ellen bell

There are two puppies resident in the ground floor flats in the Quad below us. Each belong to different owners, though they live side-by-side. One owner has put up a fence around the piece of grass directly outside his front door so that his puppy is free to prance. And he does. He is a delight. We watched him last night, digging. (He digs and his owners comes out and replace the soil. A hopeless business.) I think he is a German Shepherd puppy and will no doubt grown huge. I told him that I sometimes think (more like fantasise) about us getting a small dog, a Jack Russell, perhaps. He poo-poohed it immediately. It wouldn’t be fair, he said. He is right, and I’m glad.

There is a shop on a corner of Pier Street that has had various incarnations. When I first knew it it was a deli, then it was a café selling Welsh fare. Its last incarnation was as a Potato Bar or Bar Tatws. It didn’t last long, they never do. All those good intentions. The signs on the window are still there. This morning there would clothes in the window. Another charity shop?

Green and more green. The landscape that we drove through yesterday, in all that glorious sun, was luscious. It was bursting with life and colour and verdancy. We both felt blessed by it. It was our first venturing out for such a long time and my first face-to-face exhibition. I was nervous but it was lovely. We broke the journey with stops as outdoor cafes. For all the cliché of it, it felt good to be alive.

I can’t do a headstand yet. I was so disappointed when I tried. My body won’t do it, it’s lost it’s nerve and strength. I try to picture how it felt to do it – the power and grace of it. It will come, I must just be patient and build myself up.

The Ridiculously Rich café down by the harbour have been leaving their fairy lights on through the night. I like it. It is a welcome sight in the near darkness. There were groups of students or some such on the beach this morning, with the ubiquitous fires lit. One had been broken up by the police. There were two police cars and an ambulance. Three masked police officers were talking to a middle-aged man in shorts, he was remonstrating. I cross the road and leave them to it.

Work to do. A review to write. Let it be a pleasure.

It was complete, at least it felt so yesterday. And it’s wonderful. I love the delving, the re-reading, the analysing of each word. I am new to it, and I feel my ignorance but it is OK. When I am alone with the books the adventure is mine.

Three things, he said. Write down three things you are grateful for each night before you sleep. I thought about it. I thought about making a little book, or re-using a wee sketchbook. But I did it in my head instead. I lay there and thought of those three things. I have more. But three is good. It was like offering up a prayer. I sent it out there. My thanks.

The space cordoned off for motorbikes on the Prom was full this morning. I don’t know much about motorbikes but they all looked like Harley Davidsons to me. They were pristine, all of them, clearly much loved, though last night’s rain lay, like a spray of tiny glass pebbles along the top of each of them. Five men stood outside The Marine’s entrance, talking and smoking. Where they some of the bikes’ owners? Where were the rest of them staying? Was it some kind of convention?

People are about these mornings, it’s probably the temperature or maybe the students are back for the final bit of the summer term. Three youngsters came down St David’s Road as I approached. I walked in their wake, the stink of one of their deodorants in my nostrils. An acrid odour, it smelt like Lynx or some such, and evidently liberally applied. Two more lads followed behind trailing a cloud of tobacco smoke. My sense of smell is keener when I walk.

What am I meant to do? I ask myself as I walk. I’ve always assumed that there would be one clear path, one clear thing that I would be able to dedicate my life to. And so far I haven’t found it. I do lots of things. Each I try to do well. My mind flitters, like a butterfly seeking nectar, from one to the other. Sometimes it is writing, others drawing, and then it is sewing. Should I just accept that that is the way I am? That life isn’t neat. There is straying and fraying and unevenness. I just don’t know.

A friend writes with the promise of gooseberries and blackcurrants from her garden. Wouldn’t that be something?

It’s been said many times by many people, but the body is a miraculous thing. It heals itself. If we let it. It is often slower than we would like but it does. My arm is getting better. I am doing more than I could with it than last week, even yesterday. But there are times when it still aches, hurts and throbs, mostly when I am tired. But it wants to get better. It wants to do what it did. It wants me to be able to stand on my head, to reach up to the skies, to put my arms behind my back, to turn off a light switch, chop up a sweet potato, and feel strong again. It wants this. But I must be patient. Always.

The mornings have been cold these last few days. No matter, the air is fresh and clean and the sea is marvellous.

