Summer’s here and I have become The Grumpy Urban Cat Abhorring Lady.
Oh how I dislike the urban cat. The Shitter in my plant pots. The Pisser on my garden chairs. The ever present observation from high places. The disupters of my dog. The fragrance of your ever available testosterone boosted tom cat urine.
Small blog, big feelings.
The term ‘intangible cultural heritage’ was new to me recently. It describes:-
Oral traditions and expressions: Includes language, stories, legends, proverbs, and songs passed on by word of mouth.
Performing arts: Covers music, dance, theater, and other forms of artistic expression.
Social practices, rituals, and festive events: Encompasses community habits, rites of passage, holiday celebrations, and religious or secular ceremonies.
Knowledge and practices concerning nature: Traditional ecological knowledge, herbal medicine, and practices related to the universe.
Traditional craftsmanship: The skills and techniques required to make traditional clothing, pottery, instruments, and other handmade objects.
These all seem entirely tangible to me.
The whole concept of culture being intangible is a mystery to me. Made all the more puzzling at a live music gig that I went to this weekend.
Held in an old chapel overlooking farmland and the River Tamar.
My attendance was entirely accidental, a spare ticket landed in my lap because of life/work exhaustion and toothache.
The gig was held in Calstock, a village oozing with cultural heritage, where even the shelter at the train station is beautiful.
Tangible or intangible there is a lot of cultural heritage in this one picture.
I realise this is just me pondering an idea and the use of words but cultural heritage is not something whimsical or disposable.
I was in Calstock to hear Cara Dillon a contemporary folk singer from Ireland. By chance the man sitting next to me was of Irish heritage. He took pleasure in the performance in an entirely different way to me. He felt the music and inhabited it. There was so much joy in him, generated entirely by his innate and experienced cultural heritage. Vibrating through him when both he and the singer were so far from home. He was having an entirely tangible experience.
It is funny the things that bother me overnight. Calstock is a village where I have participated in so many varied experiences that are certainly worthy of the title ‘Cultural Heritage’ I am enriched by experiencing the things that have enhanced the lives of other humans throughout history. 5 years ago, 50 years ago or 500 years ago. All worth preserving I feel. Overnight pondering took me down the internet rabbit hole. Luckily I landed on another WordPress Blog. Far more erudite and knowledgeable than my ponderings, I will share it below.
If the UK is proud of its tangible cultural heritage, why not so when it comes to intangible heritage?
The word ‘intangible’ really doesn’t touch the importance of such things!
The link to Calstock Arts, the venue I visited is below. Somewhere that does its very best to promote the intangible culture that is so vital to us all.
Calstock Arts
Home – Calstock Arts : Calstock Arts https://share.google/1aOp1S20YIObzbN59
Bright lights at the end of the longest day. Summer Solstice and Fathers Day.
Marked by the bobbers with swimming at sunrise and sunset. In between we celebrated Fathers Day with a Camper Van Adventure. We absolutely filled every minute of the longest day with activity. Most were planned but a trip to A and E was on nobody’s schedule. These things happen.Wrestling with a new Rock and Roll bed in a camper van is not an even fight. Van 1- Human 0
Curiously swimming at sunset was a good bit quieter than the sunrise swim and involved absolutely no nudity.
We have been doing this for 5 years. Blog from the first Solstice Bobbings below.
Pandemic Pondering#454
04:20 on the Summer Solstice. All dressed up and somewhere to go.
The Bobbers have been swimming at sunrise and sunset on the Summer Solstice and the Winter Solstice for 5 years. Of the two,
the summer one is by far the most pleasurable. This morning we were just four bobbers but the sea was alive with the sounds of swimmers.
5 years ago we were doing this to celebrate building a water based friendship group during the Covid years.
Pandemic Pondering #453
Did we really expect to still be doing it 5 years later. Probably not. But wherever Bobbers are in the world we all try to swim on the Solstices.
For me it is a celebration of being alive and still kicking. A ritual of gratitude and celebration with friends,most of whom were strangers 5 years ago. The Silver Lining of a Pandemic that forced us all to pause, change direction, and do things differently.
Maybe the Bobbers need to rethink our dress code next year…
Another greige day dodging mist, low cloud and rain. All colour sucked from every viewpoint until we went into one of the local ‘ secret’ gardens for our evening walk. This one is really close to the sea but is protected by a very high wall. The mist is not obvious but must have filtered the light, making this quiet corner almost magically green.
So many threads of thoughts this morning and no clear path for today’s blog. Maybe I should just accept that this quiet green corner is the place to rest a while and contemplate nothing more complicated than a quiet green corner.
If the mist were not present this would be anything but a quiet corner.
The ‘secret’ garden is the setting of live music sessions on Friday evenings in the early summer. Last night’s session was moved indoors to an old and beautiful warehouse. The outdoor garden vibe completely switched on its head to a vivid indoor session of great music with intense colours and happy humans.
The intended location left as a quiet oasis of calm with just a scintilla of live music carried on the breeze.
Quiet corners are a good place to start the weekend. The other blogs will sort themselves out in their own good time.
I am not sure how long we have owned this coffee pot. It lives in the camper van and performs the morning ritual of coffee wherever the van is. It came into the house for the post holiday wash and has not returned, so yesterday it posed on a mirror for some sketching and water colour action.
I am a one cup of coffee a day woman. Unless the day, or I, am flagging. Or being social.
Yesterday I was social, two cups of coffee were enjoyed, one with cake. Which is almost certainly why there was no post-lunch slump and I felt the urge to paint a still life. I also pruned things in the yard and gave Lola an extra walk.
