Author: theoldmortuary.design

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.

Pandemic Pondering #35

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Gardens and gardeningLeave a comment

This morning this beauty appeared in the rough ground that runs along the side @theoldmortuary.We planted a mix of Oriental Poppies and Field Poppies on the rough ground to mark 100 years since the end of WW1. The land is opposite the village War Memorial.The rough ground is not officially ours but it is the entrance to our back garden. For many years it was the responsibility of the local council to look after it. It is a sad little triangle of land planted with actual road signs. It also bears the posts of old Street furniture and the droppings and scrapings of many years of road surfacing contractors left over cement and tarmac. With Austerity the council has abandoned it. As a growing space it has a mixed aptitude, in the spring it does beautifully with miniature daffodils . In summer weeds do particularly well but so do the poppies. At a high point, it slopes quite steeply up a hill, we have created a little garden between abandoned curb stones and an old but hugely fecund ash tree. The garden like the rest of the triangle is somewhat picky on what it will grow. Currently it supports a very old climbing rose from Hannah’s parents garden. A Christmas tree from a broken home who needed somewhere to rest his roots, some vivid geraniums, a glorious helibore and a few bright Heucheras.Attempts at introducing other things have failed , not exactly expensively, but disapointingly.This week’s Lockdown outdoor project is our annual chore of taming the wild space for the summer. We’ve not quite finished but it was a great reward to have this beautiful poppy this morning.And then there were two.and then the job was done.

Pandemic Ponderings #34

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Pandemic ponderings, SerendipityLeave a comment

Pandemic Ponderings started on 17 th March sometime before the Government Lockdown restrictions and a little before my own self isolation due to a common virus. That’s about 36 days of life being significantly different from anything any of us have experienced before. Have we @theoldmortuary developed a new set routine? The answer would have to be no although we do seem to run out of food/ provisions on Tuesdays. Our world has shrunk and the weekly trip to two supermarkets, one each, is an event in life rather than something squeezed into life. Communication is everything and we’ve not quite got that right. Yesterday was National Tea Drinking Day, unconsciously we took the cue and bought 500 teabags, both bagging a bargain. Stockpiling at its most shameful, the T bags join the six tins of sweetcorn.Gardening has become a routine but we are fast running out of places to store lawn cuttings, bush trimmings and weeds. It is weather related rather than supply and demand which governs shopping. Storage of garden waste is soon going to be the factor that controls us. The weather flip opposite of the gardening routine is interior DIY. It’s amazing how much we can achieve just by using stuff we already have in our shed.Curiously Mondays have become our laundry and house cleaning day. This is exactly the routine my grandparents had and it’s one that has crept up on us. In non pandemic times we washed whenever there was a load but with no life beyond home we are producing less washing. House cleaning is not so bad when you are not exhausted from working elsewhere, I can only think of two pre-pandemic routines that we’ve not modified. One is the bedtime walk for the dogs, we never meet anyone even in normal times and that’s not changed, people don’t whizz past us in their cars anymore . No cars means no pollution and what is noticibly more lovely about our evening walks, this spring, is the intensity of fragrance from people’s gardens and the hedgerows.The other unchanged routine is having flowers in the house. The weeks of daffodils have passed and currently we have tulips.One slightly odd juxtaposition is our fireplace. An interiors psychologist suggested keeping Christmas lights up until Spring as it helps to make darker evenings less dire. Weve stuck with that because a Pamdemic needs light shining on it. Fear not, that is not a Trumpian solution , we just love a bit of twinkle, any excuse. Now we have tulips and Christmas lights,if this goes on it could be sunflowers. In this shot the pandemic gets a mention too. It does not improve with twinkle.

Not to be outdone the garden has some new solar lights to brighten up the evening of whoever walks past the house. Something we do at Christmas time but it seems important to do it now too.Lola reminds me that there is one other routine that must be adhered to, dog hugs. This is the face of someone who wants me to stop pondering.

