#1270 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn artLeave a comment
Working lunch.

The 5th heatwave of the year has slightly driven me indoors to start some post summer art projects early. The research and thinking/tinkering process has been ongoing for some time but yesterday was the first paper and pencil/paint  action.

But the heatwave drove the day and my daughter and granddaughter wanted to do a cool dog walk and then an even cooler dip in the tidal pool. I suppose I have never taken the time to sit on the edge of the tidal pool in peak summer and just enjoy it as a safe play area and people watching zone. I love it best when it is empty or has just one lone figure. 6 people as in this picture are way too many. Imust have cropped out 30!

The heatwave drove us to have a very continental lunch. Cheesy chips from a cafe and fresh figs from the tree on the tennis club.

I have no idea when my current arty project can be shared. Contemporary Witches could be the working title.

Quite a lot of witchery work was achieved yesterday. The tidal pool came into its own while I was ckearing up after the creative phase of the day. I submerged one of my very simplified water witches under the waters of the tidal pool. Giving myself an accidental pool witch.

©theoldmortuary, The Firestone Water Witch

I love the struggle of creating art, the struggle is where lovely accidents happen. In setting out on an actual project it seems I have found myself a side project. Heatwaves have a lot to answer for.

#1269 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Bobbing1 Comment
The 95% Eclipse Bobbers

10 bobbers bobbed together for the whole of this evening’s dramatic eclipse.

Proper protective specs were worn on  land and at sea. The colander was not so useful in the wet phase of the bob. It was a really special evening, beautiful colours as the eclipse developed. Sobering that none of us will be alive when the West Country see’s the next eclipse of such significance, in more than 70 years time. But that is for the future,  for now we have the happiness, on repeat, of gathering together regularly and on special occasions, talking too much , swimming a bit, eating cake and enjoying life.

What we saw through our specs but couldn’t photograph.  © Plymouth Post.

Novelty picture of the night.

#1268 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art, dog walks, Procrastination, StonehouseLeave a comment
Early morning boat

A fifth heatwave looms, so Lola and I set off early to get a decent walk under our belts before things get too warm for her paws. Instinctively she pushes the walk , pressing me to add her favourite sniffy places  as appendices to my planned and intended walk. At a basic level I need her to have had a couple of effective wees and a poo. She knows this. In the pouring rain both are achieved with speed and she turns her head for home with determination.

Days like today she  holds on to her eliminations, rationing them until she has had her desired length of walk and her fill off sniffing other dogs wee messages.

I look at little boats and plan a painting.

Although right now I am supposed to be focussing on figure drawing not solitary row boats. Or indeed clearing out the campervan after a weekend trip. The art of art as procrastination.

#1267 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Hugo and Lola1 Comment
Accidental Colour matching.

In lots of ways our weekend away was all about Lola. In the dog picture she is being Queenly in the van.

In the brick picture I just caught the delicious colour combination whilst she was having a determinedly slow sniff in a sunny corner of a National Trust property.

Our weekend away was about swimming at dog-friendly beaches and using our National Trust Card. Dog friendly beaches in summer months are a rarity and we don’t tend to use our National Trust card so much in peak tourist season.

We concentrated on beaches at the bottom of lush green  valleys. It was way too hot for anything else.

There was a delightful irony at one dog friendly beach. Dogs had free access to the beach, there was a coffee shop and shade. All sounding rather perfect but the beach was primarily a water sport location and for safety swimmers were corralled into a triangle of the sea, that was about the size of a swimming pool.

I did manage the usual splashy pose but it was hardly an open sea swimming experience. Although I did have the pleasure of swimming really close to a Cornish Pilot Gig.

All in all a successful experiment of finding exactly what Lola likes, exactly what we like and for the most part still avoiding hoardes of tourists.

I am not a tourist hater at all, they bring essential revenue to the Devon and Cornwall region. It is lovely to talk to people from all over the world who find this corner of England fascinating. I love touring our own visitors around in the summer months , I just prefer avoiding big crowds of people anywhere.

Just to prove my tourist loving heart I thought I would share one of my favourite sounds. The sound of the small wheels of hand luggage cases on the cobbled streets near our house. I realise the people pulling those suitcases may feel less romantic about the historic surface but it is a happy quirk of mine.

