Category: Writings

Their chatter relaxes me. It is inconsequential, a kind of background noise that they use to interact with their clients. It’s all ready for you, she says, nice and cosy. Pop off you clothes and hop on the bed. I brace myself as she presses down the cloth strip onto the warm wax, ready to rip. How was Dublin? I ask, remembering that last time I was there she and her colleague were anticipating their Christmas Away-Weekend. We take it after Christmas, she’d said, when it’s not so busy. Dublin? It was fab, she says. Underarm as well? That’s it. Did you go on the amphibian craft? I ask. No, she says, there wasn’t time in the end. We went on a bus thing instead. How about restaurants? I ask. Any good ones? To be honest, she says, it was more of a liquid weekend. I don’t drink much usually but we found this gin palace. A hundred and fifty different kinds of gin. With different garnishes. It was fab, she says. I don’t drink much usually but with gin I’m fine. No ill effects whatsoever in the morning. There, that’s you done. Take your time. Open the door when you’re ready.

Something white is bouncing about on the beach. The breeze catches it, lifting it up and then dropping it. A white puffed-up thing. It twirls about then comes to rest. I move closer, straining my eyes in the morning dark. Its an inflated plastic bag. I think of American Beauty and the young boy filming the dance of a cellophane bag. Concentrate on the detail. Pay attention.

It’s end of term. Crowds of students like shoals of fishes at 4.00 am in the morning slowly moving down Penglais Hill. A boy lies down in the road. There is a frisson of tension. A taxi cab drives down the hill slowing its speed. The boy bounds up. A girl voice drawls, Craig, the g extended like a sigh. On the prom a large boy is smoking by the railings. I kick the bar and turn, walking towards him. He looks at me, and as I draw near he says, Sorry, I was talking to someone else. That’s alright I say, smiling. There was no one else there.

The path through the Quad is littered with branches. Crows are building their nests. We can hear the scrape of seagulls’ feet on our roof. You have to be careful, he says at breakfast, they can be vicious around their young.

The radio peppers my day with delights. A programme about Anne Sexton, mostly filled with her two daughters’ anger. We called her Joyce, one of her poems ran, so we could call her Joy. As parents we start out with so much expectation of happiness. They will change our lives, we think. How can they? I dreamt of a baby last night. It was right up close to my face and petulant. Then a short story this morning. I only caught the beginning. A lollipop lady knitting baby clothes for other peoples’ babies. The night before I dreamt that she told me that she didn’t want me to contact her anymore. The shock of it. The grief of it. Then I was in a room. It was white. All the furniture was covered in dust sheets. More radio. A snippet of Henning Mankell’s memoir. I felt relaxed, he wrote, as I always do when nobody knows where I am or who I am. Later on DIS Gloria Steinem talked of her mother. Like many women I’m living the unlived life of my mother, she’d written years before. At 81 she has much grace. And a quietude.

We were six at church. A new person. A red-haired young man. He scuffled past me to the back pew. The old man with the fluffed-up hair came to talk to me. I asked about his accent. I couldn’t work out whether it was Yorkshire or Lancashire, I say. He pulls a face. Yorkshire, he says, North Riding. I see it now. I hear it now. Cosy. Always. Though I don’t say that. He tells me he used to be a gardener for a large stately home nearby. I worked till I was 75, he says, until they sold it. It’s luxury flats now. I ask if he has a lovely garden. No, he smiles, I live in a flat. At the end of the service, a palm cross in my hand, I stride off down the apse. I hear my name being called. It is the old man. Gosh, you walk fast, he says, catching his breath. I had to take two for every one of yours. He walks with me out of the church. There must’ve been a wedding, he says, looking at the confetti that has blown against the edges of the turf. Their not meant to use confetti. It’s nice though, I say. He continues chattering. He is deaf. Usually I hear the bells, he is saying. Then he tells me that the man who usually sits next to him in church is in New Zealand. He’s been all over the world, he says. He seems to know everyone’s name. Have a nice Easter, he says, turning left towards home his hand raised in goodbye. I am touched to be so singled out. I always am.

Paul Daniels died. A part of my childhood. I found him a little excruciating as a child, never having been comfortable with what my mother would’ve called a ‘show-off’. It was later, much later, when Louis Theroux did his programme about him that I felt a warmth, a sympathy, a compassion for him. There was a sadness behind the showman that was both intriguing and pathetic. Rest in peace.

