A good weekend for this prompt. We are in the midst of wallpapering. Not exactly to turn our current home into a dream home but maybe to turn our existing spaces into something more beautiful. When we bought the house it had been done up to attract buyers. It is full of original features and the materials used are mostly of very good quality. We have spent two and a half years trying to love an expensive French style wallpaper chosen by the previous owners. Love has not overwhelmed us and the pale blue birds on pale blue twigs on a pale gold background have been replaced. A hugely different, concrete, abstract paper burnished with a soft bronze has silenced the already mute birds. The concrete, just like the birds reflect the morning light from the East.
By this time tomorrow those irritating birds will be gone. One person’s dream eclipsed by another.
Yesterday was one of those repetitive blogging days when I do a regular activity. About once every four or five weeks, our dogs go to the groomers in Wembury and I get three to four hours to do whatever I want. Unhindered by the needs of two dogs. Sometimes I get on with regular life admin but mostly I take myself to Wembury beach which offers a variety of me-shaped entertainments. A Coffee shop, an excellent swimming beach and the South West Coastal path in two directions. Yesterday was a little different as the weather was shocking and I had driven through a flood to get there. There was no phone signal and the rain was drenching. I had one essential task that could be performed in the local Post Office. Beyond that it was just book reading in the campervan with cups of tea from a thermos flask. Hardly the stuff of blogging gold. But the weather and tides had other plans for the day. The header photograph is not black and white but exactly as the coast presented itself on arrival. The wind was a warm, but strong, south westerly and an abnormally high tide was due at 5pm. In no time at all our little brown campervan had many friends in the car park. Campervan’s and regular vans bringing hoards of excited surfers to the beach. Maybe fifty vans being unpacked by rubber clad enthusiasts eager to make the best of the day on their boards. I watched from the comfort of the van and the hours passed, but soon enough the tea had worked its way to my bladder and I decided to walk to the public loo rather than use our onboard facilities. The power of the sea was amazing in a relatively small bay. The surfers or the weather had brought many onlookers who, just like me, stood on the cliffs and watched the spectacle of nature and the little black specs who were riding the waves. The sunset coincided with high-tide and nature threw out a light show to end the afternoon.
Nothing quite went to plan yesterday. Unless a weather forecast is considered a plan. Thursday was predicted to be exceptionally rainy and that really was the overriding sensation of the day. But while my plans changed quickly, in the bad weather, I had a moment in a doorway when this view, of a courtyard reflected in windows, caught my eye. Equally serendipitous was this lovely image of flaking paint right by my shoulder as I took the first photo.
I am not the only family member that ponders. Hugo finds pondering easiest on a comfy bed. He is pondering the quality of the biscuits he was given in a pub in Penzance. I was at the same pub but not given a biscuit, a tickle or photographed by a stranger, looking cute near a ship’s wheel or staring masterfully at a sextant. For me the pub itself became a massive ponder.
The Admiral Benbow is one of the oldest pubs in Penzance. It has elevated itself from an illegal drinking den in the sixteenth century to a regular pub with an irregular clientele in later centuries. All safely in the past. Famed for being the meeting place of pirates, smugglers, wreckers and all other forms of seafaring miscreants. The pub would also have been a great place for all varieties of prostitution to thrive. My ponder on the subject of the Admiral Benbow is really about the whitewashing of crime and criminals, illegal activity in all its many forms by the passing of time and the ‘ romance of the sea’
I cannot imagine choosing to spend an evening in a pub or club associated with 21st Century criminals. Drug dealers, handlers of stolen goods, people traffickers, or perpetrators of modern slavery.
But centuries passing and a whiff of the sea makes sharing a time-hop space with the imagining of rogues acceptable, fascinating and enjoyable.
Romance and fantasy stick themselves to the sea and seafarers in a way that seems disproportionate and mystifying. The whites of tropical uniforms are a ‘thing’ in both heterosexual and queer culture. Sailors have a word for a temporary madness that hits them in the tropics.
Calenture a sort of giddiness that brings a heightened state of excitement in hot weather. Throwing themselves into the sea for fun and feeling sexually aroused.
