Oceans of flags and children. Hurra Hurra. Brass bands and american-tan-stockinged majorettes. So proud. Reclaiming the streets. Echoes of Nazi jack boots high-stepping. Cancelling out.The city bursting with red. Women and men in national costumes, warm in the sun. I found a brooch. A keepsake.

He is so stiff. I cannot find a warmth. He offers me war stories. An eight-year-old boy witnessing the bombing of a building. Just here. Here. Six hundred German women inside. Blown up. Bodies everywhere. He saw it. His father pulling at his hand. Come. Come away. I ask why. Why. Innocent women. No. He says. It was war. It is war. They worked for the enemy. Hurra hurra they shout. I don't know what to say. There is no warming to him. I am sorry. She needs him.

A tiny woman full of smiles. She carried guns in her bag. Resisting. They all did. Just nineteen. Not a duty, she tells me. Everyone did it. So proud. Proud to be Norwegian. I am. Too.

Dark stories. Trying to understand. Through my blood. Blood.

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A long day. A long night. Full of strangeness. A disintegration. Winding forest roads. A warning of elks. Five hundred kilos. He slowed down. We crawled. The kindness and the strangeness of strangers. No room at the inn. Until later. Found. A warm bed. A deep bath. Dark adventures.

Her hands were cool. Smooth skin. She held my hand in the dark. Two women connected by blood. One still so beautiful, the other watchful. Love. Finding love in the disintegration. Drawers full of pills. Her heart flipping flapping with the confusion. Take care. She needs him. And yet he is so strange.

Too tired to cope without warmth, water, a bed. Saving grace. The grace of love. Being loved.

Morning cityscape. It is what I wanted. Here. So much dying. Disintegrating. Watching. Feeling the grief of it. The beauty of it.

I listened to them talking. As we drove. In the dark. He said there were bears, wolves. A silent, brooding wildness. Beauty in the strangeness. Wild. Feral beauty. Find the ground. Neaten. Tidy. Impose order. A surface neatening. That is all.

Cooking red meat. Blood oozing. Too raw. Too blue. He was the only one who ate it all. The blood turning the sauce pink. Dirty fingers. A stained mackintosh. Smoking on the balcony. She needs him.

I hold her hand. Blood finding blood. Then strawberries. Bruised redness. Eyes sore with tiredness. And yet. So much love. Wait. Wait and see.

Wait and see. See.

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He keeps bringing her tulips. Her room has jugs and jugs of them. They swoon in the heat of that too hot, airless room. Their once rigid stalks flag, strewing petals, red, yellow upon the windowsill, the radiators and the floor. It is all he can do. To please her. She wants nothing. Just him. There.

Outside pigeons are beginning their puffball wooing. Seagulls and crows swoop past, their beaks bursting with nesting stuff. Grass, twigs, feathers, fluff. There is a compulsion, a new urgency to their movements.

In the home there is a notice announcing a Jubilee Party on June 1st. All are invited. 50s dress. And there is a prize for the best dressed. 'Dress to Impress' it commands. A man in a pale blue cardigan sits in the canteen, alone. He raises a hand, briefly, at our greeting. There is chocolate sponge and white sauce for pudding.

'When it's spring again, I'll bring again tulips from Amsterdam.'

She is sleeping when we enter. Such a tiny thing. Everything is shrinking. Turning in. Turning inside.

I stroke her hand, her arm. There is no skin. Her body is all blue with veins. Just blood. A tiny, meagre pulsing.

'Weave it awone, Phwip. Weave it awone.'

She moans, as he tries to take away the sleep from her eyes. She sings inbetween the drifting. She giggles at her audacity, her childishness - the play of it. Elsewhere the other residents doze in beds or upright in chairs. The heat inside defeats them. Sucking away any will to move, to think, to be.

'Take care. Take care.'

She mutters.

'It's windy out there'.

She whispers, before sleep takes her. Down. Down.

The day is still. The sun a shining thing.

