For once I was completely ready . No last-minute tweaking for me. Which was just as well as a friend of mine had her own disaster. An escaped Peridot.
Her Peridot escaped as she was finishing a necklace. Not in the normal run of things a big problem but she was tweaking the night before she was due to deliver her work to me and then fly off to Greece.
She arranged a Peridot delivery to my house and gave me easy to follow instructions to follow for me to tweak on her behalf.
My tweazers had quite the day. Not for them the normal chore, the pulling of a stray chin hair. Oh no, they became artisanal tweezers, craftsperson tweezers. Tweezers of importance. Tweezers in the spotlight.
And for just a moment I experienced the joy of being a jeweller.
Sometimes it is a surprise, even to me, what goes on in the studio.
Thursday already. It has been a busy week @theoldmortuary. Two days of a man with power tools building a trellis wall extension for us and prepping for an exhibition.
Bags lined up ready to go.
Hugo has been doing a lot of soulful eye work as there has not often been time for a lap to sit on. Also not much time to ponder on ponders and ponderables.
One thing that came and was largely unremarked upon, was the curious 12 hours on Saturday and Sunday when we were suddenly without a signal or any wi-fi. We were camping near Looe and communication was lost locally, nobody could use their phones. There was no problem at all for us, but it is odd how guilty I felt at being inexplicably unreachable without warning.
Something entirely normal only a few years ago.
Clearing and sorting 4 years worth of emails, over the last few days, has also highlighted how much communication we all have with one another now, compared to even our recent past. A nicely sorted and deleted email account is curiously liberating. Spring cleaning of my electronic soul.
A midweek pondering at midnight that has become all about communicating both ancient and modern. Dogs have looked at humans, in the same way that Hugo is looking at me in the first picture, throughout history. Stone Age humans and their dogs, and every other age since would understand what was going on in that picture.
Just as everyone reading this blog understands the joy that the last picture brings me.
But the doleful dog eyes will go on as long as there are humans and dogs. Emails will, soon enough,be consigned to history. Just as parchment scrolls and quills have been. That is quite the ponder.
Late blog, I am so flaky if I miss my early morning slot. Here we are mid -afternoon and what to ponder?
I can celebrate that I have cleared a backlog of 27,000 emails. Woo Hoo! Now to do this accurately has taken me two days. How do people clearing emails for naughty reasons, for instance Governments or big business, do it so quickly?
Our yard now has a fabulous trellis extension ready to accommodate climbing plants and deter our neighbours cats, chickens and other unwanted creatures, from using the wall as a super highway. Pictures will follow when I have moved all our plants back into their growing positions.
I could be all giddy and excited and start it now but I have paintings to sort out and pack up for delivery to an exhibition tomorrow.
Stonehouse Fruits
The exhibition space has a 360 degree film projection dome. Our paintings will be projected on a massive scale , which is very exciting. This little painting will be about 12 feet square. That is going to be surreal!
A milky sunset after a giddy day in new glasses. As a lifelong glasses wearer, I am used to the day when trusted old glasses are replaced by a new prescription and new frames. I never quite trust that I have made a good decision on the frames until they have been on my face for a few hours. Yesterday there was the added jeopardy of me deciding to change the ratio of my varifocal lenses and a much bigger prescription change than I have had for a long time. I was very happy with all things spectacle until my crisply restored vision alighted on these new beauties.
Ray Ban Smart Sunglasses
Smart glasses! Glasses that can be like a smart phone, taking photos and making calls!!!
Oh My Goodness. @theoldmortuary becomes a 21st Century blogger. Photos and a dictated blog with just a subtle nod of the head and some talking out loud to myself.
Madness x Awe.
Meanwhile a traditionally gathered milky sunset ends a giddy day of adjusting to new lenses and the thoughts of Smart Sunglasses. Maybe next time.
Four Devon Bobbers and one Cornish Bobber went bobbing at Talland Bay in Cornwall this weekend. I will admit this image is full of digital trickery but memories are a bit like this. The imagination and reality merged in a slightly twinklier version of real life.
Here is the real life.
I just chopped it up a bit, played with scale and enhanced some colour. Which is exactly what most humans do with an anecdote.
There is something a little tingly about being confident cold water swimmers. It turns us into Nyad Ninja’s.
We know that holidaymakers look on at a group of over-fifties women, arriving on the beach, and wonder what we are about. Especially when we slip out of our normal lives and stride confidently into the sea. No timorous squeals when the cold hits. We hear the comments of ‘Mad, brave, bonkers’ and push on.
We were plunged into digital silence yesterday. The O2 mast serving the Talland Bay area provided no service for nearly 12 hours. I thought this Foxglove was much more pretty than a useless signal mast. It is also a reminder that we are heading towards the Chelsea Flower Show Season. When we dream big in our gardening/yardening world. In our yard world, next week sees the arrival of a wall height trellis extension. In our city home our neighbours have cats and chickens who see our yard as an extension of their own. After nearly three years of escalating visits, we have to do something. So trellis and climbing plants are the new deterrents.
So , very soon the yard will be a whole new world. Hopefully a chicken and cat free zone. And hopefully as beautifully styled as a Show Garden.
I found this lone Californian Poppy yesterday. He was growing in an inhospitable space. Caught between Tarmac and an old concrete wall. A brutal, liminal space for something as fragile as a poppy.
