Month: Dec 2022

#418 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Advent+2022, Cornwall, SerendipityLeave a comment

Sunday morning started in a very misty icy way. I was crossing the Tamar to learn the art of Christmas Wreath making.

The sun only appeared as I approached the border between Devon and Cornwall.

Wreath making is a very fragrant occupation with Yew, Eucalyptus and Spruce as the basis for our creations.

Embellishment in the form of ivy, cones and oranges was the organic way we chose to create our wreaths.

A quick Google gives the explanation for Christmas Wreaths.

History of the Christmas Wreath by Gerry Wilson from Wilson, Michigan. Is everyone in Wilson called Wilson? https://www.wilsonevergreens.com/history-of-the-christmas-wreath/

Wreaths are more than just decorations. If you’re driving through town during the Holiday Season, you may see a Christmas wreath on almost every front door. Most people don’t think of the rich history attached to these beautiful Christmas decorations.

The word wreath comes from the word “writhen” that was an old English word meaning “to writhe” or “to twist.” The art of hanging Christmas wreaths originated from the Romans who hung wreaths on their doors as a sign of victory and of their status in society. Women usually wore them as headdresses as a symbol of pride, and also donned them during special occasions such as weddings. Additionally, the victors of sporting events in ancient Greece were given laurel wreaths; This tradition still being used to this day during the Olympic games in which the medals are engraved with sprigs of laurel.

Christmas wreaths are made by twisting or bending evergreen branches into a large circle which are then decorated with pinecones and a red bow. The circle shape of the wreath is made to represent Christ’s eternal love, his strength, and the creation of new life. Evergreens are commonly used in the construction of the wreath due to their heartiness throughout harsh winters and that they denote strength as well as immortality. Christmas wreaths in the Catholic tradition had four candles – Three of purple, symbolizing penance, and expectation, and one of pink to represent the coming joy. The four Sundays preceding Christmas day are embodied by the four candles that were lit each Friday of Advent at dinner along with a prayer. Similarly to Catholic customs, traditional Pagan wreaths were also evergreen circles consisting of four candles. These candles represented the elements of Earth, wind, fire, and water. Their wreaths were typically used in rituals that would ensure the continuance of the circle of life.

Christmas wreaths are a beautiful decoration for your home or office that can really show off your true holiday cheer. Spread that holiday spirit and buy a Christmas wreath for yourself or someone you love! 

– Gerry Wilson

So now you know. About Wreaths and also where to find the Wilsons of Wilson. Advent+22 just keeps giving. It Our first wreath is up but I need to see how it looks in daylight.

#417 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Advent+2022Leave a comment
2019 at the actual old mortuary.

Full disclosure. I am not certain that all these images are new to the pondering but in the spirit of Advent+ 2022 but they do illustrate this pondering rather well. As yet I have not really done the festive decorating for 2022.

It has been a giddy weekend. I have attended 2/3 of all the parties that I have been to since the pandemic started. I am not counting the gatherings in my own house.

The first party of this weekend was a works do, my first ever as a volunteer employee. Being a volunteer is a funny old business. The British class system is often bubbling under the surface of institutions and organisations in this country. Upper, middle and lower as categories can be swapped out to almost anything in our mad British need to ‘ find our place’ or be ‘put in our place’ by some sort of bonkers hierarchy. The works do is always a great place to observe this Great British Idiosyncrasy.

My second party was also a first. The first as a neighbour in Stonehouse. There was no Great British Idiosyncrasy at work, just extended natterings with lovely people. Since living here I have learnt never, ever to leave the house just in time to hit a deadline. Every journey no matter how small needs a ten minute buffer in case you meet someone you know or even don’t know very well. I call this buffer the Stonehouse 10 minutes. I learnt last night that some people call it the Durnford 10, using the name of the main street into the Peninsular. Last night I met more people who will certainly slow me down in 2023 and extended my conversation range to at least 20 minutes with many others. Warmed by good food, good conversation and Prosseco I set off, after the party, to walk the dogs. I met no one and arrived back home 10 minutes early.

#416 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Advent+2022, YardeningLeave a comment
Leviathon grasping a tomato.

The Leviathon is not really grasping a tomato and this image is the random image for Advent + 2022, but were Leviathons real and enjoyed grasping tomatoes, then there would have been a queue of Leviathons making their way to our back yard this year. Taking the tomato plants down marked the end of 6 months of ripe, red tomatoes being produced outdoors in our yard. Before this year I had not ripened a single red tomato outdoors in any garden I have ever had. It has never been a bumper crop but steady production from the end of June until now. The plants were even putting out new flowers when I pulled them up.

