Month: May 2025

#1284 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Yardening1 Comment

We have been growing climbers in our yard for about ten months.

Last year we missed the most dynamic part of the growing season so none of the climbers bloomed with anything more than the short lived flowers they arrived with. This year, the first where they have had almost a full year in our care they are all slow to get going. But first a climbing rose and now the Wisteria are putting out flowers. Just as the first rose bloomed its stalk became too weak and it was rescued to live a brief life in a shot glass. Yesterday the first wisteria bloom snapped off the plant and has been rescued into the kitchen, this time in a milk bottle.

A good excuse for some still life photography but hardly the Yarden of Eden we had imagined. The pollinators are not queuing up to buzz and pollen-up their bottoms any time soon in our yard. In contrast to our blooms the wooden bug hotel is terrifically successful brown, scurrying non-photographic things live a busy metropolitan life under and around our water butts. Worms live a happy terracotta life in our improvised composters, enjoying coffee grounds from around the world, tea bags and the occasional dog poo. If yardening were a sporting event our Mid-May results would look something like this.

Brown Things 6- 2 Pretty Things

The pretty things scoring a two because the roses have learned how to both bloom and hold their heads up.

Claire Austin rose and the sharp shadows of night in a city yard.

#1283 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Stonehouse1 Comment
©The VOT

When I moved to the Plymouth area for the first time from Brighton, in the late eighties, I was not so sure it had been a wise move. The cultural and societal differences between a liberal and multicultural seaside city and a post industrial port were vast and uncomfortable for a long while. I quickly found my tribe by joining an art class.

Plymouth artists liked to drink in out of the way places. One such place was the Victualing Office Tavern, a grubby pub in one of the roughest parts of Plymouth. We went there to enjoy live jazz , rock and folk. Just as the quote says, we were a very broad gathering of people from all works of life. People creating art in council flats and some in homes that were mentioned in the Doomsday Book. There is a theory that artists are the first sign of gentrification….

Now I live in the exact same area  as my 1980’s art excursions, after a ten year return to London. The VOT has gone up in the world, as has the area. Queen Victoria should have swapped the word dangerous for interesting.

Visionary rather than vituperative  is a better way forward even for a Queen

Just a blog to use one of my favourite words that rarely gets an outing.

Queen Victoria was a Vituperative Old Trout.

The VOT best bar in Devon!

#1282 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn anniversary, Plymouth, Serendipity, Words1 Comment
© Jenny Tsang

Oh the loveliness of concatination, and having friends in High Places. This shot from a TV shows my friend Jenny, standing on the outside walkway of the lighthouse on Plymouth Hoe. A T.V crew getting a much better view of the goings on at the Hoe yesterday than I did. She watched the T.V in case she was on, and she snapped this pic.

She and I were chattering because I was suspicious that I had also caught her up a lighthouse in one of my meddled photographs. ( A sentence I never expected to write)

‘I caught my friend up a lighthouse’

©theoldmortuary

It is lovely when serendipity and concatination come together.

Then on my way home nature got all serendipitous. Look at this beautiful pansy making the most of a difficult location. Now just as I went to the Hoe and saw nothing yesterday,my pansy growing is not the most successful, slugs believe I am their artisan food producer. But leave a pansy out of my direct control and they manage very nicely just growing away in a drain.

Serendipity is a wonderful thing.

Concatination equally so.

#1281 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Plymouth, Plymouth SoundLeave a comment

What was the last live performance you saw?

Here is a conundrum. I did not see the last live performance that I experienced but I did hear it. I went to Plymouth Hoe, this morning, for the V E Day 80 Civic service and arrived too late to see anything apart from service personnel’s bottoms.

Or the back of the Mayoral Party.

But I did hear some marvelous music and listened to the Churchill V E Day speech in full for the first time. All in all a most exceptional and interesting dog walk .

Even more thrilling, one of the people at the top of the Lighthouse is my friend Jenny. She is the smaller human of the three.