She was standing on the rocks. A young black woman in leggings and a tight vest. She was curving, stretching, holding yoga poses, her body strong and lithe. She laughed as she wobbled, then re-gaining her balance her face became serious, staring, concentrating. We walked on a little more and I saw the photographer crouched amongst the rocks, camera lens pointed at her. I knew him.

He, her husband, called them ‘as dangerous as Lucifer matches’. Letters. Her letters. Charlotte Bronte’s letters. Many were burnt.

Walking down Loveden Road at 4.30 am I can hear voices in the dark. It’s like, you know, Mrs Hubbard and her cupboard, a girl’s voice is saying. So no one’s there, replies another.

The birdsong before dawn is marvellous. Arriving at work at 5.30 am it fills the air. Layer upon layer of calling, chirruping, piping.

I wasn’t going to reply. It felt odd, more than a little creepy. On her card she wrote that she was a secretary in an engineering firm. She wanted us all to do a drawing and enclosed an S.A.E. I wasn’t going to reply but then thought about it. It was rather sweet really. I want to see what happens, she wrote. It was an act of immense optimism. I wonder how many artists responded. Yesterday I received another card from her. Thank you for your contribution, she wrote, and I’m enclosing a token of my gratitude. Inside the envelope was the remains of what was a Lindt chocolate rabbit wrapped in gold paper, now flattened.

He was so gauche. His nerves emanating as a smell. A smell of fear. Gosh, you’re early, I said, opening the studio door. Yes, he said, sorry. No, no, it’s fine, I’d said, suddenly cottoning-on to the reason why. He had to wait half-an-hour then, sweating with anxiety in that little cupboard of a room. They pitted him against a feminist. She was good, well-informed and sharp. You did fine, I said, as he took off the headphones, forcing a smile, he grabbed his bag and scarpered.

I am overly watchful of him. I can’t help it.

The companion of the sky, wrote Charlotte Bronte in her grief, the solace of the solitary.

I glance at the article before secreting it away in a drawer to read later. She championed those who live alone, it said. The solitary. The unmarried. The childless. Rest in peace A.B. Anon. I will return to you anon.

The sun shines.

What a joy.

It took a moment to work out what it was. I’d seen a cat earlier, trotting along North Road. You expect cats, night-prowlers that they are, but a rabbit, and by the seafront. Bounce, bounce, along the tarmacadam. Bobbing in the morning darkness.

The air was warm. I came out earlier than usual. At 3.30 am hordes of students were still slunking around town. The pizza and fried chicken shops were bursting with bodies, all shouting. Groups of twos and threes making their slow way back to Halls. One young man was clutching a traffic cone, screeching. A police car crawled up and down, not stopping, just observing. Beyond the castle the pip pip of oystercatchers echoed from below the sea wall. The sky was a mass of stars.

I was in work early and so was the guest. She was nervous, her eyes wide. I’ve never done this before, she said. She had a script with her, two pages of questions and answers. Do you think they’ll follow it? she asked. No, I said, trying to think of ways of calming her. They kept her waiting almost an hour. Budget day, important news, more important than the love letters she came to talk about. I’ve got to leave work early this afternoon, she said. It’s my cat. He was attacked last night. Oh, I’m sorry, I said. By another cat, she said. He’s rather timid. A colleague in the studio suggested that TV might like the story. The guest looked horrified. I’m don’t doing telly, she said. They’d found two boxes. Boxes of love letters. She was nineteen and he was fifty-nine. A pop star of his day. Long-forgotten now. She pursued him. They wrote in French. Someone kept them. Preserved. Was it her?

It’s his last day tomorrow on the tills. He’s retiring. I’m going to sell me house and me car, he says. What will you do then? we ask. Don’t know, he says. We’ll see where life takes me. His hands and face are a livid purple. They won’t let us wear gloves in ‘ere, he says. Is it his heart? He’s a bit of dandy, heavy chains of gold adorn his wrists and neck. A contented man, I think, except for his cold hands. We shake hands and say our goodbyes.

Always changes. Some stark, dramatic, others imperceptible.

I’ve four sessions today. I need to succumb to it. To fight it makes me uneasy. Let it be. No time to do anything other than sit and wait and make others comfortable. That is a good enough day, I think.

Overhead the clouds hover, static and stubborn. They promise sun later.

The owner calls the flat the crow’s nest. We are up high. High in the sky. Sometimes we are level with birds in flight. I like that. I can see their underbellies. They fly towards our window, only to swerve upwards at the last minute to land atop of the eaves.

