I had a wordy struggle earlier this week. I was caring for a small person who is just under two. She has started to push boundaries and it is rather dull to keep saying no or suggesting that her behaviour is naughty. I came up with the word ‘sensible’ to express a better way of doing things.
With safety in mind the word worked, but the free spirit in me challenged myself, how sad that sensible needs to be applied to someone so young. But safety is essential.
Sensible says ‘do not stroke the bee’s bottom’ but most of us can empathise with the urge to do so.
August the 19th Monday. A grey old day that was always going to be one of chores. With away-from-home jobs done I am about to do the home tasks. Laundry and tidying up. Aided and abetted by podcasts and music.
While pondering about Monday Mundane Monotony I thought I would spend five minutes checking up on previous 19th of August photos .
12 years ago I was escaping a blisteringly hot day post-on call in London. All of London was heading for the coast of Kent. I deliberately chose a rather unlovely part of the coast, Minster-on-Sea on the Isle of Sheppey. Just one photograph all day but I’m sure I had a well earned sleep and some book reading while looking out over a rather unlovely part of the Thames Estuary. 12 years on, my extremely random automatic photo editor turns my close-up beachscape into something rather joyful.
9 years ago packing my art stuff , this time before an on-call but also related to an escape the next day to the coast for some arty dabbling in Cornwall.
At no point until 3 years ago did I ever imagine that the coast would become a five minute walk from home. I’m not sure I imagined a life where a coastal escape could happen whenever I fancy it. It certainly makes a day of domestic chores much more enjoyable. Not exactly Fireworks all day but definitely something to perk up a dull day with dull chores.
Yesterday we took a trip to the last castle built in England. Built between 1911 and 1930 by a multi-millionaire.
Google maps suggested that the quickest route was via Dartmoor.
The livestock had other ideas.
Feeling immediately at home in a castle is not, I would suggest a normal feeling. But that was exactly the feeling as I entered Castle Drogo.
Castle Drogo took 21 years to build being finished in 1931. My Granddad took 10 years to build a three bedroom bungalow between 1920 and 1930.
Hugely different in scale and cost, the similarities made the Castle feel comfy.
The millionaire who built the castle owned the Home and Colonial stores, forerunner of supermarkets. My grandparents shopped at Home and Colonial. The architect and garden designer were aspirational designers of their day. Edward Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyl
Quiet corners of a massive castle were replicated in a small bungalow.
A standard lamp with a flying duck.
Which in turn, unknowingly until yesterday,my we replicated when we converted the actual Old Mortuary.
My Granddad was an avid gardener and very much a follower of Gertrude Jekyl. I still have one or two old terracotta pots with their rims painted white which she advocated and he copied. He also planted his front garden in her ‘swathes of colour’ style. Replicated yesterday at a castle in Devon but to me it felt like a very familiar acre of Essex garden design.
Below are some links to actual useful information about Castle Drogo should you care to know more.
But today is all about a plan coming together. 3 months after the new trellis went up on our wall our climbers are getting acquainted.
The evergreen Honeysuckle is in touching distance of the Wisteria and on the other side the evergreen Honeysuckle is already mingling with Rosa Banksia Lutea.
And the wisteria is finding her way along the chain rescued from the sea.
I am not a hugely goal orientated person. Fixed deliberate outcomes are a little too precise. That is not to say that I have no dreams or aspirations but I have learned that often hitting the goal post or losing the ball into the crowd turns out to be the better outcome. But if a goal must be hit with precision I Plan/Prepare/execute while wearing Personal Protective Equipment. PPE in PPE. I jest a bit of course because life does require quite a lot of goals to be hit, but personally I find the near misses more interesting.
Heavy traffic delivered me to this leafy lane earlier this week. My goal or desire was to get to a local park before the rain arrived but there was a traffic jam in my way and dark clouds were gathering. I took an unknown side street and found an uphill footpath in the top picture. The path went between some military land and a college and was completely quiet with no one else about. So quiet that a rustling in the bushes caught my attention. A pair of snails having sexy time on a flower.
A smooth sophisticated snail falls for rougher good looks on a fragrant bower.
Copulating Gastropods not at all the goal of the day but fascinating in their own way.
My accidental detour also gifted me an important message etched onto stone. The significance of the message lost in time.
