I feel the urge to do another list. I’ve been drawing again most mornings so this journal has been sadly neglected. The drawing has become obsessive and not going this morning almost hurts. I’ve been chasing cherry pickers. Well, one in particular. It was or perhaps still is on the Prom awaiting collection after being used in the painting of the RNLI building. I love them but they are a bugger to get right and my intimidation of this one was complete. Five drawings later it has still eluded me. I keep pushing my comfort zones. Yesterday I drew upstairs. It was so different and threw me. We could hear the staff talking. On Saturday a man came in and engaged the manager in conversation for well over 10 minutes. Bless her, she is so good, calm and open, though I knew she had stock-taking to do. He talked about real ale pubs, revisiting old haunts (maybe he had studied here) and how he’d had eggs benedict at Sophie’s for breakfast.
He hadn’t turned up for work a few days before leaving the coffee shop in eerie darkness for well over two hours after its usual opening hours. Everyone was worried. He isn’t picking up, said the manager when we eventually got in at 9.45. He’d overslept. He turned up with his tail between his legs later that morning, she told us the next day. Bless him. He’s a tiny scrap of a thing, with pale skin and a long forelock of a fringe of red hair. He told me it was his birthday. He’s twenty-six. I asked him what he did. Me mum came over, he said, and we had fish and chips. It was nice, he said. Then I had some vodka and fell asleep until 1.
I’ve been out drawing most mornings this week so I haven’t had a chance to write this journal, hence the long list of things to remember to mention.
On Tuesday our boiler went funny, flashing a symbol AU. Look in the book, he said. I did and it was something to do with it not being able to find the flame. I remember the old days when you just relit the pilot light. Not now. We both hate it when people have to come in. It makes us edgy. Always. He came eventually. He’d been here before, he remembered. I remembered too. A nice man, young and handsome. We ate supper while he fiddled around, eventually bringing out a small board with three what looked like spark plugs fixed to it. See this, he says pointing to one of them. Yes, I said, with my mouth full of salad. It’s worn down and can’t locate the flame and tell these other ones that there is one (I’m paraphrasing, I think that is what he said.). I can fix it for now, but it may go again, and if it does at least you will know what it is. Yes, I said. And there was I planning to fill my morning bath with water from the kettle. I love practical people. What a star and hardly a dirty footprint anywhere.
The day before his coming hadn’t gone well. I was desperate for a good morning’s drawing in the coffee shop but when we got there it was all shut up and dark. Where now? we said to each other. We went to Costa – no good. Then to Wetherspoons, or ‘The Spoons’ – yuck! I even asked for our money back the drinks were so dire. And then Caesars. Better but I had too much tea. That looks very artistic, said the waitress looking down at my sketchbook. So does your arm, I said, diverting the attention away from me and my not so good drawings. Oh, do you like them? she asked. It gets rather addictive after a while, she says, I’ve got them all down my back as well. Our favourite coffee shop eventually opened at 10.00 where I had another tea and tried to make some decent drawings but things had unravelled.
The moon was huge this morning. I heard myself say wow as I turned into Bridge Street and saw it looming over the harbour. Is it a wolf moon? Later, walking along the Prom I happened to look down onto the beach just below Castle Point. There was a double bed down there, base and mattress. It was unmade but looked pretty pristine. A jolly jape, perhaps? I said at breakfast.
We’re both reading her. I’ve done so lots of time. She’s a new author for him. And he rarely reads books so it was lovely to see him enjoying her yesterday afternoon in the car park will browning his back on his new stool. I haven’t read her for a while. And now I’ve got three novels out of the library to enjoy. She makes me smile. I see myself and my friend H. in them. He does too.
It’s our summer holiday, he said. Mind you, I shall still draw every day. How can I not?
I know enough to know how it should be done. I’ve read good writing. I know it. But all too often I cannot find it in myself. I did the first draft yesterday, and in my head it is still clunky. I am about to address it now. Will it be as clumsy as I remember? There is still so much to reach for. Is that a bad thing?
