A kind friend sent me some fruit from her garden. She’s done so for the last few years. Blackcurrants that still smell of the sun and gooseberries, almost translucent. We don’t see each other much these days. I miss her. But this is a touch, a connection that I value.
A student (presumably) had put some boxes outside one of the accommodation block. There was a sign balanced on one of them. FREE STUFF it read.
A black cat made as if to cross the road in front of me and then stopped and sat down in the road. I kept on walking and then heard a terrific screech and whirled round thinking it as the cat only to see a seagull swooping up from a dive. Had it attacked the cat?
I dreamt of the dark man – it was a beautiful dream. We were lovers and he was in my bed. Such sweetness. And yet, even in the dream I felt that same unsated longing when he was gone. And he was gone often. Forever elusive. And yet, such sweetness.
The sun was unexpected, and though I was dog-tired I went out with my cardi on to read. I took John Locke with me. I thought I would struggle but he was very readable.
We’d noticed that the blackberries a few days before. Isn’t it very very early? I picked about 8 ripe ones and I’ve eaten them for breakfast. Such foraging pleases me, small though it is.
In my last dream I had to pack all our things up. Were we moving home? There was a boat too. How are we going to carry that? I thought.
It’s a perfect house. I felt a momentary longing. It would be too big for me, he said. Possibly. And possibly I might be a little freaked by its exposure – but the space, the cleanness of the lines and the light. It is stunning. Do they know how lucky they are?
Someone had left a child’s trainer on the top of the railing along North Road. It was a tiny shoe. Lost, or mislaid no doubt and someone finding it had placed it there. There’s a sadness to it. Will it be mourned by parent or child? Was it much loved?
The wind was strong. The tide had been high and lashed the Perygyl before I’d arrived.
I’ve just been watching a fledgling collared dove. She or he was perched on our neighbour’s guttering, pondering, observing and then preening. They all gather, mostly due to the fact that the next neighbour along keeps up an endless supply of fat balls and seeds. There are five containers full at present. So they all come. There are the rooks, the blackbirds, a whole host of sparrows, the doves and yesterday there were three baby jays. It gave me such a fillip of joy. They were fluffy, ungainly things but those tell-tale lozenges of blue on their wings were there nevertheless. I can catch them from my studio window, if I stand up and look down, that is. I love to see them, as does he. Small things. And now I must write…..
He got a text saying that she’s had a stroke. They think it’s either as a result of her fall, or that the fall was because she’d had a stroke. It may also be because of the stress of looking after her husband single-handedly, whose memory is failing, during the lockdown. My heart is with her, though I don’t know her well. And her situation reminds me of another’s. She too carried the burden of her husband’s waning memory, though in their case there wasn’t the same love or care. Not by then, at least. Which is worse? I wonder. It is a sad thing.
A few singular souls wandered the Prom as I did this morning. We keep our distance, locked in our own darkness.
Will it rain?
I got all the timings wrong, but she was forgiving and kind all that way away in her mountain home.
I’ve been listening to an audio of Richard Mabey’s Nature Cure. I read it a while back. I like his writing very much. He feels what he writes, and there is such care in both the feeling and the writing. A gentle man, I think. The word is his, he used it to describe house martins making their nests. Robert McFarlane was on DID on Sunday. I’ve read and listened to his books too. Another good man. ‘We go into the darkness to see,’ he told Lauren Laverne. He talked about his Lost Words book and I hanker after it. Some will have to be passed on to make room.
A baby gull was standing by the steps of the small car park I walk through to exit our estate. It was a big fledgling. It gave me a shock. It was something to do with its hugeness, its stillness and also its vulnerability. It doesn’t do to be still as a bird. It stared at me, its eyes full of loss and perplexity. Too much. Just too much.
It stresses him. It particularly stressed him yesterday. We all have our things – things that wind us up. For him it is the non-closing of the outer door of our shared hallway. It drives him to distraction. And we’ve tried everything, notes, signs – all very polite, all very seemly. I’ll just have to go and knock on their door, he threatens, convinced that he knows the culprit.
