I like the uncanny-ness of what I notice during my early morning walks. I like that inexplicability of them. Like the man I saw apparently mending his motorbike (or perhaps he was putting it back together again), in the street just outside his door at 4.00 am in the morning. Or the Welsh Water vans that I saw again this morning, this time near the back of M&S, and that other van, the ice pigging one, parked up beside them. Or the girl I saw through the window of the student house with the billiard table in the living room, fast asleep on a couch under a blanket. Why aren’t you in bed? I wanted to ask. I smelt bonfires as I walked along the Prom. The tide was right out and the sunrise a salmon pink.
The ex-butcher now eBay trader extraordinaire who lives in the elegant house on St David’s Road has a series of cars. Some are his, some are his children’s and his wife’s. One of them is a Ford Capri. We used to have one. It was lime green and our mother’s favourite. I remember you had to step down from the pavement to get in. Anyway he saw the ex-butcher on the Prom the other day and they discussed the car. He doesn’t like it. The ex-butcher does and told him how much it cost. And then he told him that when he’d driven it along the Prom a group of men (where they Asian, Chinese or maybe from Japan – I forget) walked over to where he was parked and struck up a conversation about it. They clearly were much enamoured. As they were leaving one of them turned round to him, the ex-butcher, and asked, in all seriousness apparently, ‘Are you a pimp?’
I see things that mystify me, particularly in the mornings when I walk. This morning it was a flock of Welsh Water vans, with their headlights blazing, all parked in a gaggle on North Road. The men were silent as they gathered around the mouth of a drain. The only sound was the hum of engines. Then returning home I saw some markings in the road, obviously made with a spray can. TEMP WWU, it read. And just before, as I’d walked past those humming utility vehicles, another van had driven past me with the phrase Ice Pigging emblazoned on it. What does it mean? And was it snow or ice I’d seen melting on the corner of St David’s Road. Snow and ice in June? Surely not.
He is kind. It is his kindness that makes me love him the most. I just popped downstairs, he said when he returned with the last lot of shopping from the car. Downstairs is our neighbour, now 103 or is it 104. She is on her own and doing fine. He is better with her than I am. He is kind. She is deaf and virtually blind, though if she peers she can make her way with her stick around the estate and take her rest on the pile of waste materials in the wilderness that we refer to as our garden. From what he reported back she clearly appreciated the gesture. Pop in any time, she said.
The moon stopped my breath this morning. I’d seen it through my studio window at 2.00am and it had been pretty stunning then but walking out onto the Prom from the riverside it was before me, squat, huge and orange. Is it a full moon today? I asked him at breakfast. He googled it. Yes, he said, it’s a full strawberry moon. Like this. And he showed me a picture. Ours is more orange, I said.
Being a Tuesday the seagulls had been at the bins. Do they know it’s bin day? They make a god-awful mess. Litter, plastic bottles and foodstuffs are strewn across roads and pavements. I picked up a pizza box from the middle of the road and took it to a pile of recycling waiting for collection. The rest I couldn’t bring myself to handle. It is too much. They are the very devil but they are just doing what they do.
The town is profuse with wild flowers, about which neither of us know anything. I have a go at the names but they are wild guesses, so he bought a second-hand book so that we can learn. Valerian – common and red – is everywhere. They have tight florets of bloom and long, straggly leaves and stems. They seem to emerge in a clump. They are mostly down by the harbour, growing amidst wild poppies, Michaelmas daisies and Orange Gerbera. They are also blossoming among the graves in the Cemetery on Llanbadarn Road. They don’t seem to have a scent. (The book is a little disappointing, I would’ve liked a little more folklore. And isn’t Valerian taken to help you sleep?)
I saw two trails this morning. The first was left from when I saw the Asian woman carrying her recycling bag to the bins yesterday afternoon. An oozing of a white liquid (could’ve been milk) was leaving a line behind her. It leads all the way to the bins and was still there this morning. I watched her from our kitchen window with her daughter straggling behind her in a pink dress. The other was in the sky. A plane, off somewhere exotic or returning. It was a gorgeous white line against a pinkening sky. And then there was the little baby. A blackbird-let, I think. It was huddled against a low wall on North Road. I spoke to it. It didn’t look in distress, just bewildered. Did you pick it up? he asked at breakfast. No, I said, I wanted to but what would be the point and I would only terrify it.