Pandemic Ponderings #33

On By theoldmortuary.designIn PaintingsLeave a comment

I’m an abstract painter with a love of colour and texture. I’ve painted abstracts predominantly for the last ten or so years. Two years ago I took some watercolour classes and since then I’ve dabbled with watercolour painting for a quick painting fix, one of the things I love to paint with watercolour are dead fish. They’ve always fascinated me as a photographer. I was lucky for a long while to live near Brixton Market was but it was long before I rediscovered watercolour. Cool box next time I visit though to bring some exotic models back to Cornwall.

The reason this is a pandemic pondering is that I have plenty of time for some fishy watercolours but no fishmongers. I’m going to have to find something to fill the gap. Tinned fish is the obvious answer when I do the weekly shop.

For now I give you my fishy friends from before the pandemic.

Pandemic Pondering #32

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Home TownsLeave a comment

London is just as series of small towns and villages joined up by history and development. To the outsider it may just seem like urban sprawl but to people living there each town or village has its own identity and sense of soul and belonging. My village for ten years was Gipsy Hill, I still have very close links there.

Famed for Fanny, the Gipsy Hill Station Cat.Gipsy Hill also has the most amazing corner shop,right by the station, filled from floor to ceiling with organised precision it stocks everything, and is staffed by men who are always happy and helpful. I have never had a corner shop quite so lovely.

Sadly one of the men who works there has recently died of Covid-19. Terrible for his family, friends and colleagues. His loss will be felt by the whole community because Gipsy Hill and nearby Crystal Palace has so much love for this shop and the wonderful men who run it.

Communities all over the world are experiencing the loss of amazing people. Such difficult times. RIP.

♥️London ♥️Gipsy Hill ♥️FreshGo

Since I wrote this the Guardian has published an article on Kumar, the man whose death inspired this blog.I urge you to read this professional version.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/20/london-death-shines-light-on-covid-19-threat-to-local-shopworkers?CMP=share_btn_link

This story has a sad but gentle traction. Some one has created a graffiti tribute just outside the store.

Thanks to Rachel Baseby on the Friends of Gipsy Hill Facebook page for this image

Pandemic Pondering #31

On By theoldmortuary.designIn SerendipityLeave a comment

Last night we watched Bait an award winning film telling the story of a fishing village. It is well worth a watch.It is a very good film, filmed all in black and white with so many unique techniques that add up to a great cinema experience. Even if , as now, it’s an at home experience. I was inspired to take black and white images myself during a walk around Plymouth Harbour . With added Turquoise for no other reason than I fancied doing something different. It’s a walk we do often in all sorts of weather, it made the walk more interesting to just focus on just one colour .

Pandemic Ponderings #25 Chapter 5

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Food ( but this is not a food blog), Pandemic ponderings, SerendipityLeave a comment

Easter 2020 in Lockdown was an intriguing one. Throughout the world people were unable to gather.

Our Lockdown Easter for two involved chocolate and some lovely home cooking. Pandemic Ponderings #25 gave us the chance to gather together with friends and family, sharing stories and anecdotes using technology. It wasn’t as lonely as I anticipated and the food lasted longer than it ever has, but next year it would be good to get back to normal, I accept that means the weather will be shocking.

Pandemic Pondering #30

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Memorial Benches, Pandemic ponderingsLeave a comment

Book bags and Woodland walks, featuring dog bums

We don’t forward plan much these days. A firming up of rules on driving to exercise during Coronovirus Restrictions freed us up to venture just a little further afield. The journey also gave us the chance to drop bags of books on the doorsteps of ‘Shielding Bookworms’ , actually members of a local book club,who need to self isolate for 12 weeks. Describing them as I did I made them sound like a covert infestation requiring pesticide.

Cadsonbury Woods, a Riverside walk near Callington has been a favourite walk for 30 years. It has an additional uphill walk to an ancient Hill Fort. We rarely do that because we always have the dogs and the fields are often being grazed by sheep. Without the dogs we would normally sprint up hills of such challenging gradients like mountain goats. Not today.
https://www.tamarvalleyvibe.uk/?p=1639

There were a few cars in the car park but we mostly had the woods to ourselves. Most visitors must have been of the mountain goat variety.

The birdsong was beautiful and recent work, felling trees to protect the river bank from erosion, had really opened up the walk to bright daylight. We even found a Memorial Bench.

