For Lally MacBeth, 2024 was a year of sitting in blue plastic hospital chairs — where she found creativity entwined with wobbly, messy life.

This year begins with a trip of sorts. To Southampton. On the last day of February a call comes, we bundle our possessions into suitcases, and take off not on holiday but to the hospital where we will spend an as yet undefined amount of time. Matthew has been told by his consultant he must spend time on “gut rest” and this can only be done in the hospital. There is no question in my mind that I will go with him. I will collect my things, and morph my life to fit a new existence for however long it takes. 

It’s hard to know how many socks and pants to pack for unknowable time. I decide two weeks’ worth is a good starting point. We take a trip to the supermarket on our way and buy packets of boiled sweets because although we know Matthew won’t be able to eat we think these might be allowed. It turns out they are not and they jangle around my suitcase for the ensuing weeks. A constant reminder of freedom. 

Inside the hospital I feel very sad. Sadder than I have ever felt maybe, but I keep it locked inside so as not to look totally mad. If I let it escape it would be too much, like a great tidal wave of sadness and loneliness, so I smile and try to be cheerful because this I feel is the least I can do to help the days pass more quickly.

Sad things are everywhere in the hospital most obviously, although I had actually never thought about this prior to spending every day in a hospital. Dead people (quite literally people in body bags in lifts), but also fleeting sad moments like parents parting from children who are very sick, or overheard fragments of conversations in which people are carefully explaining to someone not present in the hospital “what the doctor said”. 

The decorative environment itself is also rife with triggers. In the era of no eating, the words ‘simply food’ emblazoned upon the door of the express supermarket in the foyer of the hospital seem crass. Simply food is not simple when you have been told you must not eat, and in order to gain nutrients you must have a wire placed into your vein to connect you to a bag of milky liquid food.

Admin errors and health ailments swim around the cafe. Whilst people sip flat whites and ice lattes they talk about resuscitation or amputations as if they are something that happens every day. Here they probably do. I am reminded while sitting drinking my coffee of my grandfather, who used to drive himself to the hospital canteen near his bungalow each Tuesday evening because they had “curry night”. He maintained that it was both delicious and cheap. Once he took my brother and I there for dinner and at the time I couldn’t understand why you’d want to spend any extra time in a hospital that wasn’t entirely necessary. Now I can feel a creeping understanding. There is something quite comforting about being surrounded by people talking with ease about terrible things. It makes the terrible things happening in my own existence to someone I love seem less terrible.

I’ve always derived a certain sense of comfort from being anonymous in a place. Talking to complete strangers and wandering around without anyone knowing who I am. To a certain extent being lonely. Maybe it’s a neurodivergent thing but in times of crisis, being surrounded by people who know me makes me feel overwhelming sad. Every time I talk to a friend or family member I feel a great lump in my throat. Strangers though — they’re great. You can pretend you’re someone else without the sad bit. You can move through the world in a slightly numb, deadened way without constantly weeping.

At night I take taxis back to a flat which is completely devoid of any personality. A white box. When I moved here from the hotel I put a book on the shelf the first night, but took it off straight away. Personalising the space in any way made me feel like I might have to stay. I don’t want to stay.

Each taxi driver takes a different route back there. Some journeys are filled with conversations. Some journeys are silent. Mostly they ask “doctor or visitor”? I reply that I am visiting my partner and this more often than not launches a conversation about their own experiences within the walls of the hospital. 

One evening we drive past a school and I look up from my phone and a motionless child is staring at me, and then another. I double take and realise they are made from concrete; two strange folk emblems manning the school gates for eternity. I later find out they were part of an early noughties road safety campaign and known as “Billy and Belinda”. Somehow this makes them even more haunting.

One driver tells me he lost his mum three weeks ago. I say I am sorry to hear this and he replies to say “It’s ok. Hey do you know you can get Deliveroo to the hospital?” I did not know this, or even consider it an option. I have been largely subsisting on what the fairly adequately stocked, albeit slightly limited selection the shop in the hospital foyer provides. Apples with peanut butter. Prawns with chilli. Katsu chicken salad. Small morsels of conveniently packaged food. It is hard to feel entirely hungry when your most loved person in the world is not allowed to even let a drop of water pass their lips. The taxi driver suggests “You could order him a pizza when he can eat again.” I can’t think of anything less appealing than a greasy sloppy pizza when you haven’t eaten in a month. 

