle I saw a small cream-coloured camper van wrapped all the way round with a whole roll of cling film.

Where’s the story? was always the implication. Sometimes there just isn’t one, merely a hotch-potch of observations. To keep until later. I notice things. Signs, bits of speech, a quote from the radio and I want to store them, or maybe just let them swirl around in my head, detached and floating. See where they land. See what happens. The speech thing still haunts me. Something said, seemingly randomly but which has huge import. Why sew them? I keep asking myself. Why? Why? And my shoulders get taught. Why not? he would say. A good voice, a tender voice, a supportive voice. Why? Anna Noel had to work at home in the end, she was too vulnerable to deal with all the whys. I didn’t have the words, she said.

Breadcrumbs available, reads a sign on the window of Slater’s Bakery.

We talked about her Gran. She calls her something else, a Welsh name that I cannot now recall. She’d had a hip replacement over forty years ago. They are only meant to last twenty, she said. She never walked, she said. What never? I asked, flabbergasted. Nope. Grandad drove her everywhere. (Again, she had a name for her grandfather, a special one, I can’t remember.) They’d drive down to the Prom and sit in the car with sandwiches and a flask. Her Gran died recently, I did tell you. She had to go to Camarthen, her replacement hips were so out-of-date that Bronglais Hospital couldn’t deal with them.

A few sad days this week. It’s all a little in the air. Chaotic, uncertain. How we respond is in our gift. I wobbled. Was unkind. And yet, the sadness brings with it a sharpness of seeing. I stood waiting for him and looked down at a hedge of box pushing against a black painted wrought iron fence. The intensity of the green of the box and blue-black of the fence was stunning. Then later, walking to our seat I saw what looked like a layer of diamonds on a rock out at sea. Then there was the sun shimmering on the water. A sparkling effervescence. Pure beauty. A gift.

There are splendid lives. (Rose Tremain)

Podiatry tales. She talked about a particular client. Cantankerous. He’d call me the ‘farmer’, she said. And do you know, when I was at his house doing his feet, I heard him refer to his wife as ‘horror chops’. No, I said. Yes, she said, and she answered to it. Didn’t seem in the least bit perturbed. Horror chops, she said, I ask you.

It was the May Ball last night. We saw them from the studio. Girls tripping in heels across the grass. Boys in black suits, hands in pockets, awkward. This morning I saw them on the Prom, weary now. Dishevelled. Walking back home along Llanbadarn Road there were three boys ahead of me. One turned to look at me, moving away to let me pass. Guys, he called, GUYS. They turned and promptly moved aside. Nothing to fear. So polite, even in their cups. Bless them. I hope they had fun. I remember. I remember.

Town was teeming with young people this morning. I walked out earlier than usual, it was not yet 4.00am. They lolled about on benches, some barefoot, none with coats. It was warmer than of late. A wind but southerly, not bitter. I strode along the Prom towards the Harbour. Pier Pressure was still heaving. The air smelt of fried chicken, stale beer, cigarettes. There was laughter and loud screeching voices. A couple leaned into each other on a bench. Two girls sat on a step, both in tight shorts, the thighs all flesh. Another couple walked towards me. Her hair was piled high and she teetered in heels. She carried a pizza box in her hand. Do you love me yet? she asked her companion. Yeh, he said, offhandedly then with stress, OBVIOUSLY. She linked hands with him. He leant away. She giggled as they walked, clearly satisfied with his answer.

Yesterday, was the same. Busy. A single red flip flop lay in the road outside the nightclub. Two girls sat on the ground, leaning against the clapperboard exterior of the club. Several boys hung around the entrance talking to the bouncers. Cath, one of them shouted to the seated girls, you a’right? There was an ambulance opposite the Belle Vue Hotel. It was like a dumb play. No one spoke as a tiny girl was led towards the car. The siren was still. All was calm.

The moon was a half. Large, resplendent. Half light. The owl hooted. Later the birds. A cacophony. Dawn comes up as I approach home these days. A relief. A joy. That blue.

We talked about the wedding. I ought to have had a perm, she said. There isn’t time now. Then about the Assembly elections. I tell her I do mine by post. She says she’d like to too but her daughter says its an opportunity for her to get out. House-bound, home-bound. I remember the first time I called her she had an anxiety attack, bringing the phone-call, ever so politely, to an abrupt end. She chatters away now. I like to hear her use my name. It’s a precious thing this reaching out to strangers. I will never know her, not properly, not physically, but we have this weekly talk and it means the world. To me.