My head was in a bit of a liminal space at the time, as I was fresh from attending a London work colleague’s online funeral. Always sad affairs funerals are moments to pause and reflect.
One of my ponderings in that reflective space was when we had last met and last communicated.
I’ve just about nailed down the last meeting which was by accident in a gloriously beautiful old pub in Marylebone in London. Close to where we had worked together.
Our last, long, on-line natter was four years ago when we discussed this cookbook.
Both about 4 years ago.
In that time we have had occasional exchanges on Facebook, but essentially we had lost touch. Which is the nature of work relationships. And a measure of my sorrow yesterday. I’ve not lost a huge relationship, but one of those small complicated mosaic pieces that make up life’s rich pattern.
Obviously, yesterday, so many people in the room at the Crematorium had lost a much bigger piece of their lives.
Although,in truth, a good description of her is, small and complicated.
What was not small or complicated was the massive amount of love in the room. Visible because family and friends ran the whole service. No religion or non-religious celebrant. Just swirling love. Fabulous.
My life in a triangle. The first cup of tea and this blog co-exist in the morning sunshine. I would say that I mostly skip the second stage but when I looked for a photo of a cup of tea there was a biscuit lurking in the corner. Out of the picture is the chair for ‘ a nice sit down’
When I was working, drinking coffee was a much rarer treat. A pleasure when enjoyed in an independent coffee shop and occasionally essential to get me through the working day.
Caffeine is my giddy stimulant of choice. Avoided after noon. A new-to-me, word arrived yesterday more usually associated with the jollity that accompanies alcohol.
What a wonderful new descriptive, these days my bacchian or jovial phase is nearly always fueled by caffeine and sometimes occurs during the nice sit-down phase.
That doesn’t mean I am only jovial or indeed at my most bacchian before noon, the half life of caffeine, in me, is extremely long lived.
This brings the blog to its usual conclusion. My first cup of caffeinated coffee will fire me up to start the day, with every hope of some bacchian moments. No alcohol is required.
Most mornings before I write the blog I have a little canter through various on-line, news-gathering services, check out the 3rd party blog prompt, and consider the blog I was planning to write. One thing jumped out from news gathering that is quite pertinent to todays blog. Also the 3rd party prompt has only a one sentence answer. A gloriously simple answer that I could have used on any of my many days on earth.
What’s the oldest things you’re wearing today? My skin.
Yesterday I did two very small paintings. They are somewhere between abstract and representational, closer to abstract.
One of the articles I read this morning was about, Euphoric recall.
My life, in my old skin, is pretty much one long example of euphoric recall. My two paintings of yesterday are far more euphoric than real life. Maritime Sunburst Lichen is one of my favourite things to see on rocks.
Here it is in its active stage.
But as it ages it flattens out and leaves circular scars.
On sunny winter days it just makes me smile. My abstracts of yesterday were painted from memory with no reference images. I just threw in some dutch gold to brighten them up , they are exactly euphoric recall because some days even Sunburst Lichen can look pretty dull.
But in my head, the lichens are gaudy circles of natural joy.
Which is very much an example of euphoric recall at its finest.
In general my blogs are all about the joyous things in life even if sometimes the inspiration point starts off in a darker place.
Wednesday ‘ hump’ day and a chance to answer a 3rd Party prompt that has been circling my mind since I first read it and decided not to bother with it. But actually circles or going round in circles is appealing as an answer and doesnt knock the planned blog off the page.
Are you a leader or a follower?
As an absolute magpie for information, both necessary and unnecessary, I am an instinctive follower. All the better to learn new stuff from people ahead of me. I have vast pots of information stored in my head.
I call it information and not knowledge because to quote my exasperated Dad, ‘I am a mine of useless information’. Despite being an instinctive follower I am more than capable as a leader, even if that is sometimes accidental. To get back to the proposed blog. I have been pondering the recent death of someone that I had an awkward, or difficult relationship with. I am not alone in finding her difficult but my conundrum was that despite our differences I could see her many good qualities and her death has both surprised and saddened me. It has also galvanised me, as these things often do, to live my life as fully and as engagedly as possible. A sort of mental energy burst. It bothers me when I don’t completely like people and, as I have discovered that becomes harder when they have died.
Luckily for me, a very clever poem to mark the death of someone who had difficult relationships has slightly rescued my circling mind.
If I Had A Voice by Caroline Wilkes
If I had a voice now It would be loving And I would say thank you for all of your care. If I had a voice now I’d want to tell you I’m sorry for not always wanting to be there. My life, it confused you, it did so to me. But I am released now and my heart is free. The heart that was hidden beneath all the pain, It felt so much more than I could explain. And if I had a voice now, I’d say out loud I love you, I wish that I’d made that clear. And in my lifetime I need you to know That I was much more than I did appear. These are things that I’d say through choice… if I had a chance and if I had a voice
I think this nicely demonstrates how learning something from someone else. In this case the admirable Dr Google, can circle a follower into a leader.
You may never have met this poem before. But you almost certainly have had some difficult relationships with people who have since died. Maybe all of this poem works for the conundrum of difficult relationships. Or maybe, like me, just one or two lines do the trick. Maybe just for a moment I have led you to some useful words.
Fantail Fish
So to conclude I believe leading and following are often the same thing from different viewpoints.
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