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.
Christmas 2020 it wasn’t Christmas but it was Christmas because that’s what it was.
The day started early with some ‘Bobbing’ admin.
Tranquility Bay
Mulled cider and mince pies were the actual admin that was required today.
Then it was a swift drive home and festive sandwiches made ready for beach #2 Harlyn Bay.
Harlyn Bay
Don’t be fooled by golden sands, if Tranquility Bay looked like madness, Harlyn was madness+. A great walk in freezing temperatures followed by a convivial two van picnic observing all current regulations for Covid-19 control.
The dogs, of course, moved vans due to the superior picnic being served next door.
To be honest the idea of returning home and then cooking a traditional turkey roast began to feel less desirable the colder we got. A cup of hot tea was about as far as we could stretch when we got home.
Much later a mushroom Wellington made an appearance.
In between walking and talking we zoomed and whatsapped with people near and far.
Christmas Day in a Nutshell with not a cracker in sight.
Our last day with the relative freedoms of Tier 1. Today Cornwall is downgraded , that’s a whole new set of rules to remember! In
Merry Christmas, who needs a big blog on Christmas morning, probably no one . What we all need is our friends and family around us. The hurly burly of traditions all bound up with over crowded homes and too much food. What we have this year @theoldmortuary is the time to go and look at Christmas lights after last minute shopping.
Southside Street, The Barbican, Plymouth.
And the chance to make home made cranberry sauce.
While watching Christmas Carols from Kings College, Cambridge.
Very peaceful and lovely, but not normal. We love and miss our festive season regulars, the irregulars and those in other realms. Love to our families and friends far and wide. You light up our lives.
Christmas Eve 2020, what to say! Facebook reminded me yesterday that the day before Christmas Eve is usually Christmas Jumper Day, if it is a work day. Not @theoldmortuary we usually rock a festive t-shirt, you can hide it under scrubs and flash when appropriate.
Which is very fortunate for this meandering blog . Facebook also shared a video with me this morning. It seems only right to share it on here too.
My favourite Christmas tune of all time.
It’s very strange looking into a fridge on Christmas Eve and still see spare capacity. It’s also odd to feel able to crack open the festive treats, Cheese Footballs, without a pang of guilt that I am depriving my children of a heritage, festive, comestible. No family for us this year, just an empty table where sometimes there have been over twenty. Not this actual table obviously.
Back to Cheese footballs.The more retro cheese footballs become the more significant it is to hunt them down early in the festive shopping season. I’ve had these little chaps since September. I have even supplied other families with them. I am obsessed!
In these Covid times where even trivial things have disappeared I thought I would share my personal timeline of cheese footballs
My grandparents owned a country pub for most of their lives. A substantial meal in their establishment was a pickled egg and a bag of crisps.
High days and holidays were marked by bar snacks. This was long before the health hazards of such things was common knowledge. Christmas was marked by swapping out the dry peanut and raisin combo for Huntley and Partners Cheese Footballs. The tin below is the retail version. Pubs could get a substantial size catering pack in the same design. Nobody ever knew that my greedy hands helped themselves to the Christmas stock long before it got to the bar, which for reasons explained below is a good thing!
Time moved on and pubs like The Red Cow have disappeared. The illustration of the building above is an image I found earlier today on the internet.
Bar snacks have been tested and declared a bad idea because, pre- Covid, the words man, pub toilet and hand washing rarely appeared in sentences or real life. High levels of transferred urine and faecal matter could be detected in free bar snacks within half an hour of being placed on the counter. Women may also have been guilty of the non hand washing crime.
Cheese footballs not unlike the England football team are a long way from their golden years of the sixties. Every September they can be spotted in the Seasonal aisles of a few supermarkets. Dressed up in a fancier tub and sold by KP.
At this point pondering took a curious path. I googled the Red Cow to see if the internet had an image. It did and a whole lot more.
I can share with you an article from the Daily Mail discussing the conversion of the Red Cow to a dwelling. The toilets get a mention. Fascinating too that the new owner was a microbiologist.
Somewhat stranger is an image of my grandfather’s grave in Wethersfield Cemetery that appears on the same Google. Something I have never seen before. My family did mild dysfunction long before it was a ‘thing’. My grandmother , Gladys, is buried in Melbourne, Australia.
As it turns out this is exactly the right blog for Christmas Eve 2020. A curious mixture of festive, reflective, emotional and pragmatic. I urge you to view the video, it is gorgeously poignant.
Merry Christmas, thankyou for being here.
P.S Following the publication of this blog a local history group sent me two photographs of The Red Cow.
The top photo is how I remember the pub but with the signage of the lower picture. The pub was a Ridley’s establishment or house as it would have been known.
I’m not certain visiting a new part of the coast is entirely sensible at dusk and low tide, particularly in late November. Despite being fairly close to home, Hannafore Beach is completely unknown to me. After a walk towards Talland Bay and back I thought I would give the dogs a low tide rock pool scamper. They loved it.
I’m just not quite so sure myself. Apologies to the many people I know who really love this place and find it restorative. Alone on an incongruous concrete pathway leading out to sea at sunset I felt a sense of foreboding and menace. There was a sense of dead seafarers souls winding round my ankles like silken slippery manacles.
Having thoroughly spooked myself, with fanciful imaginings and uncertainty about how the tide would come in, we called it a day. Two exhausted dogs and an overactive imagination. Time to research shipwrecks in Looe Bay and put my mind at rest , or not.