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I have walked through the stiffness in my leg. Trying to be tender.Tender with myself, my body. My new slowness sharpens my attention. I walked off the promenade and up the slight hill towards the castle and through the municipal gardens. It was early, not yet six. Tiny droplets of dew had been caught on the blades of grass. They hung there like fibre optic lights. Entirely perfect. Joyfully perfect. Complete. Perfection. Just for me.

A week of intensity. An exploration of touch in all its awkwardness and beauty.

Wood pigeons coo in the morning. Round, soft sounds of contentment. Forgotten woods. Pennies on the pavement. A child's delight in treasure. A single black shoe. Seagulls bob on the waves. Playful and momentarily quietened. A man on the beach walking his liver-spotted dalmatian, whilstles while he collects pebbles in a Lidl bag.

Someone died in the home. A ripple of discomfort. A brief rattling. The residents withdrawn, quiet. She had been bedridden. Not seen but still present. It will come to us all but they, they are at the door. No way back. Not now.

It is cold in her room. Dai 'Dogs', handyman and ex-police dog trainer, comes in to sort out the radiator.

He watches the football and she, disappearing into her giant bed, reads and re-reads her 'friendship' book. She doesn't mind the repetition. It is easier that way. A re-visiting, a re-turning. Round and round the mulberry bush. Going back.

A man with a soft voice. Red blotches on his skin. Everywhere. Skin shows us inside out. Touch. Touching.

The water lapping gently. The morning after the night before. And all is calm.

(Image borrowed from www.photoshow.com )

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'Find your own corner, a corner for yourself,' he said.

Yes. Not cornered. A focus. A focal point. Else, it is all too big and wide.

Pain. Not be able to walk my walk. I have missed that openness, that wide wildness. I have wept over the temporary loss of it. Pain has its gifts. It has slowed me down. I have noticed the detail, the littleness. Instead. It has been enough. Pain draws the finer stuff of the body. Its lines. Its intricacies. Pain makes you know it. Know it.

New realms. I return to my corner at night. To rest.

Wild weather. Overcast skies. Pushing down. Greyness.

The other morning. A ferry. Pulling out. I walked alongside it. Journeying. Out. Further afield. Out to sea. The sea bringing change. Magic. Always renewing. Always changing. The thrill of it.

New faces. New voices. Rich sounds from sun-warmed throats. Exotic possibilities. Fancy shoes.

Cinema on a Friday night. Front row. Plush red seats. A performance. One-dimensional. Cosy corner.

Students walk past the window dressed in animal suits. In the rain. Sundays. I will bake shortbread. Fill the flat with sweet buttery smells.

A warm corner. Come.

(Image borrowed from www.ulrikabjork2.blogspot.com)

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Early morning and I return to the launderette to collect my washing from the dryer. There has just been a downpour. Then a storming of hail. Spring storms of crazy weather. A drenching. There is a young woman in there. Drenched. She has spread a striped towel on the floor. Her clothes and things are strewn over every available surface. A regurgitation of chaos. She is all over the place. Her breath is sweet, sickly. That morning after miasma. Matted hair, matted fake fur. Her washing is a tumble of cheap lace. As I fold my clothes she is pulling herself into a pair of faux leather trousers.

Garrison Keillor on the radio talking about spring thunderstorms. People felt different afterwards, he said. Fresh. Clean. Cleaned through. So unexpected. So fast. A flash of power, of electricity. We are all plugged in to it. Part of it.

A garden planter sprouting mustard and cress on the dashboard of a van. A dwarf wearing an Anthrax t-shirt. A steam engine, toot tooting. The sounds of a brass band rehearsal coming from an annexe. The hallway, a landslide of rucksacks. I pass a man who looks like Mr Toad. A honey labrador sits in the passenger seat of a white van, a spotted kerchief around his neck. He stares straight ahead. Earnest in his commission. To guard, to wait. A little girl, big-eyed, pink-eyed from crying, stands at the bottom of the bar room stairs. Not allowed up. Later.

Saturday. The farmer's market. An oddment of curiosities. A forager. Wild garlic pesto. Pedestrians slow, amble by. Testing their thoughts. Nervous of the new. Time. There is time today.