Caffeine is a wonderful thing! I have wanted to paint this little coffee pot for years. Inspired by a sculpture made entirely of these pots by Robert Fabelo.
Cafédral is a shed sized building made entirely of old coffee pots. Since seeing Robert Caveo’s work I have had to resist rehoming coffee pots like this when I see them in charity shops. But yesterday I got such pleasure from painting our pot and his reflection I wonder if I might collect just a few for a bigger still life moment…
June is making herself very hard to love this year. Recent mornings she has turned up with a very November look on her face. The word greige and June have no reason to appear in the same sentence.
I thought I would share a local weather explanation.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1HDtV9JwQH/
More of the same today!
Last year our yard was vibrating with heat and colour.
It is hard to think that yesterday the weather stopped any serious yardening and the only time I crossed the yard was to take washing to the tumble dryer.
It did not look this pretty.
The day was not without some colourful excitement. One of my hybrid images from my Meddled Photographs x Watercolour project has been chosen to be printed onto glass to create a unique splash back in a recently renovated kitchen.
The full description of my project is here.
I am sure there will be a splashback reveal soon. Currently there are many blue squares of wall adhesive on the freshly delivered glass.
It is the Meddled Photograph of the same location as the glum picture at the top of this blog.
Then late in the afternoon a conversation starter was posted on one of my arty Whatsapp groups.
My comment is the green one. What I love about this brief, arty exchange of ideas is that it is timeless.
Artists of all types would have had just this type of discussion throughout history.
As someone who has always had to embrace new technology. I am used to the challenges and the.convoluted thinking that these things often require. I would be really interested in what anyone who reads this thinks.
As it turns out, a greige day was quite the fertile place for creative thinking.
What is one way you have grown this year?
Creatively I have grown like a weed. I chose to step away from exhibiting at formal art exhibitions for a year and just let art and photography grow in their own way.
The kite surfers at St Michaels Mount were the first sign that something was up . Goodness knows why I had never considered that the skills, both analogue and digital that I used in Medical Imaging could be transferred to photography and art.
The epiphany occurred on Mounts Bay beach during a cold winter weekend in January 2025. I could get mediocre photographs of a great location and some kite surfers but nothing particularly Zingy. Until I tried sticking three photos together and slightly altering their angles and magnification.
18 months in and I happily stick anything that I have photographed or painted together, to create an image which pleases me. Along the way I have used screen printing tricks like deregistering and sometimes registering, different renditions of the exact same subject. Altering perspectives, angles, magnifications and colours. Anything goes really. No guarantee of success, the failure rate is high, but when the serendipity goddess is in a good mood then anything can happen.
Like all experimental creative processes there are more duds than there are successes. But there is always some learning lurking even in the duddiest of duds.
Sometimes I flip the process and paint one of my amalgamated images as an original painting.
Yesterday’s blog featured one of my hybrid images that I was always planning to paint.
#1510 theoldmortuary ponders.
There was more flipping, flipping because the image was of a small yacht haven on the Peloponnese in Greece. Just a tiny jetty that offered overnight, safe mooring just off a shingle beach. Double flipping because my digital image was created using three different photographs, superimposed, simplified and then overlayed on a hand painted watercolour background.
Then flipped colour wise because everyone knows that all images of boats in Greece should be represented in shades of blue, green and turquoise. But I wanted to represent the warmth of the evening and the moment.
Painting this image yesterday I abstracted it a little further.
I also had a go at doing a digital deregistered double image. A pencil sketch overlayed on top of the watercolour.
Just like growing weeds, I never quite know what will pop up next .
Just like weeds quite a lot of these ideas end up in the bin.
One person’s weed however can be someone else’s flower.
What is something you wish you could tell your 20-year-old self?
My advice to my 20 year old self would be significantly different from the advice I would give to my 16 year old self. To add a caveat, any advice to my younger self that would create life changing decisions would alter my here and now. My here and now is my happy place. No changes needed. People often think change is for the better but of course change can equally bring rather negative consequences.
At 16, I would advise sticking to my artsy A level choices and fighting harder for them.
At 20 I would advise that the Science choices have worked and would continue to work. However I would suggest taking a year out, take a breath, travel a little. These delightful options were not available in the 70’s.
Lipstick
At 16 I was obsessed with No 7 Plum Beautiful.
By 20 I had moved on. It took 30 years of experimentation to lead me back.
30 years wasted.
At 16 I felt art floating imperceptibly from my fingertips
At 20 that loss felt profound. Sometimes I can be a Drama Queen.
It turns out that Art, like Love, will find a way.
This is my project for today.
Something is up in blogland. Inexplicably my reader stats for this year have jumped. Not quite half way through the year my blogs have already been read by the same number of people who read my blogs in all of 2025.
A red letter day of sorts. It seems appropriate to share the blogs of past June the 15th’s.
Pandemic Pondering # 89
Pandemic Pondering #447
#239 theoldmortuary ponders
#632 theoldmortuary ponders.
#948 theoldmortuary ponders.
#1321 theoldmortuary ponders.
Some time hopping for you all. Which is a really crafty way of throwing in a book review. This morning I was awake early finishing a book that I have loved. I just couldn’t quite finish it last night.
Time hopping in books is either to your taste or not. No spoilers here but the time hopping element in this book is as near perfect as any that I have read.
And if that were not enough the book stops almost exactly where my blogs for June 15th start. In a shop just after restrictions were lifted post Covid
In another quirky little coincidence the bakery, where I bought this doughnut, has been in business for 5 centuries. The exact time span of Tracy Chevalier’s book. Life is every bit as strange as fiction.
My 5 year effort seems pretty tame compared to 5 centuries.
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