The Scarf

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I thought all I had left of him was a beige cashmere M&S scarf. This scarf is soft as cat fur. It goes everywhere with me.  A gift, one Christmas, he’d left it in a flat box, slipped between two others, on my Mum’s front step. He’d left gifts for several years after I stopped seeing him. We threw all the others away – on principle, you know? But I couldn’t bring myself to part with the scarf. Then one Christmas, all through Christmas Eve and the next day, I opened and shut Mum’s front door, snagging the holly wreath, letting in a chill. But the step remained empty.

     
That was the end of 2000. Tonight, as I returned home across town through a windy drizzle, I knotted that scarf around my throat; pulled it up over my mouth. I remembered our phone conversation, a week ago.

     
It was as though no time had passed at all. The first thing he said to me, after ‘Hiya love,’ was ‘There’s a fella here I’d like you to meet. History Professor. I’ve told him all about you. He's two beds down from me.’ That’s so Dad. Twelve years of painful nothingness between us and now he wants to show off his ‘clever daughter’ to the man in the other hospital bed. It was sad hearing him in the ward. The nurse talked about him being up and about on his Zimmer frame as though that was a good thing.

     
Zimmer frame?

     
The second time we talk, he tells me ‘You always were your mother’s daughter.’ Asks me what we are doing about Mum's house. ‘We’ve got to go for probate,’ I say, not mentioning the protracted grief, trauma and health problems my sisters and I have endured since our mother's death. 'But then I think it’s best that we sell it as soon as’. ‘Very sensible,’ says Dad. ‘You want shot of that millstone.'

     
 I’m stunned by the mysteriousness of my Dad’s life: it lies behind a door I’ve never opened - I never even so much as curled my fingers around the handle. Dad gave himself another family, another wife and stepchildren, even grandchildren. How did he do all that... without me? I know virtually nothing about the last twenty years of his life or the people in it – just a few names. In my mind, my father has stayed the same man as the one he walked out as in 1991, wearing the same clothes, holding the same attitudes, and with the same mistress. He's occupied some ethereal space in the back of my mind. I've had vague images of a hump-back bridge, a quiet leafy lane and a bungalow, paintings of landscapes from our old house hanging on its salmon-coloured walls. 
     
But for my Dad, of course, life moved on. For over half my own life-span, he’s lived another life – full, not empty and containing something approximating love. The mistress became his wife, the blonde bit of stuff became his step-daughter. Then what? Holidays to the South of France? Afternoons out to stately homes, with a cream tea for afters? Cosy nights on the settee front of the box? The question mark he left for us, his three children.

     
I’m not angry with Dad. Not now. Not today. Too much time has passed, and there is so little time left. It’s funny, he sounded like my Mum on the phone – that same softening of the palette, that child-like laugh. Is that how all people sound when they’ve reached a certain age or degree of illness? And a Zimmer frame. Bloody hell! That’s a far cry from his purple Porsche blasting 120 down the motorway. Dad shouts at the doctors, and argues with the nurses about his medication. That man could argue his way out of any situation. Any parking ticket. Any hotel bill. Any extra-marital affair. My Dad, the self-made man, unmade. He falls over on the living room carpet. Is at the mercy of medication and heart monitors, bad hospital food. He loves his food, my Dad. Butter spread thick as cheese.

     
I want my Dad to be happy. Not lonely under thin white sheets. Scared. Still I wonder how he lived all that life without me. How it became normal, to make me into a memory. It’s not nice feeling erased. So of course, I erased him, or tried to. I know when I’m not wanted.

     
When something has gone, it’s gone. And if it was never there, nothing will ever, ever, make up for it. Some people understand this more than others; they’ve learned it by experience. Yet so far, a couple of phone calls to my Dad have made a difference. Everyone has such a different relationship with their parents - and some people are better at being parents than others. Some are just plain rotten. But good or bad, the relationship simple or complicated, your mother, your father – they made you what you are today. Call it biology. Call it blood. They bloody know you.

