A January weekend in St Ives, the streets and the beaches are empty. Plenty of space for dogs to think that they own the world and humans to be the only people in the pub, apart from the faces looking down from the walls.
Hugo tried being masterful with the waves and the waves won.
We, the humans, knew the waves would always win and were not tempted in for a swim, as yet. But for now just staring at the sea and pondering the massive changes the last 100 years have seen in this beautiful coastal town while the sea remains unchanged. History of St Ives below.
Last weekend I collected some lovely textures from Marylebone High Street. Possibly my favourite High Street in England. I know it like the back of my hand and after a three year absence it felt as familiar as ever. It is decidedly upmarket and glam but holds all the shops you should expect from a normal English High Street. Supermarkets, charity shops, butchers, bakers, cafes and chemists.
Hardware Store
I’ve walked Marylebone High Street with so many friends,family and colleagues. Attended summer fetes and Christmas Markets, all with a little more twinkle and pizzazz than normal. I have left a little part of my heart in Marylebone.
Charity Shop
It is always good to step back into a place that has so many happy memories. A place to give thanks, to absent friends and fabulous moments.
The sunlight has high jacked another days blog. Imagine walking upstairs at your place of work and seeing this. Just spellbinding in every sense of the word. Then the evening dog walk, for five beautiful minutes gives this clear and crisp sunset. Not all guns blazing just quietly contemplative and comforting. The Northern Hemisphere is slowly grabbing the light back.
I’m not sure if I often consider temperature as a texture but yesterday my lunchtime walk was filled with unexpected sensations. A high tide had brought up a huge bank of seaweed, which was both crunchy underfoot and softly yielding like a marshmallow. The temperature was hovering at 0 and the sun was starting it’s sharp descent towards the horizon. Both dogs were thrilled. Hugo loves nothing more than scavenging seaweed. Adding his small efforts to a massive pile kept him busy for an hour while Lola and I basked in the sunshine. I was wrapped up very snugly and Lola was as close to me as a barnacle on a boats bottom. Soon enough the ratio of sunshine and temperature made sitting still a bad idea. We had been in a golden triangle,moving took us into the territory of icy blasts whipping fluffy ears back and making me hugely grateful for a felted wool hat
The dogs took the best possible position on returning home.
Just filling in time until the next outdoor adventure.
Time to consider the fuel it takes to drive our city walk. There are some guidelines that need to be adhered to and a good breakfast is the foundation on which a good days walking is built on. We have scaled the delights of high-end and high-up, The Shard, breakfasts. After extensive research we have narrowed the key ingredient down to bubble and squeak. A working- class use of left-over ingredients, cabbage and potato. Just the stuff to get our legs going and our jaws constantly scattering. Our next stop to take in fluids was a Korean tea shop. We got there around lunchtime but our aim was only to have some unusual infusions and that was exactly what we found.
Our final destination took us across Central North London to Marylebone and the home of a simple no menu restaurant that serves only one dish. Steak frites with a famous green sauce. Queuing is the only way to get a table the perfect combination of French and British culture.
And that concludes the fuel blog from our city walking. East to West in 20,000 steps, many conversations and three delicious stops. The 3 websites follow-
P.S I wrote this just after I did my first gym induction since the pandemic. Turns out those machines have got cleverer. Not only do they count the amount of calories you have burned off. Now your walks or runs on a treadmill take you on lifelike augmented reality tour. This morning I walked 10,000 steps through Paris streets without so much of a sniff of a croissant or a glorious cup of hot black coffee. Where is the pleasure in that!
City walks in January need plenty of stop offs. The last time I was in this glorious Tom Dixon interiors shop was in February 2020. I was feeling as ill as it is possible to feel and still be more or less functioning. In reality I very probably had Covid and could barely appreciate the joy of his designs or the fragrances of his beautiful candles. Three years have passed and my personal score of Covid( before testing) Novid ( – test, all the symptoms) Covid (+test minimal symptoms) My pleasure in the visual remains high, but sadly the pleasures of fragrances have all but left me.
