ellen bell

I think she said he was called Banjo Barry. We’d asked her how the Home communicated with the residents about the weekly programme of entertainments and events, and she’d said that they each got a leaflet with the details. She read some of the them out, including a Singalong with Banjo Barry. Asked if she’d ever been she said: NO! It is excruciating for her. There is little dignity in being incarcerated in a place that makes no distinction between refinement and bad taste. I’m sure that it is all kindly meant, and they are having to cater for all, but the leaning towards stereotypical blue-rinsed, pre-war, cosy,scone-eating-jamboree, hug-some-bunting jolliness is a bit much for her. As it would be for me. She goes along to some. Cookery was one. She told us that she went a few times and it involved six people to a bowl where each had turns at stirring it before the mixture went into the oven to metamorphose into a cake. She stopped going because she wasn’t allowed to eat cake for a while after her stroke. “I was put on Level 6,” she said. What’s that? we asked. “It means that they are worried that you might choke.” She’s also done some gardening. Today she will go to Chair Ballet. “Most fall asleep,” she said.

It was lying on the dashboard of a small white car that was parked at the beginning of South Road just before you turn up High Street. There was nothing else on the dashboard except this bleached ecru palm cross. It triggered a memory that played through my head as I walked in the nearing daylight of the one that I was given at Bath Abbey and kept for years afterwards. I like them. I like the ritual they represent, the simple symbolism of them that generations before me have taken nourishment from.

For today, it is enough.

There were just four initially, a satisfying row of black flower pots lined up against their garage wall but this morning there are now ten. The original four have green leaves already climbing up the stakes. Fresh tomatoes. I love that smell, a smell of warm greenness usually associated with greenhouses made steamy in the summer heat. They belong to the woman preacher and her husband who cannot help but be inspired (if that is the right word) to grow things living next door, as they do, to Mr Lawnmower Man and his pretty, diminuitive, black-bobbed wife who spend most of their time in their garden adding more pots and plants and trees and soaking in the sun. It’s another world over there compared to that lived by us flat dwellers.

The great blousy red Mexican poppies in one of the gardens at the end of Llanbadarn Road have flowered again this year, and they are, sadly, already on the turn shedding their red, crepe-like petals along the pavement. The juxtaposition of the red against the deep black of their seeds heads is spectacular.

I often hear radios through high-up open windows as I walk through town in the early mornings. They are disjointed voices mostly, not music. Insomniacs, no doubt, needing company.

Oh and the blue light of morning is here now. I love this time of the year, the black of night lifts earlier and I walk home in the almost daylight.

I dreamt heavily last night. Someone was letting me live in their house in the country. And then later a man, an owner of a cafe was telling me he could find a home for me whenever I needed one. He handed me his card and then began to show me photographs of his tribe and the blue and white garments they wore. He called me a lady. Then I was boarding a plane that had touched down. It was a huge but dark inner space, rather like one of those military planes the RAF etc. parachute out of. It was full of students and lecturers. I recognised one of the lecturers and even remembered his name, James Mason. They’d touched down so that students could grab a coffee. I felt a little shy entering the craft and made a joke about the worst thing about a full plane was trying to find a seat. Everyone laughed. They were kind dreams, and warm and hopeful.

As I age I find it is the small things that delight me more. Perhaps it is that I take more time to notice them, though to be honest as a child the minute and the minature always engaged me. I liked things that I could hold tight in my hand. Now it is the need to supply my desire for things to draw that prompts my collecting or buying or re-finding those little tiny knick-knacks, toys and tools. But it isn’t just small objects that give me pleasure, small events, happenings and sensations do it too. I like to walk into town early with the sun on my back and capture the smells that emanate from shops, cafes and gardens: there’s the salty stink of bacon that oozes from Spartacus Sandwich Shop, the buttery aroma of croissants from Cafe Nero and yesterday, as I walked along North Road, the sweet perfume of an old rose hanging over a garden wall that stopped me still.

It comes unbidden from watching something smaltzy from a box set. A nothingness kind of trigger that brings it all flooding out. I think the worst of it is I cannot find a space in me which likes her. There is love but it is the deep primal sort that is beyond thought, that remembers the smell of her being the same as mine. I cannot tell when it was that I first lost her. Did I ever have her? She has never asked me what happens. Perhaps that things people have told her, things that their silences have intimated, have been sufficient. Will we heal this? Do I want to return that carelessness of hers? I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t know anything at all.

She was quite animated on the phone yesterday afternoon. He makes her laugh and vice versa. They share a similar sense of humour. I listen to the two of them as I prepare supper, sometimes chipping in with questions but mostly I like to hear the two of them reminiscing or just getting closer, it is enough, that. She told us she went to Chair Ballet yesterday. Apparently there were a dozen or so there. Many fell asleep, as is there wont. The music was courtesy of Tchiakovsky’s Swan Lake and another ballet called Pineapple Poll, which I vaguely know about. Was it by Stravinsky? I ask her. It might have been, she says. She told us that they have to sit quite far apart so that when they wave their arms about they don’t whack someone in the face. The voice from the video isn’t an American one, but ‘a posh English one.’ This activity was followed by a meditation. There were images and sounds of the sea lapping, she said, adding, I thought it was a bit rubbish. I mean, who wants to be told when to relax? A no-nonsense woman, like her mother, there’s no queasy sentiment to her, it probably stands her in good stead if one looks at what her life has become. She has backbone. How I like her.

