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.
This is my real world dog walk after dropping the Christmas Tree off at the recycling centre. This photo makes the day look O.K but really it was dreary and muddy. There were rumours of snow but the reality, at sea level, was just more rain. The top image would be my perfect snowy walk but I know it is a fantasy in so many ways. Oh how I wish I could learn to love rain. But the truth is I can only truly embrace the puddle aftermath of a rainy day.
Puddles of joy.
Maybe I should adjust my attitude to being afflicted by rain. But I think that is unlikely to ever be a genuinely altered character improvement.
Clean snow and puddles are as close as I can get to loving the wet stuff. But for now the sun is out and I am off to bask for a bit.
The need to de-rig Christmas was derigueur yesterday.
Not because I always adhere to the custom of the 12th night. But because I had done half a job on Saturday, and half a job is worse than no job at all.
To motivate myself, I started early and decided to do the job in my pyjamas, promising myself that I could not shower or dress until the job was done. Not a popular decision with two dogs who love an early walk. By 11:30, everything was done, and some Christmas lights had been converted into winter lights to pull my summer-loving soul through a gloomy mid-winter towards Spring.
Pyjamas Day explained and on to Gotcha Day.
Hugo st 8 weeks in London
12 years of Hugo, the original urbane city gent who moved to the Cornish countryside and then relocated to the coast and currently lives the life of an old seadog. His current good looks are still a little lopsided, but nothing a few more weeks of hair growth can’t cure.
Life rather joyfully overtook the plans for a De-Christmas of our house.
Significantly I remembered that I had also Christmassed up the Tennis Club Clubhouse. She who puts it up inevitably has to take it down, so my morning was spent removing twinkle and baubles from a community space. This led to many lovely conversations with people, both familiar and unfamiliar, around the club.
What I did not achieve was any sort of real Christmas progress at home.
But I did remove one set of lights from a live tree and reposition them in old turquoise coloured glasses to give our whale some greenish winter lights for his shelf unit.
The live tree needed to be settled into the yard . Which required more footling about, which took time .
Then planned friends came round ,and still the actual Christmas Tree stands resplendent in baubles and red lights until 4pm arrived and we had to go out.
Definitely a day when procrastination and circumstance won. I have decided that De-Christmasing is actually a whole weekend project.
I discovered this new blue plaque about 1/2 a mile from home a few weeks ago. Over the Christmas period a late birthday gift from my ex-husband arrived. A subscription to the National Geographic magazine. The front cover story was the discovery of the Endurance.
One of my favourite bits of the festive season is the time and space to read. It was such a lovely coincidence to find the blue plaque and have the magazine arrive within the same month. Although I had googled Shackleton’s adventures it was so much more of a pleasure to read a magazine article.
I imagine this weekend will see the slow de- Christmassing of our house. Yesterday I made next year’s gift labels from our Christmas cards.
They have joined the gift labels I made last year and forgot about. It feels about right to step out of my festive cocoon and embrace all that January 2025 has to offer. But I will retain reading time and some festive lights to perk up and enhance the short days of January and February.
The sun got to me yesterday. The shadows on the moss made me think of a lateral skull X-ray. Overnight my silly head kept thinking about it. I even dug out my old Grays Anatomy. The book, not the TV series. Just to satisfy my poor insomniac head that wanted to sleep.
” What keeps you up at night”
“Just random nonsense”
Some of the proportions are a bit wrong and the stick to the back of the neck is rather a lethal look. But a bit of superimposition shows why it was a hard thought to shift.
January 2nd started in much the same way as it usually does.
Buying a birthday cake for my daughter that has no essence of Christmas or New Year. A very, very normal Colin the Caterpillar . No glitter no sparkle, no Festive Colin.
Normal Colin. Colin was created 35 years ago by Marks and Spencer. A birthday without Colin is unforgivable.
After buying Colin the day could have gone one of two ways.
If the weather had been poor I would have bobbed with the bobbers.
The weather was wonderful.
But with the weather, wonderful I walked in the woods with my daughter and her family to celebrate 33 years of life and laughter.
The sun came out for the first time in 10 days.
A small person enjoyed puddles.
And all was right with our world.
Dismonds in the moss.
More woody stories tomorrow. Today is better late than never.
And so as the first page of a 2025 diary turns. I must return my twinkle garments to the wardrobe. No more sequins or clever play on words.
2 t shirts like this one blue one black.
I have promised my green sequin skirt a possible summer outing but for now they are off for a well earned rest.
I talked to a friend about our shared love for twinkle garments for the festive season. She said the only problem is that all our festive photos look similar no matter what the year.
A point well made but of no consequence to my simplistic thinking.
Talking of observing time passing, I have had an awful shock. A 10 X magnification, illuminated mirror arrived with Santa. We have a 5x travel mirror, which I last looked at in September. Let’s just say the shock of 10X v 5X was not a gift. The wrinkles are im-pres-ive in the new mirror. 5X has been telling lies on my holidays or the last four months have been particularly harsh. My face looks like a geography contours project. Waterless fjords have appeared on my face. Smiling makes things worse. I may spend 2025 being enigmatic.