A Handsome Man

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Sunday, I came back from London. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. Things didn’t make sense. On the train home I read the spiral bound diary of a relative I couldn’t place – no name on the cover, only a date: Aug 6th 1938. I wasn’t even sure if the author was a man or a woman. They’d taken a train from London to Basle in Switzerland, (‘Train reservations wrong… terrific electric storm and rain all night through France’), and then on to Lucerne, and finally, Lugano. I traced the journey as my own carriage shuttled through East Croydon and Gatwick, aeroplanes humming overhead. I ate chocolate with hazelnuts. Then I flicked through some photos I’d taken away with me from my sister’s flat – of my mother and aunts as children, of my grandparents and great uncles, and my grandma’s semi-detached house in Shotton. I read a newspaper cutting about my aunt’s journey to Nigeria to teach at a local school, and two Easter cards I’d made in infant school for my mother. I’d also brought with me two photocopies: one, a newspaper cutting noting the funeral of my great uncle Preston, who died at sea, and the other, describing my great uncle Tony’s bravery as a ship’s officer in helping rescue the crew of twenty-four men of a Portuguese steamer, abandoned in a fire in the Bay of Biscay. 

     
It is strange thinking of all the men on my Mum’s side having had distinguished Naval careers. Generally speaking, I remember nothing of their lives - only dirty red brick terraces, a Woolworth’s and a butcher’s, fish and chips wrapped in newspaper. I remember Shotton steelworks pumping out grime; the whirr and clump of skates on Deeside ice rink. Yet even my Grandpa, of whom I have no memory, and who my mother described as a dour, emotionally blank man, sailed a clipper ship up and down the River Dee.

     
My Grandma and Great Aunts were the kind of women you’d expect from that period – born just after the turn of the century – strong, solid women with large shoulders, striding purposefully in flat, ugly shoes and black furs, handbags tight under their arms, hats propped neatly atop iron-waved hairdos. They kept house, and they kept each other going - proudly, and without fuss. Whenever I stayed at Grandma’s, despite her being up, without fail, at five-thirty each morning, she’d still open her curtains before we climbed the stairs to bed. I’ll not have her-next-door saying I can’t get out of bed of a Sunday morning.

     
I’ve always run from the family line. I think myself autonomous, born anew, escaping the ghosts of my past. But we can never finally stand apart. Can a box full of images really give me back my history, restoring my sense of belonging somewhere? These men and women who went before me, who lived and died, the images of their births, marriages, deaths, are as transient as moments of my own life, which seemed so important at the time yet now are lost in a blizzard. As I get older, what marks me diminishes; the significance of things punctures the skin less and less. When I was young, I opened my arms to it all, and life crowded in, promising so much. I seized it, and the bruises seemed worth it. Now, most are not. 

    
On Saturday, in a London restaurant, over pizza and pasta, my sister passed me my mother’s gold wedding ring. I slipped it on, not expecting to feel much; I’ve done my best not to feel much this last year. But as soon as it was on my finger, I felt a circle completing: Mum was all around me again, as though she’d never left.

     
I always cringed when she told me that had I been born a boy, she’d have named me Preston. Now my Uncle's picture is on my wall: in his white peaked cap, stripes across his jacket arm, gold buttons down his front. A handsome man, they said, and a brave one. A right charmer.

That Day

I opened my curtain this morning and peeped out, expecting to see a white river spreading across the streets and rooftops of Hove. But the road below me was grey, dry and hard, as though no snow had fallen at all over Sussex these last weeks.

     
Yet yesterday as we spilled out onto a London pavement, clutching flowers, coconuts; two packets of butter, handbags and a brightly painted Ganesh statue, the heels of my brown 1940s shoes sank straight into slush and ice. Snow smothered pavements and cars; I stumbled towards a taxi.

     
We were running slightly late. In fact all the guests were running slightly late, except for the Hindu priest, who was running rather late. My friend S, coming from Brighton, stood on a platform at East Croydon staring at Cancellation signs on the departure board, and the snow was still drifting down. South East London was muffled by white. I suspected that the five of us squeezed into the cab might be the only ones making it to the crematorium that morning. My sister, her calm expression suddenly cracking, said, "I'll do the bloody service myself."

     
There aren't many days in your life where you say have to goodbye to someone you love, and won’t ever see again. Tears mess up your eyeliner; hands shake, voices wobble. Ordinary life seems like a silly childish sketch: bus journeys to work, petty arguments; that TV programme you can’t bear to miss. However, such days seem to have increasingly crept up on my family and I over the last few years, to the point where they feel more normal and real than anything else a lot of the time. Jobs, money, relationships, aspirations: these are the things you do between heartbreaks, and not vice versa.

