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.
We said farewell to some neighbours yesterday. The weather was kind for their last day of having a home near Firestone Bay. They are headed for Yorkshire. A place with a very different sort of beauty.
Meanwhile we have discovered that we have some foxy neighbours who have taken to visiting our yard at nighttime. Leaving a pungent calling card of foxy odour.
Foxy neighbours and their fragrances are not unknown to us. The picture below was a regular occurrence in our London garden .
That a pause, even for fifteen years is still a pause. This painting was started and paused 15 years ago when I was doing a painting course. It was painted using only my fingers. A technique I never tried again until this week when I realised what I needed to do to make it exhibition-ready.
The Wheelhouse proportions needed to be altered and the moon tweaked with copper leaf. Having tweaked the moon the ponies required a little tweakment and then with all that bling the shadows needed darkening and on and on it went. All the time using my finger tips! All well and good until they start to get sore and the top layer of skin is worn away. Really not a technique I ever need to use again. Useful if I ever need to enter the world of crimes created with two fingerprintless fingers, but really not so smart for operating my smartphone with its fingerprint recognition.
Not my favourite beach and not Lola’s but definitely Hugo’s. A dog who was born in Bedford and raised in London is obsessed with collecting seaweed. He learnt this habit on the pebbles of Whitstable and the Thames Estuary.Perfected his art on the expansive beaches of Cornwall and currently operates on the city beaches near our home.
Wonder and Joy
This beach would win no prizes for human pleasures beyond exquisite sunsets over the Cornish bank of the Tamar. But for Hugo at mid-tide, it is a pleasure-dome of seaweed research and reconnaissance and, ultimately, rescue and retrieval. He is at his happiest when he can create a pile of seaweed. Obviously, he works along the water’s edge and creates his pile a little distance from the tide’s reach. All well and good on a lowering tide, the distance walked just gets greater, but on an incoming tide,he just rescues the same ten or so strands of seaweed as his pile is gently washed back into the sea as the tide laps at the foundations and then destroys the evidence of his endeavours. On a good weather day he would choose to be there for hours. The only thing stopping him is me. I am not always his best friend.
I woke up this morning with a busy head. The sort of busy head that requires a list to be written for the rest of the month. The list is almost more important than the blog. But the blog is my calming moment.
Morning Mist
But not so this morning. Jetpack my blog hosts have upgraded my phone App overnight and nothing is where it should be. This development will take a little getting used to! This blog will be brief because that list really does need attending to.
Misty Morning
I also woke up wondering if this was a ‘bad’ photography day. Which I think it was. Aurally the day was fabulous. Mournful fog horns and distant church bells. The 21st Century was wiped from view. I wanted to create digital images that were truthful to the location but that still made the mist the story.
Stonehouse Tidal Pool in the mistRoyal William Yard in the mist.
Brief and to the point this morning. I’m sure I will get the hang of this brave, new Jetpack world, but today is a day of lists and ticking things off.
Why mist? The Exhibition I am entering in the summer is about exploring the Tamar Valley with the Artist, Turner in mind. He and mist are forever entwined in my humble opinion. Mist and the Tamar Valley are also fairly frequent companions
But work for that exhibition doesn’t even make today’s list.
It reminded me to reflect, in a very self indulgent way, on the passing of winter and how as an ardent winterphobe I improved my attitude to my least liked season.
Reviewing things I realise that actually there are only three things I really dislike. January, constant rain, and short daylight hours. None of these things avoidable.
In December I am lifted by the run up to Christmas, festive lights and goodwill.
And I love February for its brevity and skippy nature as the days grow a little longer and Spring flowers spike the sodden soil.
Leaving me just with January to endure. ‘ Find the positives ‘ was the advice from Newspaper magazines each Saturday. I am always an optimist but January sucks my optimism. But I gave positivity a go and decided to try and create interesting images out of the shockingly dull photographs I was taking. What light there is in January is overlayed with a perpetual mist and large quantities of rain. I tried everything in my medical imaging repertoire of image manipulation, everything in my arty photograph toolbox, some painting skills and used image manipulation software from really old systems to current ones.
There is almost no predictability about which bad pictures will turn out to be visual gems with my tweakments but learning to use all the tools and ideas in my head has been fascinating. There have been some epic failures.
I even went back to the nineties and bought myself a home printer. Goodness me they have improved.
January and indeed winter 25/26 I am ready for you.
Here is the Magnolia on a gorgeous shade of ‘ greige’, surely my most used word of the winter months.
Four nights of magnificent illuminations and projections and the dogs given access to buildings they would not normally enter.
Quite what they made of it we will never know. But a festival of projected light makes the average last dog pee of the night a lot more illuminating than usual, with paths, walls and steps rather more vivid than usual.
I think a celebrated and projected history of Devonport may have passed them by but they sniffed their way through every location with dogged diligence.
Which allows me to ponder on what they really get from sniffing other dogs pee.
Foxes are supposed to be able to read the pee messages left by several generations. I assume dogs are similar. Wouldn’t it be cool to pick up family and local history by just sniffing,
Spring is not just ‘in the air’ she is on the ground and surfing the sea. My winterphobic bones are enthusiastic and ready to gad about a bit.
Two solid days of sunshine puts gallivanting back on the daily schedule.
Not that I was ever brave enough to quit my job and go gallivanting around the globe.
I am a small ‘g’ galivanter. Almost certainly because of my family circumstances.When I was at the peak big ‘G’ gallivanting stage, I needed to be responsible and stick around because my mum developed an untreatable neurological condition when she was in her mid 40’s.
As it turns out having to moderate youthful big ‘G’ gallivanting taught me to really max out on small ‘g’ gallivanting. A useful life skill I think.
A collection of Galanthus gadding or gallivanting about.
Yesterday was the most predictable of days. Chores, errands and dog grooming.
A publicity poster for the National Trust ( A Charity in the U.K that protects beautiful places and spaces) did not reflect my lived experience of a late February Thursday with chores to do.
I knew exactly where I would find myself and the list was not thrilling. But the sun came out, a gap appeared in my to-do list and,the somewhat dull, life admin was achieved early. Thanks in no small part to the parking deities who were endlessly kind yesterday.
After the dog grooming I returned to Wembury beach car park, where the poster was and took my pristinely clean dogs for a walk on the beach. A treat rarely available to them due to beach restrictions for most of the year.
Where will I find myself? Back in the same place.
And in finding myself in exactly the same place as I had been two hours earlier I had two delightful moments of serendipity. A hug from a friend and fellow club administrator who was cliff path walking. And an encounter with an off-duty witch. She was astride her witches broomstick by the sink in the public toilets. Not a word of explanation as to why she had a broomstick between her legs but being English we made pleasantries about the weather and the tragedy of a closed cafe. She said cake was her downfall and affected the brooms performance. So in some ways she was grateful.
If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be, and why?
Not for a whole day . Just a morning or afternoon or evening would be enough.
I would love to experience actually being the conundrum of humanity that is an Alpha male. Potus or Putin perhaps if I were aiming for infamy or more humbly, any regular Joe who just sees women as inherently inferior. I could wear the invisible Stag Horns of a person who actively seeks out confrontation and domination in the tiny details of life as well as the more significant ones. Actually, any horn would probably do.
Just a portion of a day would be enough to start with, to give me some level of understanding. It would also give me plenty of time to make my apologies and relax my jaw from all that jutting both real and metaphorical.
Meanwhile the Alpha male I have briefly inhabited could perhaps enrol on a Lambda ( Lovely) man course and we would both have been enlightened.
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