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.
Summer Solstice started with a burst of colour over Firestone Bay as two bobbers and about 100 other swimmers took to the sea at dawn, the conditions were perfect.
Then the Solstice took a more practical turn as twenty volunteers, including two bobbers, took on the annual task of painting the Tennis Club Clubhouse with preservative.
Then it was back to the sea for more swimming at sunset.
So much exercise in one day and not a gym in sight.
A day painted perfectly.
Painting the Summer Solstice at Stonehouse Lawn Tennis Club.
In other news, the Solstice was celebrated in the local Tinside Lido.
For four years the bobbers have celebrated both Summer and Winter Solstices by dipping at sunrise and sunset. Summer takes more dedication with early and late starts. Winter takes more grit because the weather is disgusting and the water is very cold. Summer has not always been kind to us but in our collective memory the event is always magical. These two images of the early morning dip and the evening dip are entirely fake. Created by stitching three actual magical dips together. The location is accurate, as are the conditions and the swimmers. But they never actually occurred all at the same time in the same place so perfectly.
But in our recollections Solstice swims are magical. And I have the photographs to prove that.
Summer Solstice Double Dipping P.M
May Summer wrap her arms around you whilst the sun gently warms your soul.
Another lonesome bob and a few minutes of tinkering with a phone camera and some Polaroid sunglasses and wet rocks.
Like all rocks, the rocks in our swimming zone are infinitely more colourful when they are wet and Polarised lenses enhance that effect.
This image is constructed by digitally double exposing two separate images a second apart and with some inevitable movement both me and an incoming tide.
What it demonstrates is exactly why this area is called Firestone Bay.
Lonesome Bobbing is not my normal way of sea swimming, but it is not unheard of. Bobbing with the Bobbers is the normal way of things for safety and sociability. Is it even bobbing if you are alone?
I wasn’t even truly alone on my lonesome bob. Two neighbours and a dog, were there before me. And thank goodness they were because in an attempt to capture a pet portrait I dumped my keys in the sea.
I was so busy doing the constricted-undressing- in -public towel wrestle I didn’t even notice their loss. When Tim noticed the brightly coloured key cutters bands and rushed in to rescue them. The photo is a fake, post-processing tweakery. They dried out quickly on a warm step,retrieving them I noticed the vivid colours ,created by bright, morning- sun and my sunglasses at a really low angle, close to the incoming tide. I popped my sunglasses over the lens of my phone camera.
Using my sunglasses as a filter.
Blurry but interesting, this impromptu image needed a little tweakery, but I might make a little polaroid filter for my phone camera for these brightly sunshiny days.
Obviously I am an addicted ponderer. It is the beating heart of this blog and for me is both creative and endlessly fascinating.
Mulling on the other hand is a much less lightweight, pleasurable task. Mulling however is every bit as essential for me.
The two thinking techniques are closely related. I have always been a ponderer, I started young, in Reference Libraries. As I edged into adulthood, worries and problems could not always be pondered into a solution. Sometimes more serious and better targeted thinking is required. Mulling moved into my life.
Recently, away from this blog I have had to do a lot of mulling on the behalf of an organisation that I help to manage.
My Mulling team, confidentiality guaranteed.
All organisations, whatever their title are essentially about people. My recent mullings have taken me to places I never imagined I would need to explore. Despite the importance of mulling it uses much the same mental muscles as pondering. And for me the creative, familiar places where I choose to ponder have proved to be equally suitable for mulling.
1.Dull domestic tasks.
2.Dog walks
3. Yardening in the yard.
Staring at the laundry whilst thinking.
Just one stark difference between pondering and mulling.
Summer Breeze makes me feel fine, blowing through the Holly Hocks of my mind.
Early summer is a fragile thing, a million things need to come together, in June, to create fragrant blooms and buzzy bees, with legs and fluffy bottoms all dusted with pollen. I love a Hollyhock but growing them eludes me. A minor success this year in the yard was quashed by the voracious appetites of our slugs and snails. Not for us the gentle hum of bees going about their business, just the inexorable chomp of a chorus* of slimy mouths feasting on our tender and tasty single Hollyhock survivor.
These Hollyhocks survive proudly, on the edge of a busy roundabout. Cared for by volunteer urban gardeners, they survive where mine cannot. Despite slightly obsessive attention. And yet, crazy, wild self-seeded Hollyhocks look down on me from cracks in rock walls and cliffs by the sea. Seemingly immune to the chomp of slugs and snails and happily hosting buzzy bees with dusty bottoms.
You may wonder where this ponder is going. The * is the answer. A recording of a single slug having a chomp, imagine what a choir of them would sound like in a back yard.