In early June I got heat stroke while swimming in Greece. I learnt that I can no longer cope with really hot temperatures. So my emergency preparedness plan is not to be so daft again.
Today there was a gorgeous cool wind blowing directly up our street. I decided to banish a rather ghastly adobe orange wall in our back lane and turn it white.
The back lane runs parallel to the street, but inexplicably there was no wind. Despite the wind maps arrows.
My emergency preparedness plan, or my newfound common sense made me stop the job not even half done. The back lane was stupidly hot.
A few glasses of water and a cool shower were all I needed to avert a dizzy disaster. But then came the oversharing. Parcels arrived for our neighbours. I felt the need to explain my cold, showered towel-wrapped appearance at 5 pm to the delivery man. Does he care? Of course not he just wants parcels to be received and to no longer to be his responsibility. The irony is that while painting the wall white I missed my own parcel delivery.
Memo to self . No painting of white walls on hot afternoons when everyone in the street including me is expecting parcels.
No need to explain why I needed a shower.
No over sharing of information.
P.s. I only opened the door because a neighbour had promised me a delivery of some Saskatchewan Berry Jam later this afternoon. Offers like this are rare in Devon. I think he forgot.
Earlier this week we had the hottest day of the summer. One giddy day of wall to wall sunshine and no clouds. Over-excited media broadcasters called it a mini heatwave. It was just one day!
Not that we didn’t get a bit giddy and go for an evening adventure in the camper van and a swim at a different beach to our regular one.
A beach that is only dog friendly after 6pm in the summer. I suppose we imagined that we might be one of the few on the sand at 6. Not so at all, it was packed and it was only the long shadows of later on that chased people away.
Cawsand Bay was buzzing with happy people. Yachts and motor boats moored, some playing music as they prepared supper in their galleys. Even the wasp- like jet ski’s were silently bobbing on the waves just taking in the last heat of a lovely day.
However beautiful this spot is in summer we are far more regular visitors in the winter,when the dogs are welcome all day and we can be comforted by warm clothes and hot drinks. We should do this trip more often on summer evenings.
Where is the fun in an overused word when a rarely used word has been tapping at my brain for more than 37 years.
The term matrescence was created in the 1970s by an anthropologist, Dana Rafael who suggested the name for the period from conception to the child’s early years. She also suggested that matrescence was possibly a life long series of changes for women.
By the late eighties and early nineties there had been enough research for there to be a degree of knowledge around the changes that affected me, but the negatives, post partum depression, forced insomnia and exhaustion were quite rightly the headline issues.
Back to the odd question of the day and why I chose to subvert it .
Yesterday I went for an evening walk in a coastal graveyard, the under research or understanding of matrescence, a word that few people use, became a little clearer to me.
This is the backside of the grave of a woman called Jane who died in a small coastal community 200 years ago. Also listed on her grave were 3 of her dead infants, none of whom survived beyond 1 year old. The most recent infant death occurred 1 month before her own death. Her husband was also buried in the same grave but had lived a more normal lifespan. Just surviving childbirth was enough 200 years ago.
Even 100 years later things were not much improved in poor communities. But 50 years later in the 1970s, motherhood and infancy were not such a risky business and Matrescence got a name and some academic study.
Women and their babies stood a good chance of surviving and thriving, so the less critical to life changes, were being observed, considered and written about. Absolutely a good thing, but in 1970 Dana Rafael suggested that the changes were likely to be lifelong and that at key points puberty, menopause and later life women are likely to have more changes if they also have ongoing matrescence.
These 3 intersections of womanhood have barely been researched.
Around 50 years after Matrescence got a name, Dr Will Courtenay put Patrescence on the academic table. The effect of parenthood on men.
Now men have some skin in the game I wonder where the available research funding will go?
What does history suggest?
Pondering in a coastal graveyard, it makes me think. See link below.
We have empty bed syndrome. Our Grandchild quota has been cut by 2/3 over night. No longer a family all in the same post code and soon enough not in the same time zone.
Peace in our duvet as the sun rises. Somewhat artificially we have arrived in late summer by mid-August. The summer we prepared for is done, over for another year. Ahead is the bonus summer, the scrag end of summer admittedly, but one where anything might happen.
Because we have had our imaginations reset by a five year old and our joy in the mundane enhanced by the wonder of two under-twos.
A quiet duvet is just the start to new adventures.
theoldmortuary.design 