Our 104 year-old downstairs neighbour has her daughter over from Milan and I’ve heard opera being played. It was loud, so perhaps it was played for the appreciation of both (the mother being virtually stone deaf) not just the daughter. I rather liked hearing the wail of the soprano’s voice coming through the floor of my studio, even though I was trying to write. How the neighbour on the other side, a night worker in A&E, felt about it, I am not sure. The singing made the old school appear European in the sunshine, cosmopolitan even, cultured. I liked it.
I do hung up on the idea of the amount of waste that we as beings create. It’s always sharpest on a Tuesday, which is bin day here, when the seagulls rip open the food and recycle bags across the town spilling their decomposing contents across pavements and roads. It is an ugly site. And it stinks. Even more so in the current warmth. And then there is the waste that I form, not only bodily waste but all the plastic, cardboard and the paper that come wrapped around those things, that I like most others, feel I must have. Ugh, it is too much sometimes. I want to live lightly, to make hardly impression on this earth. Oh, to be just spirit, leaving no trace.
There is still so much to learn. This need doesn’t lessen as the years pass but increases. Learning to accept what life brings is one of them. A major one, I think. I need and try daily to accept that my body is different than it was, that it cannot do quite what it used to do. And that sometimes it hurts. I am learning to accept this, and the more I do the more at peace I am with the disease that life has brought me. I need to apply this to wanting things, like the research degree. The place of accepting the outcome whatever it is, is a more serene one than that of yearning to the point of misery. I cannot do anything more. What will be will be. It will. And I can live beyond it. I can walk, breathe, love, experience, draw, sleep, read….. Acceptance is a potent thing, not a weak, modest thing. It is powerful and I am empowered by practicing it.
When I’m in a writing period I have less to give this journal. So, I shall stay with the small things for the time being. Another mopping and cleaning morning. The flat was still warm from the sunshine of the day before. After preparing breakfast, I lay on my yoga mat doing some stretching and looked up at the skylight window above me. I’d just been thinking about being in Nerja and how the house and terrace there play through my mind when the weather is clement like this. Looking up through the window I saw a plane leaving a glorious vapour trail behind it, a drawn whiteness through the blue. A fillip of thrill, of joy, and a perfect encapsulation of those playful thoughts of escape.
I talked about it before, that focussing in on the small things and the delight they bring. Is it an age thing? Who knows and who cares, it helps me through the stiff and tired days, and with doing things that I’d rather not do like housework. Take this morning for example. It’s mopping all the floors in the flat week this week so I had to go down and do the outer stairs. I opened the front door only to be utterly taken over by the sound of the 4am birdsong. It was mostly blackbirds, or was it just one? Whatever it or they were it was marvellous. Perhaps this doesn’t qualify for a small thing, for it was large. A cacophony of sound, and so chirrupy and joyful. It helped with my work. So thank you, birds.
As I’ve said, he always calls her mid-afternoon while I’m preparing supper and most of it is, as they freely admit, bollocks. He asks about Bertie (a character from Alexander McCall Smith’s Scotland Street series which she has become extremely engaged with, as have we at one step removed), about Escape to the Country (which is usually on the TV when he calls), the usual statement being “Where are they escaping to today?”, whether she’s been doing her exercises or been to Chair Ballet or had her haircut, what she had for lunch and then finally what she’s having for supper. A lifetime self-denier regarding food, she keeps to a narrow regime of favourites which rarely involves a pudding and definitely not custard:”I like Bird’s but this chef makes his own.” She likes smoked salmon, fruit salad and yesterday she went for a steak and kidney pie but mostly its soup and ham on brown. “I wanted chicken,” she told him last night, “but it had all gone so it was ham.”
They can’t come to meet us. The car journey and sitting in the cafe is too much for her now. He read out his text last night. I think he said that her tumour is the ‘size of a supermarket swede’. He also wrote that it is beginning to ooze some nasty pus and goo. Poor, poor love. And him, to have to watch her dying when they are so close, two peas in a pod. And their children too. She is so loved. A bright, blue-eyed star, so full of joy and life. I want to hold her, and him. And I do as I write this.