     
In Hinduism, yesterday was an auspicious day, one where sins are cleansed, and night and day are of equal duration. Anyone sent to the other world on this day is especially blessed. After we’d arrived at the Crematorium, I couldn't help feeling, as I watched snow hanging off oak branches in clumps, weighing heavy on rose petals in the garden, that we might be the only people left in the world, the rest of it muted to silence, whited-out by puffy snow-clouds.

     
Soon taxis pulled in; legs stretched out onto pavements. The driveway filled up. Everyone had made it.

     
I can write about before the funeral and I can write about after, but not about what happened in between. These things are too personal. All I can say is that I think it was what he'd have wanted, absolutely. And I was proud to be there.

     
I ate twelve ciabatta sandwiches yesterday, including three I grilled for my dinner at my flat later that night, after it was all over. I'd left my sisters, friends - people I've loved long before I really knew what love meant - hanging over the balcony of a London block of flats, waving the paw of a dog at me. Then I trudged again through thick snow into darkness, the wet gloom of a tunnel finally gobbling me up. I sat on the train eating Reese's Cups and crying quietly, the day, the last month, finally catching up with me. Beauty, suffering: two sides of the same inexplicable force we call life. Of course there's not one without the other. But knowing this doesn't make it any easier, does it?

     
The sadness didn't leave; it followed me into my dreams, and was there when I woke up this morning. But now I'm here. Tomorrow, things will be different again. Life moves. The snow melts. The rose opens its petals.

No Smoke Without Fire

 

I lift my finger and sniff. There’s no smell, no evidence of it at all. It doesn’t linger on my fingertip as it does in hair or cardigans.
     
I look at the cigarette fallen carelessly from the ashtray, grey speckles spreading across the table like a distant constellation of stars. I rub my finger in it again; make a smiley face.
     
Cigarettes reminds me of my family: of my mother sipping black coffee on the back step on dull afternoons, of slanging matches with my father across Sunday dinner, of Alien Sex Fiend's RIP rising like a ghoul from my sister’s speakers every Saturday morning. The smell of nicotine carries me back to Garthfechan - our old white ghost of a house swallowed up by holly bushes and cherry blossoms with its red front door, Seventies wallpaper and our King Charles Cavalier spaniel, Daisy - her brown and white paws skittering across the kitchen lino. It’s tea stains on the green carpet; it’s squash rackets in the hall. It’s raised voices on the upstairs landing. It’s gravel spitting from under tyres as Dad’s Porsche speeds off again down our driveway.
     
Both of my sisters smoke, as did my mother and also my father until he got diabetes in his Forties and gave up. Most non-smokers I know, given the choice, would extract their own lungs before taking a smoker as a partner.
     
But me, I love a smoker. The smell. The ritual. I feel as though I was born in a tobacco cloud. My memory of childhood is fume-filled, hazy, polluted with tar and matches. I can almost imagine my mother lighting up another Silk Cut as she pushed me out of her, sucking on it between the midwife's swearing and her own screams. Every night of my childhood she sat in her red leather armchair by the living room window, the TV screen lighting up her specs, a marble ashtray teetering on the arm. I'd peer up as rings floated from her mouth like bubbles. Fags were as much a part of her as the tight perm, large square bifocals and her all-year tan (from hoeing the rich, rye earth of our flowerbeds in all weathers.) Mum pinned little swirls of hair to her scalp as the opening credits of Minder or Coronation Street rolled. I took another Kirby grip from the old green tin on the carpet; open up its dark ribbed metal pincers. They were addictive to play with; I pulled their shiny heads of like lice eggs and squeezed them between my fingers.
     
I like the faint aroma of smoke through chewing gum; the casual whiff of it on clothes. I love to hear the click of a lighter and watch a person’s face change as the cigarette end starts to glow. I’m intrigued by the necessity of it, the burden. Mum demanded fags throughout all three strokes. We tried to deny her, but in the end, well, it was one of her only pleasures left. I’d sit by her in the living room as it burned down in her fingers until the end was a curly, grey beard. Then I’d nudge her and she’d flick it, absent-minded, into the ashtray and take a puff. For her, it was now less about smoking and more about feeling that thin paper between her fingers as she sang along to the Sheila's Wheels adverts. It was about being normal.
     
