It isn’t the same for all of us, some are really suffering.
She irritates him, Ria Parkinson, that is, the character from Butterflies, and her lover manque irritates him even more. It’s her moaning, and what he calls her histrionics that winds him up the most. And after what 4 series of it, I can see his point. Her bemoaning is really just boredom, and who is responsible for that but herself. She has a loving husband who tries to respond to her desires for difference and at least one sensitive son who really watches her, knows her. She has comfort, money, a house, a garden, security till the end of her days. And she has choice, she just doesn’t see it. The cage is of her own making. They would applaud her for taking her freedom. They would.
He talked about the DPD driver he’d read about, living in one room with a family of four kids and with no work. It is desperate and they talk of it going on for another 3 weeks. Be with them. Let it improve, let something happen to ease the suffering. And all those inmates dying in care homes. The forgotten living and now the forgotten dead. Things must change, mustn’t they?
I don’t know why the death of a celebrity should hit home more than the other 10,000 people taken prematurely by this virus, but it often does. Such notables enter our homes, our consciousness in the way that nameless strangers don’t. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is. We need to relate, to build a relationship, no matter how small, to care. He came through the radio. Always funny. A charming man, Jack Dee called him. He made me laugh. I loved his quick wit. I dreamt of him last night, I asked if the gags were all scripted. He played down his skill, and said yes, they were, particularly his. I liked him. I believe I would’ve liked him if I’d met him. Is that the key, we make them nice people in our heads, shining, always shining with something we don’t have?
Ah the radio, it keeps me steady. Yesterday I listened to a repeat of Sue Macgregor’s Reunion with the hostages, John McCarthy, Brian Keenan and Terry Waite. It was so life-enriching, their courage, humour and sanguinity after such ordeals was time-stopping. Such people. I am humbled. Always. How to manage solitude, how to live with yourself without distractions, that is the nub. And then I couldn’t remember the three things Waite told himself – one was to have no regrets for that would demoralise him, the other was to not allow himself to feel self-pity but I cannot for the life of me remember the third. Did he waiver? Did he stick to it? Keenan seemed the most fragile, the most tender of the three. And the little speech he gave about McCarthy, his only companion for all those years, was beautiful.
The cherry blossom lies like forgotten confetti along the pavement gulleys. The wind whistles it up into flurries as I walk, like pink snow. No one was about. The wind was strong. His back is sore. He doesn’t know whether he will walk today. And there is the monster shop to do. I think I’ll get it over with, he says. Yes, I say, good idea. I dreamt I kept finding myself in supermarkets when I wasn’t meant to be there, and once there I couldn’t get out.
We sat in what has become our seat looking down on the Vicarage Fields yesterday afternoon and talked of the crucifixion. The usual stragglers taking their allowable burst of exercise walked or ran out before us. There was a young lad training, doing various things like jumping, throwing discus like objects and speed running. A skinny thing, rather like Adam, played by Nicholas Lyndhurst in Butterflies. And the couple arrived too, the one that we see each afternoon, both sporting cotton sun hats. He walks ahead of her, and then sprints part of the way. It’s a stiff run, they must be in their eighties. He waves at us on our high seat, and says something neither of us can hear, particularly not him. What’d he say? What’d he say? We wave nevertheless and make a reply, some remark about the weather usually suffices. I started the conversation. I thought of the film, Jesus of Nazareth that was always on the TV when I was younger. We then tried to remember the name of the actor. You know the one, he said, he looks like my younger brother. I can’t remember. And I still can’t. I found the film harrowing. It is/was meant to be, I know, but nevertheless. All that pain, all that suffering. Did it make me a better Christian watching it? We talked of his pain, what it must’ve felt like. And those words, why have you forsaken me? It stopped us still, in that sunshine, with that glorious green space around us. Still. Still.
I saw it when I gained the hill. It was sitting in a neat pile on the bench just below the crest of the little hill I walk down to get to Llanbadarn Road. There was a chocolate bar, a fruit drink in a reusable plastic container and something that looked like cereal in a tupperware box. A straw bag that had probably been used to carry the lunch was lying on the ground next to it. What had happened? Why had someone placed it on the bench in readiness and gone? I hope that they are OK. There was a fastidiousness to it, a care that touched me. I understand that pre-planning, that cupboard or drawer full of tupperware.
