This is not, as you may at first think a fire, but a glorious autumn, stormy sunset. At the very bottom of the street are the wharf steps where we either walk down to a beach or, at high tide, enjoy the sound of flisvos on old stone steps.
As Florida waits for Hurricane Milton to touch land, calm views like this seem such a privilege. We will all know how bad it has been by the time our sun rises again.
In September I was a little obsessed by the colours created by daylight and artificial light falling on crumpled white bedlinen.
The October obsession may well become light falling on and through two new light fittings.
Yesterday we replaced two of our chandeliers with crumpled paper light shades.
We’ve gone down from 7 old chandeliers to just one old, but simple one,and a new contemporary one.
The grime that revealed itself when the last three old chandeliers came down yesterday was a very serious lesson in housekeeping. I have flitted about on the chandeliers with my feather duster infrequently for the three years we have lived here.
It is my humble opinion that chandeliers are a really bad idea in a house without the numbers of domestic staff that Victorians were used to. The grime visible on the upper parts of the chandeliers as they came down to ground level was grim. Appalling. Off to the tip with them!
So now I can be thrilled with light playing on crumpled paper rather than looking up in horror at dusty chandeliers, and I didn’t even know quite how dusty they really were.
Lin Deacon
Who are your favorite artists?
My favourite artists are my friends who happen to be artists. And artists who I meet and like, whose work interests me.
I realise this may be a poorly written question trying to probe which are my favourite works of art, but just as I would in an exam I will answer the question, not what I think the question is.
Obviously this only works for contemporary artists or artists who I feel I know through reading biographies, autobiographies or watching documentaries.
Jill Coughman RIP
I am far too much of a diplomat to write about artists and their art that I dislike, but I can say that I love the work of Rothko but I rather doubt if I would have liked him one bit.
Marks and Spencer are using the words Big Autumn Energy as their current call to purchase. September rushes in with a frenzy of activity after the languid, sun soaked days of High Summer, but beyond that moment, I never feel Autumn to be a season of high energy. So Big Autumn Energy is not my vibe. I feel it is the consolidation season after the energy of Spring and Summer. But the word consolidation is never going to sell anything in Marks and Spencer or any other retailer. But it gives me the chance to use my watercolour of harvested apples to good effect.
A slightly darker energy was created when I overlaid a Red Admiral Butterfly who was basking in the sun yesterday.
She was soaking up sunshine and stored heat, on a stone wall while I gently stalked her, quietly consolidating her autumn.
What would you do if you lost all your possessions?
I would be devastated. I know things are just things but I quite like things. To lose all my friends and family would be so much worse, but either is unthinkable.
Goodness I have been hanging onto these prompts this week. We have been hiding out in the campervan keeping our germs to ourselves. The weather has been kind. But pondering has been a little on the back foot.
Powered by a morning bun that looks like a comma we geared up for a two year olds birthday party.
The weather was kind. It’s been a good week for the weather. And today was a good day to be two.
Especially if you love bunnies.
A classic ponder for a Friday. Covid has darkened our doors this week with 50% of the human household out of action sequentially. 100% in total. So not a huge amount of out and aboutage for us. I have chosen not to walk the dogs locally as it is impossible not to meet someone to talk to. I have not been alone, an autobiography of Adrian Edmondson and a biography of Alexander McQueen have kept me occupied. Both creative. interesting and somewhat troubled men at times. On a brighter note the David Austin Rose catalogue popped into my email, this is the inspiration for todays blog.
I chose a climbing rose for the yard and have ordered a bare root to be delivered in November. I chose it on sight and smell. The name in my opinion is rather ugly.
Unknown to me Crepuscule means sunset in French. Living in the west of England I have learned to love a good sunset. Where I grew up in the flat East of England sunsets were something that happened elsewhere.
Just a little googling found an even uglier word for something quite so lovely.
Sunnansetlgong was the term for sunset in Old English while the word sunset meant West.
Both perfectly understandable. In looking this up I got the usual targeted online advert. My answer would be
” I give a crap, words are important”
Tell us about a time when you felt out of place.
