Month: Jan 2023

#447 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Friends and Family2 Comments

December and the build up to Christmas has a smooth-curve build up to the festive season. I have no time or interest in creating jeopardy into the mix. We don’t go in for ‘perfect’, our tradition has flexibility built -in, to allow the joy of serendipity to play a part. I really dislike it when someone enquires if I am ready for Christmas. I know that that question only requires an answer that suggests I am in a state of anxiety or stress. The answer ” Everything is at the stage it should be at this point of the month” is usually truthful, not smug, just reassuring. That answer,or a version of it, seems to disappoint somewhat and sometimes gets a response like “Oh well you are a well organised woman”. This sounds complimentary but often has so many hidden little barbs in it, I am in no doubt that it is a weaponised statement punishing me for not having enough festive drama in my life.

The build up to a ‘good enough’ Christmas is like that, no drama, no unrealistic expectation, just friends and family gathering together in the darkest part of the year ( Northern Hemisphere) to bring happiness to one another.

The decorations are put away in the Sandalwood Chest and our tree is off on an adventure as a beach stabiliser. Another ‘ Good Enough’* Festive season tidied away.

* Good Enough,was, of course, fabulous. Who really needs drama or perfection in the darkest month of the year.

#446 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn walkingLeave a comment

The sun was up yesterday and I was in Wembury. My feet must have sensed this and were reluctant to wear socks. It was a dog grooming day so I had the beach to myself while the fluffs were being pampered. The last time I was here was in the midst of a really cold snap of weather, the overnight frost had stayed well past noon. Socks were definitely needed. Yesterday walking the coastal path was a bit unpleasant with cold toes but wandering bare foot on the beach was not so bad at all.

Usually, at Wembury, there is a splendid cafe almost on the beach but January is the time small businesses take a break. There was nowhere to warm up, once my toes had decided that being liberated from shoes and socks, and paddling in a river and the sea was not the smartest move in the long term.

The actual plan for the morning was to finish my book club book which required all my concentration just to keep a grip on the characters. With my feet wrapped in a blanket I stepped into the warm but hazardous world of Cyprus in 1974.

With my reading mission accomplished, I collected two clean and fragrant dogs from the groomers and returned to the real world of January life. I am not a fan of January. Like the back end of the beach, it is strewn with unremarkable stuff that probably needs clearing up.

#445 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn StonehouseLeave a comment

Early morning and no rain! Monday shows promise. Yesterday was a proper drencher, probably due to my own bad planning. On a positive the rain chased me into a newish coffee destination near home. Block in the Royal William Yard.

Loads of lovely texture to enjoy while drying out and enjoying a plain chocolate, hot chocolate. The dogs and my feet dried out ready to carry on walking, swamp foot avoided for another day.

#444 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art, Serendipity1 Comment

Backtracking slightly to an earlier blog of this week. My Sunday ponder tackles the subject of procrastination again.

#442 theoldmortuary ponders

Sometimes while procrastinating I watch videos on art techniques, I am fascinated by the Japanese art of Kintsugi. Where broken porcelain is repaired, the repair is enhanced with gold.

I find the whole process mesmerising but am both self aware enough to know that I don’t have enough broken china in my life or the the tolerance for this meticulous craft. But knowledge can always be adapted.

This Christmas I was gifted a female torso vase. She had rather pneumatic breasts, if she were real I think she would almost certainly have ‘had some work done’

For some time I have felt the urge to depict the curious sensation of swimming in really cold water with a shortie wetsuit on.

Pneumatic Nancy is now officially a bobbing woman. Modified Kintsugi shows exactly the sensation of water finding it’s way into the openings of a wetsuit and then rivuleting over mounds and crevasses as it streams downwards. To be completely accurate the gilding should be done in ice cold silver. A project for another day, and another torso.

Procrastination creates gaps where serendipity can flourish.

#443 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art1 Comment

Morning dog walks are full of unexpected surprises. Sometimes when we stop for the ritual of the poo, I stare into nothing for the time it takes to sniff out the exact spot, spin to geolocate and then eliminate. Yesterday there was a bright flash of blue. Not an urban Kingfisher but some lovely old wrought iron, showing it’s provenance, over 200 years of being weather beaten. Two dogs equals two stops,the second one on a beach where this tiny piece of old tile was my gem of the moment.

My day was all about tiny gems, the studio needs to be de-Christmassed. It has remnants of twinkle from pre-Christmas gilding left on the work bench.

