I didn’t get it. I missed the irony. I felt stupid. Humour can be so specific. I need to be comfortable, safe to laugh or to get it when a leg is being pulled. He didn’t want my attempt at softness, at empathy, and batted it away. The joke about the sardines went over my head. He let it go. I care for him, more now since I’ve been drawing in his house. I kiss his cheek. But we don’t gel. Not really. And it doesn’t matter. Does it?
Being winter their window hasn’t been open. Last night it was. They live in a flat in the opposite block to ours. Nevertheless, it seems close, particularly in the carrying of sounds. Before they arrived the couple that were there used to hold dinner parties. She had a very high, raucous laugh. It would penitrate into our flat. He couldn’t stand it. With this family its their little girl. Well, not so little, eight, nine or even ten perhaps. She has a temper. A real temper. She screeches, screams, yells, argues and shouts. For hours. She woke me at just before ten pm. I saw a man’s arm, presumably her father’s, reaching out to pull the window to. I still heard her from behind the glass. I rarely hear her parents’ remonstrations. Do they leave her to it, hoping that she will wear herself out and sleep? It rattles me, her distress becomes mine and finding sleep again is hard. Is she unhappy or is it just temper, encouraged when she was young or at least not tempered? Bless her, bless them and me. I am soggy as a result.
I never found it for myself, and I suspect I never will. A home, that is. A space that reflects who I want to be. Is that a home? Probably not. I see the cheapness, the cut corners and the old dirt that I cannot dispel. But there is space, and light, and for the time being it is ours. I think of other peoples’ homes (and lives) and they seem nearer perfect. Though I know that this is never the case. I have made other choices. I have been freer than most. Free to create. And I am loved. So loved. It is enough. Just somtimes, the notion of beauty sings her siren song……
One of the users of Instagram posted a comment about the fact that, as he wrote, art schools haven’t “trained” students for over 40 years. He does qualify this a little by saying that to do so they’d have to had a notion what that training might be. I know what he means. We don’t have the technical skill of our artistic forbears, but we have other forms of expression that are surely just as valid. I wish I’d been trained, though I suspect that if I had I would be made rigid by it. I don’t have natural skill. I make do. Make shift with both drawing and writing. That’s all. It hurts sometimes, because I know it should be better, all of it. But I strive and that is the result. Art is bigger now, more democratic. I think I like it that way.
Town was wild as I walked in. Noise, hilarity, and shouting ricocheting off the terraced streets. Students. Winding down. A man falls to the ground. A soft falling. Intoxicated, there is no hard thud. He rolls to his knees and raises himself. I walk on. Watching to see if he needed help but not wanting to go too close. Christmas trees in shop windows abound. It helps cut through the darkness. So thick, so black.
I try to secure what I see as I walk the streets of this town in mind. It’s almost a memory game. A listing of things, of sights, of overheard conversations that I make in my head as I return home. This morning it was sausages. A cling-film-wrapped try of raw sausages that lay on the pavement along Llanbadarn Road, priced £1.79. Clearly they had fallen out of someone’s shopping bag. Had they got home, anticipating their cooked breakfast and scratched their head at the absence of them? An incongruous sight. Seemingly, more akin to fiction than fact.
One of the trees on the estate has fallen across the road out. A huge branch. Wrenched from its trunk, tt snapped in the storm. It looked so melancholy in the early morning dark, throwing strange, unearthly shadows. It forms an arch.
I was frightened. I think it was the howling and the whistling and the bowing-in of the windows. I was unrelenting. All day and all night. The power on and off. I was frightened. He wasn’t. I don’t think he understood. Do tiny animals also sense fear during storms?
I had a phone call from an unknown number. It was the town’s hospital’s admissions offering me a hip operation this month. It threw me. I thought it has all been forgotten. Not so, it seems. I declined it. She seemed a little irritated. I am doing OK. So far. And isn’t it better to offer it to someone in pain and incapacity? I have to come off the list, apparently. So who knows? I don’t want the surgeon’s knife. Not now, not ever.
Sebald’s book is becoming harder and harder to read. R. N. D. was stamped on the files of those sent away from the ghetto and onwards to the camps, he writes. R. N. D.? Return not desired.
He writes a note for me each night, leaving it on the stairs for me to find in the morning. There are ostensibly weather forecasts but he often adds a comment about how he feels about me with a crossed heart. I love them. Yesterday he wrote (that is, after the usual gloomy forecast of rain and more rain) that “you are more than you think you are.”