Less of a happy quirk recently when I was touring my old history teacher around our historic area. He had, what can only be described as a hand luggage mobility scooter. I think he felt every cobble on my extensive history tour. Two forms of suffering for him, an aching bottom and spine and my haphazard history tour with random facts flitting in as I recalled them.

A history tour not too dissimilar to a blog really. Random ponderings stitched together with slightly iffy threads at times.

#1266 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art, SerendipityLeave a comment

Another morning camping in an orchard with just the sounds of nature and sizzling bacon.

Our evening was spent listening to the sound of a birthday party in a house hidden completely from view.The playlist was  eclectic and suggested possibly a 60th or 70th birthday. It sounded like fabulous intergenerational fun and ended at 10pm when the valley fell silent.

Our day was spent in our favourite Cornish town. Doing familiar things. I have known and visited Penryn for more than 40 years.

A friend grew up there. More recently I attended one of the local universities to do some post-graduate study.

Falmouth Intensives, a personal view.

The town is home to two university campuses now. Something unimagined 40 years ago. We are regular visitors and our favourite chair, at home, was bought here on ebay in a very shabby state but is now a thing of great beauty and comfort.

In all our visits we have never needed a supermarket, which is why a giant Asda was a complete shock to me. Walmart has a share in Asda. This particular Asda has all the larger and finer points of Walmart without the sales of firearms. I only needed 5 things. It took me 45 minutes. I could never have predicted that beauty products would be hidden in an upstairs corner!

The shock of the new!

We returned to the familiar territory of coffee shops and charity shops.

Status Quo and a surprising brand of crisps.

Sometimes our granddaughter, Bonnie is called SuperBon.

I am not certain the illustration is shouting out the product.

#1265 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Van Life1 Comment

It is most unlike us to visit Cornwall in the school Summer holidays. But here we are waking up in an orchard where peace reigns and our evening walk along a picturesque estuary with boat yards and boat skeletons resting up in the mud, gave us complete isolation. We could hear other humans and their dogs having tinkling, brittle holiday conversations in their million pound holiday homes.And the pervasive beat of party music on a Saturday night from houses rented by groups of young friends anxious to be as cool and interesting as they thought they were at 18. Anxious to still be friends despite the tribulations of negotiating the adult world since leaving university.

None of this touches us in the Orchard. Birdsong and squirrel movement are the only sounds that are interrupted when an apple falls from a tree.

Apart from our own invasive sounds of a whistling kettle.

And the spit of bacon in a frying pan

And the quiet tap of fingers writing a morning’s blog.

#1264 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Bobbing, SerendipityLeave a comment

I went to a friend’s  house earlier this week to assist her with picture placement in her house. I did the same thing a couple of years ago but no progress has been made at all. She is a talented photographer and has a good eye for artwork but is framing and hanging averse. Not an unusual problem .

We have had a week of domestic admin due to the loss of important documents. All found now but I also found our own unframed gallery of shame. See above.

I think in total there are 6 pictures to be framed, a mind blowing amount . But not as mind blowing as my friend’s gallery of unhung images. No wonder there was no progress in 2 years!

I took myself off to one of those out of town mega shop warehouses/ to choose some frames. I am always overwhelmed by big superstores in England. Let me out and about in one abroad and I am stupidly happy.

Such a bad idea… Oh the progress of the merchandising year. Summer products all in the reduced area, and looking very depleted. Halloween and Christmas all stocked up and ready to go. Love and extreme dislike all in the one place. Halloween, my particular bête noir is rebranded in this house as an autumnal festival. Pumpkins all the way! Frames are not seasonal, thank goodness I put on blinkers, focussed on my task and got out. I do have to return next week for two more frames but I know which areas to avoid.

A restorative swim with calm companions eased my overstimulated mind.

Summer is most definitely still with us.

And now to procrastinate less and get on with the framing. Or the planning of a framing session…

#1263 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity, Photographs, art, Words, Plymouth Sound, Plymouth, Stonehouse, Hybrid PrintmakingLeave a comment

Does every picture tell a story?