Sometimes is it as if we live in the sky.

It always helps, talking to him, that is. He irons out my creases. He calms my inner chaos. I lay it all out before him. He listens, bearing witness with his gentle wisdom. It always helps, talking to him.

It’s something to do with being in that particular environment, it makes me a little stir-crazy. I feel hemmed-in. Held in. Locked-in. They are all so furiously busy, well most are. Doing what appears to be important things. Telling important stories. And there is the alien language. I am shut out by that too. I know the feeling too well. It isn’t their fault. They don’t intend to alienate me. They are just doing what they do, speaking what is, after all, their mother tongue. Sometimes, when I am more ease I am happy to sit there letting it all float above me, unconcerned, not responsible. On the outskirts. But other times it really gets to me.

I take in my sewing. And that is an act in itself. Unconventional. Un-art. It is a considered act. I was nervous at first. What if they ask questions? I don’t know how to explain it. Not yet. But no-one did. No questions. Except one. The authoress. She strode right over, whatya doing? Is it cross-stitch? I mumbled something about letters and Charlotte Bronte. Oh, she said, have you read the new biography? Do I want them to show interest? I don’t know. It is all ego stuff. I can mostly let it go. There is an ease to what I do. It is just time, that’s all. And in that wasted time I can at least think. Think as I sew. I read somewhere that girls were given sewing to keep them quiet. Keep their hands busy. It is an act, a performance, sewing in public. Whatya doing? I don’t know. I feel like a charlatan. I always have. In every art school I ever attended. A charlatan. Whatya doing? I don’t know. I just don’t know. No yet. Maybe never.

Anita Brookner has died. It never seemed fashionable to like her books. A very particular readership, I think. Melancholic novels. Elegant restraint. Unrequited love, foolish passions, un-spilt. Women lost in a fifties greyness, waiting to be saved. Edith Hope was my favourite, the romantic novel writer of Hotel du Lac. Anna Massey played her in the film. Beautiful. Rest in peace. And thank you for the gift of your stories.

And Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. They said on Radio 3 that he went to live on Orkney. Why do I keen towards such tales of withdrawal, isolation? I see it in my mind’s eye and long. He wanted to concentrate on his composing, undisturbed. Do you have to be important to do such withdrawing? Is it enough to just wish to be ordinary. Quietly ordinary.

It’s been a while since I called her. She weighs on me. I want to reach out but the phone is so difficult for both of us. It was the first time she didn’t recognise my voice. She wouldn’t speak English. Her voice was strained, cold. I must put down the phone now, she said in Norwegian. Have I lost her? Try her again, he says. Try her again another day. It may be just a blip. She was like that once before, don’t you remember? Give it a few days. OK, though I am scared that I’ve lost her. I love her, you know. I know. I know.

The congregation had swelled. Seven in all. One of us had to wait for a second sitting for Communion. Walking home the birdsong was a cacophony. On Llanbadarn Road a woman comes towards me with a spaniel on a lead. They stop at the junction. The dog sits patiently awaiting her command. She makes him wait a little too long. There is restraint there. A control. The dog, however is at ease. Floppy with trust. I smile at her. It isn’t returned.

Still no word. Shall I text again? I just don’t know. Stay still just a while longer. Trust like the spaniel.

Let be just a while longer.

My mind has been elsewhere. I haven’t paid attention. Except for a red coat pulled tight across generous hips. And a skinny girl-child being scowled at for taking a bite from a doughnut. It’ll spoil yer tea.

It smells like Spring, though the sky is milk-white.

She says she wants to use one or two of my poems. I thought they’d been lost. Overlooked. I felt foolish. It won’t be in print but spoken, on a video. Given life. Breathed into. Shall I read them?

My mind has been elsewhere. I haven’t paid attention. Except for the metallic stink of guano as I walked by the Pier. And the robin that bobbed before me, returning twice as I walked up the incline. Such tender little things, legs like fuse wire.

My mind has been elsewhere. I haven’t paid attention. Except for thinking of her, often. Trying not to worry or feel hurt. Let it go, I say. Let it be. Let be. Let what will be, just be. Just be. Simple, isn’t it?