The girl with the orange Pre-Raphaelite hair whose laugh through open summer windows used to drive him to distraction and her boyfriend (with equally flowing locks, though his are yellow not orange) who works in the film & photography loan department at the University have gone. I saw him cleaning out the flat at the weekend. The doll’s houses are gone too. I presume they were hers not his, though one cannot be sure. They appeared one day and lined the sills of his flat for years. I liked seeing them.
Changing, things are always changing. That’s flat life, I suppose. I also smoker (2) coming up the back lane with his two little boys. I’ve never seen him outside his flat. They looked so happy with him. I am glad.
I think she said he was called Banjo Barry. We’d asked her how the Home communicated with the residents about the weekly programme of entertainments and events, and she’d said that they each got a leaflet with the details. She read some of the them out, including a Singalong with Banjo Barry. Asked if she’d ever been she said: NO! It is excruciating for her. There is little dignity in being incarcerated in a place that makes no distinction between refinement and bad taste. I’m sure that it is all kindly meant, and they are having to cater for all, but the leaning towards stereotypical blue-rinsed, pre-war, cosy,scone-eating-jamboree, hug-some-bunting jolliness is a bit much for her. As it would be for me. She goes along to some. Cookery was one. She told us that she went a few times and it involved six people to a bowl where each had turns at stirring it before the mixture went into the oven to metamorphose into a cake. She stopped going because she wasn’t allowed to eat cake for a while after her stroke. “I was put on Level 6,” she said. What’s that? we asked. “It means that they are worried that you might choke.” She’s also done some gardening. Today she will go to Chair Ballet. “Most fall asleep,” she said.
It was lying on the dashboard of a small white car that was parked at the beginning of South Road just before you turn up High Street. There was nothing else on the dashboard except this bleached ecru palm cross. It triggered a memory that played through my head as I walked in the nearing daylight of the one that I was given at Bath Abbey and kept for years afterwards. I like them. I like the ritual they represent, the simple symbolism of them that generations before me have taken nourishment from.
There were just four initially, a satisfying row of black flower pots lined up against their garage wall but this morning there are now ten. The original four have green leaves already climbing up the stakes. Fresh tomatoes. I love that smell, a smell of warm greenness usually associated with greenhouses made steamy in the summer heat. They belong to the woman preacher and her husband who cannot help but be inspired (if that is the right word) to grow things living next door, as they do, to Mr Lawnmower Man and his pretty, diminuitive, black-bobbed wife who spend most of their time in their garden adding more pots and plants and trees and soaking in the sun. It’s another world over there compared to that lived by us flat dwellers.
The great blousy red Mexican poppies in one of the gardens at the end of Llanbadarn Road have flowered again this year, and they are, sadly, already on the turn shedding their red, crepe-like petals along the pavement. The juxtaposition of the red against the deep black of their seeds heads is spectacular.
I often hear radios through high-up open windows as I walk through town in the early mornings. They are disjointed voices mostly, not music. Insomniacs, no doubt, needing company.
Oh and the blue light of morning is here now. I love this time of the year, the black of night lifts earlier and I walk home in the almost daylight.
I dreamt heavily last night. Someone was letting me live in their house in the country. And then later a man, an owner of a cafe was telling me he could find a home for me whenever I needed one. He handed me his card and then began to show me photographs of his tribe and the blue and white garments they wore. He called me a lady. Then I was boarding a plane that had touched down. It was a huge but dark inner space, rather like one of those military planes the RAF etc. parachute out of. It was full of students and lecturers. I recognised one of the lecturers and even remembered his name, James Mason. They’d touched down so that students could grab a coffee. I felt a little shy entering the craft and made a joke about the worst thing about a full plane was trying to find a seat. Everyone laughed. They were kind dreams, and warm and hopeful.