Seafarers really do get some of the best words.
As I sat in the Admiral Benbow enjoying a rum,while Hugo enjoyed a good sea dog biscuit it was easy to imagine the bar boasts of olden times. I really hope Calenture cropped up.
Prof.Google helped me out on this one.
Are Sailors romantic because they were the first profession to really see the world and bring us unimaginable things from foreign destinations.
Which brings me, rather circuitously, to today’s random question
What’s your favorite candy?
Chocolate. Just chocolate. Not chocolate cake or puddings. Nothing too fancy.
Ponderings, in the Admiral Benbow on Monday night. Plenty of space for historical visitors from all centuries. Some nibs of chocolate in a leather pouch and tales of Calenture. Just fascinating.
Lola, meanwhile, thinks such pondering is overated. She could be right.
The job I am doing needs a break from me, not me from it. I am cleaning the grate in a very old fireplace. When the fireplace was installed this job was performed daily. A waxy potion has been applied to all things grate related and I have retired for two hours for a miraculous transformation to occur.
Attending to the houseplants yesterday was much more pleasurable. But not all Spring Cleaning is about pleasure, and thankfully, not all of it is quite as filthy as cleaning fire grates. Mostly this week I am tinkering between rooms. Filling bags for the charity shop with ‘ stuff’. Stuff that we no longer need and quite possibly never needed. In my two hour gap I have also done domestic admin and eaten lunch. Like my fireplace this blog is unbelievably dull. Recounting the joys of Spring cleaning is like that. Dull, but essential. In two hours time my grate will still be dull, a little less dull apparently with the addition of graphite powder and an enormous amount of rubbing.
Bloggng is a much better daily activity than cleaning a fire grate and never dull. This was a battle, done wearing leggings and an old jumper. The different angles required to buff everything were extraordinary. Unimaginable in a traditional maids outfit. No wonder gentlemen got the wrong idea, there is absolutely no way to clean these things with modest movements.
While January, in the West Country, seems to drag its feet. February definitely skips along a little faster. There were a few photographs that didn’t make it into a January blog. Each of them was taken on a January day when the sunshine was bright. In contrast, so far, February is a little more murky. Today seems like a day to play catch up and give each of these images its own moment in the sun. They also only have tiny stories attached to them so there will be an element of randomness to this blog.
In no particular order. January always starts the Spring cleaning bug, long before Spring is anywhere close. Taking down the Christmas decorations is the trigger point. My copper preserving pan got a new location and a lot of polishing. Thank goodness for podcasts.
Christmas left overs would never normally feature in a blog but my Stilton and Parmesan pastries cooled down in a sunbeam.
Gourds on a window ledge in Totnes made a cosy corner on one of our out of town excursions.
The reason the West Country can be greige is because on the whole the climate is a little milder than the rest of the United Kingdom. Better than normal sunshine brings colder temperatures. Cold, cold dog walks drive us to find convivial spaces to warm up.
These last two pictures were taken at Marazion. The day was very bright, as you can see from this photo of seaweed.
It was also very cold and we were the only people out and about on the promenade. Or so we thought. I stopped to take this ghost image of a swimmer.
Out of nowhere two Northern European men approached us. Sunday morning Evangelists extremely focused on talking to the only people visible to them. With the practised certainty of their faith they smiled, asked questions and countered our answers with smiles and different opinions. We were all battling icy cold gusts of wind that took most of our words out to sea. 10 minutes passed and we had no idea what they were trying to convert us to and similarly they probably had no idea what they were trying to save us from.
I am fairly certain this was not one of their questions. Science not normally being a faith kind of thing.
The most important invention in your lifetime is…
My answer, had they chosen to ask it would have been the perfect hook-in.
Describe your most ideal day from beginning to end.
An ideal day cannot be predictably planned and is perhaps only recognisable as ideal once it has come to an end. Because I was involved in doing Bloganuary many of my ideal days went unmarked because they did not fit with the Bloganuary prompts. There were many days that would be considered to be ideal in January especially as the sun came out a lot more than usual.