She fell out of bed again. Took a tumble. No harm done. She was even perky. Yesterday she was sleepy. Shorthand. Up and down. On and off. She tells him how much she loves him. He is her only focus now. She sees little else. Her other children come and go. He is her special one. It has always been so. A love given and received without question. A tiny thing wielding such power. Power to divide and separate. Torn asunder. It bubbles under the surface. So much hurt. Nothing is said. A hat is found. In a box. She wore it when she married. Saved. Nothing thrown away. They hold their noses and get on with it. The great clearing. The throwing away of a life. The extraneous matter. The circling stuff. The dust and dirt of it. So long un-looked at. Time to go. Clear it all away. Away. Sleep tight. Little one. Blithe. Blithe spirit.

I am glad to be here. Glad to be sentient. Awake. Awakened.

(image borrowed from: www.123cleaners.com)

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A New Zealander on the radio talking about going back home after four years in Britain. She wants to go home. She misses the ocean too much.

My sea has been a ocean these last few days, a bubbling mass of devastatingly furious power. It stirs me up inside. My heart agitates. My innards whirl and dance. The wind lifts my feet from the stone path and sea spray spatters my raincoat. I am alive. This is live. This is life. Ravens, commorants and gulls are hurled about - flotsam of the air. They succumb to the chaos of the wind letting it throw them here, there and everywhere. Scatterings of feather, white, black and grey. A crow catches a plastic container of ketchup in its beak. Proud of its prize, it pecks at the red stuff, holding the tray down against the fury of the wind's gustings. I walk down through the harbour. Out. Away from the wind. I say the names of the boats to myself. Fishing boats, row boats, yachts, tugs. A chant. A meditation. A song. A poem. 'Miss Me', 'Blue Marlin', 'Quaker', 'Last Laugh (2)', 'Seaesta'. Their rigging rattles and chafes. No one to hear it 'cept me. No fishing today. 'For those in peril on the sea.' A swirling brownness. A crashing whiteness. Beyond us. So much bigger.

In town. A rainy afternoon. Kids off school. A slow trawl in and out of shops. A woman holds open a boutique-shop door for another woman with a pram. An old-fashioned pram lined with a pink padded blanket. A small dog sits inside it. A lap dog. Hairy but neat. Small. Bijou. A bow around its neck. The dog sits erect. Self conscious. Used to being laughed at. He keeps his countenance. Head high.

Encounters. A gentle, urgent-voiced, female vicar with a blooming, a bursting, of blood vessels upon her cheeks. A beef and sheep farmer, lean-bodied, high-pitched, so friendly, so warm - good-hearted. And a union rep, short-legged and bowed, intelligently subtle - good, good, good. Layers of life. Unexpected in their richness.

Gifts. Some for me. Some not. I accept the yeas and the nays equally. A-coming and a-going. The right things stay. They fit. The rest fall away. Let them go.

The feral sea brings surfers. Frogmen wading, crawling through the water. Onward. Camper vans on the prom. Steamed up windows. A red one. A stuffed Mr Happy roped to the roof.

(Image by John Mason, borrowed from www.bbc.co.uk )

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A stationery shop.

'Have you got a refill for this pen?'

An elderly woman, stark henna-red hair, pink lipstick and brown woolly coat, enquires of the woman behind the counter.

'No, but we have the pen.'

'You don't have refills? What a shame. Its a lovely pen, lovely.'

'They don't do refills for that pen but we do have the pen.The price of the refill would be the same as the pen.'

'Oh, shall I take a new pen then? It's such a lovely pen, lovely.'

Outside the shop I walk behind another. She is wearing a black astrakhan coat and pair of battered slingbacks. Her stockinged feet lurch over on these less than sensible shoes; the heels worn down on either side from such dramatic rolling. A patent leather handbag swings forward at each rocking-rolling step.

The blackbirds were out a-plenty this morning, heralding the dawn, the new light, the new day. Liquidy black and that yellow-eye stare. I love their song. It is quizzical. Fresh. The hop and skip at my approach. Not scared. Not perturbed. This is their time. I walk gently. Hush, hush as I go. Wind wild. Waves rocky. Marvellous.