I am a terrible smoker. I take the tiniest puffs and choke if I inhale anywhere near the filter. In my parents’ day, smoking was what film stars and heroines in novels did. It was sexy; it was romantic - like driving fast cars and giving up the person you loved for the sake of international politics. Watching Godard’s Breathless recently, I noticed the film was shot almost entirely through a cloud of French cigarette smoke. I can't imagine Jean-Paul Belmondo’s climactic death scene without that final drag on his Gauloises.
     
Let me make it clear - I am glad for the smoking ban. It’s a bit like sex – I only want people I am intimate with blowing smoke in my face, giving me an increased likelihood of lung cancer. Strangers – you can forget it. However, in an increasingly vice-less society, where our experience is franchised rather than disenfranchised, where troubles are smoothed out by regular decaf lattes drunk in regulated chain-cafes, served at regular temperatures by waitresses with regular faces, regular breasts and regular uniforms, smoking seems one of the last bastions of irregular, disenfranchised, real life.
     
Admittedly, Brighton still has its pockets of iniquity, where rooms are filled with that unmistakable clog of youth and a few too-old-and-should-know-betters. And though I’m by no means saying that pleasure can’t be found in past-times that are healthy and wholesome, I can’t help wondering if one day soon we’ll be reminiscing about a long-gone era of revolution, rock n roll, fags, booze, pub brawls and teenage rebellion. Counter-culture will be dead; pop music will be dead. All the old hippies, punks and ravers will be lying in unmarked graves.
     
Would we care? As with climate change, you may mock, say it’s all fantasy, a gross exaggeration. But the signs are already here, and it might not be that long coming. So, any last requests
     
I thought so.

Monday: train to Brighton

I'm on the train, having just left Birmingham Moor Street, heading for London Marlebone. After several days of balmy Indian summer, I pass through a rain soaked Birmingham, drizzle sketching out its streets, a familiar greyness suspended in the ether.

I can feel my mood shifting as I edge nearer to Brighton; a heavy feeling in my arms and legs, a sinking inside my stomach. I look in my rucksack for the armour I need to face my life back home. I find hoodies and a hard-backed book about a complicated love affair.

I left my sisters on the tiny village platform, and watched them shrinking as the train drew away, their plump arms raised, faces smiling and sad. My lungs surged with feeling as I sped past houses, yellow coloured fields, more houses. This is territory I have known so well. I have chartered this journey for the last twenty years.

I'm uneasy. As I made the journey back home to Wales last week, my speech was still blurry, my experience filtered through a tin can. The preceding weeks had taken their toll. But having seen Mum for myself, stable and much as she was before this latest emergency stay in hospital, and having been home with my family, a little bit of myself has returned. There is a little bit of Clare back in place.

Uneasiness lurches up through my throat, determined as I am to not go back to where I was when I left Brighton last week - sucked in, spat out.

So I sip my tea, plan my strategies; write here. I even have biscuits in my bag. Life isn't so bad. Mum is still alive, I have sisters who are loving and brave, who fight their demons and cut my hair, make me cheese sandwiches. Who always tell me the truth about myself.

They sit chatting in the fading evening light out on our back yard, staring at the apple tree and the flowerbeds, flicking ash from their cigarettes into the cooling autumn breeze. They never sit for very long. In a flash, one of them will be up, dragging something around the garden, pulling out a hose, raising some clippers, re-arranging the shed. They like to keep busy.
It’s then that I feel most like the baby of the family that I am, with my writing, my hula hoop, my desperate need for a new haircut. Watching and feeling and thinking and turning it over, all of it, again and again.

I got my haircut. I watched the dark pieces fall to the ground and with every snip felt a little bit of myself coming back to life. I am still arriving, in whatever this new place is. I watch dead wood fall, hear the doors closing.

So I want to get my head down, start my course, let those who really care, come to me, and the rest, I'll watch them take off like birds into a cloudy sunset. Throw a stick and see what comes back to me.
Despite the Twinings label, the tea is disgusting. No amount of sugar can mask it. Drizzle hits the windowpane and I'm returning to Brighton stronger, but more wary than ever, to a town cursed by too much sunlight, by too many options.

I might feel alone, but I'm not alone; I feel scared, but I'm not weak. I have lost, but then... life culls what it needs to; it does some of our dirty work for us.

I watch crows taking off over cow fields, and feel the love of my family, the ones still there. I feel the greenness of the passing fields, my hair against my neck, a brightness still behind my eyes, and for now, that's more than enough.