Town was quiet again. The Pelican Bakery was whirring as it does when I go past but little smell of bread being baked. I saw the woman with the bag as I walked towards the castle but she was sans bag. And the milkman in his van, the one who looks like Bruce Springsteen drove past. But that was all. Oh, and the man I see in his kitchen intent on his computer screen was actually reading a book in front of it this morning. It looked like a children’s book, shiny and colourful. And I’ve been meaning to say that I noticed that one of the daffodils in the Mind’s window boxes had flowered. They left the premises a couple of years ago, though no one has taken it over. And the window boxes had been forgotten. And yet, the daffodil still flowered, regardless. Nice.
He worries about us sunbathing, that is, taking in a little sun in the Col Fields. It’s just anxiety about what the rules are. It’s hard to know what the right thing to do is. We keep to ourselves up there, on our perch. What harm can it do?
It used to be trade name of a shoe polish. I remember it from my childhood, it always conjured up lovely notions. And cherry blossom is especially beautiful. The tree of it along Llanbadarn Road, in the backyard of the Nursery School is bulging, positively bursting with it. And there are van Gogh’s paintings of it. It will fall soon. Enjoy it while you can.
There is serendipity everywhere. I spoke of Paula Rego yesterday during my interview with A and then there was her voice coming out of the radio an hour or so later as part of a promo for a Desert Island Discs revisited promo. I can’t imagine she was an easy interviewee. Sue Lawley did her best no doubt. She isn’t polite. I remember her in that bookshop in Cambridge, wild, untamed, thrilling but scary. And her work always gets me in the stomach, it punches me there. It is magnificent. Nobody draws like her. I am floored by her brilliance. But she still scares me. There is no ‘paying lip-service to niceties’ in her – she is uncontrolled. And there it is there on her canvases. I told A to look at her work, saying that I saw a link but there isn’t really, A is fragile, cautious, a free spirit but not untamed, not feral like Paula. Her voice on the radio talking about using the figure more and more. I’m interested in looking, she said, now.
No one was abroad as I walked. I saw the lorry driver sleeping in his Tesco’s truck and the woman in the bakery filling the shelves and that man in one of the houses along Mill Street sitting in his kitchen on his computer, his face lit up by its screen. And that was all, no police, no night-time wanderers. Oh, there were two cats skittering across the road. But that was all. Just me. And the moon.
Things do have a habit of working out. They sometimes work themselves out, or others do it, or we do it for ourselves. A problem, a worry always seems worse when it is contained in the head, in the mind unshared. We talked in the sun yesterday afternoon, sitting on a bench in the Vicarage Fields. He always helps me. He doesn’t see things as disastrously as I do. He never does. He is wise, where I wobble. I sit with my legs over his and he strokes my feet as we talk. They are simple pleasures, a simplicity that I crave during this episode of bleakness. I am nervous about today. And yet, I know it will be fine, once I’ve got a handle on the technical stuff of it. I like her work very much, and she comes across so warmly. I am sure that we will get on. And the writing? Will it always scare me? Probably. It’s because you want to do these artists justice, and yourself and the fear of judgement from all sides is ever present. Can you not find some spaces in between the fear to enjoy it a little? Yes, I think so. One day at a time, he says. One day.
900 died yesterday. We will probably have the largest death count of all Europe, he said yesterday. I was shocked. I have this notion of us being forward, up in front with the wherewithal to cure. Clearly this is not so. I am sorry. I am sorry for all of your losses. So far I have not been impacted with such grief. It may come. The odds are high that it will.
And still the sun promises to shine. So much pleasure and so much pain. Can we ever contain it all?
I’ve talked about it before, the radio and how it plays into my mind. A snatched phrase, a word that resonates. The other day it was from a short story. An Irish story. A short, they called it. The story was about a daughter meeting up with her mother after she’d run away and left her with her grandparents. You hear the train of the girl’s thoughts. ‘You’re both stuck in the year she left’, says the narrator. And then yesterday, one of the composers on Radio 3 having the same surname as the maker I am to interview tomorrow. An unusual name, Dutch.
The sky is milky with wispy clouds. A few more people were about as I walked this morning. It is warmer, possibly that is why.
Take each day at a time, he tells me. One at a time. I watch my breathing, sometimes I am holding my breath and I don’t know that I am doing it.
The fullness of the moon disturbs my sleep bringing both ridiculous yet disturbing dreams. One of the ones from last night involved me seeing a doctor (who happened to be the red-haired bloke who played the dentist who had a thing with Trixie in Call the Midwife) who told me I had this condition and he spouted out a long latin name which required him to pump my ‘downstairs’ with water. I baulked at his use of the word even in my sleep (he laughed when I told him about it this morning) – and then when the consultation concluded he abruptly turned round, ignoring me completely and began chatting up the nurses.
