Speechless

This morning, as I inhaled a cloud of pain and breathed it out again and said No, I will change my life, I will not let the cloaks of recent events take me down, and I rang the electricity board, and I unpacked my new mini laptop and prepared for the launderette, I got a phone call. It was the phone call. The one I’ve waited for two years. Perhaps.

     
Mum has been rushed into hospital again today, this time with breathing difficulties. But she went to sleep and didn’t come out of that, and now we’re all playing the waiting game again to see if it’s another stroke, the one that’ll finally take her, if she’s finally able to swim to freedom, away from tubes and machines and the same view of squirrels and daffodils from her bedroom window.

     
Today, for the first time in my life, I lost the power of speech. I'm a good communicator. But today, my brain shut itself down, and the world span backwards, and my mouth no longer said the words I wanted to say. I slurred my way through this afternoon, this evening, a personality I no longer recognised, in a world all too familiar. That blurry world. Where walking forward feels like going backwards, where I blink an eye and am filled with terror. Where I suddenly notice the moonlit sky or the glassy sea-water and I feel like heaven is exploding right inside of me.

     
I am used to being split open. I even get accustomed to it even, and find joy in what I discover inside - the hidden jewels, the rapture of knowing what really matters in this life, behind the masks and the craving, the need and the games. I can hold it in my hands for an instant and know it’s worth everything.

     
As I cycled slow as a snail towards the Meeting Place today, I saw a little girl with her dad on Hove lawns, just learning to walk. She turned as she marched with wobbling legs away from her father, her face lit with an incredible radiance - sheer exhilaration, unadulterated joy coming into being. It's hard to accept, but true nevertheless, that what lies behind that little girl’s smile is the same as what lies behind my Mum’s closed eyelids, and what will take her, if not now, sometime soon, away from me forever.

     
What a magnificent beauty of a terror for us all to live with. It makes me want to love all the harder, dance all the more fiercely, hold what’s precious in the palm of my hand and never malign it. Then it makes me want to crawl under a bush and stay there forever. We are idiots, and that makes us all the more human. We throw away the best things in life and usually we learn the hard way.

     
I hope I'm learning. One day I will finally no longer call myself a victim. One day, maybe tomorrow, I will reach out and see all this is my making, not my breaking. And that forgiveness is always, always, already there, at every turn.

Friday night

My street's ablaze with colour at the moment. The hydrangeas two doors up have sat, crisp and mottled for months, like old maids perched by the side of the road. Now, suddenly they've erupted into pink, purple and blue life, turning into something resembling a mild acid trip.

Seeing hydrangeas seems to short circuit something in my brain, sending me into a peculiar kind of rapture. They remind me of my Grandma more than any other flower. One glimpse of them takes me back to her garden again, and to her, brown skirt to her knees, hair firmly in place, picking a handful of peas or mint. There she appears, sturdy and loving, in her small, perfectly kept patch of green at Southview.

I'm not great at understanding the anatomy of things, at labels and the naming of parts, at decipherable wholes and the bits that make them up. I generally have a much more impressionistic experience of life. So it took me almost 34 years to learn that the flower I felt so ardently about was even called a hydrangea.

But I knew how those flowers made me feel; I knew the quality of the air in those summer days when I played on the wall. Every single day for the last two years I've touched the hydrangeas growing on my street, lightly, with my fingertips, as I've passed. And been immediately back there again.

Tonight, I walked home on the other side of the street, feeling like the wind was blowing me down towards the sea, pushing me out into a night where seagulls gather in a sky lit by boats and stars. And I wondered about all the flowers on my street; I wondered how come they are not made of blood, as we are, but of something different. Because our lives are not so dissimilar, and our beginning and our end all converge at the same place.

A rose feels the force of nature in its petals, trembles with the weight of the rain. It stretches its stalk away from the muddy earth, towards the sunlight. Tonight, I imagined every flower, every leaf trickling sap. I imagined salt water falling down from each one, red blood spotting the pavement, and a curious wet emerging from in between each petal. I imagined mucus-streaked stalks. The liquid of life washing across flowerbeds, over walls, out onto the empty grey pavement.