Who killed Zebedee? by Wilkie Collins. I listen to it again on the iPlayer. Zebedee from the Magic Roundabout. I never really got it as a child, though I always felt a pang when it ended. A five minute slot each evening at about 4.30 pm. Just before we had tea (though I’d call it supper now). I knew it was for us. Your programme, he would say. Just for us. Dougal, Florence, Dylan and Brian (I think he was the snail). The end credits made me sad. Something was finished. I was no longer held in its cosy embrace. I felt the same about Play School. So long ago.

Supporting herself by her needle. A line from Wilkie Collins. That’s what women did then. You couldn’t now. Not now. Not now. I want to write about making art as a gift. But what constitutes a gift? Something left? Something inserted between the pages of a book?

We talk about friendships. I hurt on his behalf, though he doesn’t ask me to. Do I feel responsible? Would he have done it if I weren’t around? Let it be. Let be. I think I have to carry it all. That big black bag of responsibility. I don’t need to. It doesn’t help. Not ever. Let it be.

The wind broke some windows in her greenhouse. I think that’s where I got my chill, she says. It’s not very big, she says. Oh, there’s a few tomatoes and runner beans, she says. Her voice is thick with catarrh. Will you be watching the rugby? she asks. Oh, yes, she says, we shout at the telly. Thanks, love, she says, thanks for calling.

The homeless boy was in the café. I’d seen his two big, lozenge-shaped bags outside. He was sitting at the long table downstairs, on the corner, his bags on the floor next to him. There was a small iPad charging on the table. He was doing a crossword, mouthing the answers silently to himself, an empty plate and cup by his side. He won’t take money, he says as we slide into the car, I’ve offered it but he just says no. How does he manage? I ask. Who knows? he says. I’m glad he has his breakfast in there though, I say. I don’t know that he does, he says, it’s the first time I’ve seen him in there. I tell him about the iPad. He can’t be destitute then, can he? he says. He has no home, I say. No, you’re right, he says. The boy smells of the cold, of the night. Damp. Does he ever get warm, truly warm, warmed through? He stays on the same street, sleeping outside Smiths. What keeps him here? Is it a choice? I often see people talking to him. Once he called the police because he hadn’t moved for hours. He thought he was dead. It will kill him. It is too much. We are not protected against the cold. I fantasise about going to the Poles. But to be in such a landscape scares me. I want the white, the emptiness, but how to deal with the cold? It is uncomfortable to encounter those who do not want to live conventionally. I remember a man in Cambridge. He wanted nothing but to left alone to walk a series of streets and to sleep where he chose. I used to think of him at night as I lay in my bed. Sometimes we just have to let go. Let it be. Let them be. Let be. Leave them in peace. To be.

We had our first snow fall. The beginning of Spring. Early March. It didn’t last. If they’re big flakes they don’t stay, she told me, smaller ones do. Counterintuitive, I think.

It’s been a while hasn’t it. I miss it when I can’t write. It isn’t important. It isn’t of any great literary merit. It is just an offloading. Not like Henry James. I listened to a programme about him yesterday. Extracts from his memoirs, his journals and his letters. So erudite, so observant, witty but not caustic. Be kind, he wrote to himself, be kind. Be kind.

The Archers is beginning to make me sick to the stomach. There needs to be some relief, I think. It is like going down a dark tunnel. I have heard such stories. It is true to life. Women turned mad by partners. Turned from their homes, their children. It is heartbreaking. Sanity is a gossamer thread.

A Mother’s Day card sent. Well meant, but not from her. No, thank you, not again. Not again.

A flurry of tests. We sit in the eye clinic. It began there, in the eye. He goes in, I wait in the foyer. Most of the chairs are taken. The air is fetid, too hot. Airless. Do you want me to come with you? A middle-aged woman asks her elderly mother. No, she replies. That’s me told, says the daughter to another woman sitting beside her. She’s so indifferent, she says, watching her mother make her way to the consulting room, bent over, feet dragging and with hard-cased, top-clasped handbag held tightly against her chest. It’s good really, says the other woman. I stare at the wall in front of me. And then at the radiator. There is a blob of chewing gum stuck to the paint. Set hard in the heat. Two collapsed wheelchairs lean against it. Next to me two woman murmur to each other in Welsh. The one nearest me bounces her feet. Radio 2 is on in the background. I notice the speaker hanging from the ceiling. Human League are singing I’m only human. I turn my gaze to a painting hanging above the radiator. It looks like a muddy Odile Redon or one of Max Ernst’s frottage pieces. The title has been painted into the left hand bottom corner. Cataract Lights. There are bursting star-light circles dotted around it’s brown expanse. He told me I had to walk 10,000 steps, he says putting on his coat. That’s doable, I said, thinking he said a 1,000.