Yesterday was a ratty day. He was sharp and I was defensive. He says it might have been nerves about the Lions’ match. Who knows. It is allowed.
We watched videos of a friend’s son doing his gymnastics. He is in the Olympics, representing Norway. He was beautiful to watch. It took my breath and gave me goosepimples. My body yearned to do it too. Round and round the frame, flipping over and over, his body like rubber. A dancer, a ballet dancer in flight. Stunning.
There was a barely-fledged chick in the middle of North Road as I walked this morning. Oh, bless it, I heard myself say. It was still yet a ball of fluff and it was pecking at the newly-flattened carcass of another young gull, splattered across the tarmac. Needs must, I suppose but the cannibalism of it made my stomach turn. There is such an excess in this over-hatching of chicks. It is too much for this small town to contain. It’s a bit like the young kids who are beginning to return to their usual night time behaviour. I hear their shouts. A girl in shorts answering her mobile phone, her voice bored. Hello, yes, can you pick me up? Where am I? I’m at the bottom of the hill, you know the hill? And then the boy, later, walking along the prom, no swaying. and suddenly crying out, to someone or no one, Oi Oi, brother. And all the while some house alarm going off, a high keening.
It’s a disintegrating town. Or perhaps it is just the ‘going over’ of summer. Too much. Too much eating, drinking, sun and indolence. A down pipe on the side wall of the Scholar’s pub was dripping – drip, drip, the water staining the wall. A shabby town. I shan’t stay when he goes. The sea has grace and power but the rest is shabby.
Sometimes one gets flashes of insight. Sometimes they come, all glaring and others its a whisper of a thing. This morning I realised why I’ve done all those degrees. It wasn’t the qualifications, or even the proof of competence but more that they gave me a path to follow, my work had a reason, a place to be. I find this empty space (that I have to fill) at times utterly overwhelming.
I watched as one of our neighbours’ grown up daughter chased away a young seagull from their front lawn.
They re-aired the programme about Rimbaud (and Jim Morrison) and I remembered his walking.
I passed The Pelican Bakery on my walk this morning. The door was open wide and the blower was on full blast. No baker, just the two girls and I got a pang after catching the sounds of their easy chat. I fantasise sometimes about belonging to such a life. Are they happy in their work?
I fell. I fell backwards, thinking my seat was there and it wasn’t. It probably looked very funny. But, bless him, he didn’t laugh. He looked so shocked. I cried. I was shocked too and my arse hurt. As it still does. I am too aware of my fragility these days.
I thought about all my books. One day I shall go through them all, particularly the art and picture books, page by page. Perhaps I shall make drawings from them. We have so much, so much that we no longer engage with, so it becomes just stuff.
I tried to explain yesterday and didn’t succeed. I’m a domestic animal. I am reclusive. I live quietly, at home.
I want to see them, all of them. One by one. To re-acquaint myself with their lives. They are my blood, though we have little in common.
My alarm went. I turned it off but went back to sleep. It’s a bugger that. It was the dream that I’d had before, it made me groggy. V. had given me a present but it was a complex one about sparking my imagination and before that we’d been looking through books together, photography books I think. And then there had been food. I can’t eat any of that, I’d said.
Their scent is intoxicating. And it’s only just come. We catch it as we walk along the back path to where we sit (our garden).
There was a man sleeping on the beach. A young man. For a brief moment I thought he might be dead, but he looked peaceful, his hands laying on his chest. How nice, I thought to fall asleep to the sound of the sea. A peaceful sea, that is. When I told him of it at breakfast, he said, he wasn’t dead was he?
There was a notice on the window of the bike shop saying that they had to close because the staff were self-isolating. I’m sorry. It’s not their fault.
We talked about my obsession or should I say, idee fixe about the early 19th century. A very particular part really, well, the part that Austen writes of. I tried to explain it to him. It helps to do that. It’s got something to do with roles. Women’s roles specifically. And a lack of a bigger expectation. The domestic life. You see, I am not longer articulate. I am watching myself too closely. I’m searching for something and when I listen to those fictions something clicks. A yearning is made manifest. A romantic notion? Perhaps. He understood. Then.