These last few are nestling under some bananas in the hope that they will ripen. Failing that it will be fried green tomatoes on toast for Sunday breakfast. When I got up this morning I had forgotten that the tomatoes were under the bananas. In the dimpsy light before daybreak and without my glasses on the tomatoes looked like fat shiny piglets suckling under a giant yellow sow. Quite startling until focus and the kitchen light reminded me what I had set up yesterday .

#415 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn artLeave a comment

I’ve had a bit of painterly block recently, since visiting Dublin to be completely specific. The weather in Dublin was wonderful, even though the evenings were dark we walked through the city enjoying the historical layers of architecture untroubled by German bombs. There are many secretive back lanes that service the busy bars and nightclubs that give Dublin it’s famed nightime economy. These back streets have seen 300 years or more of the grubby underbelly of Irish nightlife. These would have been the places of sexual liaisons in less permissive times, now the back streets are left to inebriated gents emptying their booze filled bladders and resting chefs, their faces eerily illuminated by their mobile phones as they take a few minutes off their feet. We stumbled on this nocturnal pairing so often that I felt impelled to draw a scene showing the characters isolated in their own activities. Timeless, almost and separated from a vivid, contemporary nightlife that was happening just out of sight. The live music is muffled by closed doors and windows. Illumination is incidental, and the smells of booze, urine and cooking blend to create a fragrance that is both intimate and universal.

Drawing anything quite so figurative is unusual unless I am in a drawing class, but I know that once an image sets itself in my head, nothing else can be done until it is out on paper or canvas. There can be no gloriously colourful abstracts until this dark and dirty image, drawn in charcoal, is finished to my satisfaction. That moment is finally here after a week of sneaking into the studio and scraping away with stubby, brittle sticks of charcoal. Frantic dashes to the bathroom to grab the hairspray needed to seal the details on each session’s layer before they smudge and blur. More leisurely trips to the bathroom to clean my face and fingers of the sooty smuts of obsessive creating.

All because twenty-first-century men, unintentionally captured my imagination in 17th-century back streets.

#414 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Advent+2022, Serendipity1 Comment

This morning is sharply cold and crisp -1 outside as I write this, under a winter weight duvet and with the first cup of caffeinated tea working it’s warming magic. The picture above was a jumble of Christmas decorations waiting to go up in a shop last year. I love the crisp cleanness of them which is my excuse to use the image in Advent+2022. The big excitement with a -1 temperature is that my Elephants Garlic needs some really cold weather to give it the best possible start in it’s growing life. Good news for the garlic is almost certainly bad news for the tomato plants which are still producing red tomatoes. From the perspective of a warm duvet a morning spent clearing out the frosted tomato plants does not excite me too much especially as I need to do it as soon as some daylight appears because the rest of the day is busy.

Duvet shrugged off and the cold embraced. Sunrise was spectacular.Nothing more needs to be said. Tomatoes gone Advent+ 2022

#413 theoldmortuary ponders

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This year Christmas feels squishy. For the first time in a couple of years it feels normal for me to hug people when we meet at festive events. I realise that not everyone feels like that, but I am, by nature, a hugger and now I feel free to go about my hugging business. Maybe with a more watchful eye to be sure I am not being inappropriate with someone who remains fearful, or who never liked hugs in the first place. Some people found Covid restrictions to be some sort of personal space Nirvana. Yesterday I met a friend at a musical event, our hug was warm fragrant and comfortable. The music was fabulous too.

In other news, that very conveniently leads me to the Advent+22 image, one of my granddaughters was in a school nativity play as one of the seven Kings. Possibly Snow Christ and the Seven Kings, who could begin to guess.

Thankfully being a woman of Essex heritage from the East I know that 7 Kings is not implausible. A picture that would never in any other circumstance appear in a pondering.

