Nighttime racing before vaping for the teenagers in my park tonight.
I’ve walked this park for years now, at this time of year I go down to watch the bats come out and fly about at dusk. The sounds of the city rise up on a still night. Sirens, shouts, cars and motorbikes and the new sound of the whir of the electric bikes and scooters that race the pavements.
The leaves are starting to fall and turn the most beautiful colours
The stars are making an appearance earlier in the evening. I welcome them. The season’s change no longer fills me with a fear of the dark winters. Welsh winters are also filled with light, I just never saw it.
God I’m rusty with my drawing. (You can all see though because drawing is always a work in process).
Started my first dark walk of the autumn hoping to see stars but instead I was treated to small flutters of rain which quickly turned to absolute deluge.
And I loved it.
Threw my hood back and got absolutely saturated.
Because skin is waterproof and I’m old enough to know best.
I could imagine I’m writing to myself. I could imagine there was an audience of cobwebs and silence. Just like when I started this little blog many many years ago. There is history here now and an older woman typing these words.
Beginnings have ends and ends always have a cat at the end of them. Did you know that?
Or something else, maybe just silence, or tumbleweeds.
I’m not sure yet. But I am not done. The pens will return in time.
I needed time.
Go revisit my drawings if you like. There’s loads.
Meet my two new corvid friends. I’ve been made honorary human in the great sausage and cheese crow supply chain. These two have been following me for a few months, flying over when I enter the park because they know I carry treats for Frannie.
They will come within a few steps of me now. The most beautiful pair, one is slightly bigger and more bossier. Frannie is getting slowly used to them as they follow us around the park waiting for something tasty to be thrown in their direction.
Posts will be images for the moment as I would like a return to what I love doing best, drawing what is around me and what no one else sees. Something that is mine. Something I have done from a very small little girl that is, inherently me.
Enjoy the lines. I’ll post everything, mistakes and tea spills.
Yes it has been quiet here hasn’t it but one pair of hands I have and trust me, I’m very good at burning food and leaving ingredients out of cakes this time of year. Hectic rushing does indeed send me into a headless chicken state.
Yes Frannie can indeed sleep two legged. This is her version of staying off the sofa.
Yes the cats sleep like that, how else does a cat sleep? Please let me know if your cat sleeps in a sensible spot.
Yes my teenager is far superior at decorating a trifle than I will ever be.
Yes Millie is at university and I’m still shocked about that but she’s home and there is washing but smiles too.
I wish you a peaceful time and with much love because it is always better than sprouts.
Shelter is a pair of legs and a nice tree. We’ve been caught out in some nasty downpours this week and it’s nice to know I’m trusted enough to be a shelter against the rain even if we do look like a pair of dodgy lurkers (in wellies).
The evening light gets quite fiery this time of year. Lights up the hill and even makes the rubbish and the massive weeds in my front something extra. I adore an angry sky.
Having a right laugh reading my meters so I can tell the readings to the energy company so they can charge me the price of my kidneys to not turn the heating on at all this winter.
I should stop there really and let you enjoy the picture of my cobweb infested ceiling.
She’s currently lying in state in London. The queue to see her coffin is currently a couple of miles long. I don’t think you can go twice or perhaps you can (if you forgot to say something the first time around or if you left your coat I suppose). Her state funeral is on Monday and everything is closing for the day. A national bank holiday. No school, no work, nothing will be open.
My kids tell me it feels like lockdown is coming. It’s only for a day I say, it’s ok, the world will continue at breakneck speed the next day.
Books of condolence have been opened around the United Kingdom and online to write in.
I’d rather draw a picture. But then, I always did.
Find me a phrase that drives up emotions in you like this one does, go on, have a try.
Then add in that you are young, with those said emotions.
A backpack, new shoes, and a dread so deep that it still wakes you up twenty years or so later in a cold sweat and a racing heart.
Now we are talking the stuff of nightmares. But then we realise, it was all a dream and we laugh at how it used to be. The relief is wonderful.
I don’t have to go to school any more!
And then we drop our own children off as the leaves gather colour.
I see you brave ones who hate school. Draw pictures in every exercise book. Day dream in maths lessons of better days. Draw on your arms in biro, draw on your rulers, on your rubbers, (stick holes in it too). Draw of robots and lasers, draw that evil student that hates you with a big asteroid plummeting towards them. Draw that teacher that shouted at you in the classroom being chased by a hungry minotaur. Draw of superheroes and villains and gather stories that make you snort aloud in the middle of French because it contained farting noises (and something awful in the dinner queue with a cheese and onion sandwich).