Writing this morning. My writing. Is it easier? No. I ask even more of myself.
It’s a total immersion thing, this interviewing and then writing about people. I don’t know any other way of doing it. And I’m drained afterwards, if also a little exhilarated at finishing it. I live what they tell me they have lived. And then, I forget them (though some not entirely), it has to be so, or there wouldn’t be room for the next one and the next. But no, perhaps it’s not a forgetting exactly more a squirrelling away.
I don’t like forgetting. It’s important to hold people, to keep them in sight. Even those who are strangers to us. We need to remember, to keep thinking of them. Like those men caught by the Russians, like all those in war-torn places like Ukraine, like Somalia, like Afghanistan and on and on. And those people who are threatened with being sent to Rwanda. My heartbreaks. Can it really be so?
I get it every couple of months or so. It passes. This time it hurts, no doubt compounded with the other thing, that I am loathe to name, that now resides in both my hips. Walking has been stripped of some of its pleasure. I like to be out, that is always good, but my legs are stiff hobbledehoys. Iron grinds against iron. I wait to hear the clanging. It is a graceless business. But, as I say to myself constantly now, at least I can still do it, get out there, be out there and on my own steam.
I stole a little time yesterday, after working, to sit out in it. The wind was strong so I slipped my body in between our car and our neighbours’ one. It still found me though and I froze a little. Between gusts I felt the warmth and was glad of it.
He is sad, and sometimes a little cross about the weather we are having this June. June, he says, it’s June and look at it! Nothing above 18 degrees and he is grieving. I am a little more sanguine. I have work to do and seeing the sun from my window fills me with too much longing. It will come, I tell him, perhaps in July.
I’ve been reading Simon Gray’s Coda. It wouldn’t have been a book I would’ve chosen but it was one of the one’s my online Writing Lives tutor recommended. It’s marvellous. And all those things it says on the front – witty, moving and so on. It’s about his dying, which gives it a sharpness, a residue of melancholy but he must’ve known that he was also being funny. But the thing is is it’s effortlessness. That is it’s marvel. I will seek out other books of his, especially The Smoking Diaries. I think about possibly doing something similar with my drawing outings during which I see much and think about much and people do interrupt or comment on what I am doing. It might make an amusing study. Doing it officially isn’t allowed, but why not informally? I could have a go, couldn’t I?
I find it hard not to work every day. My sense of self is bound up in what I do, whether it be writing or drawing. I feel better about myself if I am striving to do something – my day is fuller for it, richer. But as a result rest is rarely taken, and if it is it can make me grumpy, and more than a little dislodged. So I didn’t take the bank holiday off. I kept working. Though I did a brief 10 minute meditation and during it (and yes, I know that the mind is supposed to be emptying) I thought about how I could rest my mind while still doing. The word ‘play’ came through. And I remembered the Paul Spooner book I got a while ago. I could make playfully (I long to find time to sew but that is not play either – I am too serious about it), and an automaton in paper might be the answer. I like the flash bulb moment it gave me, that precious flicker of insight.
I walked out into the still damp air my face pushing through lines of gossamer. And my feet extra wary now of stepping on snails. There are hundreds about, particularly up that back lane. Large and small, they set off on their treks across paths, exposed and vulnerable and leaving their slimy trails. I hate that crunch under foot and that knowledge of taking an innocent life. I dodge them as best I can, performing a kind of dance as I do so.
He mentioned it a few days ago after saying that he’d bumped into our neighbour’s mother in M&S. She’d told him that someone had told her husband that it was going to happen. He didn’t believe it and said so to her. Then he met her husband the day before last and challenged him about it. He said he had it on good authority and mentioned part of a name, not being able to remember the rest. He knew who he meant and told him the whole double-barrelled name (she’s sometime big in the University, apparently). This is how small towns work. And I find myself caring more than I’d imagined I would. I love that space. I love hearing the cricket being played on it in the summer. I like seeing the young boys with their dads practicing kicking balls. I love hearing the groundsmen mowing it continually through the year, and the smell of the grass leavings. I like to walk into town along it’s paths. I like that fact that it is open to the sky. I don’t want them to sell it and build another block of flats on it. He doesn’t believe it will happen. And I must trust to that.