Walking the Prom, he begins to count. Don’t speak, he says. Later, he says, how many was that? I haven’t been counting, I say.

Rosemary Tonks is featured on the poetry programme, Lost Voices. Rich vocabulary. Sexy. Hotel rooms, steamy-windowed cafes. Broken relationships. Bad choices. She calls him a criminal. She disappeared. Maybe she had nothing more to say, muses Adrian Henri. A messy divorce. Her family lose touch with her. She disappears. Becomes a recluse. Won’t answer the door.

I think about Sark. Mervyn Peake. A seigneur. No cars. We don’t want cars, the tourism officer says. An island. I make plans. I make plans for my old age, my dotage, my aloneness.

Ruby Wax with her inheritance tracks. I don’t listen to music, she says, it makes me too sad. Such emotion must be contained. The black dog hovers. Sanity is a gossamer thread. So it is. So it is.

Ah, here comes the sun.

There is sign in the window of The Pelican Bakery, Toast now serving all day, it reads.

When I am distrait I clean. A need to establish order, I suppose. Returning from a long morning at work, I do the same. Kitchen tops are wiped, bed covers are smoothed, cushions plumped and pictures straightened. I am distrait, as is he. We manage. Welcome it in, I say. It is there, this anxiety, we must live with it. No, he says, I cannot, will not. Fighting it is useless. It is age. It is life. It is uncertainty. Test after test. He acquiesces, more than I would. He trusts. He gives himself over then comes home and consults Google. Anything to make him feel better, to take away the uncertainty.

It has been a while since I wrote. Have you noticed? Have you missed me? I remember a farmer brought in to talk about the anniversary of Foot and Mouth. There was an inhaler beside him when I went in to check he was OK. An asthmatic, clearly. I heard him coughing through the office speaker. Afterwards, he looked sheepish. Did I do OK? he asked, my brain froze.

Passing the studio at home, on my way to bed, there was a light outside. A strange light. Greenish, eerie.

I thought the word was garrotted, or was it carrotted? No, he said, it’s carotid. What will I do without him? But this must not be about me. Give me the strength to carry him, to carry his fear. I read about Charlotte Bronte losing her last sister, Anne. Four days in Scarborough. They travelled to the seaside. The air might help. It did not. Four days and she was dead.

We watched Jane Eyre with Michael Fassbinder as Rochester and Mia as Jane. A beautiful film. Her waterlogged skirts dragging through the bracken and heather of the moors was so powerful. The sisters would walk the moors daily in their petticoat-ed skirts and tiny fragile boots. I have some, Victorian boots. They are minute, tender, with soles of kid. His beauty unsettled me. It is rare these days. Last night I dreamt of fish.

The radio continues to nourish me. Charlotte Bronte found similar solace in the books that her publishers would send her. Neil Ansell’s account of his five years in a remote Welsh cottage. He arrives with just a small bag of clothes, ‘I wanted to know how lightly I could tread on the Earth’. It is the simplicity that appeals. I yearn for it. A Spartan life. A life of paying attention, of being still, of observing. A life of no self. Listen, it is good. And then yesterday, a book about Paris read by Simon Russell Beale. The author wrote about the Bohemians. A man from Guadeloupe, I think he was called Privat. Privat walked and walked the streets of Paris, writing in cafes and bars. ‘He wrote his books with his legs’, wrote the author.

I think about writing all the time. Possibly it is because, at the moment I cannot do it. Not yet, I am too busy with the commissions. There is so much I want to do. To reach out with, to communicate. Though, in truth, I write for myself. Of course.

My favourite bowl finally broke. It had had a crack for over two years now. It was green. A pea-green.  I loved it. I ate everything out of it. I let out a cry as it fell from my hand. It was a childish cry. A petulant one. I know when I do this now. I cannot get away with it. But it is OK. To be a child, to mourn the loss of something familiar. I bought another. Two in fact. White ones. Heavy, solid with the wood ‘food’ impressed into the clay. I like them. I grow used to them. The maker, Keith Bryner-Jones, makes cups, plates and jugs. I have a hankering for a jug. For daffodils. When the money comes. When it comes, perhaps I will treat myself. Something in, and something out. Give and then receive. A good balance.

I find a note. I write them on scraps of paper. Sometimes I forget what they refer to. Stitching families together, it says. Stitching families together.