On a night like tonight, how I wished they would, how I wished the flowers would do their blood-letting and their weeping, their loving and mating, and I could walk through their rivers of their living and growth and disintegration.

Perhaps then I could finally see manifested the desire that's pumping through the veins of this world, through me, seeping out through my pores, winding through the channels of my mind, enveloping my tendons.

Otherwise, that which fuels everything that we do, the very axis on which this planet turns, remains as invisible as the air we suck on. We can almost pretend it doesn't exist, and that the world can be containable, reasonable somehow.

But I can feel it in the wind that's rattling my windows, in the heat of this evening, in the hum of night-time. It's everywhere I look. And it's in my heart, tinkling like that empty beer can rolling past my window. I am trembling with the force of what makes me, and will break me every time.

New petals generate, old ones die, and I proliferate. And if you think I'm being over the top, if you doubt it, look out of the corner of your eye and you'll spot it, always, sitting there in your living-room, drinking your coffee, planning your next move.

I don't know what to do with all this desire inside. It's as strong as that sea out there and as fragile as those petals. Me. Silly me. Messy, bloody, somehow growing. The world never did come to terms with itself, did it? And nor, yet, have I.

Back into the world

I've just cycled home from town. It's the first time in a long time that I've cycled home at night along the seafront. Being there felt like I'd left the television on low-volume for weeks, and finally just realised and switched it off. The fuzzy static in my head stopped - it was just my humming wheels, the breaking waves and the night all around me.

I put Kurt Wagner on my headphones. His voice felt like warm fingers stroking my tired brain. That particular Lambchop song reminds me of driving around in circles in Boston at three in the morning, my eyes dry and wide, high on sleeplessness and adventure. A white house appeared through the trees - unknown, hallucinatory. Life was very much like that drive to Boston back then - exciting and painful, turning corners that were never quite the right one.

I've missed cycling like this. The seafront used to be my constant companion, back in the days when I had things like free time. Passing one of the shelters looking onto the beach I spotted a life-size, stuffed penguin, just sitting there - part-comforting, part-menacing. As I stopped to take its photo, it sat there sizing me up, its beak high, fake furriness protruding from every seam.

I'm on a mission to not lose the sparkle that Andalucia gave me - the shine I felt on the inside, just walking through its streets and sleeping in its beds. So I'm currently putting certain things 'into motion' with my life, trying to keep the aliveness alive. It's no surprise to find myself back on my bike, then, and back in the silence that's Hove seafront at night.

I had numerous great ideas and snippets of posts to write about my holiday, but they all passed through and away before my fingers had even hit the keyboard. Maybe they'll come back and I can write them. It was such a good time, and the memories would clutch at me if I let them.

Friday

Tonight I cycled along the seafront. It was late and the air felt still, the sea was dense. There was a pressure in my head which made me speed up on the concrete and my mind feel like it was richocetting off the balustrade.

That's alcohol for you. Inhibitions left to the wind. Thought processes unsteady and darting, like a hundred shoals of tiny fish; full with fleeting feeling, reason empty.

I sped along, unaware of how fast or slow I was going, but at the same time, sure of myself. It was then that I saw them, emerging, ghostly from the recessed darkness of the beach; a man and a woman dressed entirely in white, their robes billowing out like they were two brides. As I sped along, a police car cruised further up the seafront to where more men and more women were dressed in white, emerging from the dark sea. It was a strange sight, stranger still for I remembered then that I'd seen them here before.

In the pub tonight, we spoke, as we always seem to do, of religion and spirituality, each of us, it felt, desperately trying to gather some truth in for ourselves, each of us missing some part of ourselves that we were trying to find, yet telling others that we had already found it.

