ellen bell

He calls her every afternoon before we eat supper. I have watched and listened to their relationship getting richer. It is a lovely thing, and one borne out of compassion for all that she has lost, and love, yes it is love. And I think she knows it. They were talking about childhood magazines and I asked him to ask her whether she’d taken Girl. No, she said, I read The New Elizabethan. Neither he or I had heard of it. He looked it up on Google. It was called The Young Elizabethan and published in response to the Queen’s Coronation. It was no giddy comic but a journal based on uplifting stuff such as book reviews and suggestions, competitions (one of which had a pony as a first prize) and extracts from Molesworth. I asked him afterwards if his mother would’ve bought it for her. No, he replied, my father. He was a real self-improver. When he spoke to her again she said that she’d really hankered after The Beano and The Dandy like the next-door neighbours’ kids read. It’s good to hear her laugh.

There was a dead badger on the road when we drove to Aberaeron yesterday. He was huge and still perfectly in tact. Had he been dumped there after some god-awful badger baiting, as Cynan Jones in his book implied happened hereabouts? What killers we are with our cars. And what a noble, magnificent and innocent creature he was. I bleed over and over.

Madonna has had a hip replacement. I think it helps, a little.

There was a bright blue surfboard poking out of an open window of a camper van along the Prom this morning. The campervan was called Violet.

I thought about her yesterday, I’m not sure why. We talked about the hotel in town she and her family (ostensibly her and her parents when they visited from Swansea) used to run that is now boarded up. She was lovely, is lovely and as smiling as ever when we bump into her occasionally in the M&S café I go to draw in. A pretty woman, the sun shines from her like a misty beatific radiance. The hotel always felt safe in her hands, she was unshakeable, professional, steady. She is another woman I would add to my ‘wanted as a mother’ list. No question.

The deluge came as we walked. We’d gone prepared in full waterproofs and it looked like the rain might hold off but it didn’t. We sheltered, he and I, under one of the castle’s arches. I liked it. I felt like I was sixteen again. A girl with a boy. A new love. We talked and listened and watched the rain. I rarely do that. Nothing, that is. It was strangely restful and the air was clean and sharp. I loved him then as I do now but it was new and tender. We got soaked anyway making a dash for the car and sat in there prior to my drawing stint in the coffee shop, melting. I’m edgy, the project looms and I am still scared. T’was ever thus.

I have neglected this journal woefully. I have been drawing, over and over again. The project looms and I am frightened. All I can do to quell the fear is keep drawing and drawing and drawing…..

I’ve foraged for blackberries twice now and there are still lots more to come. What a lovely feeling it gives me. Such a simple delight. And so sensual. There is no smell, like there is with blackcurrants (hot, dusty and green) but the sensation of delicately releasing the berry from its stem is gorgeous. They stain my fingers, those fingers already, and now perpetually, stained with Indian ink.

There were two flashes of lightning over the sea this morning as I walked. There was a mysterious magic to it. Did anyone else see it?

We were just getting our little deck chairs out of the car like a couple of old codgers on a day out to the Peak District when we saw one of our neighbours (they live in one of the big houses round the front of the estate) coming up the back lane with three Tupperware containers in her arms piled high with blackberries. Are you going to beach? she shouted. No, I said, bold as brass, we’re going to sit here. She showed us the blackberries. They were just from the lane, she said, and there’s lots of red ones so more are on the way. We watched her walk off, her arms laden. Then he began his tirade about the cheek of it, her taking all of them and so on. It was semi-serious, semi-joking I believe. It makes me laugh. They are lovely people. And she is so cosy in her neat smallness. I’m off to make some blackberry and apple crumble, she said as she left, not for now but to freeze for next year. It’s like watching another life (we can see all their comings and goings from our upstairs window), one that I could never live out. It both warms and chills me such spectator-ing.

I think that I am invisible and mostly I am but these days people are engaging with what I am doing as an artist. ‘The artist lady’, one man called me yesterday. And then there was Barry the Busker wanting to photograph my drawings of him for his FB site. I’m not sure how I feel about it. It increases the nerves, certainly.

They promised a meteor shower this week. I looked at the sky as a walked. I saw a moving light but I suspect it was a plane. I will persevere. Shooting stars always give me a fillip.

He, and what we presumed was his wife, were sitting at the table across from us in the coffee shop when I noticed that he was making drawings. He seemed to be drawing me drawing. It reminded me of all those years ago in the Royal Festival Hall when M and I were doing the very same thing. He looked like him too. He had the same loose linen trousers, the linen shirt and the beard and he was using what looked like hand-made sketchbooks. But there was no pipe. Maybe he had one in his pocket for later. When they got up to leave he came over. He had a trace of accent, was it German, Swiss or Dutch (hence Wolfgang). He talked about taking life-classes. He showed me his drawings and asked to see mine. You are a painter, he said. His response to my work was kind and genuine. It made me feel good. And he asked me to show his wife too. Oh, she said, that’s me.

The man sitting outside Matalan yesterday who asked him for change was sitting outside Smiths this morning as I walked. Good afternoon, he shouted, adding, any change? I explained that I didn’t carry any money. Have a good evening then, he said, unphased. You too, I replied aware of the ludicrousness of such knee-jerk responses. What’s wrong with your leg by the way? he called after me. I stopped and turned round to face him (his face lit in up in the dark by his iPad) oh, it’s just a bad hip, I said. Is it arthritis? he asked. I was going to explain, touched by his care but he’d lost interest and had turned away. I carried on walking smiling at his lugubriousness. I told him the tale at breakfast. I liked him, he said.

I haven’t seen him for an age. I used to see him at least once a week doing his morning stride as I was, his long cotton trousers flapping around his legs, turban tight on his head and with a western-style anorak over his tunic. He walked with a determination that I recognised in myself. I saw him this morning seemingly being accosted by a man in a raincoat. I paid attention as I walked past to check he was OK (he’s such a tiny man, fragile in his elderly frailty). The other man was doing all the talking and he listened patiently until he finally put up his hand as if asking him to cease (or showing that he’d had enough) and walked off. I hurried on not wanting to be the next victim of the man’s obvious garrulousness. Then I worried that I’d been unkind, perhaps he was lost or needed help. Was that the case? I will never know. And I feel so vulnerable in the dark. Is that excuse enough?

She knows that I draw her. Yesterday I saw her smiling about it. She never asks to see them. And I’m glad. She is tricky for me to capture, I think it’s her fragility, shown in the pinkness of her face, the sometimes greasiness of her and the delicacy of her small body. I watch her eat her croissant, drink her coffee, read her phone before settling down to make her roll-ups for when the coming day. I like her. He told me that she asked him (when I’d gone to the toilet) if I’d had an accident. I was touched by her interest. I like her. Are we (am I) beginning to belong?