I’m at a music festival at the moment. I watched a fantastic young lady perform acrobatics last night on a rope suspended from some rigging. It was fun to draw this. To have the opportunity to draw acrobats was wonderful. I had to grab the sketchbook. I adore drawing moving figures. The nighttime and the festival atmosphere made it all the more interesting.
Just one woman with a pen and a sketch book who still really doesn’t have a clue how she thinks of the world. I guess that’s real honest drawing, I’ll figure it out. I always have perceived my world through these lines. Mistakes after mistakes. Processing and redrawing. I drew Bonnie after six goes, it helped me to do so.
On difficult days the only way for me to process events is to draw. A language in itself of sense. I’m deeply grateful for all your well wishes regarding Bonnie’s passing, you’re all in it with me, some of you for ten years now. It’s not the Never Ending story though, it’s my life on concrete streets and there’s no dragons I’m afraid. Just this cat who really is going to be the death of me. I make no apologies for the anatomical mess in this drawing, I will look like that if she gets me one day. Much love.
All tennis balls have been marked safe today. All socks and fluffy toys. All annoying spaniels. All cats and chickens too. Sausages have been marked safe today. Grass is less yellow, there is less hair and no mugs of tea have been knocked over.
You were the good girl.
There is a crater were an almighty heart once beat.
Your long legs and huge ears, the pneumatic tail, the gaze of absolute, unconditional love right until the lights gently dimmed.
Disclaimer…..no pigeons were harmed in the drawing and the writing of this factual happening. Frannie has great recall now unless I give her permission to run (and on a long line) as she is so fast
The pigeons have launched a petition to attach mini cymbals to Frannie’s paws to announce that turbo mode has been engaged.
The streets around me closed for a bit at the weekend. They hooked up a sound system and blasted 80’s music and Tom Jones into the early hours. The sound of bouncing and laughing from the inflatable castle and a quiz that went on for quite a bit.
Questions for the Queen.
70 years of wearing a shiny crown is going to give one serious hat hair. How does one take the crown off and not giggle? I take a hat off and my hair is flat and the rest sticks out like an explosion.
Does the world really smell of fresh paint to the Queen or is she fed up of everyone saying that?
Do her corgis chew her slippers? (Frannie has so far this year eaten two of my best pairs of trainers).
Is her throne a recliner now she is a bit older so she can get nice and comfy?
When she puts on her cloak, does she do a maniacal laugh like a villain or does she want to be a superhero and zoom around the palace like Superwoman?
Oh and Frannie has added bunting to her barking repertoire. One is delighted at that. I bet her corgis are used to flags I suppose.
Hark at me getting the landscaping done in my garden.
Frannie is planning a moonscape (or dogscape) she hasn’t decided yet. It’s obviously going to have mostly two foot deep craters as Frannie loses interest and moves along to the next virgin patch of grass once she’s dug the thing. My ankles are really loving the new rugged terrain.
Another question. Why does the laundry pile grow in the spring? Because everyone has outgrown their clothes again and nothing fits so everyone throws out said clothes to be washed and for me to put it back once dry and the cycle continues…
One of Renee’s many sleeping places is a little wicker basket on the landing. She likes it here very much as she can place all her knitted kitty puffs in one basket before a days screeching (carrying them all around the house and leaving them in random places).
This was a fine plan.
Until we got Frannie.
Stair gate is up but skinny necked pilferers do find a way.
Kitty Puff numbers have declined rapidly since the introduction / invasion of this blonde, dog tornado.
Sunday baggage check. Filmed too because it has been a while (because I’ve been up to something rather exciting).
The bottom of a school bag is never a pretty place. Don’t go there. If you’ve lost something in your bag, accept it’s loss, just stuff more books back on top. It will turn up in a few months with that old banana skin you forgot about.
The electronic billboard that appeared a few weeks before the start of the pandemic in 2020 on the side of a house on my evening walk, the one that featured images of the giant Coronovirus and telling us to stay indoors to stay safe. The one that lit up my night time walks with garish primary colours of resilience.
It’s gone.
Just a freshly rendered golden pebble-dashed wall.
And my dog cocks her leg and wees on the wall while a discarded mask blows past me.
I’m probably the only one that’s noticed (or remotely bothered). I can’t decide if I’m actually bothered or that my icon of the Pandemic has just got fed up and gone to another wall to advertise holidays. Covid 19 is so yesterday.
And just like that, the skies over Port Talbot (Mordor)light up as the blast furnaces get going for the evening shift.
Millie and myself chopped it down ourselves too and carried it off the hill.
