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.
It is almost 7 years since I last had a formal interview of any sort. I am completely out of practice of describing myself to others.
Does anyone really listen to, or remember a self-description?
How would you describe yourself to someone?
People are so busy making their own judgements and assessments of the person they see before them.
I care less and less what people make of me as I get older. First and chance encounters are just that. Repeated encounters build a more accurate, nuanced portfolio of my character traits.
I can think of people who have quite the wrong idea of me. But their narrative suits their purpose. Others perhaps know me a little better than I know myself.
I always think people, myself included are a lot like Avocados. Their core values and attributes exist within the enormous seed, but the pulp changes and develops over a lifetime, while the skin just slowly ages but shows evidence of the good times and the harms that shape the whole fruit. The skin of course, is all that is ever seen until a sharp knife is applied. Time to halt the avocado analogy I think.
My Life as an Avocado- the autobiography I will never write.
Just a bit of a blue sky ponder while we get on with chores in an industrial estate. Significantly the campervan needed its roof properly cleaned to remove the sap from being parked under trees. Coxside a 21st century industrial estate does not have the glamour or flawed history of the past.
But it does have an excellent Bikers Cafe where we can while away the hour it takes to remove sap. Serendipity gave me this absolute gift of an image. A biker taking a long drag on his very long pipe.
Men and women would have been smoking pipes like this in this area since the 16th century while taking a break from whatever trade they worked hard at. A bit of digital tweakery and the 21st Century Bikers’ gear becomes a little bit of history.
And he can conjure even more history from the smoke of his pipe.
Hard on the heels of yesterday’s blog comes todays’. I failed to push the publish button yesterday. Too busy getting out of the house to join the bobbers.
The tides and the weather are being kind this week. This is not our usual location for a bigger bobbing group but the perfection of tide and weather had made our usual jumping off spot very congested.
This location with slopes and steps is perfect for solo or two person swimming, but as no one else was there it accommodated 9 bobbers and a dog very well. But it was the previous day swim for two that prompted this illustration that prompted this blog
Rocks as a Snicker Chocolate Cake
A friend and I had planned a late afternoon swim the previous day. Beyond the swim she arrived very much as a woman on a mission. She needed chocolate and she needed it now. So as no swimmer should ever do we headed off to the pub first.
The pub in question the V.O.T serves very good cake.
No nickname ever and so no backstory. The closest I get to a nickname is ‘Bobber’.
As a founder member of a swimming group of just under 20 people including past members who predominantly swim in one location we, as a group are recognisable, we have named sweatshirts, and have a certain positive notoriety in the swimming boom at Firestone Bay.
Groups are not for everyone and ours is as unstructured as a group can be. Just a WhatsApp group to organise our swimming time so no-one has to swim alone.
” So are you a bobber” is a fairly regular question.
Followed by ” Why are you called Bobbers”
Because mostly we just bob about nattering, some focused swimming is involved, but actually the most valuable thing is the bobbing and nattering. Putting our many worlds to rights and our sense of belonging to a supportive and caring community.
I was never a fan of Circuses or Fairs when I was a child. I was not a fan of performing animals or clowns. I was always a fan of a great big tent appearing somewhere locally, just the arrival of the tent was enough for me.
I have become older, and Circuses have reinvented themselves. Music festivals have big tents so live music and skillful human circus acts are both something which I now enjoy in a big tent as an adult. I still prefer to observe the excitement of fairs from a distance and I avoid clowns and, as a subset, magicians.
This freshly erected big tent in a local park still gave me that conflicting thrill feeling, a sense of happy anticipation even though I may still choose not to participate in whatever is going on inside.
Such was my dislike of clowns and magicians as a small person they were often part of my dreaming world. Never nightmares, just quiet dreams where I wandered through whole towns built of big tents, successfully avoiding the things I didn’t like.
I don’t believe I am Coulrophobic because I could easily engage with both clowns and magicians. I just choose not to.
Sadly there is not a word for people who just love big tents for their own sake. But I am that person. Day or night.
For this blog, I pondered what my best big tent experiences have been.
Authors reading their own books or very skillful actors reading someone else’s book to a large and enthralled audience at a Literary Festival.