Walking home in the early hours there is a young man, a boy really, leaning against the window of The Salvation Army shop eating pizza from a large carton. There is a lit cigarette in his hand. As I approach him, he pushes himself off the window and begins to walk ahead of me. I watch him from behind. Small bum, long slung jeans, tight on the leg. I can smell the acridness of the cigarette smoke. He walks slowly still eating from the pizza box. He is so slow I soon catch him up. He begins to talk to me. I can’t hear you very well, I say, I’ve got my headphones on. I think he says it’s cold. And then that he has to walk all the way to Llanbadarn and that it’s a long way. I say something about walking fast. Perhaps he misinterprets me. Good night, he says. Good night, I reply and walk on. I am touched by his desire to make contact. I generally feel quite separate from the kids I encounter in the mornings. Often drunk or stoned, they are in another sphere of experience from me. I’ve slept after all. It is rare that one chooses to engage with me. I hope he got home safe. Will they sleep all day now?

She is cheerful this morning. I’m not so grumpy, she says, laughing. Will you go to the wedding? I ask. Yes, she says. And did you get a new outfit? Yes, she replies, we went to Marks and Spencer’s and I go a maxi! I love to hear her voice. It sings. Last week she talked about her father, she speaks of him a lot. We had a pony and trap, she said, and pet sheep. She tells me of his sayings, his mores. They are not particularly erudite or brilliant, but she quotes them nevertheless, wanting to hear, to feel his words on her tongue. (I think about Bruce Chatwin’s novel On The Black Hill about the two brothers, so dour, austere, yet intimate.) She talked about her pet sheep. Whenever she had lambs, she said, she’d leave them in a hole and come home alone. We talk of the weather. They’ve had snow. It’s so cold, she says. Her daughter found a dead baby bird. I’ll have to go to church and pray for the weather for the wedding, she says, laughing again. She is better. I am glad.

I’m written out. Three reviews in a row. I want to support, encourage, celebrate. I write for the art, for the artists. Just like teaching – celebrating not denigrating. There is always something. Isn’t there? It takes courage to put oneself out there. I’m not sentimental, not hagiographic, just celebratory. It is enough. Enough, for now.

WET PAINT ON RAILINGS. WET PAINT ON BENCHES. The Promenade is having its yearly touch up. I haven’t seen the painter. There is usually a team of them, overall-ed and radio on, paint drying too fast in the sun. Not this year. The wind has wrenched the taped-down signs from the floor.

Wind. Wind was strong this morning. Battering. A young man walking along South Marine his skimpy jacket collar pulled up shielding his face against the wind. Sorry about the music, he said to me as we passed. What music? I heard no music. He hurried on. His winkle-pickers turning up at the ends like jesters’ shoes. Yesterday a young girl, who from a distance looked ancient, shoeless traipsing across the stones, her boots in her hand.

I’ve been writing reviews. Caught up in the writing and the fretting. I’ve a list of things to think about, to consider. The chatterbox in Ta Med Da. She talks so fast. She needs to talk. Anyone will do. I touch her arm. Don’t go, she is saying, don’t go.

I ask what she did at the weekend. She went dancing, in Rummers. The pub by the sewage works. I remember. I remember the sawdust and a new dress. They have live bands. She loves to dance. During the day she works on the tills. She handles my fruit with such care. I thank her. Other people have said the same, she says, smiling. Do you dance alone? I ask, tentatively. Oh, no, she says, I wouldn’t do that. Wouldn’t go to a pub alone. I go with what I suppose I should call my partner. I change the story in my head. She is not alone. That is good.

We bump into her by the harbour. Her voice is remarkable. A jazz singer’s voice. A pub voice, deep, throaty, almost male. I knew her from the pubs, he said afterwards. Margo. She lives in Germany now, but is over here looking after her father. He can be cantankerous at times, she says. She looks tired, trapped. I’ve a week off, he’s going into respite care, she says, but it’s so expensive.

A boy is juggling with fire. I felt wary about getting close. Just a boy in a lumberjack shirt.

I wear dark nail varnish on two finger nails. Looks trendy, he says. It’s a cover-up. To cover-up the staining. Dark, brackish green. Some damage in the nail root. Mum had something similar though not the staining. I live with it. It is nothing.

He had a heart monitor for a day. Tick, tick. Strapped to his chest. Circular plasters. It looks like a colostomy bag, he said. Fragile. Tick, tick.

I dreamt she was still a child. We were bathing her, me and him. Her hair was fine. I wanted to wash it twice. Make it clean. She was silent, acquiescent, trusting.

Breakfast time. Adieu.