Talking, laughing, wiping pine needles from our hair, our car filled to the brim with prickly branches and laughter.
I care not for mess, I care not for resentment, I care not for mistakes. I care about my children, growing up and becoming free. And it is the most liberating experience watching them fly.
Swansea is glowing. NASA have confirmed we are shining out to the universe a message of neon and tinsel through the endless, cold rain and wind. Even through the grey, permanent cloud that envelopes the city in a wet hug, we are shining. I haven’t tripped over in the dark all week, it’s lovely and bright.
Every plug socket, overloaded with nine cable extensions, of course it’s safe, they’re LED’s, plug it in Mam, light it up.
We are so bright, we are shining, come on then Santa we haven’t got all month you know, can’t you see we’ve been ever so good?
Now pass me a mince pie, no it is my first one, honest.
No not quite there with the coming back to me. In fact it’s a hilarious game of catch me if you can. Being a sight reactive dog is a tricky one to navigate as Frannie is very fast and there is no way I can catch her. Poor Bonnie is too old to join in and too busy sniffing out crisps to eat.
We get sneaky and cunning. We use sausages and chicken, we throw fluffy toys.
There is no dog here, I have no idea what you are talking about. It is simply a messy pile of cushions admiring the autumn sun streaming through very wonky blinds.
Yes Autumn is most definitely here. After a period of denial and a few weeks of early morning school starts, we can safely say we are on the downward slope of darker, wetter evenings.
But do not doubt the resilience of the people of Swansea to get their washing loads out on their scaffolding pole lines in between the showers and lob a beach ball over the back gardens while doing it.
You are just not living unless you are.
Come at us Autumn, we’ll get the bedding dried and folded in between your deluges.
Oh that phrase. Strikes anxiety into the hearts of every school child that didn’t think summer would ever end.
Like a guillotine for fun times and lie ins. The harbinger of Autumn.
Here come hard shoes and stiff trousers, time tables and breaktimes, packed lunches and P.E., assemblies and assessments. Gym hall smells and nippy mornings.
Heads down parents, morning battle has commenced, get on the road and growl at the morning traffic.
You’ll look back and wonder, where has the time gone?
A big fast moving blur just happened and we’re ten years on.
And then I see all the drawings and I smile.
Artistic snapchat, illustrative Instagram, whimsical facebook all in a little sketchbook and all from the day I’d lived.
Technology is indeed great and I love it too but there really is something lovely in looking at your day and picking out what mattered to you, what was funny, what was hurtful, what was just great and then detangling it through lines.
Humidity and thirty degree heat means one thing. Ice lollies, shade and fan on.
Frannie is being kept in as she has only one fast speed setting and Bonnie is setting a lovely example of a dead dog and sprawling her long bones wherever I seem to step.
Everything is sticky.
Swansea is baking hot today and our old stone terrace house has heated up lovely and is roasting us slowly.
It’s a bit hard seeing a whole stadium full of football fans shouting for their teams on the television yet you can’t leave the house because there’s been a positive Covid case in your year at school.
Last week of school before the summer and it’s back to online learning with the cats.
Lots of creepy crawling flowering plants grow in little places on the old stone walls. They always have thrived and grow on everyone’s walls. Brightest of purples this time of year with the happy drone of busy bees.
I’ve added lots of pots this year with herbs and trailing flowers. It’s plant chaos and I love the mess.
The lavender is enormous this year so the bee party is going to be lovely. I’m hoping to see a return of the hummingbird hawkmoth I saw one year, it really looks like a little hummingbird.
No chemicals, no weedkiller, just a pair of hands and a cat interested in digging.
Part one was four days of feeling a little rough and a sore arm, not much to get concerned, I grew no second head and disappointedly I didn’t develop an affinity with anything Microsoft.
I drove to the same building as I originally went to for part one, a small community centre, one way in and one way out. I waited 5 minutes before being ushered to a chair where a trolley was moving up and down the line of waiting people. One to inject and one to ask the questions.
Are you well?
Are you allergic to anything?
Whispers in my ear…Are you Pregnant?
My enthusiastic shaking of my head went on a little too long.
Fifteen minutes of waiting and wondering will this make a difference. Will enough of us get the vaccine? Will it work? Truth is we will have to wait and we will have to hope that it will. I feel very small again, insignificant in the bigger picture.
I got my phone out and ate melted sweets from my glovebox.
Miya likes to come in through the roof window this time of year. Obviously as late as possible and normally making quite a racket as she plops onto the floor of the loft, startling Millie.
How does she climb up?