Having cleared that up I was left with a pristine surface to work on, almost as delicious as clean bedding, I decided to take some time out from tidying and give a new sketch book and latex tools a little try out.

The exhibitions of last year inspired me to explore some different aspects of drawing, painting and printing. The one genre that can be fitted into a small box and just an hour or so of time is charcoal sketching. My new sketchbook is going to be dedicated to drawing in charcoal with a bit of water colour thrown in.

Have a good weekend!

#442 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Art for sale, Words2 Comments

Procrastination gets a bad rap. I absolutely am a procrastinator. I have always felt that procrastination, done well, is a force for good. In the exact opposite of current psychological thinking I believe procrastination is a force for good in my life.

Yesterday I definitely procrastinated, deliberately and mindfully. There was a small list of things that needed to be achieved but I delayed starting them. Then a whole new task arrived which required action and the use of old skills. The task was completed in a couple of hours. That squeezed the required tasks into a more compact time-frame, which made me sharper and more effective. Art got done, the washing was done, the dogs were walked and I felt like I had achieved.

There was also a bonus for someone. My delayed dog walk meant that they stopped a little earlier to poo. In a pile of leaves they have never bothered with before. As I rummaged around collecting their morning offerings I found a small gold ring. Someone else’s lucky day.

Positive procrastination, positively powerful!

#441 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn HomeLeave a comment
A bus stop rainbow. 8 a.m

Some days a bus stop rainbow is the best and only option. The run-up to Christmas is all about preparatory domestic admin. The week or so after New Year is about clearing up. Over the festive season, a couple of Gherkins had made their escape from their pickling brine. There was a bitter smell coming from the fridge. It is amazing what gets put back into a fridge over Christmas.

My plan was to de-Christmas the kitchen and dining room but the bitter whiff of escaped gherkin in the fridge made my number one priority clearing out the fridge. Our fridge has an energy-saving function that means when 2 minutes or so have elapsed, with the door open, it squeals like an urban fox in the mating season. It took me 30 minutes to empty the fridge and find the whiffy gherkins. That’s an awful lot of squealing. It is possible to silence the alarm but only by pushing the door-activated button. But that only buys another 2 minutes. OK while I was up close and intimate with the fridge not so great when I was discovering, over at the sink that the salad and vegetable drawers, were not water-tight after I had filled them with warm soapy water. Only a fool would shout expletives at a fridge, I was that fool.

So an hour or more into the big post-Christmas clear-up, Christmas was still untroubled by my plans for domestic order, I had an unplanned clean, twinkly, and most importantly silent fridge. Half a lemon that never got to dive into the fizzing abyss of a Gin and Tonic and two nearly empty jars of mayonnaise.

The lemon

There was also a bin with out-of-date stuff dating back 18 months. An archive of unrepeated recipe ingredients stretching back to the day we moved in.

Sidetracked by the mayonnaise jars I decided to move everything off the mid-century modern, solid wood furniture and nourish the wood with the leftover mayonnaise. Once that was done I moved some plants into a window to refresh their light-starved leaves.

And then at 4 pm as the light started fading, I took the Christmas tree down, packed up his baubles and lights, folded the tree into his cardboard box, and posted him up into the roof space. At 5 pm the bus stop rainbow had gone. Where exactly had my day gone?

#440 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn 2023Leave a comment
http://quicktide.co.uk/

Farewell, old friend. Not having a nautical bone in my body, it is a surprise to me to love something so clever as a cardboard tide time calculator. In the big January clear up this friend of the past two years moved into the recycling pile. Having only a two-year life cycle it has moved into obsolescence during the festive season. Apart from informing me about the safest time to call a ‘bob’ for our group of hardy, year-round swimmers; I think I loved it because it reminded me of a Gestational calculator. An essential tool for anyone who works in obstetric medicine.

A quick whizz of this in a clinic gives an estimated date of delivery as long as a woman knew the date of her last period. Most of us who have used this calculator professionally have been asked to spin the wheel inaccurately by patients, anxious to make an acceptable man believe he was the father of their child, rather than the likely, but not necessarily acceptable, man that the true date indicated. We never did as they asked.

My mastery of these two sorts of calculators is miraculous to me given that a slide rule and logarithmic calculator books brought me to my knees in mathematics lessons .

© Ebay

Predicting the future my dad even bought me a round slide rule. It didn’t help.