For Better, For Worse

I'm back in Brighton after four days at home in Wales. I saw my sister, I saw my Mum. I even visited the nuns at Poor Clares. And I went to a wedding.

I usually tend to subscribe to this commonly held misconception: the present is what's here now, the future is yet to come and does not yet exist, and the past, well, is in the past. All that sails into it is gobbled forever.

This weekend I remembered a different reality: that the present is disappearing even as I live it, that the future can never be separated from what is happening now. And the past? Well, it never really goes away.

So, at the start of this new year, after eighteen months of watching my mother ebbing away before my eyes, after losing a dear friend, I turn around and suddenly notice that nothing has ever really left me, and that no matter what it feels like in those emptiest of moments, nothing is ever lost.

I don't understand this, but I know it's true. And as I sat at a long table in Wrexham Lager Club, melodies from old Motown songs swirling around my ears, a cocktail stick with cheese and pineapple on my plate, I became absolutely certain of it.

The most painful thing about the passage of time is that you can't bring back what has gone; you can't turn the clock back, you can't undo the mistakes or right the wrongs. You can't recapture what is lost. You can't ever, as it were, go home again. But what do you know; sitting at that table, I realised, it all goes on living inside us anyway, the good and the bad. Something endures.

I finally found an hour on Monday to visit the Convent that sits next to our old house. I wanted to say hello, keep up the contact I've begun. I sat in their chapel listening to the sounds of nuns laughing and running for lunch, then I got down on my knees and prayed. Strange as it sounds, I find it hard to pray very much in Brighton. But there, in that quiet, holy place, it felt the most natural thing in the world. And I remembered that thing about the past again; I felt the holiness pouring through the windows, through the wood of the bench I was sitting on, through my own bones. Something that's there all the time, I just can't see it, flooded the chapel with light; it bounced off walls and reflected off bronzed figures, hitting the sides of benches and lighting up the corneas of my eyes.

I remember this light from when I was 8 years old and kept a picture of St Francis above my bed. I would peer from my bedroom window into the Convent garden next door, watching the nuns as work or giggling together. I never thought one day I'd be on my knees in their chapel, feeling that holiness from inside those walls.

The wedding on Friday was of the father of my ex-boyfriend to his long-term partner. I've known my ex for nearly 19 years, and when we were still together, his family were like my own. He is my kin. And I know what it took for my ex-boyfriend, his brothers and their father to get to the point of making that wedding happen. I also know what it took for me to be there. The amount of love I experienced that night was so strong that for at least part of the evening I was pinned to my chair by the sheer force of it. I caught the train home, humbled and exhausted. The feeling I had was the same as on that chapel bench.

Time passes, but the bonds of real love remain untouched, perfectly in tact. I want to try and remember this. And I know I'll forget it again. I know I'll see the failing flesh of my mother, the darkening of her eyes and I'll not be able to see past the withering skin and mind; it will engulf me. That is the other mystery. We remember, we forget. Only to remember again.

Nunhead Cemetery

Four o' clock. The iron gates close at five and this is not the kind of place you want to spend the night in. My sister and I hurry up the gravel path, then stop suddenly to speak about our mother, taking it in turns to empty our hearts, spill our grief, hear the brown leaves crackle underfoot.

We walk up to the ruined church, without a priest or congregation, without stained glass or sermon. No hymn book. No bride. Only our two sad faces peering up into the light, past the crumbling pale stone, no longer seeking the holiness of perfection, instead loving the ruins of beauty, perfect in themselves.

And so we wander this way, wander that way, speaking in staccato through leafy alley ways, past grey tombs and mighty obelisks, under huge trees heavy with ivy, graves hidden in the bracken, overturned headstones, fallen angels with broken wings sliding, sliding into mud.

We stumble down a narrow dark tunnel of green, and there, in the squelch of mud, we speak our truth of grief and fear and losing, say things rarely spoken of life, except at times like these. Names and dates, old and young, men and women, loved and unloved, all pass through our unlit eyes.

To my right, an ancient tree is being lifted into the air by a cracked headstone which has subsided and moulded itself into its thick roots. My sister turns, spots a marble casket, its lid open some inches, sliding off. The blackness inside stares back at us like an unflinching eye.

We stagger out into daylight and a damp grassy glade filled with the graves of wives and mothers, plastic flowers in psychedelic colours in plastic pots dotting the horizon. And there, around the fresh churned soil of a newly dug grave, jump seven magpies, and a red fox, darting, moving.