P.S. I found this dog centric page on line. A much more positive vibe! I’m clearly just inventing my own ghost stories for these dark days around the winter solstice.
The shortest day has lost daylight and quite frankly the few hours of daylight were of pretty poor quality in our part of the world.
Hugo and Lola tolerated another day of dog walks planned around the rejigging of Festive Logistics @theoldmortuary . Nothing on our walks was inspirational enough to illustrate this blog so the Christmas tree has stepped in, rather camply, to shine a light in the darkness. Apart from fog and rain it was a successful day, the last of the Christmas gifts were wrapped and sorted for collection. All the gifts for our family, marooned so suddenly in London and the South East, have gone off in the post or with a kind friend who was driving up to the city today.
The shortest day is always a day of optimism that from here days start to lengthen and we can begin to look forward to Spring. This year the feelings have extra significance given the mental and physical load that everyone is carrying during the Pandemic.
So now concentration must turn to creating a festive season for two people and two dogs. This could be tricksy, we have never catered for such low numbers over Christmas.
I wonder if a quiet year will give us the chance to think about all the amazing people we have shared the festivus with in past years . There is also a chance that for once the TV might actually be turned on but if the weather is good that is unlikely.
Our weekend had a plan that most definitely conformed to a usual pre-christmas weekend. Saturday started and finished with a watery theme.
It began well with some cold water bobbing.
In the evening we went to the National Marine Aquarium for a ‘Night at the Museum’ dining event which in itself was a curious piece of serendipity. The pictures we took will illustrate the rest of the blog.
We had been booked to attend this event at a different time of year but it was postponed until this weekend because of Covid-19. Our socially distanced dining area was in the room holding the Eddystone tank which is where the tenuous serendipity comes in.
In the morning we were swimming in Plymouth Sound above unseen sea creatures. In the evening we were dining surrounded by the same types of sea creatures that would have witnessed our flailing limbs from below. Not that I’m suggesting that ‘Bobbers’ swim to the Eddystone Rock, or in anyway disrupt sea lanes. We ‘ bob’ in the vicinity, quite a distant vicinity in reality and always with regard to the Sea Lanes. We are not the sort of sea swimmers who get mentioned in the Plymouth Evening Herald or are reprimanded by Harbour Masters or Port Admirals. I don’t think we even trouble seagulls.
In between these two events at 4:30pm Boris Johnson had delivered a monumental clusterfuck. Or Prime Ministers Briefing as it is officially known.
Without going into details, these can be found on any, far more reliable, news source. Christmas in Britain has been Clusterfucked.
This certainly affected the mood and ambience of our evening at the aquarium. We had plenty to talk about just trying to reset the logistics of a Bubble Christmas to the Clusterfuck variety. This may be the time to say that the food was great and being in an aquarium at night was wonderfully calming. The Rays were particularly meditative. We had a great evening.
Understandably, under the current circumstances, the streets of Plymouth, on our way to the Aquarium, were unusually quiet for the last Saturday before Christmas, as were some tanks at the aquarium.
The Sea Horses, our favourite exhibit, were missing.
Only time will tell if the Sea Horses and the good residents of Plymouth were spending their Saturday night doing the same thing. Officially the Sea Horses were ‘ away breeding’ It was a massive disappointment in a day inadvertantly filled with disappointments. I’ve been forced to design my own Christmas card. Exclusively revealed here!
This was supposed to be the last December swim , presuming that we would ( The Bobbers) be off celebrating Christmas with our familial/friend bubbles. But Boris and the Virus changed all that at 4:30 pm when Britain announced sweeping new restrictions that would change Christmas for all parts of Britain.
Now we have the rest of December ahead of us to swim at sunrise.
Naturally occuring hearts have been a little thin on the ground.
This one is not on the ground nor is it particularly naturally occuring. The bright blue heart is just an accident of light reflection.
Nothing in this picture shows how windy it was during this walk. Maybe the picture below gives a sense.
Dog walks in weather like this are for one reason only. Elimination. Picking up a dog poo in such winds is unusually difficult. It was hard to stand and open the plastic poo bag but once I had grasped the evenings offering the wind whipped one little nugget and blew it away before I could tie the bag up. I did not chase it!
Baubles, stars and twinkle. I’ve always been a museum and gallery kind of person. When my children were small I always chose a theme to keep them interested. I used the same thought process for my shift at The Box today, hunting out Christmas decorations cunningly disguised as exhibits in the Natural History Department. The magnificent egg collection was an easy replacement for baubles.
Cushion Starfish make pretty good stars.
Twinkle was provided by beetles and minerals.
Even the mince pie gift at the end of the day seemed a little closer to a starfish than a star.
All these pictures were taken in the Mammoth Gallery. For once she was not the main event. But she is not to be ignored.
Another day, another afternoon dog walk and another sunset. Portwrinkle was a very fine reward for a day’s work that failed to live up to expectations. It was nowhere near as dull or difficult as I had imagined.
Clearing a shed sometime this week was a plan that required reasonable weather and some sort of reward. As it turned out clearing the shed was not so bad. Two big bags of miscellaneous ‘stuff’ was whittled down to one small bag in a surprisingly interesting afternoon. Quite how the content of those two big bags had ended up together is a big mystery but ultimately the sort out was not so onerous that it required a beach trip afterwards. The dogs, however, insisted. Not that they helped in any way with the shed clearance.
We had the beach and harbour to ourselves which is always an extra pleasure. the dogs exhausted themselves on the black sand and I watched the sun set.
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