Well, she scales a stone garden wall and then leaps vertically up the side of our house to access the roof. Terrifying.
Both agree the swift show is wonderful and are very happy the sun is warmer and the clouds are bubbling high into the long, light evenings.
There are drop in clinics running this weekend for currently the youngest portion of the national Covid vaccination program, the eighteen year olds.
Millie had her text through a few days ago notifying her she could attend one of these clinics.
She had to take a photographic identification so we dug out her passport.
I drove down with her to the enormous film studios on the outskirts of the city, it was quite something driving into it, lots of run down industrial units colonised by flocks of noisy seagulls.
We parked up and she put a mask on and joined the queue with lots of other young people. Red stripy tape and orange bollards, they all stood apart without being asked. Some on their own, some with mates, some with parents, most on their phones probably checking in with a nice selfie and a hashtag #gotstabbed
Our children have had many vaccines in their lives already, this one felt different. Probably because of it’s newness and it’s immediacy. The other vaccines as babies you knew there was a slim chance of them getting the said diseases. This one is different isn’t it?
I waited an hour in the car watching other parents in their cars, watching the shuttle bus pull up bringing more young people. It was busy.
Millie texted me while inside, in her words:
There was no daylight inside, the building was really big but the ceilings were low and everywhere was white..
Corridors were white too with small windows in where I could see people sat inside. Lots nurses and doctors walking around in their uniforms often wheeling trolleys with large computers on and stacked up carts with the medical supplies on.
I sat in a waiting area next to another girl (well 2 metres next to her) and we chatted about stuff. When it was my turn, I was taken through to a station and they asked me some questions about if I was well. Then I received the injection and waited for a few minutes to make sure I was feeling fine.
And then out she came, clutching an information sheet and asking for lunch.
The council weed killers were out last week spraying down the walls and pavements to get rid of the weeds. Most unfortunately, it poured down right after and washed most of it away judging by the explosion of colour between the cracks and the gutters.
The smallest little flowers, easily ignored by big feet but loved by little bees and insects. I never really noticed myself until I was drawing on the pavements last year during lockdown. They grew through discarded masks and broken bottles.
Last year, because of the pandemic, we had less spraying and as a result, the most beautiful wildflowers grew on the pavements and the gaps between the old walls.
My hands are filthy with cool earth because the cat is lying on top of my new gardening gloves and I’m not getting swiped.
A small packet of seeds with 100 count, how many to sow, to broadcast or a few in a tray? (There’s no way my long sighted eyes can read this tiny packet print).
You know the answer already.
I sow the lot and I’m hoping a few will come and not be like last year when I couldn’t bear to thin out one seedling and ended up giving the whole street tomato plants potted into toilet rolls or any container I could fill with soil.
This year there are vegetables but also flowers.
Catmint or the snuggle plant as I like to call it as my cat will snuggle the poor plant the minute the first tiny leaves appear in the spring.
There will be violas, phlox, cornflowers and poppies. Nasturtiums and hanging pots with trailing flowers.
To be present and part of the moment without self conscious thought or overthinking.
I’m absolutely rubbish at it.
But
I can see the moment like no one else and I can slow it down, turn it upside down, take it somewhere and show you.
To watch a moment and the hand to produce a heap of lines on a page that my brain understands. That’s crafted over and over and over for years and years and never perfected but perfect in it’s imperfection.
That’s drawing. I like drawing, the only reason I ever started was not because I wasn’t any good, (I was just a toddler) I just saw the moment.
I was a young child sat in a church silently drawing with my finger, the backs of people’s heads sat in their benches.
I was a sad teenager with no escape from my head so I drew my moments that gave me hope.
I was a tired mum with seeing no value in my life that picked up a sketchbook and saw a moment.
I’m getting older and my glasses are thick (and give me huge eyes) but the moments are there and they matter.
When you run at one hundred miles per hour over broken glass it’s not going to have a great outcome.
Enforced rest and knocking over of everything for the next few days while the superglue and antibiotics mend those power pads then it’s back to flying.
Millie and her classmates are testing for Covid 19 twice a week before school. They do it themselves. For the record I have tried a test to gain some empathy for this process.
There will be sneezing and retching.
Do not touch the fuzzy bit of the swab.
Do not let the dog touch the fuzzy bit of the swab.
Do not let the dog touch the test.
No silica gel is not the liquid.
Did I mention do not touch the fuzzy bit of the swab?
The cats love home learning, piles of paper and warm laptops.
Makes essay writing a challenge but I have it on good authority they have never missed an assembly.