(Image borrowed from www.schoolstrader.com )

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The poet David Whyte begins a poem with the line 'I want to write about faith'. I want to write about anger. Not mine. His. And hers. Two of the most significant people in my life are angry. It eats away at them. Such anger used to terrify me. It was combustible, uncontained, dangerous. Now that I am grounded. Myself. Brave. I am no longer scared. It is theirs, not mine. What is it? An energy. A power. A blowing up inside. Of what? Of something near to disappointment. A disappointment with self, with life. Maybe. Or is it a hand-me-down feeling? A father with an anger that he tried to suppress. And did so in company. Like table manners. En famille he let loose, let rip. Uncontained. Have compassion. It is painful to feel so much anger. To be so consumed, so eaten up with such a dark-browed passion. Soften it. Meet it with love. Meet it with calm. Breathe.

Commorants at sea. Such a morning. Brooding clouds giving way to such blue lightness. The sea a brown shot silk. Oily liquid, soft and heavy. The man with the three 'yappy-type' dogs. We met twice yesterday and smiled at the coincidence.

I am learning to accept what is. This is how it is. Beauty, loveliness has to sometimes be looked for - beyond the surface. And this is ok. I don't mind. For it comes. A deep creamy chocolate of loveliness that is so much richer for the search. It is all about circles. Coming back again to the same place but with a different approach, a different face. And this is ok.

Get it out love. Get it all out. And then rest. 'Better out then in'. Yes. And it is safe to do so. I am sorry for your pain. Your disappointment. I will sit by you while you grieve for your life. That long lost dream of every possibility. It has gone. It could never be. But there is this. And this. And this. It is enough. Enough of a life. Be glad.

Soften the red.

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Boxes are almost unpacked. I handle treasured objects, placing them in new spaces. Containers. Distilled memories of a life. My life. Another treasured object. Yes.

I walk through it all. Friends at a dinner table. Nice warmth. He laughs again. And she still lives. She thinks they are at home together.

'I love living here with you,' she says to him.

Yes. Don't tell her the truth. What does it matter? What does anything matter? The morphine patches keep her buoyant. She sings. She reads the same book over and over again. In the end it is the little things that matter. The little things that need attending to. Cutting toe nails, hair. Keeping nice, keeping tidy. Care. It is enough to pay heed to such things. The grand stuff is all hot air. We turn to dust. And what have we done in that time? With our time? Have we been kind?

I sit at the kitchen table and watch a black cat as she winds her sinewy way along the high path, sniffing at shrubbery, rubbing against branches and then sitting, waiting for something to happen. Later, a old dog on a leash lifts his nose to a smell. It is all in his eyes. He reads it. He wants to follow it, to find it. Let him go. Wildness calls. Feral longings. They don't disappear with age.

Climbing the stairs up to the reference library. There is a ladder to the roof. A spider has spun a web across the staircase. The sunlight finds it. So do I.

I think of a man. A rogue. His friends live through him. Vocariously. They couldn't stomach his life. And yet, they want him in theirs. Sometimes. Not all the time. He looked well. Sunbrown and exotic. He lives in a hotel. And wants to write. He does but not fiction. That is what he wants. Fiction. Manderley burns and they live out their life together in hotel rooms. Poste restante. No fixed abode. Live lightly in the Pearl Hotel. God speed.

The sky was a magical thing this morning. Early. I turned and there was the moon. A half circle - too white against black blue. A shining white. Gigantic in its luminosity.

Replete.

(Image borrowed from www.homesteadgardens.wordpress.com)

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Flat as a pancake. I feel flat. Too much change and I am sucked out. Exhausted. I try to move through it. Even tiredness has its gifts. Perhaps it is about stopping. Just for a bit. I can't find myself. The rain fell hard on me as I walked this morning. I liked its freshness. It didn't care. It didn't care about the minutiae in my head. That world of a thousand things.

I think of her lying in that bed. In pink nylon sheets. Mostly asleep. Nothing to do. No longer described by what she does but by what she is and has been. Four daughters post a thank you in the local paper to all those who acknowledged the passing of their mother. A woman made bitter by widowhood. And yet, she was a life. A central point of love, nevertheless. Who can say? Who can judge? All life must be worthwhile. It touches.