Discovering a new band or artist in a big tent at a music festival.
The flower tent at agricultural shows.
DJ sets in a tent, wherever that can occur.
New Age stuff, even if it is nonsense dressed in tie dye. The smells are always fantastic.
The produce tent at a village fete. Again the smells but also the people watching.
The absolute silence in this reflective image of Sutton Harbour last night, does not in any way reflect the aural reality. The harbour had the rich sounds of the harbour through history. Tuesday evening dog walks around the harbour have the bell ringers of St Andrews Church as a regular and welcome soundscape. Seemingly performing perfectly, Tuesdays are their practice nights.
Coupled with the nearly still water in the harbour the acoustics were perfect last night. It was also the last day of the school summer term so families were filling the cafes, and their exhausted teachers were finding their way to the bars. The pavements filled with strange adult crocodiles of walkers. Large groups of colleagues making their way to their selected bar informally but formally, two by two. The only thing missing from the human crocodile were the luminous pink-tabarded attendants at either end.*
Live music spilt out from the bars across the harbour, and dancing girls made their, uncertain, way to a Salsa Bar. High heels and cobbles are tricksy at the best of time without the added uncertainty of a pre-class drink in the evening sunlight.
As seagulls circled, greedy for chips, the only thing missing from this moment , which could have been heard any time in the last 500 years, were the Fishermen and Sailors in any significant number. Fish are landed in Plymouth but the huge fish market is just a holding space for the fish auctions that are held on-line. I’m not sure what handsome young sailors en-masse do on Tuesday nights but they were not easily visible. Represented only by middle- class, older men, in two’s and fours. Pink trousered with those non-uniform, uniform caps they all wear to silently call one another from across a world crowded out by non-sailors.
The harbour hubbub and the people watching was just serendipitous concatenation at its unpredictable best last night.
A Golden Moment, I might say.
* I only realised the significance of the teacher element of last nights bar activity when I heard the crisp steps of a man walking from one bar to another. Who walks from one bar to another with recognisably crisp steps?
A man, or woman, who regularly crosses purposefully from one classroom to another. A warning sound of impending trouble that we all learn to recognise from age 5.
*Of course such a lovely evening was rich pickings on which to ponder.
A painting ponder was to sketch Sir Francis Drake and his wife Mary Newman in the contemporary attire of Summer 2025. She will be wearing a spotted flared dress for a night on the cobbles and he will be wearing the older casual sailor outfit with one significant difference. Those pink sailor trousers will be cropped to show off his shapely calves and feet in deck shoes with no socks.
Something that will require a lot more pondering is how to replace the phallic symbol of the hilt of his sword. I suspect an uncapped bottle of beer will have to do. Over-sized of course. No cold weather posing for Frank.
Sir Francis Drake on Plymouth Hoe ( a Spanish seagull has taken revenge on this day)
Domestica has leached into Tuesday. I am not entirely certain why, maybe the success of yesterday has spurred me on. Unlike my grandparents I don’t have to be fully engaged with domestica. Today I loaded up the washing machine and the dishwasher and took off for the morning dog walk, then went to meet a friend for coffee. By the time I had returned the domestic goddesses were ready to be reloaded and so with heavy rain outside I started deeper domestica. I also had to look for a missing note book, amazing how missing things gather together. I didn’t find the notebook immediately but curiously my bank card and a tape measure were hiding side by side in an unexpected place, the place I had hoped to find the notebook. The notebook announced that it was not missing at all, but had been put in the wrong place under a quick watercolour sketch all along. In the midst of a domestica day these three misplaced items had eaten up an hour of my down time created by the Domestic Goddesses.
And just like that another project for domestica downtime was inspired. Superimposing the notebook on the quick sketch.
And indeed on some other images I was pondering today.
A wet feather.
A sunflower
A recent sketch
And lastly, the domestica.
In between these images beds have been made and a bit of a summer clear out. I predict Wednesday will be much the same but there is a good chance the additional summer chores will be done and dusted. 2 weeks early. I still don’t love domestica but having the end in sight of the big seasonal jobs does bring a little smug satisfaction.