I feel like we are intruders in this scene. The grass is all lit up, the trees are bowing. A strange current of silence is in the air. The grass is blowing. For this is their world, their language, of brightness and burial, tender woodland and no return.

The fox looks up and stares at us carefully, turns tail and leaves. The magpies scatter and disappear, and we are left alone once again in the singing daylight with only the trees, the dead and the ravens, and some distant echo.

We leave the gates of the cemetery. Back on the high street, I feel as though I am emerging from a murmured spell, a remarkable tune running through my head.

Thursday

12.30pm, at Shotton Station waiting for the train to Llandudno. We have just arrived from the tiny train station at my village, Hawarden.

My mother was raised in Shotton, my grandparents lived here all their lives, as well as my Great uncles and aunties and other relatives. This tiny steelworks town, grey and rainy, is infused with memories.

I used to love coming here as a child. Only a few miles from my Hawarden home, I would come to stay with Grandma at weekends. We would walk up the high street, she and I, and I would stare at my reflection in the shiny Tesco's wall, when I was younger, holding her hand, and when I was older, trailing behind her playing with my hair, pretending I was cool. We would go to the pick n' mix section at Woolworths and I would always get strawberry creams and a small packet of After Eights for 20p. Sometimes she would pop a toffee from the pick n mix into her mouth, giving me a naughty knowing smile as we walked up and down the aisle.

If she didn't have a pan of scouse waiting for us in the pressure cooker when we got in, or braising steak with thick gravy, we would get fish and chips from the chippy at the end of Shotton high street, with Angel Delight for pudding if I was lucky. Apart from my Grandma's jam turnovers, Angel Delight had to be my favourite ever pudding, especially when it was served in her cut glass bowls and kept in the fridge overnight. I could clean my bowl in seconds, and would lick the last streaks of pink mousse off the spoon like it was precious gold dust.

When Fridays at school were still half days, my Mum would drive me and a friend to Shotton, to the 'icey'. There I would watch packets of crisps drop from metal pincers in the crisp machine, slurp my Slush Puppie that turned my lips blue, eat Monster Munch and whirl around the ice rink to the sound of echoing music. I cherished those Friday afternoons, the smell of ice and children and the way it felt when I had finally laced my ice skates up, and was padding across the black rubber flooring to the entrance of the freezing rink.

It's raining. It's been raining on and off for days now. It has gone straight from Summer to the heart of a British Winter in four days, it feels. We are on the train to Blaenau Ffestiniog now, from there, we will catch the steam train and chug our way deeper into the heart of North Wales. A young girl on the train is teasing her mother in Welsh. I don't know what she is saying.

Everything is so cheap here in Wales, so unpretentious. It makes me realise what a blag so much of Brighton is. Yesterday, in Mold, I bought a pair of boots for £3.50, and shoes for a pound! Bone china cups for two pounds each.

My sister and I ate lunch in the kind of café I used to come to a lot when I was a teenager, with my first boyfriend. The entire place was heaving with fat old ladies with chronic health problems sitting on orange plastic chairs, smoking fags at the tables. We got a proper cup of tea, and a 'milky coffee', (instant coffee and hot milk kept warm in a huge pot on top of a stove.) It tasted fantastic. The owners were collecting money for one of their washer uppers, who has recently found out they have cancer. A fat lady in a wheelchair commiserated:

"I was in hospital recently, and they cut the wrong vein. Terrible it was. They don't care, you know, you're just a number to them. But then, as I was lying there, I had to think, when I was younger I was a matron in hospital, and I'd go and see all those men who had lost their arms and legs who were in the Paraplegic Ward, all there, back from the army, and I'd think 'there's always someone worse off than you.' Yes, there's always someone worse off than you. Anyway, I'd better be going, I'm on a hunt for Shredded Wheat, reduced sugar.."

With that, her son span her out of the café in her wheelchair, a somnambulistic look across his face. Somehow I feel like there is a woman like this in every cafe or bar across the Western world, telling such a tale, with a cigarette in her hand, and glasses, dyed hair and a son with an impenetrable sadness in his soul.

Wales, I always feel so much more at home here, and always such an alien.