We were sitting by the edge of the ‘Col Field’ as he calls it, in the sun, flouting the rules in the name of Vitamin D when I saw her. Isn’t that T? I said, from the cafe? He wasn’t sure until she came closer. I’ve always liked her. There is something steady about her. And she has a style, yesterday she was sporting some particularly flamboyant slacks. She doesn’t know my name but manages to fudge it. She been out getting food for her cat, she told us. What’s your cat’s name? he asked her. Patrick, she said. It helped. It helped her obvious stress at having to close their business, and the losses that this has incurred. It helped to distract her. She turned her attention to recounting how Patrick was faring during this strangeness. He used to go out when we were at work, she said, now he’s in all the time. Poor love. She has savings. We’ve worked hard for them, she says, it seems unfair to use them. I know. I know.
I know these things aren’t personal, how can they be? These fraudsters don’t know me, they just take a chance. And the amount was small, relatively, just a monthly drip drip that I was sure to overlook and I did for a couple of months. It churned me up when I did realise what had happened. First you feel so foolish then you feel abused, invaded. And it took so long to get through to speak to someone. Initially there is that slow, sterile on-line chat to deal followed by the endless wait on the phone. In the end a warm voice answered, a warm kindly voice and all has been taken care of, but I do feel silly, and a little ticked-off by myself and that imaginary panel of judges sitting on my shoulder for not noticing it sooner. Was that their intention, that I wouldn’t miss it? Well that’s them stymied now. Anyway all that meant that I didn’t have the peaceful day I’d intended. Isn’t that part of the frustration, that things come in unbidden, unexpected and shake up one’s plans? Does that mean we shouldn’t make plans? Is it better to be unprepared for the day, open to anything? And yet, structure, however impermanent holds us in place, helps us to believe in an order, that there is a sense to this chaos. And the worst thing is we rowed. We rarely shout at each other like that. It was horrible, short but horrible. It makes me weep, I need his goodness, and his belief in mine to function. All was settled soon, but the residue, that trace of rancour remains.
Another beautiful day is promised, though the wind, they say will pick up. I shall so sew today while I can before the next tranche of work comes in. I thought about work as I lay in bed waiting for sleep trying to find a peaceful place with it. And it came in that thought, that sense that when I am working, writing in particular, there is pleasure in ‘sitting with it’, even before the blank page has been resolved, of giving myself to it. And that was enough to calm me. The same can be applied to art work and even to my BBC work. It’s about yielding to it, succumbing and seeing what comes. For it always does. Always.
I think about her. I talk to her, in my head. Was she, is she wiser than me? I remember her reticence. The world was a frightening but also a wondrous place for her, as it is for me. Little has changed. For her the day to day was about managing her fears, as it is for me. They come in, unbidden, or so it seems though I know my mind brings them, hurls them into my thinking space. What are the fears of? Not being good enough, generally, or not meeting a deadline, or not finding any inspiration, of being emptied of all thought, original or not. And of displeasing others. That was a big one for her. I remember that. Mostly displeasing her. That was a frightening thing, at times a violent thing. But what of her joys, her pleasures? They were usually in the small things. Her things. Her room. Her bedroom, particularly the one at the farm with its split level, its little window onto the garden. How glorious it was to sleep alone after so many years of sharing with her sister. Her own space. Her posters, her music, her things. What were they, those things? Gimcrack stuff mostly. A musical jewellery box with the ubiquitous ballerina, an old teddy, a collection of her Dad’s old 45 singles, and her own, including Donny Osmond’s Puppy Love and his and Marie Osmond’s version of Paper Roses and her books – fairy tales books, exquisitely illustrated, Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven and Famous Five novels, and various Anna Sewell stories. She took care of her things. She still does. They were lovingly possessed, owned and treasured. It was her quiet space, her safe space, mostly. Was she wiser than me? I think she accepted things as they were better than I do. After all she had no false sense of power or agency. Things were done to her that were beyond her control. Her only power was in acquiescing, quietly, silently and staying out of the firing line, not putting up resistance. Resistance met violence, or at least had the potential to attract it. Oh, it wasn’t so bad. She wasn’t so bad. She was doing battle with her own particular demons, but the child, she was scared of the threat of violence. She was a quiet soul, a peaceful one, then. Can she be so now?
It promises to be a beautiful day.
I was thwarted in my intention to begin to put together his quilt. The material the woman had cut for us in the material shop wasn’t big enough. So I made flapjacks instead, read and did a meditation which is guaranteed to make me tenser as I always feel I do don’t manage to reap its benefits as I should. Heigh ho. I tried it. And the quilt must wait.