The barge, glimpsed through the window says it all. So much has been lost by so many over those three years my sense of smell is a small loss to bare. A January afternoon in the Tom Dixon store is such a feast for the eyes I barely missed the fragrances.
Our day started, as it went on, doing entirely normal things in unusual locations. A visit to our favourite bakery seemed very standard until I decided to use the loo. Only to discover that it was in the strong room, the bakery was in a former bank.
Unfortunately the name of the Strong Room could also be considered a judgement of my years of expertise in enjoying bakery products. No such judgement on the next stop.
Be-oom a Korean tea shop whose outdoor space was very unexpected.
I was particularly thrilled by the nearby what3words location.
After the tea, this silver author wished for somewhere cosy to relax after my rose petal infusion. There was no relaxation, though, in a day of long city walks. The last of the normal things in unusual spaces was a book shop on a canal.
And just to bring this unusual blog to a close is a clever door stop.
The love-child of Zephyrus and Nortus gave us a good old going over last night. Not that I knew that at the time. I have been researching the blowing faces that are sometimes seen on old maritime maps. Mistakenly I thought they were cherubs, they are in fact wind Gods although many look a good bit like a cherub probably because they are blowing as hard as a trombonist.
I have a plan to create a painting that is a mash up of an old nautical chart and a Google map. My wind will be the lesser God of the South West Wind. Inconveniently the South West Wind is not the love-child of Zephyrus/ Favonius, the West wind and Notus/ Auster the South wind. The God of the South wind is Lips/ Africus. His parents are assumed to be Astraios and Eos. He is a winged man holding the stern of a ship and if last night is a sign of his strength he is capable of a good old blow. Drawing him is going to be blast, in my picture he will be holding the peninsular of Stonehouse. Currently he is just superimposed on an old painting of a stormy sea. And that my friends is the wind-God, rabbit-hole I have been down today after a windy and sometimes sleepless night at home.
Small blog about small gains. Our sitting room illuminated by natural light for the first time in 2023 and catkins on our journey today. Life is better with sunshine.
Tomorrow’s blog will be all about the painting which is going on the big, bare, green wall. Once it is painted of course.
Yesterday was a surprise in many ways. Most significantly it did not rain anything like as much as predicted. Impending wet weather gave the morning a sepia tinge. My working day at the local museum was somewhat dull, many of the exhibition spaces are in a state of flux with old exhibitions coming down ready for a change. In consequence there were not many visitors. The Museum offers excellent facilities for family history research. So on a whim I sat down and had a dabble at a family tree.
The minute I started to achieve relative success the day began to feel even more sepia as old documents flashed up before my eyes. In honesty I don’t really know what I am doing, so half an hour of success had fished out more than enough information for a first day.
I had dabbled with a family tree once before and found an unknown, but close, relative had done a huge amount of research which was available on-line. I was impressed and wrote via the website to add myself to his family tree. While I had no expectation of a grand reunion so beloved of the media. I had thought that when doing a genetic jigsaw every little piece has some value. Not so in this case,he clearly preferred his relatives to be dead and historic, not current and breathing. No thank you email ever found its way to me. My brief foray yesterday did not uncover his precious resource so perhaps it has been removed to keep live people out of his way. He may also no longer subscribe… Who could guess?
The lack of visitors did not cut down on my talking at the museum. What I lacked in numbers I made up for with two exceedingly long interactions. One was with a very inebriated man who’s intensity of conversation took many intriguing twists and turns to unexpected places. The other was with a regular visitor who talks in ever expanding circles that then with no warning snaps back to the exact same point that he started at, many, many minutes before. Sometimes it is fascinating to be included in another, unknown persons mindscape without any responsibility or limited timeframe. Maybe a little like reading an unknown persons blog.
Some days not much happens, here is clip to show how the header artwork was created.
theoldmortuary.design 