The land is rising up. From the coast train past Rhyl and Prestatyn and Colwyn Bay, now we are deep into country where the hills are starting to rise, fir trees pointing upwards from their peaks. The grass is verdant, almost luminous in the rain. Slate walls, slate paving, slate rooves under the cloudy slate coloured sky. The Welsh landscape. Moving, primal. It's time to get my raincoat out.

Darkness When The First Light Was Born

Homage to the world. Homage to the raging fires that eat it alive. Homage to tomorrow. Homage to the day when none of us will wake up. Homage to ships and planes. Homage to speeding clouds. Homage to the stripe on the zebra's back. Homage to all fallen prey. Homage to the predatory. Homage to light. Homage to the baby's skull. Homage to machinery. Homage to apparatus. Homage to buildings and to streetlights. Homage to my sisters. Homage to bad friends. Homage to mistakes. Homage to silent birds. Homage to snow.

Homage to stereos. Homage to the yellow stain on my mother's nightdress. Homage to kissing. Homage to fingers. Homage to harrowed eyes. Homage to brilliance. Homage to stupidity. Homage to sex. Homage to abstinence. Homage to a blue sky. Homage to apples, unripened fruit. Homage to leprosy of the soul. Homage to worshippers. Homage to the uncontrollably vain. Homage to TV. Homage to the hermitage on a hill. Homage to the ringtones of teenage children. Homage to their fathers.

Homage to the dying. Homage to every tear wept at their bedside. Homage to my mother. Homage to my father and his ebbing mind. Homage to animals and to beasties. Homage to the night. Homage to the frail, the ugly. Homage to superstars. Homage to the brave. Homage to power stations. Homage to sadists. Homage to euthanasia. Homage to the suicidal. Homage to insects. Homage to bats, eaten alive by beetles. Homage to caverns. Homage to church steeples.

Homage to the beatific. Homage to the horrific. Homage to the damaged and needy. Homage to air. Homage to sunlight. Homage to wrinkles. Homage to breath. Homage to limbs. Homage to eyesight. Homage to decay. Homage to the Atlantic Ocean. Homage to gravestones. Homage to small Northern towns. Homage to nonsense. Homage to the written word. Homage to mystics. Homage to tenderness. Homage to the cry of the wind. Homage to bad smells. Homage to the face in the mirror. Homage to you. Homage to me. Homage to waving goodbye. Homage to the end.

I have not forgotten...

I have not forgotten the breeze in the branches of the tree outside my bedroom window, and how, during those long mornings, it kept me going. I have not forgotten the way your hair sits on the pillow, braided like a seven-year-old girl's, the sweetest sight I could ever lay my eyes upon.
     Nor have I forgotten the way you leaned in to feel me near you, when I kissed you, when I wasn't even sure if you remembered my name anymore, or who I was to you.
I have not forgotten the trips to the supermarket after the hospital, how I cowered in the drinks aisle, behind the diet cola, nor the feeling of something I could barely articulate between us three sisters, feeling so alone in the world without our mother, fussing round your bed like the oldest of souls together, the best of friends, the tiniest of children . We love you; that's as clear as the first morning of June, we love every hair on your head, and brush it with all the tenderness our shaking hearts have within them.
    I see your toes in their special white socks, poking out of the bottom of the white bed sheet. It cripples me with love just to look at them. I see your mouth, encased in plastic, and this is the part I find hard to talk about.
     I see a loss so big it will never be replaced, by wind or water or earth slide or rain storm. And you are in me with everything I do, you never go away, but also you are somewhere else. And how can that be - that you are always here and yet so far into another place I cannot reach? Here, gone, here, gone, here...awake but asleep, living, breathing, dying, seeing into my eyes, looking away, travelling, sailing, floating, shivering along another shore, a foreign land, in a language I cannot speak.
     I have not forgotten how you brought me up, how you taught me to spell, how you always nudged me to look up at the sky, to see those red and violet sunsets, to watch for the blue of the morning. How you are my only mother, how I was born out of you, how I stretch way beyond you into vastness and my own mystery, but always return, a cub to her mother bear, a fox to its hole, a bee to her hive that always was the source of honey and creation. Home. It is so far away now, and yet I carry it between my breasts, under my vest, in this heart here, and in everything I do, everything I want to do and will become, as the last light of this day ebbs into a filament of dust.
     Here are your daisies, your buttercups; the box of flowers you planted and that are still growing. They are all for you, and their colour will keep the night alive in your absence. For today you are sleeping, as you have never slept before, and when you awake, I will be there.

