theoldmortuary has been a blog for about five years. It has evolved into an almost daily event. Pondering on the things that are inspired by my daily life. Often mundane, sometimes repetitive I swerve from hyperlocal activity to big and small thoughts without blinking an eye. I am an artist and writer. My hometown is Plymouth in South West England, part of me will always be connected to London and another part loves to travel.
Spring tides and slightly warmer waters have brought a little zing to coastal sea swimming.
Kim and I had a Sunday night swim and she returned to the beach with the sensation of a stinging nettle encounter on one arm, neither of us had seen any jellyfish but that seemed the most likely cause of her discomfort.
Yesterday I was working in The Box and was having a natter with a colleague. We were talking about our weekends and were surprised to realise that while I was in the water on Sunday she was basking, like a reptile in the sun, on a boat moored not far from where Kim and I were swimming.
We were not even in the Natural History department when she flashed me the picture of the Compass Jelly Fish she had seen on her return to land. The Sunday mystery sensation explained…
Shameless use of wildlife to make my excuses and say that it is a busy week with not to much time for pondering. It is also a week of Spring tides and wrong tide times so there is also not any time for Bobbing. Weeks like this, the one certain thing is dog walking early in the morning and later in the evening. Mornings are calmer because I dont venture onto the beaches.
But evenings, coupled with unusual tides have become quite the giddy experience. Lola calmly digs for gold.
But Hugo wages his one aquatic pursuit ,with great diligence and a lifetime of practice; rescuing all the floating seaweed in the bay.
We spent a lovely hour sat in the setting sun while he busied himself on the most futile and pointless of tasks. Sometimes he persuaded Lola to join in but she lacks any interest in doing something quite so impossible and prefers to just irritate him.
Leaving the beach at a time to suit the human element of the pack was more difficult. Rescuing seaweed is such a satisfying task that Hugo never wants to stop. Once back on his lead he was distinctly skittish and skipped and jumped like a puppy all the way home. Not too shabby for a mature gentleman of nearly 10. Even the evening poo featured many spins and elaborate excited dance steps before the exact landing spot was identified.
I belong to a great bookgroup. Just the right mix of 10 people with wide and interesting reading habits. Absolutely we talk about the book we have all read together each month hi and books that we have read independently. But we also talk about anything else that the books have inspired. Today a bookish t-shirt found a new home.
But most significantly a new word revealed itself at book club today. Viridescent !! Meaning greenish or becoming green. After the wet weeks we’ve had, Viridescent is just about all we can produce in the yard.
Then Sunday arrived with some sunshine which added a bit of colour to the viridescence. Not too much of course.
And then this morning there was a burst of colour.
As daylight established itself it wasnt just me excited to see the flowers of summer. The Bee’s arrived and were immediately busy.
Now if I were a bee I would be all over the gorgeous yellow seed pod, but I suppose he knows his business of collecting pollen better than me . Just one last blooming development, the really fancy poppy revealed its own fondant fancy seed pod, this time it is a subtle lime.
The bees, of course, are elsewhere, inside these lovely petals.
Viridescent you are so yesterday. The yard is blooming.
Yesterday was all about watching family members doing sporty things. The weather was kind to everyone. Hannah and friends Emily and Becky swam to Drakes Island and back.
Just once a year swimmers are allowed to swim across the deep water channel entrance to Devonport Dockyard between Devils Point and Drakes Island. The swim was sponsored to raise money for the Chestnut Appeal, an organisation that raises money for research into Prostate Cancer. A disease that is close to our hearts and minds as far too many men have lives blighted by this disease. When I say close to our hearts the comment is emotional not anatomical. The prostate gland actually lives just below a mans bladder and surrounds the urethra just after it leaves the bladder. Clearly nowhere near a woman’s actual heart! It is the size of a walnut or chestnut. The prostate is a busy thing making the juice that sperm swim in, but in engineering terms it is badly designed for longevity. My dad described it as having ‘built in obsolescence’ . As men age it swells and becomes thickened, which is benign disease, and makes men wee a lot at night, sadly it is also the site of a very common cancer.
The swim was a little delayed because a big ship needed to pass.
But soon enough the swimmers were off.
And 30 minutes later back again.
Rewarded by coffee provided by their very attentive support team.
My second stint of watching involved the TV, our family had tickets for Wimbledon and while on an outside court had front row seats. Unfortunately the BBC overlayed the exact spot they were sitting with a score checker.
When they were in court 1 they were just tiny dots of pink and blue.
Never in the history of @theoldmortuary has a blog had so many people in it! The dogs were there, at swimming, not Wimbledon, too.
So after a day of watching other people do stuff I felt duty bound to take a little dip in the sea. The crowds were smaller and reaching the island positively not allowed.
Sunshine and Fl(Sh)owers, mostly showers. So much rain in the last two weeks, the new flower beds in our yard have become mini jungles. After the vivid colour of the late Spring ; Summer is a different yardening business. The greenery is wild and vibrant, the flowers mostly shy and retiring, preferring to stay inside or appearing only as coy buds.
Domestic admin is the winner in this sort of weather, we are a week ahead of the game, which feels very luxurious. The game in question is a family holiday, at our house, followed very swiftly by an art exhibition. The smug feeling of being prepared is almost certainly going to be fleeting. We had double smugness as we tucked into a vegetable curry featuring courgettes from the garden.
The sun came out yesterday evening and just like flowers, people and live music popped out to bask for an hour or so.
The perfect setting for a party at the Tinside Lido
The minute the sun came out we set off for a walk, and a quest for junk food.What better way to finish off after a healthy veg curry than a walk to the lighthouse and some 2 for 1 chocolate. Saturday all sorted.
