ellen bell

Is it ever to be found? There is so much destruction in this constant warring, so much loss of life, of safety or security. Have we learnt nothing? I think of an afterlife where war has no place. Is it possible?

I get glimmers of it, in the form of a sharp, clear other way of thinking. And then I think, it may not be so bad. I may not be so bad, after all.

It featured on the news several times, about how the government have brought in Alan Milburn to look into why over million young adults are not working, in education or training. It’s a sad fact. I mourn for them. I’ve seen the hopelessness, the inwardness and the utter lack of motivation when I used to teach. What can be done to help them?

Did my imagining that it was going to happen, make it so? Who knows? I thought about it, minutes before he did it. And it went everywhere. Such mishaps bring him down. He feels stupid, awkward, cross with himself. It’s wiped up, done. Though upstairs reeks of coffee. There are worse smells.

I am constantly tired. I thought my energy would pick up since the cold we both had left, but it hasnt’. Is it my heart? Or anaemia? I trudge rather than walk. Will it pass? I need my strength, for there is still so much work to do.

My reply to his Instagram post about Palestine, and how his sadness and impotence over what is happening there has made him unable t draw or paint, felt paltry, mere platitude. I feel for him, and for him, as I do for the Ukrainians over our selling out over buying oil from Russia. It is all so ugly, so unethical and unkind. How have we got ourselves in all this mess of degradation?

My dreams borrow from my waking life. I’d looked at an image of Keir Starmer on his iPad that afternoon, and the same picture became animated during sleep. He was reading from an iPad as he parked his car. It irritated me that he could be so careless. Then he got out of the car and said, his hand stroking the back of his neck: “It’s so hot.” And that was it.

He called me after I’d texted him. He sounded more like his usual self. He was driving he said. (Perhaps it was the imagining of this event that fed my dream.) There is still a long way to go, but he seemed sangine about it.

Some days are like that. I am awry internally and externally. I drop things, fall and knock or cut myself. I don’t know why. And then the agitation come. I am best safe at home, in my studio and at my desk working, on such days. Out of the way of harm. Mostly.

I no longer drink it. Is that why I crave and, indeed, derive so much pleasure from the aroma of it. I have a candle that smells of it, and nothing pleases me more than sitting amongst the scents of the roasting of it, such as in Covent Garden’s Monmouth Coffee House. Perhaps the addiction goes on regardless.

Some days I am beyond tired. There no word for this lethargy. Sleep doesn’t cure it. I wake up tired. I am sorry. I do not have to go down a pit or work a loom in a factory. It’s just that my work, mental and domestic, is so relentless, that my days lack joy. And I am ashamed for compared to so many I am so very fortunate. It’s my perspective that has gone awry. Is it cast in stone now?