The slide rule in any shape was just a method of torture to my poor dysnumeric brain. I wonder if learning maths is any easier in the 21st century. To be clear slide rules were not part of my formal education. My dad loved a slide rule, to him they were a miraculous magic wand into a world of mathematical calculations, a world that he entered for both work and pleasure. Despite his best efforts it is a world that I stand on the threshold of. I know enough to get by both in life and professionally but Maths is definitely the kind of party that I avoid wherever possible. A lovely man called Dan told me a maths joke last week. I was both fearful and mesmerised. Impressed by his ability to use the two words maths and joke in the same sentence.

So goodbye old friend, you gave me some brief credibility as someone who could use charts effectively. 2023 will not be the same without you.

P.S Straight after writing this I went to a news website. Our current Prime Minister wants to make studying maths compulsory up to age 18.

BBC News – Rishi Sunak wants all pupils to study maths to age 18
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-64158179

#439 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn The Box, Van Life5 Comments

This was the view from the van at Harlyn yesterday. We have been waiting for the whole festive season for the weather to improve enough for us to spend a day by the beach. One of our regular winter treats, usually on Christmas or Boxing Day. Harlyn has been much on my mind since my work at The Box last week. My poor insomniac head was pondering the inclusion of a human skeleton, from about 2000 BC, in an exhibition at the museum.The skeleton and it’s Cist style slate coffin had been exhumed from an Iron Age cemetery just beyond the beach at Harlyn. In the circular and always inconclusive thinking of an occasional insomniac I felt so sorry for those bones, that ex human, that loved one ,who had been moved from somewhere so beautiful to be gawped at in a museum, even a very splendid museum. I would so prefer my own bones or those of the people I love to lie close to where the waves break over a beach. Left alone where they had been interred in the place where they lived and died.

I realise far more learned heads than mine have debated the rights and wrongs of showing skeletons in museums. But the curious workings of my night-time brain are never restricted by my lack of qualifications or experience in any subject. Now I’ve got my nighttime pondering off my chest I can waffle on about what a gorgeous day it was today. This is not as random as it seems, when my childhood home was built a terracotta pot and some bones were found and put on a show in Colchester Castle. I always felt sad that that person had been moved too. My parents always thought I had an overactive imagination.

Strong Adolfo’s

Our real world day started with coffee at Strong Adolfo’s and one of my favourite complicated images created by sharp bright sunlight. Soon enough we were on the beach, scampering in the waves.

Since we were last at Harlyn a sauna has been built in the sand dunes.

The sea provides the cold plunge for scarlet and over-heated Sauna lovers. Hugo and Lola liked to join them for the plunge once they realised it was a leisure activity that involved squealing.

Two long beach walks and an hour or so of van time, enjoying tea and magazines that had been gifted to us, as subscriptions for Christmas gifts, was as arduous as our day got. The temperature dropped once the sun started to set so, putting coats on for the first time of the day, we took a final walk on a much quieter beach.

The last of our festive season traditions completed.

#438 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn FilmLeave a comment

We have used the New Year wisely so far. The kitchen has piles of clean bed linen and towels following our Christmas of friends and family.

We’ve also used these last few days to catch-up with all the TV we missed while we were eating, walking and playing games .

One catch up was more than 75 years old. It’s a Wonderful Life, voted the best Christmas Movie often and until yesterday completely unknown to us. Christmas Movies is not a genre that has a huge amount of quality to compete with. Quantity certainly, but Hollywood producers scrape the bottom of many barrels to assemble their teams for festive film making. Then throw in some snow and romance and hope nobody notices the shortcomings. It’s a Wonderful Life is an accidental success having been a commercial failure when it was made. The copyright lapsed in 1974 and was able to be shown on TV with no fees needing to be paid. Broadcasters all over the Western world showed it multiple times each Christmas after that and it became ‘the’ classic, black and white movie to watch at Christmas. Using similar magic realism and fantasy to Charles Dickens novel A Christmas Carol it sets a tale of personal/human woe in the heart of the festive season. At 75 years old it becomes a history lesson too.

There is comfort in doing the same things every Christmas. Watching or reading a Christmas Carol makes me glad to not be poor in Victorian England. It’s a Wonderful Life makes me super-grateful not to be a woman in a pre-war U.S.A. I will probably watch the film every year from now on just to irritate myself. The irony is not lost on me that this pondering started with the sense of pleasure at having clean laundry!