annanotbob2's Diaryland Diary

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Better

I had a real dip there but I was good. I got in touch with people and made arrangements to see them, one at a time, over a few days and they were all lovely and supportive and it was cool and I came out of the black place. I fell behind with my Bella bits, but I told myself that was OK, because it is. I shall do some in a minute, when I finish this.

Today I met Son in Brighton and after he went to catch his train home I went to see an art project in the Pavilion Gardens. It's called Arrivals/Departures and is two big electronic boards like you'd have at an airport or station, but you're invited to add the names of people who have been born or died. I added Sam to both - her names (her birth name and her adult, married name) came to the top within a minute and it was so weird and powerful. I did really like seeing her name especially at the top, a big acknowledgement, but then I was overwhelmed at her being gone, not seeing it, being there on my own, no one who knew her seeing it. That kind of stuff. Son hadn't wanted to come but I couldn't remember what it was, just a thing I wanted to check out, so I didn't sell it to him.

This may be a link to the radio 4 bookclub programme I'm on, airing at 4.00 BST on Sunday. I may have been edited out - they recorded more than an hour and it's down for 28 mins, but there you go - Lianne Moriarty - very interesting and worth a listen.

I sent an email to Saturday Live (also on Radio 4) for their 'Thanks' slot, to say thank you to the lorry driver who saved me from sleeping rough on a January night in Dieppe, in 1976. It was only when I had the email reply from them, saying they'd get to me in turn, that I remembered the reason I was fleeing to Spain (via Dieppe) was that my then husband had raped me and I had no recourse to law. Not a crime, not even grounds for divorce. By marrying, I was deemed to have consented to him having sex with me whenever he liked, no matter what I felt at any given time. I manage to completely forget this - it sinks down right out of sight.

Three Good Things
1. I have written one good thing for every week of the year so far, on a small scrap of paper which I have folded and put in a big jar, ready to open at the end of the year,
2. I have walked 285.6 miles so far this year, That's not enough - if I want to get to 1,000 this year I need to bump up my daily mileage, but I did 5.4 miles today which is a good start.
3. I turned on the TV just now and there was one of my ex-students, reading the main news on a major channel. They don't just read it, of course, they write it. He was always a great lad. Very proud.

Here's my Bella bit - I keep doing bits with the virus and bits without - I can decide one way or the other at some point.

Bella was fed up. She’d had that letter from Paul, Paul the mad kid she’d teamed up with all those years ago to solve the mystery of the skeleton on the demolition site, without involving the police and ruining bloody bastard Barry’s precarious demolition business. After all this time he’d written her a letter, a brilliant, chatty letter, wanting to see her again but now there was this virus and no one was allowed out.
She sneezed and grabbed a tea towel to use as a handkerchief. She only had one pack of toilet paper and apparently there were none in the shops. She never had tissues. Was sneezing a symptom? She knew coughing was, but sneezing was different.
She could feel herself sliding back into the abyss, the panic rising and swallowing her up, her heart pounding, thoughts ricocheting about in her head till she didn’t know who or where or what she was. Then a voice spoke, words of wisdom that she hung onto like holding the end of a piece of string, pulling it towards her. The voice said, “Count your breaths, one two three four five. What can you see? Five things.” It was her key worker’s voice, in her head, quite loud. Bella counted, first her breaths then things she could see – the door, the wall, the window, the letter in her hand, the cat, staring at her in alarm. Bella grabbed the cat and held her tight – that came next, what can you feel? A furry, struggling cat, my bum on the floor, my cold feet, ow, the scratch on my hand, my cold feet, my breath getting slower.
Fuck. She felt a bit better now, panic over. But honestly, how shit was it to get a letter from a person she you really bloody liked, right when you couldn’t meet them. He’d said she could write and tell him what she’d been up to, tell him about herself and her life, that letters were cool. Typical Paul, she thought, always had to be bloody different, He hadn’t put in a phone number or an email address so if she wanted to contact him she didn’t have much choice. But a letter? She hadn’t written a letter on paper ever. She wouldn’t know where to start. All right for him, the words came pouring out of him on paper the same as when he was talking, but she couldn’t do that, could she? No, she couldn’t and she didn’t have any paper or an envelope or a stamp so that was that. She could feel her heart starting to race again

11:15 p.m. - 01.05.21

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