Woke up early with Nick. He finds it hard to combat the programming of his workday routine, and, although if I wake with him I usually go back to sleep, I didn’t today. Perhaps because he was only feet away. Silly of me as he was very quiet, just reading his paper. I hoped he would come back to bed, and, with prompting, he did for a little while. I suppressed the urge to talk, and to make any further requests, thinking it would spoil the closeness. There was an separation of physical and mental self, which happens occasionally and generally means neither part engages. Unusually, this time, my physical self engaged on its own. Maybe this led to what happened when Nick got up. I felt overly emotional, bereft, and lost. A horrid sick anxiety, a cheapening. This used to happen when I was a teenager and he would get up, go downstairs and watch the TV series Airwolf. We get older and more in tune with each other’s needs and feelings, but are essentially the same people. I got dressed and attempted to make the best of the day, but it all felt a little off colour. Mind you, I have a headache, earache and sore throat, which didn’t help.
We drove over to Marazion and walked up and down the windy beach. St Michael’s Mount was sitting in a puddle of drying Quink. I was outraged that the part of the road that a few months ago you had been allowed to park on for free had been yellow lined, there seems no reason for this other than to force drivers into the expensive car parks. We looked out for amber which Nick says sometimes washes up on Mounts Bay, but didn’t find any. Then we ate pasties and sat in the car drinking hot tea and not talking, like a proper married couple, Darcy asleep on the back seat. Driving back via Penwith, over the rocky heathland and between drystone hedges, I felt a great surge of love for the West Cornwall landscape, and a sense of being home. I was playing with ways of describing the bare blackness of the trees that grow on those hedges and the way that the windward sides are cut off in sharp hypotenuse shapes. I couldn’t get the words and can’t even now, back in this sheltered valley where the damp trees are cuddled up in mossy duvets.
Spent the afternoon in bed dozing and reading the David Peace novel 1974. I watched the Red Riding series on TV, so I’m trying one of the books. The writing is masculine and its uncomfortable in its violence. By reputation, the books are evocative of the West Riding of Yorkshire, but I haven’t found it so, even though a lot of it is set in Leeds. If I think of my time there, its of the black churches, schools with fences fronting on to main roads, bitter still coldness, and most of all of rows of brick terraced houses marching down hillsides, terracotta dominoes.
We drove over to Marazion and walked up and down the windy beach. St Michael’s Mount was sitting in a puddle of drying Quink. I was outraged that the part of the road that a few months ago you had been allowed to park on for free had been yellow lined, there seems no reason for this other than to force drivers into the expensive car parks. We looked out for amber which Nick says sometimes washes up on Mounts Bay, but didn’t find any. Then we ate pasties and sat in the car drinking hot tea and not talking, like a proper married couple, Darcy asleep on the back seat. Driving back via Penwith, over the rocky heathland and between drystone hedges, I felt a great surge of love for the West Cornwall landscape, and a sense of being home. I was playing with ways of describing the bare blackness of the trees that grow on those hedges and the way that the windward sides are cut off in sharp hypotenuse shapes. I couldn’t get the words and can’t even now, back in this sheltered valley where the damp trees are cuddled up in mossy duvets.
Spent the afternoon in bed dozing and reading the David Peace novel 1974. I watched the Red Riding series on TV, so I’m trying one of the books. The writing is masculine and its uncomfortable in its violence. By reputation, the books are evocative of the West Riding of Yorkshire, but I haven’t found it so, even though a lot of it is set in Leeds. If I think of my time there, its of the black churches, schools with fences fronting on to main roads, bitter still coldness, and most of all of rows of brick terraced houses marching down hillsides, terracotta dominoes.
No comments:
Post a Comment