ellen bell

I was transcribing my last interview and it is a rather tedious business, even though I do like to hear back the conversation I have had. It’s the writing out that’s humdrum. Anyway, I was flitting about, doing other things in between the scrawling and went on to Facebook. She’s blocked me but he is still there, not as my ‘friend’ I hasten to add, but nevertheless I could visit his page and that’s when I saw it. He is not cautious about sharing his family’s intimacy with the wider world. And at that moment I was glad of it. They were celebrating her first cycle ride without stabilisers. He was behind her, also on a bike, filming her whirling around and she was far ahead with the other one. Was he on a little bike too? She looked so slim, ethereal even, with her characteristic slow loping walk, and that slight curving in of her shoulders that always tried to lessen her height. I thought I was alright with it. That was until I called him. He was distracted, trying to tell me something and I just lost it. I threatened to hang up. He understood, as he always does. I didn’t know there was grief there. And it is, still there.

I drew her spoon later. I shall send it to her, along with other semi-precious things that she might like to keep, give to her daughter or even sell. That would be up to her.

The flags are up on the Prom. I love these signs of the oncoming summer. The lifeguards’ hut has been up for a while. The wind enlivened the flags as I walked this morning, hood up against its blasts. But the light is a joy. I even walked the back way, along the covered lane that brings you out onto the College Field. I felt brave enough, even to walk under the bridge. One more piece to write for now. Keep going.

I watched the daughter and the mother walking back home. The mother, now 104 years old, takes a daily walk around the old school. She doesn’t go far but it keeps her connected with the outside, nature and gives her some fresh air and exercise. I think she is proud that she can still do it. Her daughter, like her sons walks beside her as she does so. I suspect she’d rather go alone. I’ve watched her during these walks, particularly when she sits down on the pile of railings that have been dumped on the wasteland. She sits, sleeps, stares and sometimes talks to herself. Maybe she also prays. I don’t know. Either way, her continued independence, one might even call it fierce, is clear. The daughter, as I watched her, looked awkward. She lives in Milan and comes here infrequently. Perhaps their relationship is spiky. I wouldn’t be surprised. Italy is a long way to run to. I did the same, though London wasn’t as far. She has none of the Italian flair. Little appears to have rubbed of on her. Nor does she have the stature that her brothers have. She is small, relatively, round-shouldered and big-breasted. She has a look of her mother in her face but there isn’t much else to say that they belong to each other, are even of the same tribe. She is doing her duty. That is enough.

Our 104 year-old downstairs neighbour has her daughter over from Milan and I’ve heard opera being played. It was loud, so perhaps it was played for the appreciation of both (the mother being virtually stone deaf) not just the daughter. I rather liked hearing the wail of the soprano’s voice coming through the floor of my studio, even though I was trying to write. How the neighbour on the other side, a night worker in A&E, felt about it, I am not sure. The singing made the old school appear European in the sunshine, cosmopolitan even, cultured. I liked it.

I do hung up on the idea of the amount of waste that we as beings create. It’s always sharpest on a Tuesday, which is bin day here, when the seagulls rip open the food and recycle bags across the town spilling their decomposing contents across pavements and roads. It is an ugly site. And it stinks. Even more so in the current warmth. And then there is the waste that I form, not only bodily waste but all the plastic, cardboard and the paper that come wrapped around those things, that I like most others, feel I must have. Ugh, it is too much sometimes. I want to live lightly, to make hardly impression on this earth. Oh, to be just spirit, leaving no trace.

There is still so much to learn. This need doesn’t lessen as the years pass but increases. Learning to accept what life brings is one of them. A major one, I think. I need and try daily to accept that my body is different than it was, that it cannot do quite what it used to do. And that sometimes it hurts. I am learning to accept this, and the more I do the more at peace I am with the disease that life has brought me. I need to apply this to wanting things, like the research degree. The place of accepting the outcome whatever it is, is a more serene one than that of yearning to the point of misery. I cannot do anything more. What will be will be. It will. And I can live beyond it. I can walk, breathe, love, experience, draw, sleep, read….. Acceptance is a potent thing, not a weak, modest thing. It is powerful and I am empowered by practicing it.

When I’m in a writing period I have less to give this journal. So, I shall stay with the small things for the time being. Another mopping and cleaning morning. The flat was still warm from the sunshine of the day before. After preparing breakfast, I lay on my yoga mat doing some stretching and looked up at the skylight window above me. I’d just been thinking about being in Nerja and how the house and terrace there play through my mind when the weather is clement like this. Looking up through the window I saw a plane leaving a glorious vapour trail behind it, a drawn whiteness through the blue. A fillip of thrill, of joy, and a perfect encapsulation of those playful thoughts of escape.

I talked about it before, that focussing in on the small things and the delight they bring. Is it an age thing? Who knows and who cares, it helps me through the stiff and tired days, and with doing things that I’d rather not do like housework. Take this morning for example. It’s mopping all the floors in the flat week this week so I had to go down and do the outer stairs. I opened the front door only to be utterly taken over by the sound of the 4am birdsong. It was mostly blackbirds, or was it just one? Whatever it or they were it was marvellous. Perhaps this doesn’t qualify for a small thing, for it was large. A cacophony of sound, and so chirrupy and joyful. It helped with my work. So thank you, birds.

As I’ve said, he always calls her mid-afternoon while I’m preparing supper and most of it is, as they freely admit, bollocks. He asks about Bertie (a character from Alexander McCall Smith’s Scotland Street series which she has become extremely engaged with, as have we at one step removed), about Escape to the Country (which is usually on the TV when he calls), the usual statement being “Where are they escaping to today?”, whether she’s been doing her exercises or been to Chair Ballet or had her haircut, what she had for lunch and then finally what she’s having for supper. A lifetime self-denier regarding food, she keeps to a narrow regime of favourites which rarely involves a pudding and definitely not custard:”I like Bird’s but this chef makes his own.” She likes smoked salmon, fruit salad and yesterday she went for a steak and kidney pie but mostly its soup and ham on brown. “I wanted chicken,” she told him last night, “but it had all gone so it was ham.”

They can’t come to meet us. The car journey and sitting in the cafe is too much for her now. He read out his text last night. I think he said that her tumour is the ‘size of a supermarket swede’. He also wrote that it is beginning to ooze some nasty pus and goo. Poor, poor love. And him, to have to watch her dying when they are so close, two peas in a pod. And their children too. She is so loved. A bright, blue-eyed star, so full of joy and life. I want to hold her, and him. And I do as I write this.

The girl with the orange Pre-Raphaelite hair whose laugh through open summer windows used to drive him to distraction and her boyfriend (with equally flowing locks, though his are yellow not orange) who works in the film & photography loan department at the University have gone. I saw him cleaning out the flat at the weekend. The doll’s houses are gone too. I presume they were hers not his, though one cannot be sure. They appeared one day and lined the sills of his flat for years. I liked seeing them.

Changing, things are always changing. That’s flat life, I suppose. I also smoker (2) coming up the back lane with his two little boys. I’ve never seen him outside his flat. They looked so happy with him. I am glad.