I shirked at my own feelings on meditation and Buddha and God and finding inner peace. Almost ten years on, I have to ask the question, have I found it? Have I got those answers which seem so integral to positing oneself to others as a 'spiritual' person? No, the questions just get harder. The more I learn, the more and more I get out of my depth and then am forced to swim.

The inner peace I sought in the past, well, now it seems fanciful. Because peace to me used to mean the end of all this tiring, endless shit. But it doesn't. The endless tiring shit goes on and on, for as long as I go on and on, for as long as the world turns in its sleep.

So the question has become one of, do I want reality, or do I want comfort? I ask myself over and over this question, and I still can only answer: both. I want reality and I want truth, but I want that truth to be palatable, not painful. In the words of that great band, Of Montreal, I want my film to be beautiful, not realistic.

But nine times out of ten, reality whoops my ass, so to speak. I was told for years that the only way to happiness is to 'be here, now'. And I can talk like a jaded old thing, but the truth is, they are right; but the question remains, well, how much do I really want to?

I felt blessed by seeing those strangers in their white robes; glad they weren't in their houses tonight watching TV. Glad for the fact that they seemed so strange and unearthly in this all too often one-dimensional world, where spirit is absent too much of the time. And I'm glad I am cycling, using my legs, using my lungs. I want to cycle more, so that my legs ache and I am caught for breath, so that I am finally worn out with effort. Perhaps that is what they talk of when folk talk of peace; it is when you are finally done with trying, and the wind catches in your throat as you breathe it in.

Wednesday

I cycled into town today, mist billowing towards me. I have had a complicated relationship with my bicycle, Jeopardy. It has been fraught, to say the least. I am feeling now, however, that we are finally beginning to understand each other, rather than simply tolerating each other, or at worst, forming what can only be described as a dysfunctional bond, based on mutual dislike and mistrust. I have to admit, I haven't been very caring towards her.

These foggy days, I love them even more than those ones which are pumped with sunshine and crisp blue skies. Today, the sea looked like snow. The West Pier was even more spectral than usual, rising up out of the frosty waves like a black demon. On days like this, it is possible for me to believe that I could be living in any age, the world stilled into a black and white photograph, all modernity vanished.

On days like this, it makes me cry to think about leaving Brighton.

Long Afloat on Shipless Oceans...

Bob has come up with a new nickname for me. It's not the prettiest, but it has a certain ring to it if you say my name in full. Cotad. In fact, that should really read C.O.T.A.D. It stands for Completely Oblivious To All Danger. Yes, that's me.

It was a glorious, sunny, blue-skied day on Monday when my friend L and I tramped our way to the inflatables shop on Hove sea-front to get my forlorn and pumpless dinghy blown up. There was a light breeze, but the sun was hot and the sea looked like it was begging us to dip our toes in.

This was the first outing of Her Ladyship since my failed attempt last week with G due to torn pump rubber and inadequate gaffer tape. As the owner dragged the now fully inflated dinghy from his shop, he creased his ruddy face and asked "Are you sure you'll be alright going out in these conditions? There's a strong wind out there today."

"Nah, no problem" we both replied.

As we excitedly dragged my great blue and yellow wonder away from the beach balls and plastic windmills, his wife reiterated "You sure you'll be ok?"

Blimey, I thought, these sea-front people can be so over cautious.

Rather than leave our stuff on the beach, we decided to bring it with us. We piled it all into one huge plastic bag, and, somewhat stylishly and effortlessly, manoeuvred both ourselves and the bag into the dinghy and set off from the shore.

I love leaving Brighton behind. My favourite thing about going out in the dinghy is that I can watch the shoreline shrinking, the noise and the hassle of the city slowly drifting away. Brighton and Hove look so beautiful from out there. They stand wrapped in silence, with only the sound of lapping waves, or a gull overhead to interrupt the feeling of endless emptiness and space. In the sunshine, the city looks like it's made of gold.