I write this as an act of bearing witness, not only to my life but that of those I encounter while living it. And these encounters are real and fictional. Though at times it is hard to decide which is which, such is my deep involvement in them. These meetings are mostly physical, I touch and am touched by them, but they also occur via the radio, a book or more occasionally the television. My emotional response to all is equal. It is only a story, they tell me, as I weep over a film, a play or a novel. It isn’t real. Isn’t it? What is real? Is my reality your reality? How can we know?

Names. Two pieces of French fiction about names. The film Therese Desqueyroux with Audrey Tatou and a radio adaptation of Martin Guerre. Here names represent family, land, power. One longs to shrug it off, the other wishes to claim that which is not his. I didn’t take his name when we married, not the first time nor the second. I’d had it before, you see. A common name. It wasn’t snobbery. I’d just grown accustomed to my own. I’d grown into it. After all that fighting it as a child. The butt of jokes, albeit gentle ones. Nelly the Elephant hummed under a small boy’s breath and later, much later, Chuck Berry’s My Dinga-ling. It belonged. It is something poetic I think, the end of my name aping the beginning. I forget the term. It just fits. Why would I change it? Besides, I belong to myself. In the end, that is all. That is all the belonging we have.

A radio programme about latch-key kids got me thinking about her. I think about her most days. She is long gone, I know this, but her influence lingers. How could it not? The participants mostly accepted their fate, understood why their mothers had to leave them to their own devices during those afternoons after school. And it was mothers, not fathers, that these now grown-up children talked of. She had to work, they said. One, whose mother had been a doctor, described how his mother would have everything organised. Food was prepared the weekend before and put in the freezer, labelled with instructions. Itineraries were set out, rotas for who did the re-heating and washing-up. All those stray hours accounted for. He saw this an act of love. His parent, though physically absent, was present in spirit, overseeing their day. As I say, it made me think of her. She always planned. Was always planning. I do it now. Meals are sorted out in my head long before they are made. Our fridge was never empty, there was always a hot meal. The house was clean, clothes washed and ironed. Our days were routinized, ordered, even when her sadness got the better of her. We were held by her. Not cuddled, but held by her practicality, her planning. It was the kind of love she could give. Even towards her second husband, a marriage that became embittered, there remained this kind of love (epitomised by the placing of his suppositories in the fridge to keep them cool). We do what we can, give what we can.

A noise at the bottom of North Road. A shouting kind of noise. Names being called out. And a loud, SORRY. I turn down the hill to see three students, a girl and two boys, coatless scurrying up towards the back of Alexandra Hall. The girl is cradling a traffic cone against her t-shirt as she walks. She wrestles with it. It is cumbersome and keeps slipping down. Later, on Penglais Hill we pass another of the students’ halls. A group have gathered outside. It is not yet 8am. Most are in pyjamas, some in shorts, a rather large-bottomed girl is in a pair of diminutive pants. They stamp their feet and huddle together. We can’t work it out. Oh, I know, I say, it’s the fire-alarm. He laughs. Do you remember Oxford? he says.

An early this morning. A paper review. In the disabled toilet I can hear the cleaner in the Ladies singing. It echoes through the walls. In the unattended studio my contributor belches. Does he know that there is a speaker in the office that relays all the sounds from the studio? Probably not. Besides, I don’t think he’d care. A two-hour stint. I read and sew. Sew and read. I sew Charlotte Bronte’s words and read of her sister Emily’s death. ‘No poisoning doctors’, she’d said. She would see no-one. Except at the very end. You may fetch one now, she’d said. Two hours later she was dead. We do not abide here long, wrote Charlotte in a letter to Ellen Nussey. No. Death creeps ever closer. (She was his age, and he.) So be it. Amen to that. The hush of heaven is a happy prospect from here. For some, for many. For me.

A jackdaw perches on the gable outside my studio window. Do they share the same internal chatter that we do? I wonder. I wonder.

I didn’t know her very well. We’d see her whenever we went to the hotel for a meal, which was only on special occasions, Christmas twice, lunch with my father and step-mother, dinner celebrating our re-marriage and afternoon tea. She was always gracious. There was no side to her, he said, as I read out the piece about her in the Cambrian News. An elegant woman who loved her work. She lived for that hotel, he continued. She cared about detail, everything was just so. Calm. She exuded calm. It was a special place for me. An oasis of ease. I loved sitting in front of the fire in the back bar looking out of the picture window at the little grotto with a put of good tea. We meant to go over Christmas but didn’t find the time in the end. I am sorry for that. I didn’t know her very well but I shall miss her. I shall miss her place on this earth. Rest in peace. And thank you.