Four early cucumbers from the yard. But these are not the big-ticket items of the day. When I tipped them out of the bowl there was a tiny bead, in my favourite colour of verdigris. As I rolled it in the bowl it grew legs.
Our evening walk is never without a boat or two to look at . I have never had the opportunity to be a boaty person but there is something in me that loves to see boats all moored up and safe in their safe harbour.
Just for a moment, last night, the clouds, heavy with imminent rainfall, parted and let a shaft of setting sunshine illuminate these boats. A golden moment at the end of a day that has been filled with small and large golden moments. Chores achieved, chatter and cake. We went to a garden party, birthday celebration. The sort of party where guests contribute food to supplement the host’s main contribution. A glorious home-made version of an all-you-can-eat buffet. Conversations at this type of event are also as random and delightful as the food. Some are somewhat deep and others are fleeting and joyful, mirth making. Leaving you/me wanting more and chuckling randomly later. An all-you-can-talk-about conversational buffet.
Both the food buffet and the conversation buffet within a comfortable community, felt like a human safe harbour, a good place to be.
We are a long way from the sterile, plastic- lawned, dog toilet yard that we bought four years ago. Our planned urban jungle has leapt into action this year. A warm dry Spring has been followed by a very wet early summer. This is the corner that overlooks a semi-subterranean garage and is about 4 feet above the back lane behind so it has the feeling of a very substantial balcony.
Like all good balconies there is an element of privacy whilst observing others. There is very little visual observation of other humans except an occasional shadow of an unknown neighbour. Deliberately oversized in these pictures because the shadow represents all the shadowy figures who enliven our viewpoint.
Aural overlooking, overlistening if you like, is the thing. The back lane is a stone-walled corridor that links a small car park with the road that leads to the sea or the city. We can hear but not see the people walking up and down. Swimmers chat animatedly, dog walkers are quieter. Largish groups of Royal Marines who occasionally run down the lane have two distinct personalities. One is heavy and mildly worrisome when they are fully kitted up with guns and big boots. The other is more chattery and indeed fragrant as they do the same run in sports gear.
Evenings are quieter, couples and groups heading out to restaurants or the cinema.
But early mornings are my favourite thing. There is a sweet spot when all the singing birds are at their peak, just before the seagulls get up and move them all on.
I have been feeling a bit nostalgic this week. I can pinpoint the exact moment it started on Monday. I was shopping in a local supermarket and saw a dress that looked like the curtains in the kitchen of my home when I was 3 or 4.
I didn’t need a new dress, and out of choice I try to only buy a tiny amount of new items of clothing. Adopting a recycle, repurpose and reuse policy as a small act of saving the planet.
This dress was certainly fast fashion, everything I choose not to engage with. I bargained with myself that I would not buy it because I only wear dresses with pockets and this one, being cheap, would not have pockets.
It had pockets and it came home with me. Nostalgia won.
That started the undercurrent of my week. A slight longing for the past. This very bland set up in my bathroom is nostalgic too. My dad was a man of the seventies and loved his electric razor but he too had nostalgia in his bones and used this shaving mug on rare occasions to have a wet shave as the fancy took him. I use his shaving mug as a regular soap dish, a small act of daily remembrance. And beyond that I don’t really pay it much attention. But because the dress triggered kitchen nostalgia the shaving mug joined in and I pondered how very different my bathroom is from the one the mug lived in during the seventies. My parents bathroom fittings were bright blue, their towels, and facecloths were in bold bright colours and in the iconic designs of the era. Unbelievably, soap was a curious shade of red. Lifebuoy Red.
Lifebuoy red shaped my early life, every part of us was washed with it. I hated it, my face was as dry and tight as the worst sort of sunburn after every face wash, noses and other orifices burned and stung if the lather or suds of the soap got anywhere near them. I soon adopted an independent washing and bathing routine that actually avoided the use of any soap. The only time the soap met water was at the end of my ablutions when I tossed it in the water after I had finished so that I could, in truth, say that I had used soap when my parents questioned my cleaning regime.
During my bathroom nostalgia I pondered that red soap, and wondered if I had just been a bit dramatic about the stuff. Being over-dramatic is always possible, I was an only child with a vivid imagination.
Dr Google has an opinion on Lifebuoy Red ‘ Health’ soap and that opinion is that Lifebuoy Red contained Carbolic Acid.
Which exactly explains why trying to rinse off the soap seemed to make things so much worse. Nobody mentioned rinsing off with alcohol
I may be being overdramatic, but just thinking about that soap gives me the shivers when I recall the lather of that soap going up my nose or south of my belly button. And the effect on my four-year-old face was certainly a mild chemical burn.
Kitchen curtains are one thing, but I can’t imagine a seventies bathroom ever making me feel all warm and nostalgic.
A cheap dress with pockets is so much more appealing.
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