Half the flat clean (our new Dyson only lasts that long, bless it). Now there is work to do. Tea for me, coffee for him, letters and then Austen. And then sun. Hopefully.

I woke to the sound of her laughter. It was a kind of hee hee, the way that laughing used to be written of in comics, almost akin to that of a hyena’s. She visits one of the flats across the way from us and on warm nights they have their windows open. It drives him mad. Me less so. It was after 11pm. But it’s nice to think that they were having a good time. I’ve never minded the sounds of others. It’s the benefit of living in flats – there is life. Life beyond oneself.

There have been a few that I’ve seen, left burning on the beach well into the early hours. I asked him if he used to do it as a student and he said no. So many do it now, setting fire to the felled trees or branches that the tide washes in or creating one from a cairn of pebbles and rocks. I love the smell. A sharp, acrid stink it also promises warmth and comfort and light. Perhaps its a primal thing, both they’re doing of it and my enjoyment of the smell, an innate longing to form a source, a focus of safety against the dark.

It was written on the back of a parked van on Queen Street. Knight on the Tiles it read. It bemused me a little till I made sense of both the drawing and the blurb that followed. Where they tilers? No, they are roofers. A Knight of the Tiles it should read, I suppose. How they laughed when someone suggested it. Kitsch but nice, eh?

It was alright in the end, I did it. And she was kind, it helped. As did he. Always. I’m tired this morning. The weather is enervating and I woke 5 times for a pee. Porridge the night before, you see, it’s a bugger. Heigh Ho work to do. Onward.

I heard a fox as I walked out. What does a fox sound like? he has just asked me (his hands on his hips, and still in his pants). Like a dog, I said, but not like a dog. I was thinking about how to describe as I walked down the little hill into St David’s Road. It was more like a rasp than a bark, harsh, metallic, brittle. I love the wildness that edges our seemingly soft lives. Let it always be so.

The day has been upturned. I have do to a rewrite. They are hard to do and I weep tears of frustration and the rude interruption of my plans. So be it. It must be done, if not for her, for her. I have no idea what I shall write. I rarely do. Let it come.

When I first venture out there are no birds and no bird song (though there are always seagulls – on a Tuesday usually ransacking the bins). On my return home they seem to be everywhere, in the trees, in the air and on the ground. I watched a blackbird scurrying along the pavement outside D’s house. It seemed to be rolling along, as if in on wheels – too fast for me to catch the motion of its feet.

The first day of June and both of the Lifeguards’ huts have been pitched along the Prom. I walked along the harbour and heard a banging below the edge and then an engine starting up. It was a small fishing boat with only a single green light. It turned the corner was soon gone.

There’s a poster advertising the latest picture on at the cinema in Bath Street just by the now shut Cooper’s Arms on the corner of Llanbadarn Road. The latest one is a film called A Quiet Place starring Emily Blunt. I know nothing of the film but I like the title. I live there, in that quiet place.

To compare lives is an insidious and painful act. One mustn’t – it devalues what is, the gift of what is. And besides, we can never know another’s life. We only have our own and if we look closely enough there is beauty and the promise of peace in it. Always.

The sun is here and we are to have our first trip in a long while.

I listened to the DID of Amanda ( I cannot remember her surname) the head of Christian Aid yesterday. What a bright human being she is. She talked of her struggles to find work when she came here, a trained lawyer from Zambia and how she ended up working in care homes. I was broken by God, she said, gracefully broken.

He and I talked of a night light to counter my fears of darkness. I remember that I had them as a child. They were a comfort. I cannot remember what they looked like, sadly. I think one was something to do with a Disney film but that may have been of my younger sister’s ones. I lit my candles for the first time this morning since I fell. It was nice to do so.

Town was quieter this morning. A few night-time wanderers, that’s all. A child’s scooter had been left in the street. Was it forgotten or abandoned? Does someone mourn its loss? A sign telling of missing cat lay on the pavement nearby, its Sellotape fixings all mangled. Had the cat been found? There was a rail replacement bus waiting in the bus station by Wetherspoons. A man with a pony tail and ruck sack sat on bench waiting for it no doubt, though there was hours to go. A single black rubber glove had been dropped in the road.

I was shat by a seagull on while I walked, spots of white spraying my coat and trousers. Is it still good luck?