Seven Kings Station, Ilford, Essex

#412 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Advent+2022, BobbingLeave a comment

We have entered the twilight zone of bobbing. Tide times and light are now the two main factors that control when we plan a bob. 4 pm was particularly kind to us yesterday. The water was a balmy 10 degrees and the outside temperature was 6. My personal dip was brief but effective. I think it took longer to drink my restorative cup of tea than my actual immersion time. Over tea the chat turned to Christmas Day. It has taken two years of Covid affected Christmases to establish a new tradition. A brief dip on Christmas morning with the ‘bobbers’ before we plunge headlong into whatever we would normally do with families and friends over the festive season. I can’t even remember what the restrictions were for Christmas 2020. I think we kept big distances between our ‘bubbles’ * and shouted happily to one another, marvelling at the madness of new friendships and the urge to swim in the sea in winter, when many of us had lived locally for many years and not bothered to swim much at all until a pandemic hit. 2021 we were cautiously closer to one another, wary of passing on Omicron but sharing individually wrapped snacks of chocolate and Christmas snacks, while we damply struggled into dry clothes. 2022 is likely to be giddy, there will be bubbles and huggles and maybe kisses on chilly cheeks. Thank goodness for Bubbles! In the spirit of Advent +2022 here is a previously unseen picture of bubbles over our swimming zone.

* Bubbles were legally acceptable indoor gatherings of no more than 6 adults during the lockdowns of 2020. This rule applied to everyone unless you were serving in the Conservative government who set the rules.For them bubbles were what they always were, a pleasant fizzy drink to be enjoyed while working, partying or indeed groping colleagues in the corridors of power.

#411 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Advent+2022, SerendipityLeave a comment

Having stumbled on a theme for Advent+2022 ( I am sharing random photographs that have never found their place in a pondering before) I find them easy to weave into the action or inaction of a ponder. The image above is the title of one of the chapters in the Book of Kells at Trinity College Dublin. If only Mulling was a verb, and not the name of the saint who is reputed to be responsible for this gospel pocket book, I could have written something witty about a book of pondering.

As it is I have to say that the Alexa moment mentioned in pondering #409 was just a day too early.

#409 theoldmortuary ponders

I had thought that being woken up with House music was not quite my early morning vibe, but I was wrong.

We have been sharing the care of our nine week old granddaughter. At 8-9 weeks she has added a new behaviour to her limited repertoire. Boredom! So when all the usual measures to make her happy and compliant failed, yesterday morning, Alexa stepped in and played House music at 8am. It worked an absolute dream. Swirling around the kitchen as if in the middle of summer in a Dance tent was exactly what a small person needed. Dublin again comes up with a picture to illustrate the exact scene in our kitchen. A stained glass window at Bewleys Oriental Cafe, a place that certainly deserves it own ponder one day. But for now in Advent+2022 the stained glass window exactly illustrates how I was feeling yesterday morning while loading the dishwasher with a small person happily gurgling on one shoulder and the Ministry of Sound remixing Iggy Pop on Alexa

#410 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Advent+2022, Serendipity, YardeningLeave a comment

Today is almost certainly the last day I will be able to harvest a red tomato 🍅 grown outside in the backyard. This is hugely significant for two reasons, I have never before achieved growing even one red tomato outdoors in any garden during my lifetime. This year our new location and probably the warmest year on record are the factors that have made this possible. Not newly sprouted green fingers on my own fair hands. The warm year had made our yard positively Mediterranean until late October. Since then the yard has grown a velvety carpet of mould. Like the set of Tolkiens’ ‘Middle Earth’ in the Lord of the Rings film franchise, everything is cloaked in green flock. The spring clear-up is almost certainly going to involve a pressure washer but maybe nature or the predicted cold snap will remove the green tinge in the next month or two. Today’s tomato is not a thing of beauty, I already know that, but in the spirit of Advent+2022 I can share a very pretty tomato from November, never before the subject of a pondering.

#409 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Advent+2022, Serendipity1 Comment

This picture was shared to me by a friend yesterday. By one of life great coincidences, I received someone else parcel yesterday. I don’t need to open it to know what is inside. A wrought iron garden ornament depicting a cat climbing into the garden. Whatever was the purchaser thinking. No one wants strange cats in their garden. I suppose the only possible positive to be taken from this surprise package, is that wrought iron cats do not shit in other peoples borders. Trying to get this wrong parcel out of my house is going to involve some thought. The address is correct but the name is completely unfamiliar.

In another coincidence my Alexa device had a funny five minutes this morning. Instead of the usual early morning list of things I might need to buy. She suggested that maybe tomorrow she would wake me up with Dance Anthems. That is certainly not my usual Sunday vibe. It does however allow me to share a never before-seen image of Plymouths’ Tinside. Taken through a 1930’s glass brick and gives quite a trippy image.

Advent +2022 images never pondered before.