Writing is such an intense experience when I’m in it that when a piece is complete I feel a little lost. Like now. I need to work. I realise that. I am searching for something in my work, some kind of affirmation that I am good enough. It won’t come, I know that, for it’s not real. It’s an illusion. A throwback to childhood possibly. A sign of discontent. A sign of fear. Of not being up to the mark. But what is the mark?

We walked in the sunshine yesterday. The promenade benches were full. People sitting, faces upturned to the sun. On one particular bench there were an elderly couple. Crepe-paper faces, big-knuckled hands. He was reading a large hard-backed book that he held perched on his knee. She was staring straight ahead, not looking but smiling. Just smiling. Sitting doing nothing. Not nothing. Being. I felt a pang, a longing to be like her. When I’m older, I said to him, I’ll do that. Just sit. Just be. Why not now? he asked. Why not now?

I have a bunch of scribbled notes, torn pieces of newspaper, post-it squares, yellow and pink. I need to remember, you see. All those thoughts that are so easily lost. Emulsion. Magnolia to patch up the marks on the kitchen wall. Was it me? Spit-spots of beetroot and pomegranate. Then there are the journal reminders. Victoria Wood, RIP, one reads. Yes. What a shock. Like Terry Wogan, she is/was entrenched. Here for keeps. Now she’s gone. Where to? I thought last night as I lay in bed listening to the birds. Where to? And why now? We used to watch Dinnerladies over and over again. I ask if we can watch them again. Course, he says, though I know them by heart. We’d quote from them all the time. Dolly with her ‘it was in the Daily Mail‘ and Stan with his ‘it’s these new-fangled condoms they’re not up to the job’ or ‘you need two types of women, one to the do the heavy lifting’. It always makes him laugh. The familiar, the cosy. Just like her. VW was such a warm writer. You will be missed.

Next on the list is ‘full moon’. It was a gorgeous one, flooding my studio this morning with that eerie white light. My dreams have been exhausting, so much detail. Trying to solve something. What, I cannot remember. Walking yesterday morning, early as usual, I bumped into a couple just leaving a house on North Road. A party. I caught her face as I strode by. She’d made it up to look like a cat with a blacked nose and whiskers. And I think she was crying. The boy she was with looked safe, kind, as he led her away by the hand. Later, we were in Newtown visiting an exhibition I was to review. A man and his wife got out of a car ahead of us. He’d clearly had a stroke. Through his jeans his legs were atrophied, and he carried one lifting it high, unable to place his weight upon it. He sported a thick white beard. He looked tired, world-weary. She left him to walk on ahead, busying herself with the car.

Lip-Lickin’ Fried Chicken is still open at 4.30 am, it’s lights a harsh yellow against the night. I can smell the salty-fatness that hangs in the air. People traipse outside, greasy cartons in hand, to sit on benches or in the promenade shelters, eating in silence, too tired to talk.

I listen to my Ipod when I walk, at least I have the last few days. Sometimes it is my attempt to counteract the dark. Other times I choose not too, preferring to hear the birds, the sea, to feel the environment through sound as I walk. I put it on shuffle. Poetry, stories, music, and teach yourself Norwegian meld together as I listen. I never know what is coming. Yesterday it was the story of Winken, Blinken and Nod. I remember the tale as a child. There were beautiful grey-toned illustrations of the three in their wooden shoe boat.

John Moore’s daughter talking about him in the radio. In the evenings my parents would retire to the TV room, she said, to watch comedy programmes. At the age of ninety-seven, she said, my father would sit in the studio listening to the radio and draw.

One morning walking along Terrace Road there were a pile of broken egg-shells on the ground. I stopped walking. A door had been splattered with eggy-goo. A whole box-full. A dozen, two dozen maybe. Why? A practical joke? There was a nastiness to it somehow. Sales of flour and eggs to under sixteens are forbidden, reads a notice in Morrisons.

I think about work, not writing but making work. It’s not there yet. Perhaps it will never be. Work v domestic chores. An ongoing preoccupation. What is work? What is valued? Women working. I think of those I know doing their nine-to-fives. And me here, trying to find my way. Always thinking, always writing, always making. Is it work? Do I work hard enough? Is there value in what I do? I try to find answers in other people’s lives. Past lives. They just did it. The Brontes – baking bread between the writing. And John Moore’s daughter saying home-work was the same as making. All part and parcel of the same thing. Yet, I remember Jeanette Winterson saying, ‘I need a wife’ to do those things. And Freud, just painting, the rest, the everyday stuff done by others. Uglow too. Does it make one less of a creative to want to have domestic order too?

The labels have come. It seems strange to read their names. I need to ponder it. To think about it. To think upon, as she used to say. Will you guide me, whisper in my ear?

Enough for now. I am done. Adieu.