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.
In my quiet moments I am still researching JMW Turner and his travels while based in the Tamar Valley. For an upcoming exhibition. I am beginning to wonder if research is a form of procrastination. Since the one location that I don’t need to research has not yet been painted or photographed. Over the weekend I discovered that Turner had sketched Burgh Island. One of our favourite destinations for beach adventures. I worked on this image over the weekend and was ultimately very happy with this muted version. Although a ‘hotter’ High Summer version also floats my boat.
But muted is the way of today, because one of life’s great coincidences popped into my emails. Jacksons Art sent me a teasing image of a palate of watercolours they are selling. Almost exactly matching my colour choices for my Soft Summer at Bantham looking at Burgh Island. Mist and a Splodge of red
Not exactly an Easter Egg but as close as we got. Fueled by this Bagel we tackled big jobs in the Yard. Both had the potential to be grim jobs but neither were too bad either.
But first a recipe for Easter.
Not for the squeamish. But the results are just like regular compost.
We use two rhubarb forcing pots to recycle coffee grounds, teabags and dog poos that are done in the yard. If such a thing can be described as a recipe then the recipe has served us well for the eleven years we have had Hugo and nine years of Lola. The method worked on the clay soils of South London, the excellent soil of an old mortuary in Cornwall and now on slightly raised beds in a city yard. The pots never smell and we use the compost for flowers and shrubs.
The process couldn’t be simpler and the compost is excellent.
Ingredients
Coffee Grounds
Tea bags
Egg Shells
Dog poo picked up with bamboo fibre toilet paper.
A handful of juicy worms from a friend’s compost heap.
Method
Place rhubarb forcer on soil ( Lid optional)
Randomly layer the ingredients as available. Worms just once.
Empty from below in the Spring wearing gloves and with a hand fork.
Pick through the compost to remove stuff that has not been turned into compost. The biggest culprit seems to be tea bag fabric occasionally and friends who pick up their dogs poos with non compostable plastic bags.
I estimate that good compost is created in about a year with a three year cycle. Our pots seem to operate at about 2/3 full. We have two. When one is full to the brim we put the lid on and move to the other. The level drops surprisingly quickly.
In the Spring I harvest about 2/3 of each pot of compost from below and leave the top third to drop to the bottom when I stand the forcer back up. I always return a lot of worms to the top after I have done this.
We have moved house 3 times in 11 years there has never been a problem just bagging up and disposing of the small amounts of uncomposted matter at the top of the forcers.
Goodness knows why I felt the need to share this recipe. Except that we watched an Easter Special cookery programme that featured a ‘ What to do with left over Easter eggs’
Not in this house.
No programme ever features ‘ What to do with your left over dog shit’
The second job of the day was more tricksy, replacing a large plastic barrel home made ( not by us) water butt with an actual water butt provided by our water provider. First the full water butt had to be emptied and the water stored. Then there was butt wrestling to get the old one out and the new one in. And then refilling and landscaping of the new edition. All achieved before we went to a friends house for some Easter nattering.
It’s funny isn’t it, the conversations you have just as you leave these things that would have been so much more valuable at the beginning of the evening. We discovered the couple who left at the same time as us lived 1/2 a mile from us in Crystal Palace 8 years ago. Both relocating to the same patch of coast nearly 300 miles away. The funny thing is just a slight fleeting familiarity not associated with our current location. Conversations for another day…
The Avon River but not as we know it. The Avon River at Bantham is a regular swimming spot for us on the coast. But by accident, yesterday evening we got much closer to its source near Ryders Hill on the high South Moor of Dartmoor. Hugely swelled by the last two days of torrential rain it was a noisy, splashy , vivid river. Quite unlike our usual, gentle ideas of the Avon.
Boathouse at the mouth of the River AvonBurgh Island at the mouth of the River Avon
Normally when we have been paddling about in the River Avon the dogs smell salty with the fragrances of seaweed and rock pools. Yesterday there was no paddling in the river and they smelled of bog.
Our morning’s domestic admin and dog walk were done in terrible rainy conditions. Enlivened only by a trip to Jacka Bakery where we picked up Cardamom Buns and a bedraggled friend, he was as anxious as us to hide in a coffee shop and play parking space jeopardy. A game where you assess the risk of Parking Wardens patrolling the timed free spaces and catching you stretching two hours out of one.
The wet morning turned into a wetter afternoon so we turned the afternoon into a time warp. We are both former rowers and had somehow managed to miss the Oxford and Cambridge Boat race last week. Not only that we had both managed to avoid the race results. So two hours were happily spent watching a sports programme that was 6 days old from start to finish, interviews, statistics and of course the endeavour of rowers whose pain, win or lose, we understood.
Madness how easy it was to fill a rainy day in interesting, to us, ways.
The evening dog walk was as wet and greige as the morning. Not a scintilla of colour anywhere. The picture below has every speck of colour available . Mallard Ducks on the sea. When I was growing up a bad day of rainy weather was described as,
“A good day for ducks”
I’m not sure if even the ducks were having a ball yesterday.
Although a friend is in Egypt currently and things were not a lot better for her.