Hopes a little dashed today, or is it just tiredness bringing its inevitable greyness?

Rain harsh on windows. Wind unforgiving. New home still in boxes. Time to begin. Again.

(Image borrowed from www.publicdomainpictures.net )

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I am stalling. Choosing not to begin packing, just yet. After lunch. I want to linger a little longer in this state of belonging, of being home before I move into that betwixt and between state of not being so. It makes me edgy that no-man's-land of between. For all my moving, I am someone who needs somewhere, a cupboard, a drawer, a space to keep my private self, neat and cosy, locked up, safe.

I sit in a cafe and watch as Sunday morning drives by. It is a convivial space. I like the whish whoosh of the coffee machine. The smell of sausages and brown sauce. The large men who wipe their baked bean smeared plates with fat chunks of bread. The builders who come in for bacon sandwiches and the morning after Coca Cola. I see the violet, brisk-jacketed, middle-aged women scurrying off to church. Hair just so. Brooch clamped to lapel. Palm Sunday. I recall the Abbey. Just last year. I kept the crosses. So simple. So potent.

No, not yet. Linger a while longer in this particular belonging. Launderette. Early morning radio. Nostalgia. 'Take It From Here', 'The Huggets'. I never knew them. Before my time. Funny. Sweet. Harmless. It fits that room. That kitchen. The stone floor, the wooden door onto the backyard, a ghost of an outside privy. Someone else's life. I move through it, observing it, encountering it but not quite living it. I am different. Always have been. I am glad to be so. But I can love the visiting, nevertheless. Walking in someone else's shoes. Try them on. Walk a while. Feel what it is like to be an other. Breathe in their smell. It is ok. It is human. I soften. The boundaries fall away.

Three elderly women come into the cafe, tweed coats and fur. Glad rags. Sunday best. I like that. They are pleased with themselves. It is nice to be so. They speak a river of Welsh. Those lovely treacly, sticky sounds that suit their soft greyness. Outside the sun promises much.

A good day.

(Image borrowed from www.davidsanger.com)

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I inhabit the spaces I find myself in wholeheartedly. Be they hotel rooms, friends spare rooms or rented ones, I root myself quickly, lichen to rock. And yet, I acquiesce with grace each time I must move on. And I must. Often. And yet, I love them, each and every one.

I move next week. And I shall miss my little room at the top of the house. Two flights of stairs, sometimes a little breathless, other times not. Depends on the time of the day. The house of clocks. Some correct, some stopped. Tick tock. The chiming of the hour. Each hour. Chipped china, watercolours hanging slightly askew. Keepsakes. Souvenirs from Swansea, the Gower. A geranium in my room. The smell of metal as you pick off the dead petals. A row of little pots on the mantelpiece. An eiderdown stuffed up the chimney, against the cold. Cold into warmth. A sanctuary. Tick tock cosy. Not feminine. Rough and ready. Much loved. Much battered. Parental gifts, hand-me-down tawdry. Homely. Back kitchen, back yard. Tulips starting to come out. A plastic pigeon poking out of a plant pot. Laying the paper outside his room. Western Mail. Tick tock. Plastic duck and I am going out. Kitchen-table scrabble. Crumbs on the floor. It doesn't matter. Floorboards give, creak at my step. Hinged wooden toilet seat. Smallest room in the house. 1930s lino. Bolt shut. Bleep bleep alarm. Tick tock. Two more days. Sleep tight. And thank you.

Thank you.

(Image borrowed from www.koolandkreativ.blogspot.com)

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'What they did like was people with education, and money.'

I sit on a promenade bench and let the spoken sentences of those who stroll by wash over me. Abstracted dialogues. Fluid. Open-ended. That last one was from a man talking to his wife in a broad, treacly Yorkshire brogue. He laid a meaningful emphasis on the word 'money'. A car thumps out reggae. A gangly student in floral shorts and striped cotton shirt jogs past singing to his ipod, 'moooooooove like Jagger'. Making films inside his head. Does he feel beautiful?

