Month: Dec 2023

#740 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity5 Comments

When we moved house from the actual Old Mortuary we bought a house with 7 Chandeliers. After 2 years we have got that number down to 4. We are not Chandelier people. I don’t have a fear of Chandeliers, and one of my favourite comedy moments involves a Chandelier.

I love a big, grand Chandelier like the one above, ours are poor imitations and rather effective as dust catchers. I have created a Chandelier black hole for this blog, I was looking for the opposite of serendipity. I wondered how to get there. Coloured glass was my route.

After a few days in Venice, where this Chandelier twinkled for us, we had seen more coloured glass than was good for us.

I had rather hoped to see some gorgeous contemporary glass but if there was anything beyond the predictable temptations for tourists we didn’t find it. So without being able to show you gorgeous glass I will share another video . Dale Chihuly in Venice. If you have the time follow the video trail that Youtube offers. Some truly great art.

Gorgeous glass in Venice. If you watch the video you will notice that the artist wears an eye patch. By an awful quirk of fate a shard of glass from a shattered windscreen blinded him in one eye.

An artist blinded by the medium that made him famous.

Quite the opposite of serendipity which , thank goodness, takes us to the black hole at the centre of this blog. Zemblamity

Goodness me that was tortuous!!

#739 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity1 Comment

Are you more of a night or morning person?

Serendipity comes in all shapes and forms. This question landed just as I had done the morning dog walk.

A beautiful creamy morning in December. Such a fab illustration for a blog with this question at its heart.

I am neither a night or a morning person. Greedily I love both. Once I passed the age of 30 it was obvious that I could no longer have both with the ease of youth but I can still happily enjoy the night until it bleeds into the morning. 2 or 3 am can be vivid in a way rarely found in their pm counterparts. The jolting, head nods of the early afternoon are one of my worst pieces of behaviour. They have plagued me all my life. How dreadful is that?

#738 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn abstract photography, SerendipityLeave a comment

Day 2 of #Celebrating Serendipity.

This morning as I wrote on the first day of December, I was warmly snuggled under my duvet feeling like bobbing was not the best idea when the temperature was 0 degrees C. How wrong could I be. Tranquility Bay was as tranquil as a summers day.

All the attending bobbers made it to the buoy at least once and still managed an enormous amount of nattering.

As usual the subjects were broad and wild. It’s amazing how vivid conversations can be after twenty or so minutes of really chilly swimming. As vivid as the tidal pool was on our departure.

And I have created two baubles for the #Celebrating Serendipity Chart. This morning I had no idea how December blogging was going to go and now I have a bauble chart. Days really do take the strangest paths sometimes.

#737 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art, SerendipityLeave a comment

Pondering December 1st.

Admirals Hard

On the threshold of the festive season and where to take pondering for a whole month.

The picture above was serendipitous about a month ago. The incoming tide created a meandering tide mark that leads the eye to one of my favourite local doors.

Celebrating Serendipity and where it leads me is going to be the theme of the 31 blogs that will ease us into 2024.

The first few days will still draw heavily on my recent Italian trip but who knows where serendipity will take us. This morning at 0 degrees I already know that life and not serendipity is going to dip me in the sea.

But back to last weeks serendipity. An Andy Warhol painting  that caught my eye. Not to be too self absorbed, but Illeana Sonnabend, an American-Romanian Art Dealer, born in 1914 was a doppelganger for me in the 1980’s.

As luck would have it there are no retrievable photographs of me in that era but if me and Illeana were in the same room and at the same age you might easily mistake us for twins. Serendipity at its very best.