There’s a lot of dog bums in the following pictures, some faces, some nature in springtime but I completely forgot to take a picture of the most significant part of the outing.

A cup of tea from a flask and a shortbread biscuit, which we had to share, after a couple of hours of walking in the woods. Bliss in these unusual times.

Pandemic Ponderings #29

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity1 Comment

Be the nosey neighbour.

Walking the dogs gives us a rhythm to our day and a purpose that we sometimes, in dreadful weather, would rather not have. In Lockdown our walks have become much more home centric. In particular our late evening walk follows a pattern . There is a pattern for the dogs who like to sniff which other dogs have passed that way and a pattern for us which involves graveyards, patches of grass, the backs of a few houses and never other humans.

Yesterday a neighbour came to.see us concerned about another neighbour who had not drawn their curtains.

We immediately knew that all had been fine the night before because the pattern of lights had been quite normal on the last dog walk.

With some trepidation we did nosey neighbour things, realised there was a serious problem and called the emergency services.

I’m writing this because of the trivial things we thought about that might have stopped us doing the right thing.

Fear of doing the wrong thing.

We had previously offered help to these neighbours and were politely declined.

We were not afraid of finding the worst possible outcome. It’s what we used to do in our day jobs and it doesn’t bother us.

What we were, for a moment, concerned about was upsetting people who had politely declined help a year or so ago. We were concerned that someone might be cross with us or upset about us invading their privacy. Thankfully our brains defaulted to working heads and we got on and did the right thing.

Covid 19 is shrinking all our worlds to something more like the 17 th Century except we don’t know our neighbours as we would have done then. All the technology in the world would not have sorted out yesterday’s situation. It just needed us to be nosey, however awkward and worrying that felt at the time.

Pandemic Pondering #28

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity4 Comments

The inevitable has happened, a friend, who I loved bumping into, has died, not of Coronovirus but something that had got its claws into her long ago. It was undeserved as most deaths are and the world has lost a fabulous ball of energy. Not for me the excoriating grief of close friends or family, more a sort of dull acceptance of the inevitability of an inevitable event.

I suppose I’m describing the loss of someone to whom I was not close close but whose company I really valued when our busy lives coincided.

Our last such meeting was serendipitous, one of her favourite words and one that I stole soon after I met her.

My little town was briefly brought to a standstill by hundreds of motorcycling Santa’s.

I had ‘popped’ out to collect keys from an estate agent,a job that should have taken 10 minutes, two hours later I was using an unusual route to find my car which I had left down by the river.

My friend and I met, I was hugely surprised, not only because she was already terminally ill but because she lived 5 miles away and our little town is never going to be on anyone’s bucket list of things to do before you die.

We hugged and made one another laugh, caught up on each others news and shared snippets of information about our friends in- common that either of us had met recently.

She has never had ‘ an Elephant in the room’ . Her Cancer story was never hidden and her progress, or not ,with it was well known. We shared an update.

” It’s bloody everywhere now”

” That is such a bugger, bastard thing”

We agreed to catch up with some other friends ‘ In the Spring’ . She caught her bus and I walked down a 45 degree hill to find my car.

As usual meeting her had lifted my heart and soul , maybe some sadness but primarily she had, as usual, shone optimism and happiness into our conversation and we had luxuriated in sharing the use of the word Serendipitous, as we always did.

So here I am in April , she has died. Coronovirus and it’s social restrictions have cancelled Spring meetings, even if Cancer hadn’t already done it’s bit to blight our springtime meeting. Coronovirus has shaped and impacted the way us second tier mourners do mourning. I can’t go round to our shared friends and give them a hug, drink tea and wallow in reminiscing, love and happy memories. Hugging is the thing that wordlessly both links and restores us, it feels inhuman to endure bereavement without them. Hugging saves us saying too much or too little and making the misery worse. It also offers the opportunity of sorting out leaking eyes or a snotty nose behind someone’s back.

Not for anyone in the second tier of connection to her and many in the first the chance to gather together to celebrate and mourn the loss of a veritable power house of a woman.

It all feels kind of blunt really. Dreadfull sadness with no ability to hug or share seems to take on a previously unimaginable direction and poignancy.

The power of Hugging, I miss it.