Later, I watch as a woman with a stick gently secretes herself into a taxi outside the hospital. The driver throws a parcel, wrapped in white plastic and marked 'lost property', into the boot.

Just before 6 am. I am walking towards the promenade. Taking a back road. I hear some odd thudding sound. There. And there. It is still that half-dark, when forms are woozy. My body remembers fur and the hackles are raised. Down my back. Tracing my spine. Watch out. Be-ware. It is a young man. He is falling about. His head asleep, his body chaotic. He walks into parked cars. In and out. Reeling. Out of control. He finds a telephone box. Eyes closed. Fumbling for the door. He walks inside and is held still. Finally. Confined. Stilled. I walk on.

They tried to get them off. To clean them off. But the stains are ingrained. Dirty fingernails. Brown. They were too embarassed to tell him why. It is ok. It is just life. A returning to the beginning. Full circle. It is ok. Let it be. She doesn't know. Doesn't care. So why should he?

Be still. Let it be.

(Image borrowed from www.photography-scotland.com)

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An acquaintance of mine once told me how he used to observe his neighbour in the mornings. His bedroom window looked down into her garden, and he would watch as she slowly and delicately removed each dead leaf and petal from her plants. Her morning ritual. A mediation in neatness. She was Japanese.

Time. Take time.

'You're home early.'

She says as he enters her room. He just smiles. Why challenge her? Her brain is fogging, clogging. She is happy. Content. Safe. They had asked him to bring in a little hand mirror. She had wanted to put on some lipstick. 'What is this for', she enquires as the mirror is placed in her hands. All forgotten now. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters.

'Is there anything I have to do?'

'No, love, nothing, nothing at all.'

He cries. Hot tears. Nothing to be explained. Just be you, in your grief. A brief respite. I know. And it is good, like the springtime sunshine. All the better for the gift of it, this extra time, in the sun. Fill her room with daffodils. Make her smile. She hums and sings. A toothless crone of lovingness. So tiny. A featherweight jewel. Eggshell brittle. I am your witness. A witness to your grief. To the whole sadness of loving, too much.

Two women ahead of me, one young, a ponytail of bleached blondeness, and the other a rolling hipped grandmother, grey-haired and puffing.

'What mad weather we're having, isn't it?'

'Just like it was in the war.....'

Take time. There is nothing you have to do, love. Nothing.

(Image borrowed from www.accesswatch.org ) 

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I am not scared of the dark as I walk the promenade. Why should I be? There is light everywhere. The smattering of patchwork squares of electric yellow from the student's halls' of residence, the jolly bouncing string of christmas bulbs still linking the Victorian streetlights of the prom, the shimmering line of jewelled lightness that is Aberdovey, the flood of orange on the road from the headlights of the motorised streetcleaner, the intermittent beam of the lighthouse and the flicking on and off the harbour lights. A conversation of light. A morse code, a semaphore, a mystery of light.

And this morning there were calls too. Voices calling from out of the darkness. Whistles. Hallooes. And squeaks and chirrups from birds. All echoing into the emptiness. A black sheet of paper, shot through with finger holes of light. And then suddenly it is day.

In the library. The reference section. And a great big buzzing comes in through the open window. A bumble bee. Disorientated, stumbling with sleep. A woman in a cheesecloth skirt and brown cardigan cries out in shock at the sight of this flying beast. It is enormous. She stands up and starts to chase it around the room, swatting at it with a wad of paper, trying to coax it back out through the window. She calls to it, speaks to it, lovingly, tenderly.

'Come on, out you go. What are you doing awake so early? Come on. Out. Out you go.'

The buzzing becomes louder, more agitated as the great bee hurls its furry hardness against glass. Over and over. She jumps, dances, waves hands, flaps and coos. To no avail. The bee and her are not communicating. They are not understanding each other. Behind a partition I hear another window being opened. A tall man. A calm man. The bee flies towards him and the window. And then, out. Out. Sigh. Silence. Peace. The woman smiles, shrugs her shoulders, sits down and resumes her reading, her face still reddened by the adventure.