Our lockdown restrictions are slowly starting to lift. We can stay local, schools are opening next week on a gradual slow return, more people are receiving the vaccines and Covid infections are for now, very low.
This three months of lockdown has felt an awful lot longer. Two of mine are taller, one has got into college and one dog has grown gangly legs.
Feels like spring is coming and with it, more changes.
Not sure really, it’s a strange dog, lady creature clutching milk bottles and dressed in pyjamas. Blinking at the bright morning light and scowling at a passer-by for daring to look at her and her two dog heads peaking out of her legs.
The schools in Wales are starting up for the older children, staggering the return until full time education resumes after the Easter holidays. They have been learning from home for three months this time. It’s been challenging and lonely for them, the lack of interaction has been hard.
There will be years ahead when we will see this play out I think.
Summer catch up school brings a look of sheer horror to my three’s faces. I can’t imagine there will be much enthusiasm at the prospect of that.
Covid infections are now at levels we saw in October 2020. The vaccination program brings me hope we will see normality of some sort and a return to leaving the house very soon.
It’s the art of making things look funny when really I’m hating every minute and would rather be sipping espresso martinis on a beach in Barbados with sunburn and giving no hoots about beach body ready or any of that rubbish.
The news has caught more people going to parties, having their hair dyed in car parks or actually being outside and having the audacity to drive somewhere nice and drink a coffee. We are told we must wait another few weeks and see if we are allowed out to travel to a destination for exercise without infecting each other with more variants named after nice places.
But the sun is shining!
Do you not know how lovely it is in Swansea when the sun shines? It’s so rare that a day without rain would be classified as a drought. I walked to my local park and felt the warmth and smelt the fumes from a passing moped piled on with screaming teenagers.
But anyhow, children on wheels are much easier to manoeuvre.
Last week Boris Johnson gave tentative dates for England to come out of the lockdown.
Wales, where we live, gave a more tentative approach to lifting the restrictions we have been living under since before Christmas. We are still under lockdown, we are still very much restricted to no travel and no unessential journeys, meet ups or socialising.
The media have erupted into euphoria.
I can’t share that sentiment. I am not euphoric, I am far from euphoric, I am tired and I am fed up and my hair is resembling an aged Rapunzel. My children are all still at home, their school lessons are still on a screen. They struggle, they can’t see their future as all they can see is the back of their bedroom door.
But moan as I do, Hope has been lobbed at us, like a big floundering fish that might flop away and slide slowly back into the water while I in slow motion grab it with both hands and miss.
Frannie is a year old now and in the middle of being a beautiful terror in our lives.
But when she runs, she flies. If she had wings, I don’t think we’d see her again. Once this lockdown is over, we are going to walk for miles on long sandy beaches. Until then it’s apologies to the *seagulls in the park.
*No seagulls were harmed. She just enjoys the chase, if it was a crisp packet it would be equally fun.
Stepping outside in a sideways ice blast to get those milk bottles is as far as I’m reaching today.
Dog print pyjamas, bobble hat and complete the outfit with some fluffy socks. A passer-by scurries on past either oblivious or terrified at the sweary mess of a women trying to keep her glasses on and picking up milk bottles with hair writhing in the cold wind like the wicked witch of the morning.
The wind is bitingly cold today. Straight from the North Pole and very bitter it is. Flurries of snow in my face and my hair. A boot full of food to last the next week, no end to the lockdown as yet but we all are holding our breath and hoping.
The house we live in was built around 150 years ago by miners and their families working in the area. That means that at one point. there were families in these very houses, going through the last pandemic of 1918 when a flu virus ravaged through the world and took out indiscriminately, from our communities.
Also a place of birth, I know Gruff wasn’t the only baby born in this house, there have been many births too. He arrived on a mid Tuesday morning cheered on by a small handful of midwives (and a few neighbours stood outside listening to my swearing).
I have dreamt of death a lot in the last year, of about people I have lost, often I have conversations in these dreams with these people and they are angry at me. I’ve got no idea why, (for probably talking too much?) In real life I have no idea what I would say as I would really rather dream about dogs or food or a nice day on a warm beach getting sunburnt.
They say death is an end, but also a beginning, and of better times ahead. I’m clinging on to that thought a little to much right now.
DoodlemumNothing wrong with that! Sounds perfect to me 😊
Jules Pkeep them coming!!!
rebbeccamurphygood morning from Indiana (USA)! I do not even own an umbrella...I always have said It's only rain a
automatic gardenerCats are on a different schedule. My last cat figured out how to turn on the clock radio when she wa
Rosie ScribblahBleurgh! I hate mornings. Why do cats wake up so early?
Doodlemum