I have always filled my waking hours, even as a child. There is so much I want to do, to achieve and experience. And there is that onus to do all of those things well, too. Consequently I am forever yearning for time to do those things more, like reading. I snatch a short time over breakfast but it is never enough to reach that point of submersion. I’m still reading BP’s autobiography, put together from notes, letters and diary entries. I am loving it. I ache for her – that ‘toothy elderly spinster’ – at times. Long may she reign in my head (and heart).
I was like a bear with a sore head yesterday. We’d sat upstairs in the coffee shop yesterday (mostly to avoid being ‘talked to’ but oh such nice people and to avoid the full crescendo the two yappy-type dogs who come in) and my drawing hadn’t gone well. I make excuses but I am out of my comfort zone up there. I sat in the early October sun later and read BP. It is mostly her notes and letters and diary entries, I love them, such gorgeous extraneous detail. I read and then put my book down and closing my eyes and raising my head to the sun I listened. This is what I heard: the distant buzzing of motorbikes, the thrumming of an idling car engine, a radio from one of the houses down the back lane playing pop music, a plane overhead, blackbird and chiff chaff song, the chirring of a grasshopper and the buzzing of flies.
I was still cross later and was a big baby over the crossword. Sorry my love.
I saw the drops on the pavement as I walked home. They were like spit spots of red, some had dried to a dark brown while others were still vermillion. I pointed them out to him as we walked in to the coffee shop later yesterday morning. Do you think someone had been stabbed? Or was it a nose-bleed?
The conkers are falling off the tree on North Road. They lie on the ground in their lime-green, hairy spiky cases in clusters like severed testes.
The wind was wild when I woke this morning. One of the bikes chained to the railing outside C block had blown over and the trees rattled and shook. It had died down a little when I walked. It makes me feel such bleakness. And yet it is nothing to what they are experiencing in Florida with Hurricane Ian. Oh, bless them – such devastation.
It was on the floor by the front door, a solitary cherry pip. Where had it come from? It made me smile as I picked it up and held it in my hand. A gift from the gods?
It was wild this morning. How I longed to yield and not go out. The rain lashed the window from all sides and the wind rattled the doors. I dressed for it with two coats, a hat, gloves, thick socks and waterproof gaiters. I could barely walk. The wind came at me from all angles, buffeting my coat and blowing my stick off the ground. But the air smelt glorious. Students were out, first years probably. They reminded me of our horses who’d suddenly race around the fields in the wind. Buoyed up and excited by the gusting breeze boys shouted and ran down streets. There was chaos. Nevertheless I did it, but shut the door behind me gladly.
We’d just got back home from two days of intensive drawing and I was shattered. I saw her making her way up the steps. Let her go past, I said, I’ll wait in the car. It seems churlish but sometimes I just can’t manage to engage with our neighbours. However, as I opened our shared hallway door there she still was, hovering.
She’s a force, even at 103 or is it 104? I’m a little scared of her. We rarely talk, he does most of the interacting with her. I said hello and she raised her face to mine, always slightly quizzically as she can’t see at all and probably had no notion of who I was. Are you from upstairs? she said, almost shouting (she is also profoundly deaf). Yes, I said, and explained who I was married to and so on. We talked about art. Well, we started to talk about my practice but she moved quickly on to talk about hers. She is confused. ‘They are using something of mine, I don’t know what it is,’ she said, ‘and my map doesn’t seem to be for sale any more. I don’t make anything from it but it should still be available. They’re waiting for me to die, I suspect.’ I have a vague idea of what she’s talking about (entirely self-taught, she took up book illustration in her 50s and did a lot of work on The Mabinogion) and I nod and say ah ah. And all the time I am looking at her moustache.
Gender becomes a fluid thing as we move towards death. Her eyes are deep set, as is her voice and hairs have sprouted up on her chin and upper lip, muscle has gone as have all the curves. She is thin and her clothes hang from her. So what. She doesn’t care. She is in a tunnel due to her deaf and blindness. Her family visit regularly but she must be lonely. I look at her and find my compassion which has always been there. Always, in fact particularly when I’ve watched her walk by and sit on her ‘seat’ in our ‘garden’. ‘Keep working,’ she says as we make our goodbyes. I asked her if I could draw her. She laughed but said yes. Good. I might come to know her then.
He was walking along Llanbadarn Road as I was coming home. Well, I say walking. He was hugging his body with his crossed arms and swaying. Where the crossed arms a way of holding himself together, or upright? Was he in fact asleep? At one point he lurched into the road and that falling off the pavement seemed to jerk him awake, at least for a moment. He was young and there was no boozy shouting. He looked tired and sad. Did he find his way home?
I was so dog-tired after our Bath trip and the no-sleep-because-of-snoring-problem that I had an hour’s sleep on his bed a few days ago. I woke from a nightmare where I was being chased by a crocodile and my only weapon was a Dyson hoover (with no nozzle on it). He was making his way around a square cement pool and I was trying to get up some steps to run from him but my legs wouldn’t work (you know that feeling in dreams, like having limbs of clay). I kept aiming the hoover towards him and blasting him with it before I woke up.
So I’m sixty now. Where did the time go? Do I recognise myself? Not always but she is in there, that little one that I do know.
The last one to do today and then its draw, draw, draw and draw…..
It was good to see the sea again, though the wind is sharper than when we left on Tuesday am. The two seats in the Prom shelter now have too permanent occupiers. There is the elderly man with his books and his oh so neatly folded possessions and someone else next door. Man or woman it is hard to say for they have an opened umbrella hiding their face (no doubt as a wind break but perhaps its also a privacy thing too and why not). They too have all their belongings neatly placed on the seat beyond the end of their sleeping bag but they also have a tricycle. Yes, a tricycle that they park beside them with a carrier fixed on its back. It makes me smile. It is so practical.
We saw friends and what a warm thing it was. I feasted my eyes on them. One told me that picking and consuming blackberries in October is a no no. The villagers here, he said, say that then they will have the Devil in them.
I took the coloured dirty clothes out of the laundry basket this morning only to discover, as it scampered about, that the huge spider I’d seen last week had found or made a home for itself in there.
A man shouted at me as I walked home. He was with a mate. Maybe he was drunk. He was trying on a faux-black man’s voice: ‘Hey,’ he shouted, ‘give us your money you motherfucker.’ I kept walking praying that they wouldn’t follow me and just get bored and move off. He shouted about, ‘Hey you!’ but my non-reaction clearly did the trick and they walked off towards the station. My hackles took some time to lie down.
We are off again tomorrow. And this time over night. It will be strange. I am wedded to being at home, mostly. And yet, to feast my eyes on that glorious city and those kind friends once more will be a joy. Carry us there safely and then home again.
That piece of writing was a hard one. And now it needs to be cut. It is too long. Such is the professional writing, no room for sentiment. Heigh ho.
Sometimes he reads or shares parts of newspaper articles with me as I prepare supper. Yesterday he read from a column by a sketch writer who’d obviously collected some anecdotes about the Queen, one of which was from a man who’d been a peacekeeper (I think) in Aleppo. He’d been talking to her Majesty about his experiences there and had realised that he was about to cry. She’d clearly noticed it to and touched his arm and then proceeded to break up some scone and hand it to him urging him to use it to feed the corgis. ‘Sometimes its easier not to talk,’ she’d said as they sat there together feeding the dogs. It calmed me, he’d recounted afterwards, and my need to cry passed. I’m glad she was kind, I said to him. Yes, I am glad. May she rest in peace.
