ellen bell

The harbour is all neat and tidy, well as neat and tidy as a working harbour can be. All the lobster pots have been stacked and are contained behind wire barriers. The ropes have been coiled and the nets packed away. I like the order of it. Though won’t the season begin again soon? There was a refrigerated lorry waiting for something as I walked by. What fish would that be then? I know nothing of these things – herring, mackerel? There was a mist as I walked. It felt more like autumn than spring. A large man or woman, I couldn’t tell in the gloom. sat on a bench looking at the sea.

Two large carcasses of trees lie South beach, one is completely hollowed out like a canoe.

There were several painters’ vans outside a house on the road where I stood drawing the cut trees yesterday afternoon. From the house I could hear one of the decorators singing Lou Reed’s Perfect Day. Across the road a woman stood in the shade smoking and texting on her phone. The sun shone. I took off my hat and gloves to draw. Earlier I’d sat on a bench outside the Nat Lib and closing my eyes in the sun I’d listened to the drones on the heather by my feet. There had been 6 magpies in the field as I’d walked up.

I heard a scuffling sound from under a parked van on St David’s Road as I walked home from drawing the trees (they were like fists or hydra). I thought it was an injured bird and bent down to see what I could do. But there were two of them, brown and dusty, and they were fighting. I told them to stop and then, realising my stupidity, left them to it.

I dreamt I had a new job and that it was my first day. I made to walk up some narrow stairs to find my office or my boss but was stopped by a secretary who told me to take a seat in a kind of atrium. Was it a teaching establishment, for I saw a line of Japanese students queuing at a canteen? She offered me a coffee and I hesitated – was it real coffee, was it decaff, what about the milk? Then I woke to my alarm with the sentence -‘it’s all anti-Danish’ in my head.

All my sisters were there in my dream. We were organising the cleaning of a house together. My youngest sister was in charge (so perhaps we weren’t all there). I’d suggested something by way of a solution and she’d been impressed and I was pleased (something to do with her car and taking a taxi because she had to leave it, all very prosaic). We were opening out bin bags and I had a packet of love hearts in my hand. I remembered, in my dream, how I’d loved them as a child. (Anything with words it seems did it for me, as it still does, I wonder why?) We’d begun stripping the outer covering off the sweets revealing a grey plastic bag and my alarm went off.

Why is the National Library lit up in red?

The moon was shining directly on the ex-butcher’s house. It was stunning.

A new month. My drawing month. And I have no idea what I’m going to do.

I’m still a little out of sorts. I am fighting myself. Let it be, he says. I’m not sure if the month thing will work. I didn’t know what I was going to write last month but a story began to evolve and now it has taken over my head. Though I’ve a lot more to research before it can really take shape. What will come of March? I intend to just sit at my desk with my sketchbook and see what happens. I’m tempted to work in silence – with just the birds song outside for company. We’ll see.

He tells me not to listen to Radio 4 on Saturday mornings. It’ll only upset you, he says. And he is right, it often does. The stories from Our Own Correspondent can be harrowing – but the writing can also be exquisite, such as Nick Bryant’s piece yesterday about New York. And then there is Money Box. A woman was featured talking about the paltry increase to the Carers Allowance. She’s a carer for her son who is autistic. She is a widow and has cared for him these last thirty years. It’s a 24hr thing and she’s had no respite or holiday in all that time. My heart leapt out to her. She wasn’t bitter, more saddened by what seems like the government’s lack of compassion or understanding. Some people have such hard lives. I need to know this, and be reminded of it whenever I fell self-pitying or cross. What else can we do but feel with them, for them? And take that walk in their shoes. So, I listen. I must.

It was a good thing to do. I think I have pleased him. I hope so. It is enough, is it not to touch others in this way. A fillip. I gave him a fillip.

I was discombobulated yesterday, losing my temper, getting ratty and tipping over a glass of water, was it the moon? Is it wholly full yet? I thought it was to be the 28th, tomorrow. It was glorious though, walking in its light, and the way it shines into my studio and on the roofs of the houses of the town making them silver.