For many, Easter is a four day weekend. Thursday evening seems just a little more relaxed than normal in anticipation. But two days of great weather have given way to a deluge. Luckily I caught sight of a group of paddleboarders at high tide and sunset. When the weather was being kinder
I took one of my ‘bad’ photographs and, inspired by my puddle photograph of yesterday. I created an image with similar bold colours but enhanced the softness of colour reflected in water.
I decided to slightly change the location and relative size of the paddleboarders. I will tinker with them some more over the next few days.
I suspect that this will be my image of Easter 2025 as I tweak it into submission, in both senses of the word, ready for an exhibition in May.
As an aside to all this, my workspace is finally finished. It has taken us 6 months to find exactly the second hand furniture we needed to store regular life and art materials. We never intended bright pink to be an accent colour but an old sari is the perfect cover up for works in progress on the table, and my lovely old typewriter is just the perfect shade of beige.
Even as I write the words ‘perfect shade of beige’ I realise that this tidy work space is another piece of great procrastination. I need to set to and get on with the work for the Turner Exhibition at the end of May. But while it was in a tidy pristine state yesterday I sat and filled in the application form on line. When I was done, not a thing was out of place.
Describe a decision you made in the past that helped you learn or grow.
Sometimes the prompts from my blog hosts are interesting and can feed into an interesting ponder. Most of the time they are just of no interest to me, so are swiftly scrolled past. Occasionally one like this holds no interest but there is a glimmer of interest in the irritation I feel at the absurdity of the question.
Surely the result of every decision made,big or small, good or bad creates learning and growth. This is why we only tend to stub our baby toes once in a given location.
I took this picture yesterday not for the graffiti particularly but because of the softness of the vivid colours in the puddle.
Puddle pictures are one of my favourite things when they are beautiful. It is just that muddy/dirty puddles are the norm.
I wanted to get this vibrancy into one of my seascapes for the upcoming Turner exhibition. This puddle set me thinking, the results of that thinking might appear any time soon. Or perhaps they won’t.
What place in the world do you never want to visit? Why?
When this question popped up on my blog host site overnight, I was a little perplexed. There must be millions of places in the world that I wouldn’t want to visit but surely I would have to visit them or have very solid research first to realise that. Life is too short for such ponderings. I will never visit all the places in the world that I want to visit or revisit. I suspect this particular question is one of my ‘ Great imponderables’
Much better on a rainy day to think of somewhere in the world I would like to be. Sitting in the shade on a very warm day eating figs fresh from the tree. Again there must be millions of places around the world where I could achieve this. Hunting for the positive is so much more enriching than dwelling on the negative.
An article in Saturday’s Guardian gave me a great name for my Hybrid photographs + watercolours. My images do not set out to fool anyone , they are just part of my creative process. But this article gave me a rather fabulous name.
Some will become Hybrid Printmaking, but meddled or indeed meddling suits my style rather well.
I deliberately meddled with a picture of Tinside Lido because I was late to the party and my plan to picture it in its winter grubbiness was foiled by it being cleaned earlier in the week. It is also still clad in the bric a brac of builders who are rebuilding and refurbishing the Art Deco Lido. My before shot is meddled with. The after image will be whatever it will be once the builders move out.
Meddling, not in a bad way and certainly not to fool anyone.
Not exactly four seasons in one day but almost. A very chilly start in Plymouth. Followed by a couple of hours of basking below The Hoe, in bright sunlight with too much caffeine, the right amount of nattering and laughter. Watching boats near the Lido.
Before returning to our yard to work off the caffeine in a yard that has declared Spring very much here with buds and blooms and sharp shadows.
Before rain chased us indoors. Then off to the Tennis Club to enjoy the views and rehearsals for Sri Lankan New Year. Coats were definately needed. But worse was to come…
Woolly hats were needed for the evening dog walk. April. What are you doing to us
This may not be the kindest way to discuss my maternal grandmother, but pondering does not always go the way of acceptability or indeed kindness. On a positive note I cleared the algae off this photo before using it.
Rocks at Bigbury
For good pondering I also need to flip and tweak.
I have outlived my own mother for four years and in the last year we have bought a high magnification illuminated make-up mirror.
As I peered into the mirror one mornng I looked close up at my soft but craggy cheeks. Skipped a generation and thought how alike my face was to my Nana’s. This is no bad thing, I adored my grandmother and kissing her softly wrinkled cheek was always a pleasure. Her cheeks were velvety and yielding, and smelled of glamour. She ran two businesses,smoked elegantly and constantly and always looked like Lucille Ball.
Men couldn’t help themselves and neither could she. In her seventies she moved to Melbourne in Australia. Pastures new and different men to captivate. Welsh Valleys , the flatlands of Essex and finally an Australian city. All changes made when her allure required her to move on.
My cheeks have not lived the life of my Nana’s. My mother very much disapproved of her ‘antics’. I was directed, encouraged and obediently followed a different path.
But a small child knows nothing of such adult stuff . Kissing a soft cheek that smells faintly of smoke, good cosmetics and a gin and tonic was a safe and exotic harbour for me.
I was aghast when my own wrinkles were laid bare by the new mirror but also charmed that in some small way my grandmother had returned to me.
My mum and her mum ( in the doorway of her pub) and unknown woman.
Google is a funny old thing. The pub my grandparents ran is long gone and has changed from the robust name of the Red Cow to the rather generically cute Daisy Cottage.
Google found an old Christmas card sent by the publicans.
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