We were out early for New Years Day on the Barbican. Earlier than the street cleaners.The Barbican is the hub of nightlife and revelry in Plymouth and has been for centuries. New Years Eves are vivid, giddy, lustful and excessive. This morning saw plastic glasses and fast food wrappers skittering round in the wind, small brightly coloured pools of sick were easily avoided on the historic cobbles.
Detail Night Out on the Barbican
Maybe not to everyone’s taste but I captured the sensation of a Barbican Night Out on a painting a few years ago. It doesn’t reproduce well as it is a glossy resin piece,but to me it represents the hedonism and joy of a great night out. Uniquely, in Plymouth, it is done with high heels and cobbles. What could possibly go wrong.
The last day of twixtmas. I thought I would have a little jog through my creative notes from this year when there was a lot of experimentation behind the scenes and there will be more in 2025.
January 2024
Tasting, feeling, painting synesthesia. Eating a frozen rhubarb crumble. The taste of high summer in the middle of winter.
February 2024
Another sensation painting/print. I needed to be ready for a print exhibition. This reflects my own experience of being a year round sea swimmer using an outdoor shower.
March 2024.
Singing rehearsals for a Green Man Festival. I wanted to create a contemporary Green Man.
April 2024
Green Man backlash. The awkward story of Green Woman birthing a fully grown, in-leaf tree.
May 2024
An old painting. The Nearly Home Trees on the A30. The original was lost for ages .It turned up in May.
June 2024.
Still a work in progress
I started experimenting with combining quick sketches and a location photograph. A book group on a quiet Greek beach.
July 2024
Another work in progress. Redesigning and reconfiguring my studio has caused some sketch notes to be found and others to be lost.
This one is currently missing in action.
August 2024
A photoshopped sketch note. Who knows where this one is going.
September 2024
Gilding apples.Finally the apples in a string bag are finished.
October 2024
Learning a new (old) skill. Printing a daffodil using the potato printing technique.
November 2024
Just using up, by weaving, scraps of watercolour and typewritten quotes.
December 2024.
Photoshop combination of two photographs of a December weekend. Firestone Bay at dawn and Glass Bricks at Battersea Power Station.
I always think my sketches are a bit random but this annual review makes me think that they are all linked in some way.
The extra blog. Twixtmas has run away with me, more ponders than time. Our usual busy family Christmas has certain traditions, special foods and things to be done. On a smaller scale than usual we have hit most of the festive briefs
With one glaring error.
A big Christmas requires planning and early shopping starting in October. A smaller Christmas requires less planning and no early shopping. Or so I thought, but starting the shopping one week before Christmas was foolish. All supermarkets were out of stock of an essential festive snack.
My usual October haul.My December haul.
Some things cannot be scaled back.
Me and cheese footballs go way back to a small Essex pub called The Red Cow.
It was my grandparents pub and stocked cheese footballs year round. Best enjoyed with Vimto in my past. And enjoyed now because of the past. ( I do know they are a bit of an acquired taste) I won’t miss out on them next year. Nobody from the pub years are alive anymore. Just me and Cheese footballs.
I suspect these ghosts of Christmas past, my mother and grandmother, standing here on the pub steps might think I was a little mad to continue to eat Cheese footballs . Not mad this year!
If we are lucky twixtmas is a lull with a little more thinking time than the hurly burly of Christmas and the optimism or trepidation of moving gently into a new numerical year. Perhaps a time to appraise relationships both past and present. My blog hosts posed this question overnight. As we gather people close to us this is a hugely significant question.
What relationships have a positive impact on you?
I would say there are three quality stages of relationships.
Close / Loving.
Intermediate with affection, respect or a combination of the two.
Fleeting.
Of the three I would say only the last can be purely positive, or indeed purely negative.
All other relationships are a balance of positive and negative impacts. Hugely positive relationships come with some inevitable negatives when people close to you break your heart in some way, not always intentionally. Intermediate relationships can be surprisingly lovely with less impactful negatives.Fleeting relationships can be amazingly positive, the negative aspects more easily brushed off.
Some relationships are negative all the way but circumstances force you to carry them around like a piece of pointless heavy luggage.
Twixtmas is a time to reflect on the texture of our relationships. Some regrets but a good balance of loveliness would seem to me to be the optimum choice for a positive impact. We all have to take the rough with the smooth to a certain degree because nobody is perfect or right for us all the time. Or us for them.
Sometimes dumping the pointless heavy luggage is just the absolute right decision and brings the joy of a negative action creating a positive outcome. Not always easy to do.
That is a good old waffle as I stare into the Christmas tree but the festive season often makes us confront some difficult thoughts alongside all the lovely positive ones, about people we share or have shared Christmas/ Life with. The luxury of the time to be able to consider relationships past and present, close or fleeting has a positive impact in itself.
P.s this blog was not written to be downbeat or forlorn. I may have struck a wrong note. I was simply observing that even the most lovely experience will have a piquancy of sadness if you are fully invested. When it ends for instance. And when a dreadful experience stops there is an uptick because the dreadful is gone.
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