I relaxed while L rowed. I had only recently found out that he is as much of a dinghy fanatic as myself, and, the experience of finding this out had been not unlike discovering that your friend is a member of the same secret, subversive society as you. We discussed our passion for the inflatable vessel over pear cider last week, agreeing how it is so much more than a crap blown-up toy which people muck about in when they go on holiday. No, it is much more spiritual than that, much more mysterious, esoteric and radical. I have long known that there are those who understand the full implications of The Way Of The Dinghy, and those who dismiss it as merely childish, silly or uncool. Such lost souls, one can only feel sorry for.

Anyway, it got a bit nippy, but thanks to the vast array of clothes we had packed into the boat, I wrapped up in a jumper. L started to look somewhat puzzled. Even though we hadn't actually tried to row further out to sea, we seemed to suddenly be rather far out, and since there were no yellow buoys out to give us any perspective, it was hard to determine exactly whether it was too far. L was concerned and so began rowing back towards the shore. After ten minutes, his puzzlement had turned to a grimace.

"No matter how much I row, I'm not actually moving anywhere" he uttered, frowning. I thought it was best for me to look concerned as well, so he didn't feel alone in his panic, and didn't notice how much I thought he was overreacting.

"Let me try," I said.

"No" came the prompt, stressed answer. He carried on rowing. At that point I turned to survey the shoreline. We hadn't moved one metre in ten minutes.

I took an oar. We both started rowing, I put my whole body into it. After a few minutes I looked again and slowly the shoreline was looking a little closer, not much, but a little. We carried on, my arms began to ache, and finally we reached a place where it felt comfortable enough to take a breather. Phew.

Our spirits returned in the knowledge that we were out of immediate danger. L suggested that I turn around so that we were both facing the same way, so that we could put more power into it. Now, turning round in a dinghy isn't the easiest of tasks, and I had just clumsily managed the maneouver and grabbed the oar when I spotted a boat heading towards us. I panicked for a moment that it might crash right into us, then, to my relief, and then my horror, I realised that it wasn't a speedboat, but a lifeboat, and it wasn't simply heading in the same direction as us, it was heading for us.

Suddenly, L cried "Run for it!" Looking back on it, this wasn't the cleverest of things to shout in the circumstances, firstly because one can't really 'run for it' in a dinghy, and secondly, if one isn't to take the wording too literally, even then, trying to out-row a large engine powered lifeboat with a small inflatable dinghy, is quite unlikely. Nevertheless, I promptly grabbed the oar and we flailed around attempting to flee the oncoming boat.

"We've had a distress call about a blue and yellow dinghy!" came the loudspeakered voice.

Now, following this announcement, came the second utterance that makes no sense in hindsight, but when faced by potential utter humiliation and embarrassment, one is driven to say somewhat stupid things.

I shouted back "Oh, that's not us, I think it's that dinghy over there", as I pointed to a speck on the horizon which I didn't even know what kind of sailing vessel it was. "We're fine!" I proclaimed as a helicopter flew overhead, and stopped precisely above us, hovering like an annoying fly.

"No, it is you" came the quick reply as the helicopter continued to buzz above us. L muttered expletives under his breath.

"No, we're really fine" he echoed, "we're just making our way back to shore now".

"We'll tow you back" came the loudspeaker.

We looked at each other. No fucking way. We'd both rather drown trying than have the humiliation of dangling off the back of the RNLI all the way back to shore. We waved our oars around and tried to look effective and competent. Unfortunately, I had only just swivelled into my new position in the dinghy and hadn't yet got a grasp of how to use the oar from this position. We sped round in circles.

"Are you sure you don't want our help?" came the now sniggering voice.

"No," shouted back L in an attempted air of confidence. "We're very British you know, very proud".

They stood there watching us, tailing every slow and self-conscious stroke of our pained journey back to shore, the sound of our rowing echoed by their laughter. At least the sodding rescue helicopter cleared off.

Finally, we arrived, wobbly handed at the beach, managed to get ourselves and our belongings out of the dinghy and up on shore.