(Image borrowed from www.egocentric.blogs.time.com)

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It feels like night again. Clocks forward. I walk into the blue-black once more. I love it. I love to move through from night into day. Sharing that almost sacred space with the rooks, seagulls, starlings, street cleaners, brewery delivery drivers, insomniacs, runners and dog walkers that are up, alive, like me at this early hour. Yesterday I mapped the promenade through smell.

First I meet a lemony, square block of scent, after shave, then I move into a miasma of last night's barbeque smoke, charcoal grey and dry, then a warm softening of fresh-from-the-oven bread, this followed by the brackish stink of brine and guano, from just under the pier, metallic and sharply salty, then the heady sweetness of the hyacinths, planted in oblongs, circles and crescents in the municipal flower beds and then the left behind white smell of laundered clothes from a runner, newly from her bed. Then the harbour. The odours of lobster pots air-drying, diesel oil, ropes, rubber boots, paint, sea salty boats, rusty metal. Too much to distil into one. The clink-clank of harbour-gazing holidays. I am always like a child down there.

This morning there were bodies on the beach, the rocky end. Four beached sea lion forms in tatty sleeping bags. Mermaids and mermen surrounded by a messy scattering of empty beer cans. Their voices were intimate in the blue-blackness. A calling up of adventure. Up all night.

Open windows at home. Springtime brings in two black backed little beetles. The crawl up the pale-yellow anaglypta, one of the first floor, the other on the second. Gentle creatures. Exploring. Antenna searching, trying to make sense of this alien environment.

Later. A pony-tailed woman waits at the traffic lights, 'Choose Life' emblazoned on her T-shirt.

He brings her Tenby daffodils.

'These ones have gone over.'

He says, shouting against her deafness, as he deposits them heads down into the bin. He puts the fresh ones on the window sill, next to the television.

Waking from a sleep ten minutes later, she points at the daffodils.

'They've gone over.'

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved,

To feel myself beloved on the earth.

'Late Fragment' Raymond Carver.

(Image borrowed from www.sfcall.tumblr.com)

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The spring sun licks the white and pastel painted promenade houses clean, making them new. New again. The prom teams with life. Skin is bared, children and dogs frolic, caught up in the excitement of life, the sudden joy of just breathing and being here. Here. Now. Pink, blue, green and yellow ice-cream rolls down chubby fingers. Beaches are messed up. Footprints back and forth, back and forth. Some run, some play, some just sit. The eternal staring at the sea. Mesmeric. A slow warming of cold bodies. Pinkness appearing on knees on shoulders on thighs.

I relish the difference. Early morning and the promenade is mine. Afternoon and it is taken over by daytrippers. Why not? They establish a different code of behaviour. They make noise. They burn barbeques. They throw frisbees. They eat fish and chips out of boxes. They strum guitars. Some swim. It is a raucous-ness of humanity. I like to watch, to share their pleasure in this springing time of unexpected warmth. Simple. Pleasure.

The smell of childhood.

(Image borrowed from www.frugalfarmhousedesign.blogspot.com)

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Ahead of me a man, with a plastic tube fixed to his nose, walks beside his wife, carrying his breath behind him in tartan trolley.

We drove North yesterday. Cutting through the soft butter of misty mountains, ancient in their mystery. A man was carrying a dead cat - black, stiff, laid out on a spade. Scooped up off the road. He walked slowly, beside the road, wellington boots flapping against denim. Jostling lambs, fresh-born, wet-licked into life. Some wearing plastic macs. A middle-aged couple on the roadside. They sit at a fold-up table on foldaway chairs, picnicking from the boot of their car. Food wrapped in tin foil parcels, plastic cutlery, a flask of tea. A headscarf against the wind of traffic. Reluctant to stray from their car. An adventure in safety.

'You're home early'.

She says, as he enters her room. She smiles at him from her sleep. He touches her hair, eggshell-tender, stuck with white strands of down. Feathered.

Early morning frogmen. Black shapes, sinister, wading out through the milky grey sea, trawling surfboards. No waves. Just a lapping. A licking of water. Three dogs. A twisted rope of leads. Yapping with toy ferocity. A feather is carried, lightly dipping, diving.

Lovely.

(Image borrowed from www.hogwartsrpg.wikia.com)

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