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.
I love fresh air moments. Early summer mornings in a park or by the sea before the day has fully got going.
Time to make tiny inconsequential pleasantries with fellow early morning souls.
What I would question is my passion for fresh air.
Passion seems such a hot, engulving sensation. I feel a little odd attaching the word passion to such a mundane activity as taking a walk in a park.
But walking in fresh air several times a day is something I really enjoy.
Why am I required to be passionate about doing something so simple ? I prefer to hover somewhere below passion and well above hatred for most of my daily activities. I suppose it could be said that I am passionate about moderation. No giddy excesses or plunging desperation involved with moderation.
The moment the last Christmas visitor leaves I am alert to the first signs of Spring. Snowdrops are the first sign but bunches of supermarket daffodils are more reliable and achievable, living as I do in a coastal area of a city.
Although my love for Spring is genuine, there is an element of it also being an escape from dull, wet, winters. This year there was no escaping dull and wet. Spring failed to lift my rain averse mood until quite recently. All will be well now until Christmas with just a minor mood dip in autumn when all the fabulous orange and russet colours are hijacked by the faustian pact made between retailers and fools for the Western Worlds Dance Macabre of Halloween, in all its tacky plastic nastiness. I survive, just about, with my obsessive love of pumpkins.
The anticipation and revelation of Spring is what encourages me through winter once the Christmas Spirit has slipped away.
Spring is the season that opens the door to summer, autumn and early winter. Seasons that encourage giddiness and frivolity.
I suppose I have never quite engaged with winter. I try to seek out the positives but they really are pretty elusive. I know that the arrival of Spring is like opening a dark chamber of dankness and illuminating it with fragile sunbeams. Just like a bear I could happily sleep through it and be woken with a nice cup of tea served on a tray with a biscuit and a small vase of daffodils.
And just like that the summer blew in. Elderflower and raspberry Gin and Tonic is a short-lived perk of early summer. As was an early early morning bob with bobbers.
And cupcakes.
The bobbing was, as usual overseen by B.V.M. ( the elderflowers were also plucked from her borders) Oh for the sake of comedy how I wish it was an Elderberry bush, but sadly it was definitely a tree.
The prolonged Autumn/Winter/Spring wet weather has not been kind to her. She could do with some of my masonry painting skills.
But that would involve trespass and all sorts of shenanigans, so instead I gave her a digital cup of coffee from a local independent coffee shop.
Which despite being excellent coffee failed to bring a smile to her face.
In other masonry painting news my June project of painting 20 feet or 6 metres of a heavily textured boundary wall is completed by the 10th of June.
Just towards the end of the project it became clear that the bright white of the project area made the garage, steps and another walled area look very shoddy. I am not promising myself to get that all done by the end of June but it is possible. My wrists and shoulders need a little recovery though. Working paint into stippled and ridged concrete makes all sorts of muscles ache. Fortunately gin is a very effective muscle relaxant.
My blog already has a tagline which works equally well for me as a human.
Pondering something nearly everyday.
Today’s pondering involves a pair of small Crocs.
A few years ago a small pair of Turquoise crocs were kept by our kitchen door. A daily reminder of a small person, a grandchild, who had moved thousands of miles away at 18 months old.
These orange crocs belong to another grandchild who lives 10 miles away. We only realised this week that we were stepping into unknown territory. A grandchild that we will interact with much more often, who is forming her own opinions.
The crocs are not just symbolic. We don’t let her into the yard without shoes on. Although I regularly pop out with bare feet. This did not impress her last week. So now we both have a pair of crocs by the back door and I am the one who needs to remember to put shoes on too.
To navigate this new small creature with her own mind I have a book that will, I hope, give me insight into 21st Century thinking.
I love that my own ideas on raising children are ‘ So last Century’
I am looking forward to reading and learning current thinking for the under fives, but I am very aware that a small person certainly thought I was being naughty or transgressive for going into the yard barefoot. I may need to get her her own book.
A proper ponder on a Saturday. How on earth to link up two different subjects into a blog that makes sense.
Nobody ever tells prospective parents that becoming a parent strips off a few layers of skin that will never grow back. This loss of metaphorical dermis makes your eyes well up more easily, and sadness comes a little more readily because suddenly being a parent/grandparent/care-giver makes risk and loss more relatable.
This ponder doesn’t come from nowhere. In 1987 on the 6th of June my local towns of Shoreham-by- Sea and Worthing were full, as they always were around this date, of Canadian D-Day Veterans. Revisiting their training areas for the planned assault on Juno Beach in 1944.
But in 1987 I had a 7 month old baby. As if from nowhere my empathy for the Canadians heroism and loss filled me with sorrow and melancholy. Their smooth balding heads under their regimetal berets were an acute reminder of the vulnerable head of my small son.