#1280 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn abstract photography1 Comment

May is always my favourite month. 31 days of gorgeousness. I have been nurturing two climbing roses since my birthday in November. This one is called Claire Austin, she has been chosen for beauty and practicality. She is a spiky and reliable woman. Chosen to clamber onto a garage roof and deter the local cats from using our yard as a latrine. Not the most glamorous of jobs for such a beauty. I am still painting Turneresque images . 250 years ago when Turner was a visitor to Plymouth my back yard would have just a rocky outcrop surrounded by sea on three sides. Claire Austin would have been scrambling over rocks and turning her many pretty heads to the sun, I gave her a little bit of Turner yesterday.

The other rose is also growing but does not have a single flower head. The name ‘ Crepuscule’ is an odd word that makes me think of grumpiness. So far this rose is living up to the sensation of the name. Sturdy green growth but no sign of glamour or effort to climb anywhere. No background painting for the grumpy one . Instead, I picked some Arum Lillies at the Tennis Club. Cool white beauties under trees in an old quarry. Probably the quarry where the rock that was used to build my house was quarried from.

I blooming love May.

#1278 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art, Serendipity3 Comments

A waterfall in parkland.

Just a waterfall in the English countryside, below a pond.

With a glass shute that humans and cows can walk under.

And a message.

If people, or cows for that matter, for just one minute, allowed Modern Art to get into their heads rather than allowing it to flow over their heads, the world would be a very different place for them.

Or maybe significantly different. Not so likely for the cows.

5 minutes is all it takes at Delamore Arts. Staying longer is even more interesting.

https://g.co/kgs/YEDj8mw

#1277 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn learning, Talking1 Comment

List the people you admire and look to for advice…

My actual list of admired people that I would go to for advice, specific to me, is subject to a strict Non Disclosure Agreement with myself. 

They know who they are.

But I am an advice and knowledge junkie and will take advice or knowledge from anyone, admired or not if advice or wisdom is needed.

Unsolicited advice though, is not my thing. Just about tolerable if given with love or care but most of it just rinses off, unrequired, unrequested and unneeded. Selected deafness can be a superpower.

So can a killer sentence.

“That is really interesting, but I am afraid I am not interested”

Maybe just as a thought bubble or a quote on a T-Shirt. I will leave that to your own discretion.

For everything else there is Wisteria.

#1276 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity1 Comment

Do you vote in political elections?

I do. Quite a few years ago I narrowly avoided running over a political leader, he was a lucky man that I was concentrating. I was in bits he had stepped out in front of me from between two parked cars. He shrugged his shoulders in his expensive camel coat, gave  me a small hand flap of thanks and went on his way. This seemingly minor moment in my life when I absolutely did the right thing always haunts me when I consider the damage he has done to our country. This morning is no different.

Moving swiftly on, our first rose bloom ever on our defensive planting scheme bloomed and drooped. We plucked her tiny head from her damaged stem and popped it in a shot glass.

She is a very thorny rose who has been purchased specifically to ramble over our garage roof to deter the neighbourhood cats from getting into our yard and having a shit. Which is exactly the word I used when I nearly ran over the politician. At the time I said it because I was frightened. Now, well…

#1275 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art, Serendipity1 Comment

Beltane , Mayday, caught me out yesterday. It was a day filled to the brim. Not another thing could have been squeezed into any second of the waking day. So much so that the blog was brief and largely unexplained.

I combined two exercises from Paint Like Turner to create a painting of our local tidal pool.

The first big takeaway was that watercolour painting 250 years ago was not done on paper that was anywhere near white. So the process took about 24 hours as I dyed paper with cold tea.

The process and the result.

Then dried the papers in hot bright sunlight, which bleached out the colour a bit. I think I quite like painting on imperfect slightly beige paper. In real life the image has a warmth about it which I quite like.

Then to read the instructions and dig around in my paint store for the suggested colours or as close as I had.

I was working from one of my favourite, very atmospheric photographs of the pool.

At this point I should point out that this is the pool on an excellent day.

And this once again is the painting. Very curious to create art from firm instructions.

I need to sort this horizon out before actually attaching the mount.

I was quite thrilled that the painting more or less has a Turner colour palate as demonstrated by the biography I am also powering through.

But the painting is nothing like a Turner in reality and much more like my photograph.

Which rather neatly brings me to the end of the day. Which was spent with a huge glass of Pimms , celebrating a friend’s success in the London Marathon. 26 miles of determination and endeavour.

This photograph has the colour palate of the sun going down through a glass of Pimms.

A Beltane well spent.