Sometimes the tide was just perfect too. Or the light was in just the right place to catch a wave.
On one occasion some Pilchard Street Art popped up.
In very similar colours to some doughnuts I had just seen.
By superimposing those two images I created the header image of this blog.
An ideal day is harder to categorise than I could possibly describe.
How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?
It is not how the significant things in life alter my perspective that fascinates me. Although like everyone my life has been radically altered by time passing and significant events.
What I love is the way tiny details in a day can spark a train of events that make some big,fat,gorgeous thoughts spring out of almost nowhere. Big, fat, gorgeous thinking is such a positive thing.
Yesterday I had to search out a portrait I had done of a dear friend. I had taken her photos after the last Covid lockdown . I spent the morning with her, a golden moment because we both knew that was the last time we would probably have together. I eventually tracked her photo down in my archive and in searching for it I found the picture that illustrates a golden moment so well.
It is also tiny things that alter perspectives and that is always a good thing.
The first bob of February was achieved yesterday morning. It was a somewhat monochromatic day. And for no particular reason quite a brutally cold swim at Tranquility Bay. There were only four bobbers, two bystanders and two dogs. A small highpoint was waving to the sailors on the deck deck and them waving back. An excellent way for us all to warm up.
Monochrome was the flavour of our outdoor life yesterday.
Two barrel hoops had dropped off a barrel near the Cooperage.
And much to the disappointment of Lola, one of her favourite cafes was shut.
Which leads me to today’s prompt rather nicely.
Something on your “to-do list” that never gets done.
February sees us back in home DIY mood. We are fired up by a very arty weekend away in Penzance.
Every inch of our previous home. The actual old Mortuary was designed and created by us and two wonderful builders, Jason and Dave who humoured our maddest ideas while still rebuilding a mortuary and attached cottage into a wonderfully comfortable home.
But fate took a turn in good ways and bad. We became the family hub and our family, which had been shrinking for many years, started to grow.
To paraphrase Chief Martin Brody in Jaws. We were going to need a bigger house. Our current home is an old Townhouse that had been owned by the same family for 60 years. It had been ‘done up’ to sell but has many original features. Without ripping out perfectly good things we are slowly remodelling the house to better represent and accommodate us. The to-do list will never be done. And we are just fine with that.
I love cooking anything with British summer fruits. Not a thing I do much of in the depth of winter. But where cooking fails, art steps up. I had ordered some romantically named water colours in the depth of winter, they arrived on the cusp of February and the little test piece I painted when they arrived, had all the piquancy of my favourite summer puddings.
The names themselves are delicious.
School Disco
Byzantium
Caravan Green
Gooseberry
Rowan berry
I doodled away giving everything except Byzantium a run out on paper. To be honest I was being sidetracked.
I was actually supposed to be creating a pillowcase from an old pyjama jacket.
But the temptation to try the new paints suddenly became urgent. Probably because sewing the slippery fabric was as difficult as it had been to sleep in the pyjamas.
I didn’t give Byzantium a moment on the brush. I’m not sure why. But it gives me a fine excuse to have another doodle this weekend.These paints are all hand made by Tansy Horgan.
I have a project in mind that will need Byzantium. I am slightly concerned that Byzantium may be a bit of a bully. Caravan Green turned out to be exactly that. Hugely versatile on his own, but a little bit of a bully when mixing with others. Gooseberry was a dream,fading out to something imperceptibly beautiful the more dilute I made it.
School Disco was a dream. As pink and pushy as Barbie. I was always a rather conflicted Disco goer, particularly the termly torture of a School Disco. I loved to dance, but in that dreadful hierarchy of teenage years my acne and bookishness cast me as a wallflower. Not that I needed to be picked to be danced with. I have always had enough chutzpah to dance as if no-one is watching, but the judgement of the school ‘beautiful people’ is a harsh spotlight to step into.
And lastly Rowanberry.
Does anybody apart from birds eat a Rowanberry? The paint was fab. A super bright red/orange with a bitter edge. I can’t wait to pair it with Byzantium on a doodle.
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