Each day is filled with the same routine of checks, beeps and idle chatter with nurses. The view from the hospital room is a wall that has been painted with an enormous rainbow. A splash of colour in an otherwise paradise of beige and NHS blue. When I need to take a break I walk to the foyer and buy an extortionately priced coffee from the chain cafe or look at the magazines in the shop. Tax is added to everything within the hospital grounds. By the coffee shop is a tap machine with ‘Donate now to the hospital charity’ and a huge photograph of someone being given ‘exceptional care’, in which a nurse leans over a man in a wheelchair. In the seating area nearby is a replica of a Banksy painting that was donated by Banksy during the pandemic. They sold the original to raise money for the hospital and wider healthcare system. 

Outside people on drips suck on cigarettes next to street food trucks that change each day. I hear someone complaining in the lift one day about the fact the bacon sandwiches from the truck are £10. There are blossom trees and daffodils if you look carefully, and somewhere on a fabled floor is a chapel and a peace garden. 

In the lift is a poster for a sister of the ward Matthew is on who is running marathons to raise money for the hospital. Nurses raising money for charity and still we can’t afford to give them a pay rise. 

As the days go on there is talk of food but first it will be Modulen. We decide to Google it and find it’s a product made by Nestlé Healthcare (™) specifically for the treatment of people with Crohn’s Disease. Who knew that Nestlé Healthcare was even a thing? Let alone something the NHS bought from. In this moment privatisation feels worryingly close. I ponder what would happen if you were boycotting Nestlé products, as many of my friends do. Would you be willing to die? To continue your boycott. When something is being offered as the only option for your care it seems unlikely that you’d reject it, and yet it feels so conflictual and strange. I come to the conclusion that it is perhaps no different to any other pharmaceutical and many of us would not reject those.  It says it contains ‘natural products’; what these are remains a mystery to me. It smells exactly the same as milky bars.

Although there are bright and memorable days in the blur — notably an adventure to the nearby old cemetery, and Oxfam Books — the days begin to become more and more shapeless. The hospital has a deadening energy. Mostly this is quite helpful because I am trying to finish writing a book, and somehow having this schedule imposed on me of waking early, coming to the hospital and sitting on a blue plastic chair feeds my urge to just keep going. There are moments where I think, perhaps, I am insane and should just email my editor and admit defeat — ‘My partner is very sick, I’m not sure I’ll make the deadline…’ — but somehow it never happens. The email draft stays in my mind alone. I plod on. Somehow having a goal, an end point, adds hope to this otherwise numbing experience. I ponder that perhaps I need spaces like this to write. After all, much of the rest of this book has been written, prior to this stint in hospital, in budget hotels and nameless chain cafes. 

I enjoy reading about writers’ routines: rise at dawn, listen to the larks, make coffee, drink coffee, write; rise at noon, take a walk, sharpen pencils, write. They always seem perfect and without any of the wobbles or confusion of life that seem to so often get in the way. What I am learning though is that there is no optimum moment or place to write, there is just life, and in order for my brain to work in this way that feels sometimes wholly unnatural to me (I am dyslexic), I must allow it to fold around and into my life. I cannot separate the two because they are, as I have learnt this year, inherently connected. An idea does not come to me when I sit at a desk and say “Now is the moment I shall write”; it comes as I walk 3 miles to find a fairy grotto by a McDonalds (true story), or in the dead of night just as I am about to creep into bed, or when I am sitting in a hospital cafe eating a slightly stale muffin. That is to say that ideas are formed in the living, they come to us through the messy, strange, sad and numb bits. Sometimes they happen in very boring spaces and sometimes in wildly exciting ones, and that’s all ok. It’s all ok, it’s all going to be ok. And that is the mantra I have repeated to myself this year as I have sat in hospitals and doctors’ surgeries, as I have watched people I love be poorly. As I have written a book which I never thought I would finish. It’s all going to be ok.