"Bet they're still laughing at us" L said with a scowl as we waved at them and they finally sped off.

We laid out the blanket. The sheer humiliation of the experience was potent fuel for laughter. We cracked up. Suddenly, I spotted two coastguards approaching us. "Are you the owners of this blue and yellow dinghy?" one of them asked. Here we go again, I thought.

They were very nice about it all, considering. Again, don't ask me why, but I tried to convince them that there must have been a mistake.

"There was another dinghy out there" I told one of them. "I think maybe it was that that was in trouble."

"No," he responded " that was a man in a kayak who was actually on his way out to you both to see if you needed assistance. We received three alerts about you from members of the public."

Shit. We apologised profusely for the fuss we had caused.

"I'll have to take down your names and addresses."

I imagined myself on some Dinghy black-list.

"It's for our records only. Any further out, and you two'd not have made it back".

So there we have it. COTAD. Completely Oblivious To All Danger. I still couldn't really accept that maybe we had lost a bit of control of the dinghy out there until I told a friend the story the other night. Whilst giggling at the hilariousness of it all, I looked back at her, and noticed that she wasn't smiling.

"I might never have seen you and L again," she cried, "I'd have turned up for Writers' Group and someone would say 'Oh, they're not coming. They drowned in Clare's inflatable dinghy yesterday."

I guess that's the thing with the sea. Like life, you never can quite tell which way the currents are pulling. They look like they're going one way, and then suddenly you realise they're going in quite another. It's all a question of navigation, strong arms and not letting yourself get carried out too far.

When the coastguards had finally left, the sun was getting so hot I could feel my face burning. I lay in a semi-sleepy state, basking in the rays. "We'll probably find ourselves on the Government's terrorist suspect list now" L surmised as he got out his crayons and pad.

"Yeah," I agreed. "CID will be tapping our phones". I wondered what the time was, as I had lost complete track of it in all the drama. I sat up.

"Are you drawing the sea?" I asked him.

I leaned over his pad. And there she was, in blue and yellow. My Rapid 4000 who had got us home. The best dinghy in the world.

It certainly wasn't the road signs or the thought of love or money littering the streets or what the paper said.

Only the half caught things that make my day. Like the end of a T.V. show. Like reflections in car windows. I don't understand why I was meant for a treacherous life. Never known any different. The clouds speed at two o' clock along with the rain and my head falls forward on your chest. Your room is white as air, Death Cab For Cutie on the stereo. I feel your tears rolling into my hair as mine spread down my chin. I say "I'm tired, I'm tired". And the way you looked at me then, well, it made my day.

And I am out into the wet again, boots soaked through to skin, waves up high against the balustrade. Paper blowing to the West, a magic lantern swings on the peeling wooden railing. I am no ornate fixture, despite the tunes trickling through my head. I am blown to pieces. But how he took my hand, he didn't have to. Led me up the wobbling road. He bought me yellow roses and carnations just to cheer me up. And a washing up bowl, one without a hole in.

I had an orgasm tonight. When I came it was no man, no woman, no fumbling graphic scene, it was only the kindness in a stranger's eyes which made the world explode. Kindness, almost blue in colour. I remember then the page after page I read yesterday from a guy in Pennsylvania writing about his girlfriend, a local stripper, who danced for him the first time as she danced for all the others and how he fell for her and how she had left him, and I cry too.

In a small room, a woman whose hair is long, the rest I don't remember, brusquely gets up from her chair, rustles through folders, tells me as I'm leaving "I can help you, do not worry". Then I am on the bus home, front seat, rain all over the windscreen, smudging the outside world into blurry charcoal. I sense the lazy orange lights of the Palace Pier, seeping through wet and black. I see beauty in oblivion.

