Category: Writings

I’ve been reading about home. It’s a thing of memory, writes Bachelard, and our first homes remain forever embedded within us. I don’t remember my first, we moved so often, but others that followed I can recall. I have to ground myself to feel safe. I do it wherever I am, in the car, in a hotel, in a holiday cottage. I impose myself on the space. I make it mine. And then when I have to leave there is that loss, akin to homesickness. Do others feel the same way? I am sorting out. I am cleaning out and ordering. It’s tiring work but there is peace in it, even if I can never get everything that I’d like to do done.

I enjoyed talking to him yesterday. He is not easy to know, I suspect. There is a slipperyness to him, not in a snakey or shifty way, but he has a front, a social side, as we all do, that I feel would be hard to penetrate. He wearst the manner required of him by his job, I suppose. But things are let out. A closeness to his father, now gone, a loneliness that brings him out to the coffee shop all that way on the bus. He is open and yet closed. Are we not all the same? I certainly am. But I enjoyed exploring, nay encountering his world.

He always asks her what she’s been doing that day. She is held captive by physical incapicity. Life has to come to her. She knows this and he knows this. But we (and I say we, for we both participate in valuing how she has to live) still give her current existence creedence and value, no matter how small and restricted. This is her home and, indeed, her life now. When he asked her the same question yesterday she said, Father Christmas has just been. What, he said, checking the date on his watch, it’s now the 28th, what’s that, three days late. We asked what happened and what he looked like. She chortled away down the phone. Yes, he was round, and yes he’d dressed appropriately, as you’d imagine a Santa to be. No, he didn’t bring her a present but he did walk into her room and pick up a few of her teddies. What a lot of teddies, he apparently said. Insightful. She seemed to be non the worse for the encounter. And she clearly enjoyed telling us about it. And there hadn’t been some cheesy mush for lunch. Things are looking up. How I love her…..

She told him over the phone that she had her wild flower book out and was drawing. He had to get her to explain. And yes, she was drawing from the images in the book. And she was drawing them first and would paint them afterwards. I like to think of her doing this. She was always good at art, he said. Yes, I can imagine. I like to imagine the peace, the small transcendence such an endeavour might give her. I’m trying to remember the flowers that we had our in meadow, she told him, milkwort was one. They’d had a field, she and her husband, near her old house. We stopped them using fertiliser. I ask about cornflowers. No, they hadn’t had any cornflowers. I remember them. That blue.

Another patriarch has died. Though I suspect he was a rather ambivalent one. A taciturn man, he was always more comfortable talking about business and to men, mostly. He could never think of anything to say to us girls. Have you got children? he once asked me. R.I.P.

I never want to go out into the dark. A tension gathers in my neck and in my back before I do so. It’s the pitch blackness, the wildness, the feral almost lawlessness of those early hours that get to my very soul. And yet. And yet. Once I am out there is something like joy in being exposed to the air, the wind, the possibility of some kind of renewal in the approach of the day. I don’t see it then, of course, certainly not in late December, but it is coming. I walked up and over the Buarth. The town’s rooftops stretched before me. And then it was down to the harbour and to the buffeting of the wind off the sea. The Perygyl was marvellous. The waves rolled and crashed beneath it and I felt alive. That’s what it does. The dark brings an aliveness, a perception that is lost during the daylight hours. I feel with my skin, my hair, my fingertips. I am alert as a mouse ever awake to its chance slaughter by a prowling cat or a swooping owl. Like the mouse I twitch with that aliveness. Is it worth it? That fear? Yes.

Christmas Day at 3.45 am and all is quiet. I can hear blackbird song. And there is one car driving along the Prom. The sea churns but the wind is less than yesterday. A few windows are lit. People unable to sleep or landing lights from the various guest houses that line the seafront. I wanted to see shining Christmas trees in the front rooms of North Road but all were off. I walked and embraced the solitude.

It’s nice hearing her laugh. He makes her laugh. And I try too. We get her to read out the Home’s activities itinerary for the week over the phone. She enters into the spirit of it. It’s a gentle piss-take, not of her but of the situation life has placed her in. She is more acquiescent of it than she was. She is fond of the ‘girls’, as she calls the carers who tend to her needs. And mostly she doesn’t engage in the ‘leisure’ activities, prefering to remain self-contained in her room. The list of what is on offer amuses her as much as it does us. Wolfren Riverick has turned up before. She says she can’t tell us what he does but that it is something to do with music. There is also a couple coming in to sing Latvian folk songs (at least I think it was Latvian). She says that the man’s name is Costa. Banjo Barry seems to have disappeared. What lost him the gig, I wonder? She giggles and splutters with mirth. As do we. I do love her.

She’d emailed me a few days before my appointment to warn me that he’d died. They’d had him over 14 years. A surrogate child, clearly, he went with them wherever they went. I wasn’t sure if she’d want to talk about him but she did. She told me that they both knew that he was nearing his end. He couldn’t settle and they called the vet. It was a stroke and they agreed to the vet injecting him. He died quickly with them lying by his side, and after eating his favourite foods. She didn’t want the vet to take him away to be cremated. ‘You never knew what you get back,’ she said. ‘They do road-kill, and everything. I want to make sure I get my dog and only my dog.’ So she found a man in Llanidloes. ‘He was a bit odd,’ she said, ‘but we got him back that same day.’ They’re going to scatter him in his favourite places but she will keep a bit back to put in a locket. (Or was that her mother’s ashes? Our conversation did digress.) I am so fond of her, and her chitter chatter is calming to my soul. I wish her peace in her grieving. Her partner has offered to make them lots of afternoon teas, she told me as I left.

The Met Office promised forty mile an hour winds this morning. Forty it wasn’t. I went on the Prom, and even kicked the bar. The students have gone, or are going. The parked cars are sparser but there are still lit windows in the night. Christmas comes but I feel little of it. The carols are nice though, and the candles. It is enough.

I’ve always loved advent calendars. The traditional ones, that is. Not the rather over-the-top ones with chocolate and even make-up. My favourites are those that remind me of my childhood ones, made of card and with little windows that you open to reveal a picture. Anything secret like that, always charmed my inner soul. Did we share one as children? Probably. Oh, and that little door that revealed Christmas Eve was the cream. I have one now. It hangs on the fridge door. It’s not of a nativity scene but a Roger de la Borde commissioned illustration of a polar bear. It’s nice enough. And, I do get a tiny frisson of pleasure from pushing the little window open. He bought one for her. A mini version that she can have on her table beside her. I hope it gives her some pleasure too. She said that she used to keep the same calendar year after year. She’d push the little doors shut at the end of each advent and re-use it. I like to think of her. And I do so often.

They’re on their way home. Parties are being held, bedroom lights stay on through the night, The Pier is open late and the Prom resounds with inebriated shouting. Exams are done, essays handed in and suitcases are being packed. They’re going home. I see them when I walk in the early hours. The other morning their were three, or was it four, girls tripping bambi-like in high heels and wearing sequinned dress cut up the thigh (no coats, naturally), they giggled as they stumbled towards Penglais Hill with one boy, unfamiliar in his suit, offering them physical, if not, moral support. I enjoy their raillery. I like that they are having fun. It’s like living a parallel life. I always wish them a safe passage home to their beds. In my head, that is. Let them be safe. Let us all be safe. Please.