There are snowdrops, a clump of them. Clump is the wrong word, a clumsy, rather oafish word. A smattering. A cluster. They have sprung up by the pavement along Llanbadarn Road, pushed up through the moulding leaves. Their white is stark against the russet red of the leaves. Their drooping heads are so tender, so freshly white. I celebrate them. A gift indeed.

You two love birds doing anything special for tomorrow? asked the man in the estate car. I smile, he says, no, we don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day. Then he says something I don’t quite catch, something about being affectionate every day. The man in the car laughs. Well, he says, you both look beautiful on it. He pronounces beautiful as if it spelt with a double o. Like the man used to do on those turkey adverts. Is he laughing at us? It doesn’t matter. We both warm to him, sitting there in his car on the Prom as he does everyday, listening to classical music, his window open so that he can hear the sea. A contented man, I think. Rather like John, Yorkshire John (or is it Lancashire, I always get them confused) who used to work in The Treehouse. We saw him this morning in the supermarket, impossibly cheerful and immune to the cold. Shorts all the year round, and this morning just a t-shirt, the temperature dial on our car flashing 0 degrees. How does he do it? I shiver at the thought. Think of me in the summer, he says. Think of me then.

She called as I was preparing supper. She was so sorry she’d missed us, she’d only gone out to do a bit of shopping. Her voice is soft, lyrical, you can here the Welsh-ness, treacly. Her house had been pretty, her garden lovingly tended. I’ve just spent the day with a friend seeing the snowdrops. She tells me the name of Hall. Everybody else seems to have had the same idea, she says, laughing. I ask if she is happy in her new home. It’s a perfect location for me, she says. The Guild is just up the road and when I can no longer drive the station is just round the corner. I’ve no idea what she means by the Guild. But she has company, and for that I am glad.

I saw her legs first, poking out into the pavement. It was 4.00 am. I’d wondered if I’d see her. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of her out during the day. Those same heavy-lidded eyes. Sad. She sits out smoking, in the dark, fully clothed. An insomniac, perhaps. She sits in the dark, in silence. I break it. Good morning, I say. She replies, looking at me without curiosity.

I’m feeling a bit nervy, he says on waking. That would’ve been enough in the past to sink him. Not now. It passes. A bit nervy, a bit anxious. It comes and goes. He lives with it. I live with it. It is part of the dark. The sun lifts it. See here it comes.

A murmuration of starlings passed overhead three times as I walked to church yesterday morning. It moved fast. There was a swish, a whish and whoosh as it passed. A scattering of black, then nothing. The birds have it in the morning. They are the lords. The masters of the sky and air. Their song is a cacophony. Glorious. I walk by hedgerows and they are a hive of activity. Sparrows, blackbirds, blue tits. They flit about and seem to follow and then lead me forward.

At 9.00 am I look down into the Quad beneath us and see a large, squarely-built young man in a tee-shirt, shorts and flip flops walking down the path carrying a large bouquet of red roses and a black box with a red bow. He carries them like a footman, holding them before him, solemnly. Later I see him again, with a girl this time. The same orange ribbon hangs from his pocket (though they are trousers this time), she pulls it out. There is a key on the end. She strides ahead key at the ready, he follows behind.

Two men call out to me from the Bandstand. It is 4.15 am. Is there a pub club somewhere near here? one of them asks. No, I say, I don’t think so. And not at this time. They mutter something and wander off.

I dreamt of babies last night. Too much Midwife, I think.

His mother had died the night before so the female curate had to take the service. I like her. I keen to such women with their dulcet tones and soft, baby-white hair. She was nervous, pages where lost, a wafer dropped, and yet, there was a deep gravitas that made it alright. It doesn’t matter, I wanted to say. We all wish you well. All six of us. A small congregation. I am greeted, welcomed, even though I scurry away like Cinderella at the end, not wanting the small talk.

I’ve got to go, I said, there’s a pan bubbling over. And it was, the sprouts coming to the boil with the lid jumping, water spitting over the hob. I’m not good with the telephone, I get edgy, feel trapped. There’s no time, no time for chit chat. And yet, I want to say, I do care, I do love you. You know that don’t you? Don’t you?