I think most do.

This one tells of the late summer clear up. All family guests have moved on to different holiday destinations and our home has eased back from peak occupation. The crocs belonging to three small girls are gathered in a bucket by the back door while the girls themselves are away on different holiday adventures.

Using a similar colour scheme I am trying to tell the story of a set of swimming steps that are much quieter this week now the heatwave has moved on.

I am at heart a story teller either with words or pictures.

A regular blog reader, who is familiar with these steps, said yesterday that I had made them look very posh. That was not the intention, but I agree. They may have been posh once upon a time but shabby shic is a better description now. Most of the time they are entirely tolerable and are regularly washed by incoming very high tides.

At night they can be a gathering place for  smokers of weed and men who like to do a wee. Not so posh then. Not so great as a swim destination either. Not  so great a picture.

But I don’t need to tell that story about these steps.

Years ago a little pair of discarded crocs by the back door of the actual Old Mortuary used to break my heart.   A small person and her family  had left us to live abroad. That would not have made a great story or a great picture.

3 pairs of crocs in a bucket is a much better story.

However in the interests of story telling I also wanted to show the earlier set of steps at the peak of the August heatwave. I am not interested in the crowds of people who used these steps recently just the steps as a metaphor for extreme atmospheric and radiated heat. Just too much heat.

The heat blistered out of the rocks at night. And the sea languidly lapping the steps, warmer than we have ever known. Not quite cooling enough perhaps. Oleaginous even.

A different colour scheme. A completely different story.

#1262 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Bobbing, Serendipity, Swimming1 Comment

My first swim this summer in the rain. Launching from the prettiest of steps. I’ve been swimming very regularly for five years and not once in those 5 years have I got  to the first week of August without swimming in a fair amount of summer rain.

By pure coincidence the July weather stats for Devon in 2026 were published this morning. July in Devon has been the driest for 190 years, when records began.

Rain of any sort complicates the dressing process after a sea swim. The combination of sea water,rain and any residual potions on skin make for an awkwardly sticky drying and dressing process. Even when you think you are adequately dry, clothes do not slip on easily. Skin becomes resistant, like trying to dress a velvet teddy with the nap running in the opposite direction . Vests and t-shirts get caught up. Trousers or leggings refuse to pull up with any speed.

Thank goodness there was no rain on our recent Full Moonie.

#1256 theoldmortuary ponders.

6 happily naked women swimming at dusk from the single file steps.

A random man decides to sit down where all our clothes were stored. He claimed to be looking for his girlfriend, pulled out alcohol and a cigarette and proceeded to just sit there. Completely failing to read the non room. We for the most part just grabbed our clothes or pulled them on quickly. Something we could not have done if it was raining. But then he may not have been quite so keen  to sit there looking for his missing girlfriend in a rainstorm.

If she had any sense whatsoever she should stay hidden for the foreseeable future.Not the behaviour of a gentleman.

#1261 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn pondering, Serendipity1 Comment

Blog #1259 was a prompted subject.

#1259 theoldmortuary ponders.

But one tiny paragraph got me pondering.

The prompt asked for a favourite quote. Mine was one about tolerance and indifference.

Suppose I had lived my life with less tolerance and more confrontation. I am an avoider of confrontation. Preferring the less damaging tools of diplomacy and compromise. I am really not very good at confrontation when I am not on firm ground or people might be hurt by my change of character, I am much better at diplomacy and compromise.

But let’s be honest some people are just so entrenched in their nastiness that they wouldn’t recognise diplomacy or compromise. So should I have been pulling on the big girl pants and getting some more confrontation experience along the way.

It is not that I never do confrontation, I just don’t do it if there is a lot to lose for me and other people that I respect or care for.

I can quietly ponder about relationships that have not gone to plan. The ones that are easiest to think about are the ones that have some finality. Estrangement or death allows the pondering free reign and are are the most fascinating because they are over. I can ponder almost clinically if I could have made any improvements in our interactions that would have made things better.

But maybe they could just have tried harder to be nicer, kinder people. Which, of course, is where I flounce off and toss my indifference to them into the air. Not as obvious as the big girl pants of confrontation but every bit as deadly.