Saturday mornings have a bit of a pattern in Stonehouse. Wordle/Exercise/Coffee. This morning things will be the same but different. A man we often meet at the coffee shop put an urgent message on Facebook last night
Shocking to read and shocking for everyone involved. Jack is an eloquent chap and went on to post a video.
The normal pattern of Saturday will continue for us, but not for Jack’s elderly neighbour. Who knows what additional health problems she accrued during her four hours of pain and lack of appropriate professional care. Thank goodness she had good neighbours who clearly did their absolute best for her. How in 2022 is this acceptable?
Crazy early morning walk, this morning, the sun almost too hot for two dogs, who are a little too furry for this time of year. By the time we returned home we had walked through a rain power shower. I was on my quest for abstract colours and shapes in bright sunlight and found a couple. Both doors this time.
Ever a magpie for images of rust. I also wasted 5 minutes on a neighbours pile of old metal put out for the recycling team.
The pile was much bigger yesterday.
The recycling team failed to take any of it but local people have taken more than just photos of the assemblage. Five minutes or so may also have been spent by me, yesterday, with someone elses garbage. Yesterday my favourite bit of rust were these two birds
Overnight I had a brainwave about what I could do with the bed springs, those in the garbage pile not the ones in my actual bed! Too late some other urban forager had taken them before I could. How will my sweet peas cope …
Before the rain set in me and the dogs cut quite the abstract image on our walk.
After our drenching our silhouettes were nothing like as sharp. Fortunately for you ,there was no bright sunlight to do an after shot. We squelched home, fur and skirts clinging tightly to our legs. Even the rust pile on the corner of our street failed to hold our waterlogged attention. The dogs also love the scrap metal for reasons of creative peeing, almost as much as I love to photograph it. Bigger dogs leave messages much higher up, cats, mice and hedgehogs leave their fragrance lower down, the whole thing is a multi story message board to them. Five minutes well spent for all of us on a dry walk.
Two new exhibitions at The Box yesterday had me pondering. The exhibitions themselves couldn’t be more different and yet they are both about a sense of place and our place in places
Because the Night Belongs to Us, is an exhibition about Plymouths changing nightlife. George Shaws, George Shaw is about one mans relationship with his home.
Goodness me they made me think and for anyone local to Plymouth I would recommend a visit over the summer.
George Shaw paints landscapes in Humbrol Enamel Paint. The smell in the galleries is soft and curiously nostalgic. The paintings are intimate and sometimes painfully similar to my own life experience. Because the Night is similarly evocative, dark and warm coloured, neon lit with snatches of music both familiar and unknown. The only thing missing in this exhibition of the underbelly of a city is sticky carpet and the smells.
Because The Night Belongs To Us. The Box
I am not from Plymouth or Coventry, the two cities that are the subject of these exhibitions but I am a wandering citizen of the worlds they represent.
George Shaw paints a council estate and the council house in which he grew up. I’ve never lived on a council estate but like many people I am deeply familiar with their architecture and the proportions and landscaping of Social housing. His painting could easily be of the corner of North East Essex, where I grew up.
George Shaws painting of a tree ‘New Romantic’ could be the tree in my home village of Gosfield, which was also a serial victim of vandalism or in a different mindset, embellishments.
In my village, during the seventies, and quite possibly in George’s tree zone it was relatively common to find old porn mags and beer cans in the undergrowth, curious treasure for children to find, we were amused more than harmed by it. Such things were, of course, the night life of these little patches of woodland.
Again finding a common experience in someone elses life. George depicts, in a series of drawings his childhood home emptied following the death of his last parent. The heartbreaking emptiness after the forensic clearing that most of us will have to go through. The last time you will ever see that, oh so familiar, back door of your childhood and or adulthood. The door that launched you into the world.
The back door indeed that you crept through after venturing into your version of Nightife.
A fab day working at The Box, thinking my own thoughts and sharing other peoples experiences. What better way to spend a Wednesday.
Last nights sunset was a warning, away from the actual sunset the skies were sulphurous. If it had been wintertime the skies would have been warning that snow was imminent. Overnight there was a lot of rainfall, the yard this morning was bejewelled by raindrops.
Apologies for using the same poppy as yesterday but nobody else has bloomed yet.
The Agapanthus is really holding off from blooming fully but the raindrop jewels are very pretty.
Not so great, from the overnight deluge are the slugs and snails, a mini city of slime and activity is happening in the yard, all at a very slow pace. It amazes me how much destruction such slow creatures can manage without any sense of rush or hurry. I never catch them rushing to destruction, they just travel to their destinations of gluttony with a casual slide. If only they were cuddlier or prettier they would be quite relaxing to watch but that is not something I have ever seen advocated for lowering of stress or tension. Quite the reverse really, somehow these slow moving creatures make me slightly uncomfortable without any logical reason. I don’t photograph them either, not even for the benefit of this blog. So here is a slug free sunrise.
This lovely shaded orange was a pocket shot after our evening bob/swim. It really was a rough one and nobody stayed in long. The strange thing is that waves can be lovely to swim in, but near to high tide it can all be a little bit too much of a good thing. Yesterday morning the perfect wave machine made its way close to our swimming zone. A very expensive wave machine to be sure, and very unusual.
The waves created were beautiful. Just big regular ripples really, I was sad to be on dry land, as this powerful submarine slipped by, it might have been rather interesting to feel all that power reverberating through the water. Our poppies are also presenting as rather powerful beasts this week. Just like the submarine, all the action is happening under the surface.
These two have not yet opened but someone else did overnight.
Is it just me or does the centre of this poppy look just like the most delicious cake?
Nuclear submarines to Fondant Fancies all in the space of about 500 yards and fewer words. Happy Monday.
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