We often spend 5-10 minutes standing outside the coffee shop on the mornings we can go, waiting for it to open. A few regulars turn up and we chat. A few days ago N. told us about his Dad celebrating Burns Night reciting Burns’ poetry. “He likes poetry,” he said. The next day he asked: “What is anyone going to do about the fact that there aren’t any bakeries left in this town?” I mentioned Medina. “Yeh,” he said, “but they don’t do those soft white rolls, its all sourdough and stuff.” Then he mentioned the bake-it-at-home bread that you can buy from Tesco’s. Having dreamt about him the night before where I worried that he didn’t take good care of himself, it pleased me to hear that he cooked for himself.

Three days away from this blog and I am resorting to list-like mode, just so that I can note all the things I’ve seen in between, like the line of off-roader jeeps and full-bull-bar-juggernaut-type land rovers parked outside The Glengower the other day. Covered in mud, excepting the windscreens where the wipers had cleared an arc of glass, they looked like they hailed from The Netherlands. That same early morning a taxi was openly touting for business. He stopped in front of a group of noisy students calling out “Taxi?” before doing the same with me. Was he short? Was it in an effort to make a little bit more before he knocked off work and headed home? Is it in fact legal? There seemed to be a car-chase this morning. First a car drove past me beeping its horn in what appeared to be a rather challenging, if a little cheeky mode. This was closely followed by a police car and then another with its blue lights flashing. Where they went I don’t know?

While waiting outside the coffee shop yesterday the woman and her follower, which he refers to as Sancho Panza,tried the door. It’s closed, sweetie, I said. She smiled at me and stood there, clearly thrown. Now and again she’d whisper into her friend’s ear. When T. unlocked the door she barged through. Her amour stopped and gestured that I should go ahead of her. He said the other he thought she had OCD. He’s probably right and I endeavour to feel compassion. It’s not hard. Why else must she go in there, not buy anything, use the loo (together) and rearrange the furniture, several times in the morning? It is clearly a compulsion. G. the amiable plasterer called them ‘Aber Removals’. It was funny but it hurts to laugh at her or indeed them. They are just trying to live as best as they can. Like all of us.

Valerian is out in profusion, poking between railings in unkempt gardens and sprouting amongst the graves in the cemetry. I love such wild plenty.

Summer is coming. The Prom is showing visible signs of its onset. One of those huge deckchairs has been nailed to its pavement and the lifeguards’ huts have also been put in place. I’ve never seen them arrive, do they wheel them out there in the dead of night? And the students are beginning to migrate home. I saw one, or at least I heard the wheels of her suitcase first, scraping along the tarmac – a kind of chundering. Bless her, a stocky little thing, she was in tiny shorts and a t-shirt, and it was cold this morning. Coming down Penglais Hill from one of the campus accommodation blocks no doubt, her suitcase whirled about chaotically. Should I help her? I thought. I wobble about offering aid. It’s a selfishness on my part, I want to stay within, I don’t want to talk. I used to be the same when I’d see P. at his window smoking. My heart would fall, as no doubt his did. We both valued peace, silence, I think. May he rest in peace. He was kind.

She was sitting on the little wall outside the cyclist and mother of Ron/Reg the cat. Her hands were gripped over her stick and she was staring up at the sun. I said hello and commented on the loveliness of the weather. She looked up at me her eyes missing me, her head turned in slightly the wrong direction. I told her who I was, using his name as a way in. She remembered and asked about the drawing. I used to be rather alarmed by her. I’m not now. I touched her shoulder, her hair, as soft as a babes. Can I draw you again? I asked. Of course, she said, any time. I only wish I was more responsive, she said. Oh, you are, I said. You are perfect. And you are.

There’s a man who comes into the coffee shop he and I frequent who we call the tracksuit man. He’s always wearing them now that he’s retired from his job at The National Library. He wears the full kit, tracksuit, neatly tucked into the waist band, trainers and baseball cap. A sports enthusiast, his enthusiasm has one peculiarity, which is that all the players. and games he follows must all have some link, however tenuous, with Wales, and preferably Ceredigion. He brings books into the coffee shop, not just to read himself but to leave there. A kind of sports Gideon, he places them on the book shelf in the corner of the shop. They’re all in Welsh, and, as I’ve said about sport (though there are also some about local celebrities).

Town is littered with kids first thing. I think it’s exam time and the evenings and the early hours are clearly their wind-down time. They wander about in differing states of dress, the girls in shorts and mini-skirts and revealing as much flesh as is humanly possible while still remaining dressed. They look cold. One girl in a boob tube, tiny pelmet and ankle boots stood on the corner of Bridge Street talking to a friend. Another lad stood a little apart from the group, the hood of his hoodie over his head against the rain. He saw me and raised his right hand in a tiny gesture of hello. Hi, I said back. Most of the time I think I am invisible.

I saw him. He ‘d just left his house on Queens Road and was heading his way to the paper shop. I haven’t seen him for a few years now. He looked older, shrunken and curved around the shoulders. I hugged him. Love poured out of me. He smelt musty, tired and sad. He’d had a fall he told him over the phone later, black eyes and everything. He’s in his late eighties now and feeling it it seems. The former strength and dogged independence is waning. I want to draw him. Will he mind?