I’ve called her every Friday as usual for weeks now and there has been no answer, just that automated answering machine voice telling me to leave a message. Is she still there? Has she gone home, or has she gone forever? I think about whether I could’ve done more. I am loathe to call her daughter, I almost don’t want to hear the reality of her situation. She has been fading, in mind if not in body, for a long time now. It has been too much. A delicate being. I miss her. I think of all the women I reach out to, as much for them as for myself. Do I fall short?
I am nervous about writing today, but then I always am. Be brave. I must be brave.
A yacht was taxing out of the harbour as I walked by this morning. Oh, the freedom of it, that sailing out into a great expanse of calm blue. How I longed to be there, on board with them. Little things still please. Like the cat sitting in the window in the house at the top of the Buarth, or the car that passed me on Llanbadarn Road towing a small wooden fishing boat behind it.
We were scratchy yesterday. Let us be kinder today.
Walking isn’t the same pleasure it once was. I must and do accept this and try to find other things to focus on such as the smell of the air when I first walk out, the temperature, the feel of the wind on my face and so on. It is a kind of paying attention that I see as a gift that comes with the discomfort of my hips. It is the same when I do yoga, I concentrate of what is going on, what it feels like. Perhaps this is the generosity of old age. A mindfulness. A mind full of life. I smelt elderflowers and old roses as I walked along North Road this morning. The seagulls (or not seagulls) were noisy above me, screeching and hollering across the sky. And the sea roared too. It wasn’t cold but the wind was gusting, pulling and pushing at my stick. I feel vulnerable then and at its mercy. And that’s OK too. It’s a state of being alive. Another review to write. I wobble and worry about what I state, seemingly so confidently. I am not. I just do my best. Always.
I love the inexplicable. I saw it the other day when I was walking along North Road. It was a piece of paper, orange and cut into the shape of triangle and then tied with some string onto a signpost. I have no idea what it meant. I just liked it.
The homeless man who has long made his home in the large shelter along the Prom has returned after it’s renovation post-storm. He keeps all his belongings so neat. I walked past and his bag is placed squarely at the foot of his sleeping bag and his food and water supplies in a small orderly huddle on the ground. A gentle man and a gentleman, I think.
I walked through the Castle Park on my way home having forgotten about the smell of them. I’d been distracted by the two figures that I saw ahead of me in the gloom (is it already getting slower to grow light?) . A boy and a girl? I couldn’t tell. I slowed my pace so that I wouldn’t catch them up. And then I caught the scent of the roses. They are going over (as his mother used to say) but the sweetness is still there. I love it. It reminds me of making rose petal perfume as a child. I loved the notion of it even if the mixture we concocted was appalling. The two men (for that’s what they were) walked slower than me, even with my hobbledehoy walk and stick. They were Asian, small and dark haired. I didn’t see their faces. They were both in shorts and one had a baseball cap on and a sweatshirt that on the back read – Korea Army.
I watch her a lot, we both do. She seems fragile yet strong. Like iron in mind perhaps and tender in body. She is over a hundred after all and yet she still walks around the estate every day, her heels rolling over the edges of her shoes, leaning on her stick, that same rain mac on whatever the weather. I watched her the other day. I was lying on the ground in the car park reading and trying to get a bit of sun-warmth out of the wind and I heard her walk by on her way to the wasteland that we call our garden. She sits there every day on a pile of discarded fencing. She perches on the end her hands on her knees and mostly drops off, occasionally raising her head only to let it fall again. That day I heard her talking to herself. I couldn’t hear the words, perhaps she was praying. I think of her and wonder what she thinks about. Her end must be near and that makes her sanctified in my eyes. I called out to her as she passed by on her way back but she didn’t hear or see me. She cannot. Both those faculties are going or have virtually gone. She doesn’t know me. She asks him what my name is all the time. Is she your wife? she says. I dreamt of her last night. I was holding her hand. It felt young and vital. And I was glad of it.