This is an interesting question. I often feel out of place even in the most comfortable of situations. I often feel like I am on the periphery of a group. So much so that I feel that that is my place and I am quite comfortable with that sensation
Like being a white pumpkin in October , I lnow that I am in the group but perhaps not quite of the group. When Orange and ornate pumpkins are the season favourites.
This feeling has never bothered me
Although I understand to most people it could seem quite odd.
I am always an observer of new situations at the beginning , I dont jump in head first hoping to survive.
I always consider before committing. Apparently this is quite normal for ‘only’ children who are not brought up in a large extended family. We are just not exposed to the normal rough and tumble of life that growing up with siblings brings. We lack an innate competitive attitude to all things no matter how small.
For me being ‘out of place’ is exactly the place I am used to. Sometimes being the white pumpkin is no bad thing.
Your life without a computer: what does it look like?
My life without a computer. No blogging, more reference books. An analog life, which I have lived before. A different way of being in every way.
Today had been a non computer day, a bit of domestic sorting out and the joy of finding an old book.
2nd of October, just two entries. An exploding barge in 1874, loaded with gunpowder, must have made a massive bang on the Regents Canal. None of the crew survived and were blown up to such a point that there was no evidence they had ever existed.
On 1915 there was a blackout in London, I didn’t know such a thing had happened in the first world war.
Without a computer that would be the end of my knowledge. That would sadden me but I would still have a fulfilled life. But if I had some time on my hands I would be off to the library for a rifle through their reference library. But I have a computer, here is a link to the exploding barge.
https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/blog/library-archive/macclesfield-bridge-disaster
And Google tells me that London started Blackouts in 1915 to deter Zeppelin raids. The first of which occured in September 1915 so it was probably a good idea.
In my analogue world, a tidy book corner plus wrapping paper.
Here we go October. The Solar festoon lights have been taken down from the yard. Poor attendance by daylight,recently, has powered them up only enough to limply glow for about an hour.
Here they are having their last glow on the floor, while they dry out, before they are boxed up until May. Taking them down was a much more difficult task than putting them up. The climbing plants had made good use of their wires as supports,
So I had a couple of hours of plant wrangling and weaving shoots into new support networks, while removing the festoon lights.
Many solar powered lights have been replaced by less mains operated bulbs. Just enough to light up the way to our garage.
The other set of lights will permit tomato harvesting in the dark evenings. Our outdoor tomato plants often keep fruiting until December. Careful storage means we can often eat a home grown tomato on C#ris##@s Day. Apologies for mentioning the C word.
In other news here is a photo that has all the components of a prize winning candid shot and is not a prize winning shot.
Moments before this shot the seagull slid down the small childrens slide. Here he is composing himself after his ‘thrill’ ride. He teased me by returning to the steps a few times but never quite plucked up the courage to give me a photo opportunity.
Leaves however have no choice. Nature imitating drive-through coffee.
Welcome October, play nicely and I will write good things.
What details of your life could you pay more attention to?
Sometimes these prompts from my blog hosts are useful and other times not at all. I am a life long gatherer of random knowledge. There is so much in my personal hippocampus/ temporal lobe archive, an archive that is not the tidiest,that it seems to be getting harder to retrieve my idiosyncratic collection of useless trivia. A question like the one above has me flummoxed. I have no idea what details of my life I could pay more attention to. Which of my details is not fully fleshed out or completely explored and understood. Who is the judge of personal details that have been given proper attention to and those that need a little more work?
Flummoxed I maybe but I rather like the thinking process that makes my mind tingle with trying to create an answer. Right now I am trying to work out if this is a good or bad prompt. I know it is not fully bad or of no interest because I scroll right past those. It is also not fully good because I don’t have an immediate response to blog about in a negative or positive way.
In conclusion I don’t know which aspect of my life needs closer attention, but I have given the matter some thought.
I have spent a few weeks with an old school friend digging out memories that we have both archived for more than fifty years. I am hugely surprised how quickly we could recall all that old data. Even more impressive is the way other forgotten trivia continues to surface in my mind. All a bit pointless now as we are once again half a world apart.
theoldmortuary.design 