People were out while I walked. There was the lady with the bag, a young lad on a bike riding along the pavement and a man with a camera and tripod photographing the moon. Lights were on in students’ rooms – I saw a girl in a downstairs living room (the one with the billiard table) reading from a laptop, and another girl with a ponytail watching TV in bed, her walls covered in photographs.

I walked on the Perygyl, the wooden slats made white by the moon. I stood at the end and saw a falling star and made a wish.

The sweet peas have been potted and sit on the windowsill downstairs waiting to live. I hold my breath for them.

I’m currently reading a few lines of Lynn Hejinian’s My Life each night before sleep. Her recall of seemingly trivial incidents from her life is amazing – such as her being sick in the school toilets because she missed her mother or the child’s tricycle lying upside down with its wheels still turning and her and her siblings being ‘sticky’ on the back seat of the car. They stop me still. Can I do the same? Even just one? Maybe. Losing a the pearl ring that my Norwegian grandmother had given me in the long grass. Not detailed enough? I will try harder. I promise.

I’ve heard people say on the radio that it happens with Facebook. It can’t know that people have died. It’s a bit like companies still continuing to send junk mail long after a person has passed away. It’s still pretty unpleasant though to be asked if you want to ‘befriend’ someone you’ve known who’s died. He looks so sad in the picture, lost, no longer invulnerable. I still think of him, though more about her of late, alone as she now is.

The moon was marvellous. Not yet full.

He was so kind and kept saying how impressed he was. She writes to say thank you. Is that all? he asks. He is proud of me. And that is so nice.

I’ve the woman with the bag the last two days, after months of no sightings at all. Usually she crosses the road when she sees me coming (I’m sure that this isn’t personal to me, she’s just shy, I think) but today I stepped into the road to give her space. She has grown a little heavier though she still wears that grey sweatshirt top. Her supermarket bag was swinging the wind as she walked.

The birds were just as tuneful this morning, come rain or wind they still keep singing.

Our neighbour was at his window smoking as I left the flat and I handed him a parcel that had been left in the hallway for him. His hair looked wild. Another two months till we call all get a hair cut.

An empty sardine tin lay on the ground outside Ultracomida. It’s lid was curled up like a tongue. I thought of my mother and her penchant for oily fish.

You’re a good wife, he said to me a few days ago. Do you mind me saying that? he asked, what with all your feminist principles. I thought about it. No, I said, I like caring for you. It’s been indoctrinated into me, that that is what you do, I do. And I want to do it well.

It’s not clear cut all that. And besides, I told him, it doesn’t matter what the outside world thinks, this is how we live, how we look after each other. Exactly, he said, fuck ’em.

I can see it sometimes when the flat across the way from us has their blind pulled up. It looks like a smallish dolls’ house and from another window I think I can see a collection of plastic animals. As far as I know it is a flat share comprising maybe three of four adults, male and female. Whose is the dolls’ house?

He came home with a camembert. It’s a long-running thing with us. He likes the really soggy brie but mostly they are wrapped in cellophane which makes them a messy thing to use. Buy one in paper, I asked. Hence the camembert. A new problem has ensued. It stinks. It is stinking out the fridge. He can’t smell it. It’s your sense of smell, he said.

Monday’s TED talk was about animals and humans. Don’t ask if your dog loves you, one contributor said, but ask who he is. A blackbird flew across my path as I walked home this morning. It chirruped loudly and landed on a wall in front of me. I stopped walking and looked at him. He looked back at me, leaning his head slightly and staring, seemingly out of one eye. Who are you? I asked him. He said nothing. I stood for ages just looking at him. He didn’t move. It was probably seconds. I left before he did. I have work to do. Good morning, Mr Blackbird. See you tomorrow.

Every other day I walk with my headphones on. I don’t have the music too loud but it does separate me a little from the sonic landscape beyond. The birds have been singing louder and more beautifully. There is a blackbird who I hear along Llanbadarn Road that wins my vote hands down. His song is marvellous.

My sweet pea seeds are beginning to sprout. Isn’t that just marvellous?

And now? To work.