The Buddhafield Festival

I've been away again, this time not up to Wales but to Devon to the Buddhafield Festival for a long weekend. It has done me some serious good despite my strong reservations about going. What better place to be than with all your friends in the glorious sunshine hanging out in tents and structures and in fields and under trees in the Devon countryside.

     I arrived in a pretty ropey state, after having not that long returned from Wales, seeing my Mum in hospital and generally having an intense and hard time of it. Then, just as the car was speeding out of Brighton towards Devon, I received news that my sister had been also rushed into hospital, with a worrying condition, and was now residing two wards away from my Mum. It took me all my will to not beg Nick to just turn the car right around and drop me back home. It was a couple of days before I could ease off the worrying about my sister, when I heard that she had finally returned home and seemed to be improving significantly. Suddenly, despite the weight of what my mother is going through at the moment and the pain of witnessing her like that, I felt on top of the world. The thought of my sister sick and stuck in hospital when she was meant to be joining me at Buddhafield and finally getting some respite from all the full on-ness of the last couple of months was unbearable, so knowing she was back home was a massive relief. I was very happy.

     And so it was - crepes at three in the morning, endless cups of tea around Stewarts table at his tat stall, copious amounts of dancing, madness in the Lost Horizon sauna cafe, magic mushrooms, a disco and strip show to the Rolling Stones 'Start Me Up' in the back of the dodge van, complete with strobe, pretty boys playing strange instruments around fires, extremely late nights/mornings, Prajnaparamita covered in string, lots of naked flesh, searing heat, Lili's 'goat in a wedding dress' shrine, me saying I would go to lots of dharma stuff and workshops and instead just sitting around chatting from one cafe to the next, catching up with old friends, bonding more deeply with present ones, and generally being a total flakeball and loving it.

     And now I am back. I've been feeling pretty inspired in fact, spending most of my time at my keyboard trying to get back into my songs that have been largely neglected over the last year, so that I will have a set for when Chastock comes around at the end of August. I've also made a vow to swim every day in the sea to keep fit and keep my soul oiled with the right things. Today I swam in the river at Barcombe, past drooping branches and scattered leaves, the muddy bank, with one white swan gliding silently by me towards the sun. Yes, these things are good for my soul, and the people in my life at the moment equally so. I am keeping myself afloat in a sea of traumatic events and loss, and I'm still very much alive and feeling, and the happiness and beauty of life which I grasp in more than moments, is a blessing, is a magic touch I still feel deep inside, despite everything.

You are the Sun

I'll bring the diamonds of my beauty to rest here on this table. I'll smash the fruits of my withering here, on the pale kitchen floor. I will watch you in a mirror, when your hair is down; I'll be a stranger, the best friend you ever had, tormentor, aid, your clown.

You're sitting on a black crate by the plant pots, in the aching ray of the sun. We are circling memory together, putting pieces back where they came from. You remember the old house, just like me. The cherry tree, the dark evenings, Grandma's boiled egg sandwiches with the yolk yellow and running. Dogs, haunting, daylight, and all that we wish we didn't remember, or remembered better.

I never felt as close to you as this, this moment, not in years. And suddenly you are ageless - seven or sixteen, new born, or nearing forty. My sister again, after years of barren yearning, cold shouldering, guilt.

How can I tell you the ways that I love you, that I understand, that I know you? How can I let you carry on pretending, when we both see the way the sky is falling? I wish I could hold you, I wish I were older, or that the sky were bluer. But wishes grow wings that bud and then wither, and I am only a child in this garden of ivy and azelea, and too much scent is wasted on dream and failure.

You stand up now, you say your hands are shaking and you don't understand why. And you love me, I can feel it, you are glad I am here, glad we are talking. As I am glad, for this is for what I was waiting.

But I cannot cross the grey wastes with you, I cannot tramp these marshes. I am tired of loss, but more tired of hoping for sunlight to filter through the cracks in the weather. For all that was pulled apart to be mended.

I can only mend myself, and watch you in the sun, beautiful as ever, soft as a grey mouse, tears like downy feathers. And hold your hand if you want it; and a hug means everything, a cup of tea means the world, when it is made by hands that are like your own, when the sun is leaping in the water, when family means blood; that is running through, circling, shedding, drying, flooding the arteries of our lives, apart and together, unstoppable, ferocious, simple, untethered, precious liquid metal, inexplicable.