I'm flailing like a good one. A nine to five seems like bliss right now. A strip lit room with pens, wrinkled shirts and routines, a pay packet on a Friday. That would keep me warm. All this writing reduced to zero. What does it count for? All that I love most is like the fucking wind. Can never get my hands on it. Get into media. Get onto the Ladders of the World and Climb. I never bothered much with what I'm meant to, it never aroused a thing in me. But I pretend. I don't let on that I know you, every last one of you, and every piece. It gets me out of tight spots to be this way. Like having a pretty face. It can pacify bus drivers when you've forgotten your change.

Stagger into the Light

I am so fed up at the moment. As my Mum would say, fed up "to the back teeth". I feel at the moment like my life is being lived on a high wire, and I am some untrained circus performer who was just minding her own business taking money for the show before being dragged up there by a couple of brutish clowns without a safety net. This isn't what I signed up for. Though one gets to experience a certain existential wisdom and inner knowledge at such times as these, I have to say, as a compensation for how bollocks everything can feel, that is not the greatest source of comfort to me.

And yet, it has its moments. After working out my finances and discovering that I have a total of 27p to live off for the whole month of February, hearing that my Mum's health had taken another turn for the worse and realising that I do not know what the fuck I am doing with my life at the moment, on any single level, today I prised myself out of my hidey hole and took to the sea-front in what felt like my very last attempt at bothering with life and its doings at all.

And I was startled by beauty. All along the prom, out far from the shore, in each direction, East and West, from Shoreham harbour up past Palmeira Square, Sussex Heights to the Palace Pier and beyond, the afternoon light fell like strands of golden hair over the coastline, over and around the enormous mass of human beings enjoying the first clear blue sky day in Brighton for weeks. The tall cream buildings lining the road past Hove Lawns stood quietly luminous and everything I saw was softening in the glow of the afternoon. I tilted my head back and felt the skin on my face lit up by the gleam of the sky.

It is a wonder to walk the prom on a day like today. To witness life, to smell the sunlight, to feel the blueness of the air all around. It all becomes part of one single movement - the puppy in a green coat chasing its tail, the flat bodies of surfers, faces pressed to their boards, bodies black and shiny, waiting for a wave to break. The bare curved torso of a teenage boy as he skateboards down the pavement disappearing into a crowd of parents and prams, women selling trilby hats, a man selling hippy clothes, and thirty something media professionals recovering from the night before. The white lips of the waves coming in, the dark of the West Pier, the pinks, yellows and blues of the beach huts, the arc of a seagull wing, the smell of chips from the sea front cafe, the glittering row of hotels shrinking into the distance.

I pass huge dogs, tiny dogs, silly dogs, magnificent dogs, swimming dogs, sniffing dogs, dogs whose eyes look like they hold the key to every soul within them and I want to take every single one home with me. I decide: I will open a dog sanctuary, no, I will live in the country with twenty working dogs for company, no, I will ask one of the owners politely if it is hard work looking after their dog, and then gently offer to take it of their hands as an act of compassion.

I wasn't expecting this. I wasn't expecting to be lifted, or to feel joy for no other reason at all than being here, now, in this perfect sunlit scene. On the way home I took the last money from my purse and detoured up to Tesco's, threw caution to the wind and bought a chocolate cake, from their 'finest' range. I took my £1.65's worth of joy home with me, made a cup of tea, and ate a slice in silence. It has been many weeks since I have enjoyed the glory of a piece of chocolate cake, and it tasted good. Sitting in the fading sun of my front room, it tasted perfect.

Next to the Angel Peace Statue at the point where Brighton turns into Hove, there was a huge crane towering over the seafront, looming tall next to Embassy Court. I wondered what it was for, with a metal grill box hanging from it, and I could just about make out the outline of two men. Suddenly a figure of a man jumped from the box and was dangling before my eyes attached by a white rope around his ankle.

I stood and watched as he was lowered back down and another man took his place in the metal grill box, and was lifted back high in the air.