When did Monday cease to be a traditional day to do the washing? I only remark upon this because I almost never do washing on a Monday.
The only person to have a Monday wash day was my paternal grandmother who was both religious and someone who had worked for others as a domestic servant before she married in her early 30’s. Her day for minor childcare of me was Wednesday when the washing pile had metamorphised from dirty linens to an ironing pile. After school I was permitted to iron cotton handkerchiefs and tea towels. I can’t say I hated it because it is really hard to hate something quite so dull. On reflection I think my grandmother gave me the really dull tasks in the hope that I would ask for more stimulating domestic trivia. Instead I learnt that in life there are a lot of dull tasks and they are to be endured but are not to be trusted to lead necessarily to anything more interesting. My grandmother seemed to take a quiet satisfaction in her tasks being achieved. What do I know? She could have hated every moment of the domestic drudge. Why didn’t she just cut loose on a Wednesday and enjoy time with her grandchild?
My maternal grandmother was both busy and flighty in equal measure. My paternal grandmother did not approve. I don’t remember her ever being tied to a domestic routine. She ran a pub and a taxi business. She almost certainly had ‘staff’. Women who came in from the village and kept the pub and the living quarters looking as fresh as a field of daisies.
Domestica passes down through the female line. So my mum, reluctantly and erratically but effectively did the housework when I was child. No Washday Mondays for her.
Which leads directly to my own lack of domestic rigour and a Washday Monday being so unusual it is worthy of a blog.
This is the beige load.
Now I am a similar age to both of my grandmothers when they were doing minimal care of me. I realise that my domestic attitude is a curious blend of both. There is no routine, I have no problem with enduring the dull tasks but there is an unstated satisfaction when domestica has been conquered.
I wonder what domestic style I will pass on to my granddaughters.
Beige with a hint of colour.
I always take time out for them, perhaps they will believe a fairy does it.
I make no apology for nattering on about the spectacular sunset we were able to watch, from our van on Friday night. The serendipitous luck of making a late decision to overnight camp in a carpark, overlooking a beach that we usually only ever visit in the Winter and Spring. Just to be close to Truro for Saturday morning. I am not sure what the correct words are, but being able to sit and read our books and glance up every now and then to watch the day melt into dusk and then finally put on a spectacular finale as the sun dived below the horizon was such a glorious experience. Other people ebbed and flowed around us as the day shapeshifted. We arrived to a full carpark at the moment when young families need to leave the beach and start the nighttime routine and beach bar dwellers are not quite ready to start the night. Half an hour sitting in the van with an ugly view of the toilet block was rewarded with the perfect spot becoming available,overlooking the whole beach with a direct view of a small stream running to the sea.
After an hour or so I began to wonder if we might be in the prime spot for the sun setting. Our evening was filled with dog walks and a bar visit. The car park filled up again with older families. Truculent early teenagers and their weary parents attempting a family holiday and much older teenagers driving their first cars. All ages of people anxious to see the sunset from the beach. Zimmer frames and walking sticks replacing pushchairs and gentle hand holding on the sand. ‘Children’ in their sixties clutching the arms of frail elderly people needing to do a sunset with much loved people who are closer to their own sunset than anyone wants to think about.
The sun did not let anyone down.
Least of all us,who had hoped for a stream of fire, and got it.
But how to depict the whole cycle of the past 4 hours.
Friday evening ended unexpectedly. We had an early morning visit to Truro Cathedral planned, on Saturday to see a friend become part of the Laity of the Church of England. The plan was to leave the dogs at home for a few hours.
An early start was needed to avoid the holiday traffic, but then we discovered that dogs are welcome in the Cathedral. That changed everything and we packed up the van and headed to a wild camping spot by a beach not too far from Truro for Friday night.
Trevone
We were set for a fine sunset, a cool beer and chips from a beach bar.
The sunset did not disappoint.
Trevone
Breakfast did not disappoint.
Trevone
And the dogs were good in the Cathedral.
Truro Cathedral
So much better than leaving them at home for a few hours while we did a quick dash to the Cathedral without them. And now we know a beautiful spot for some overnight camping. A marvellous change of plan on a Friday evening.
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