Category: Writings

I suspect it hasn’t been the reign he’d expected. A small feature in the news a few days ago said how the give-away portraits of him from his coronation had only been taken up by 3 per cent of the hospitals to which they were offered. I remember how ubiquitous images of the Queen were during my childhood. They were everywhere – in doctors’ surgeries, libraries, schools and church halls. She had her tricky national moments too, but towards the end she was well and truly embraced by the royalists of this nation. It doesn’t appear to be the case with him. Is he too reserved, too removed? His ill health can’t have helped, nor that of his wife. I am sorry for him. Having spent a lifetime in expectation, he must have hoped for more. I hope he finds some joy in what is. I try to.

It’s a word that I associate with Shakespeare’s King Lear. A violent word, one that threatens destruction. She talked about it terms of clouds coming over the eye. Yes. It makes sense now but it was a shock to see how little of those lines of letters that I could decipher. Take your time, she said. But time, it seems, is something I don’t have.

We talked of a neighbour who looks after his daughter’s dog. It’s a sweet little thing. White, fluffy and mild. He said how different the dog had appeared when the daughter visited. Unrecognisable. Neither the father or the dog want to be together. They accept it. It is their fate – he walking ahead, the dog on a lead, behind. They cohabit, appreciating, even respecting, the gesture. But it is joyless. A joyless marriage.

One of the DJs I sometimes listen to always ends his programme with a quote from some star or other. Yesterday he used one from Ridley Scott. Something to do with trying regardless of failure and that failures are all good learning curves. I paraphrase him, of course, I was only half listening. Failure. Failing. What is it? The doctor insists that I have heart failure. Have I? I don’t know. I live with it. As I live with my other failures. They are everywhere in every drawing and piece of writing that I make. It is inevitable. And it is what I see. Distance sometimes makes them more bearable but not always. Yes, I am fearful of doing more. Always. And yet I get up each day set on repeating them in the hope that I won’t.

He suggested that I might not be reading enough. He is right. But. And the but is significant. I’m not doing anything enough. I am reading but there is always more I can do. And, when I do read, it takes so so long to assimilate it that it feels like a single breath in a mountain of sighs. I am drowning in the work that needs to be done. Drowning. I am mole, drowning. A mole because I am in the dark, unsure of which underground trail to follow, scrabbling about taking wrong-turns, coming up against hard rock. And the water is coming. I can hear it. Help me.

I walked through the harbour early this morning. Still dark, I cannot always make out what is ahead of me. But there are also the noises and the smells that seem so particular to the place. The boats’ rigging alternately rattling and clanging in the wind, the water making the vessels bob and clash and then there’s the stink of the lobster pots and the nets. I negotiate all these sensory interruptions blind. This morning there was a sound I couldn’t decipher. It was a kind of rasping, a metallic grinding. Was someone working on their boat at that hour? I never discovered the answer. I felt alone but perhaps I wasn’t.

It’s so black at this time of the year. I walk into its bleak dankness with a low heart. I seek light. The moon cannot give it. It is but a thin, smile. I walk the Prom to the sound of the sea rolling its mass over stony sand. Turning the corner and there’s a tree, lit with tiny green, red, blue and yellow sparkles. It’s a joy. My heart leaps up to meet it. I see its reflection everywhere, in the windows of shops, cars and bars. It’s even there in the puddles left by this relentless drizzle. Had someone forgotten to switch it off? Its not a real tree. A metal structure formed into a tree, welded and rigid, it, and its three sisters, isn’t much liked by the townspeople. But I like it. I do. And the lights make me a as child again, remembering wonder.

I put them out early. I needed it. He needed it. The weather has become bleak. Storms have raged and the world is more and more askew. We need light. I’ve only put some out. Not all. Save those for advent and beyond. It pleased him to have them on his bedroom sill. I knew it would.

A branch broke of the yew tree in the storm. It lay shattered on the ground. They are such ancient trees. Who planted it there? And why? Usually they are associated with graveyards and churches. There is something sancrosanct about them, though I believe that they are poisonous to horses. This one stands beside the fence that encloses the old school’s bin area. Hardly a hallowed site for it to oversee with its creaking grace. It made me sad to see it (though I’d missed the evidence of its breaking in the dark). An omen? Perhaps. The world seems shaky. As do I.

I know that they are there. That they have always been there. Always. It’s just that they get eclipsed by the charismatic, the famous, the lauded and, if there is truly such a person, the wholly bad. They are quiet. modest, usually. Like that young girl who offered herself to be parachuted into Germany in an effort to save people from Auschwitz. She didn’t survive and was shot at 23 years old. And my neighbour’s husband, who, as a missionary in the 40s and 50s, I was informed yesterday built sewers and schools in India. He had the face of the Dalai Lama, she wrote.

The wind worries and moans outside. Winter comes hard and fast. A storm, with usual benign-sounding name is predicted for tomorrow. I go out into the dark reluctantly, though it is rarely as bad as it looks from the inside. The air is clean and fresh on my face and the wind buffets me. I don’t mind. Not really.