Today the sea front is so alive with such sights, I feel almost airborne. Huge swathes of starlings line every inch of the West Pier, and seagulls float above me, immobile in the wind. Black silhouettes of men in wetsuits bob up and down in the waves around the West Pier, and occasionally, one struggles to his feet on a board momentarily before being swept under the foam and waves once again. In the distance, seven kites curve in the air, dragging more men and perhaps women above and across the surface of the choppy sea.

Even the clouds seem buoyant and adrift, turned orange by the fading sunlight, which casts a sheen over the sea like copper, which mixes with the turquoise of the five o clock sky and makes the rain on the pavement shine.

It feels good to take steps in such a swirl of brightness, like a lifting bird who does not mind if her feathers are ruffled or if it looks like there might be a storm over Shoreham harbour tonight.

Light, light, light. I pass the lawns I have passed so many times, the toes of my shoes turning darker with the wet from underfoot. I have a wind in my soul, clearing through cobwebs and the blackest dust, loosening the stiffened grey cogs of my machinery so that I can move again. I am surfing this moment, my hair, aflap with gulls and a single aeroplane trail. Air is billowing my dress and senses, the wind is sailing me home.

Sunday Best

Well, the afternoon Tea Party went down a storm on Sunday, with cakes, Assam and ginger cake galore. It was a magnificent afternoon, the weather holding out, and the sun daring to shine. We all wore our Sunday best and I even put on a bit of Edith Piaf and Django Reinhardt to add to the atmosphere. An eccentric affair, the kind that always bring the biggest smile to my lips. More afternoons should be spent like this - there is something poignantly beautiful about such a spread on the beach, with all your friends, watching as the sun sinks behind the horizon and Summer ebbs its way from the tides of the shore.

I finally have some more time off, so today I am working on a song at my keyboard. Oh, the joy of solitude.

The Leaves Are Starting To Fall..

Autumn is coming. Walking up Ditching Road this morning, I felt it in the breeze, saw it in the cracked orange leaves that circled round my knees and bag.

This morning I am a girl of the sea. Sweet and strong with a head full of wonder, an eye for light: I sparkle on water. Tomorrow I may be Andalucia, with a body of blood like aged red wine from the cellar, a heart of ardent rapture, sitting by a ring of sand, watching the bull toss his head with bleeding pride.

Yesterday was a bad day. Today, so far, my heart is alive and breathing once again, remembering it can take care of itself, and that, in the midst of pain, there is still love, if you can persist to find it. This can take some looking.

But as there is a season about to end, there is another beginning. I will make it a new beginning. And to mark it, this Sunday I hold A Tea Party on the beach, with fancy frocks and friends to say goodbye to what has, in many ways, been a memorable and beautiful season.

And I am not quite ready for snow, but the thought of chocolate coloured days and walks by the green cooling river fill me with a new joys. Trips to London to see the new Rodin collection, Tate Modern, my sister and the Thames. Kittywakes calling from Seaford cliffs, quiet afternoons writing, berries and hot tea late at night.

And the beach will change its flavour, but will still be there, chugging and churning, my solace in this greedy busy town, peace in the burning car headlights.

Who knows what will actually become of this Autumn, but perhaps I don't have to opt for complete hibernation just yet, or can do so in another way. I think they call it Recuperation. I call on all my animals of the forest, of the ice, of the road. Let them take care of this little soul when it grows littler, when the rocks start falling and I need a place to hide, some fur and strong paws to bury my face in.

And all being well, it won't break my heart to see Mum in the new nursing home where she'll soon be residing, with her child-like vision, the flower pots on the patio. I am so glad there will be flowers for her there. And though it feels a devastation to think we all might be in for another long haul, because we know she will not get better, but could stay in some twilight world for years to come, I am glad she will be settled somewhere where there are no nurses, too busy to give my mother a second glance, to really look after her, where I can leave behind wards, the clinical smell, the dreadful taste of death and withering in my mouth. At least there are hills there.

And I have joined a Writing Circle. And I soon begin a little writing course. And life moves onward. I never stay the same. And even in one day, who I am shifts and changes. I am Clare, and I am reborn with every tear, every pain.