That feeling has never left me and I am much more sensitive to these things than I ever was before. But Thursday, watching the Commemoration of 80 years since D-Day seemed like a double layer of loss. There are those who never left those beaches 80 years ago. And those who survived to tell the tales, filling hotels and bars in Sussex with lively chatter, while they were in their fifties and sixties. Proudly wearing their regimental blazers and berets remembering their lost comrades but also revelling in being alive and being able to visit their old haunts with their fellow survivors. Most of those vibrant men are themselves now deceased. The links in this blog are a useful read and explain better than I can why Sussex was so special to them.
I will always struggle when I see a bald head, a blazer and a beret. Being a parent has indelibly changed me. The two are linked, tenuously, I agree but linked never the less.
List three books that have had an impact on you. Why?
I am a devourer of books, which is why I anonymised my book pile for this blog. My list of books that have had an impact would be bigger than 3. But in my reading life, 3 is the magic number. I tend to have 3 books on the go at any one time.Sometimes 4.
1. My current fiction book of choice.
2. A non-fiction book . History, Biography or some other subject.
3. A digital book or audio book stored on my smartphone.
(4) My Bookclub book if it doesn’t sit comfortably in 1,2 or 3.
Currently Book Club books are the books most likely to have an impact on me. 1,2 and 3 are self-selected and what I would choose to read, but a book club book often knocks me off my reading orbit. The most enriching thing about a book club book is my book club. Once a month I get to talk in depth or in a flippant way about the book we have all read.
There is something rather marvellous about being able to talk about a book that has been read by a group of people at the same time and then being able to talk about the book, regardless of whether I enjoyed it, with other people.
The book was written in 2011 and nicely sums up my point about reading a book at the same time with a group of people.
If we had read this in 2011 the conversations that swirled around our different interpretations of this book would have been significantly different to the conversations that were had this week in June 2024.
The impact that any book has is dependent on when and where it has been read. That makes the word ‘impact’ a much more fluid concept.
Aren’t books wonderful?
An audiobook has had me crying into my white paint pot this week while I have been labouring on my white walls.
The idea of colour blocking outside came from an Interior Design Book.
How could anyone expect me to choose just 3 books?
Huge thanks to my fellow bookworms for opening the doors and windows of books, that I would never have crossed the threshold of without your company and some hand holding
Another day, another paint pot, another direction. I had no idea how to paint one section of the yard walls. Complicated by mixed surfaces and under colours. I decided to use colour blocking , beloved by interior designers. Who knows how that is going to work out.
But the big reveal is the, almost psychedelic, colours that appear when painting white on a west facing wall in the morning. Nothing like that happened when I painted the north facing wall at any time of day. A most odd sensation. I sense the big old chunk of concrete that forms a seat is also going to need painting. Whilst waiting for paint to dry I let the digital tweak make some patterns from my paint pot .
Time to do that next coat. This blog will grow as the day progresses and I need to let paint dry…
And as it turns out, sunshine and shadows quite like my colour blocking.
“What is the point of doing anything in life, if you know what the exact outcome will be.”
A day of transforming a yard from off-white to white turned out to be both extraordinarily colourful and a self-limiting occupation. The colour change can be seen just by the O of off-white. The early morning dog walk set the colour bar high when I noticed that the luminous cows had moved.
To make way for a very fancy shoe, advertising a Theatre show.
Nature also created wild flower paths between cows and shoe
Dog-walk over it was time to flip off the paint pot lid. With just a moment to tweak Pure Brilliant White into something a little more lively, with fingers still clean enough to touch my phone.
Radio at the ready and I was off.
6 hours later, I had not reached the end of the job but the end of the pot of paint was a most welcome sight.
So much for providing myself with many different audio treats, mucky fingers meant I was stuck with Radio 4 for the day. My ears and mind were taken to places I might not necessarily have chosen. Other people pondering the concept of unconditional love. Very thought provoking. I had some thoughts to add, but radio isn’t like that unless the show offers a phone-in and I would not have had clean enough hands for that sort of shenanigans. Rolling news reports. And some poetry, who could possibly have predicted gentle tears while painting.
What does a blank page in the diary and a favourable weather forecast predict for me in June. More white wall painting is the answer. A job where radio, podcasts and pondering will be my only companions.
Convoluted meanderings of the mind. I am very grateful to not be a perfectionist in the sense of this article.
I slide about on the ‘good enough’ scale. White wall painting needs to be fairly close to the perfect end of the scale. Aesthetically pleasing and competently executed will do for me.
Creatively I love happy accidents, these are not born from perfectionism or control. Being a little casual is the thing and knowing when to stop is the golden rule of being creative. Knowing when to stop is not a retrospective skill.
With the potential of a whole day to paint walls white, knowing when to stop is going to be essential. There is going to be a nail biting moment when I am going to need to be creative. Impossible to imagine I know, but when it happens the blog will be the first to know.
theoldmortuary.design 