What does your ideal home look like?
Our ideal home looked like it should be in a magazine. And it was.
It was planned to be our forever home but the urge to start again was too pressing. So now the name lives on as a blog . And Hugo still has to keep a paw on all the latest interior trends.
What brings a tear of joy to your eye?
The prompt from my blog host ( above ) exactly matched the blog I was planning to write. Yesterday tears of Joy/ mirth were shed as we enjoyed a coffee in a bikers cafe with two other bobbers.
It should be said that none of us have any actual experience of motorbikes. Two of us have, as the wall art suggests, shared the ride
Me at only a few days old when I was brought home from the maternity hospital in the sidecar of my dads motorbike. Rather more unusually Gill Bobber rode in a sidecar made of scaffolding poles when she had a biker boyfriend. This proximity to an actual motorbike allowed her to ride out with a motorcycle club. The name of which brought the actual tears of joy yesterday.
Just to prove I haven’t made this up to add pzazz to my blog, here is the map of the area just north of Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire.
The upper part of the road is called Slack Tops . Which has a scintilla of humour for all post-meno women as nature is not kind to older breasts.
Which leads me to the epic tears of joy which we shed yesterday. All four of us have substantial knowledge of 3D human anatomy. Sometimes that leads other people to ask us odd questions. Our friends had been asked by a fitness instructor if they could crochet a soft model of a pelvic floor so the instructor could more easily explain the importance and significance of pelvic floor exercises. Another essential for post-meno women.We puzzled over the problem and actually came up with a half decent design of such a thing. Including working parts. The tears of laughter were shed when we realised how long we had taken to seriously design a crochet pelvic floor and the consideration of making such a thing. Quite a different sort of engineering to the usual nattering in a bikers cafe I am sure.
As a cultural note, Slack Bottom, of Gill’s bikers club in Yorkshire, is just a little north of the grave of Sylvia Plath who wrote the best excuse for blogging that I know.
Everything in life is writable about.
And to finish, me, sitting on an actual motorbike. The only time in my life.
August 31st and it is still summer, only just, the summer tide is going out. But not before the bobbers managed a historic bob, with P.S Waverley the world’s last working Paddle Steamer coming into the background of their evening swim. A paddle steamer and three choices of cake. It really was an epic bob.
Our Cornish bobbers got to see the Waverley twice, catching her again on their return across the Tamar.
Still summer, a phrase that uses the word ‘still’ two ways.
It is still summer but summer has also slipped into its still phase. The last summer storm, Lilian, happened a week ago. She was a screamer for a few hours, rattling chimney pots and screeching up our cobbled back lanes before stirring the sea into a murky stew for a few days.
Since Lilian we have slipped into the still summer phase, no raging heat, gentle rains, crystal clear seas and some really lovely days. Not that I am looking at Summer 2024 with rose tinted glasses. She arrived shockingly late when June had already started and Spring hardly made an appearance. Tomorrow we hit the first day of Autumn/Fall, lets hope summer drags her heels a bit and leaves as late, if not later than she arrived.
Last night we went to see an art exhibition featuring the work of one of our bobbing friends.
She has been doing her Masters in Illustration.
We really loved her work.
But it is hard to show in a 2D format. Bobbers have played their part in her research, we sniffed our way through the olfactory part of her final project when we were very cold and damp. Glad to see our hard work paid off.
Another aspect that is impossible to share in this format. Regardless we are very proud of her and so happy to be able to give her a gentle squeeze. The poor woman has been acutely ill this week.
Not remotely linked to art, it is bobbing and Covid-19 that delivered her to us as a friend. As we walked around to look at other students work it was surprising how many people we recognised from other sea swimming or paddle boarding groups that use the Stonehouse swimming beaches.
Small worlds that collide.
All work © Debra Parkinson. Link below to artist information.
Every picture does not tell the story. This calm section of water was at the bottom of a huge waterslide. I was there to catch images of family members hurtling their way towards me having an exhilarating splashy ride to the bottom. This is evidence that I missed my moving targets. This image, though, feels very calm.
Another calm,watery image occurred yesterday.
Still water in the harbour as I walked to the bakery. Both accidental really. The greyness of the sky makes this image a little dull. But overlaying one over the other makes the combined image more vivid but there is still a sense of calm.
Isn’t life like that though? Something unplanned enhances the planned or expected outcome of an action or escapade. I am glad I didn’t just dump the first image because it was not what I wanted. It may become a very useful perker upper of photos that are not quite colourful enough. Just one tiny tweak and the whole image becomes a very believable sunset.
What was the last thing you searched for online? Why were you looking for it?
The last of my proposed climbers to be planted in the yard in 2024. I checked on-line and most nurseries were out of stock. I was also checking when to plant. Early autumn while the soil is warm was the advice. So basically the time is now. My long term goal is for all the climbers to mingle. Exactly as in the illustration below.
Clematis Avalanche should head towards Wisteria Amethyst Falls. Hopefully they land safely together. Sprawling elegantly across our garage roof. Turning something fairly ugly into something fragrant and beautiful to herald the arrival of spring.
Being a climbing plant in my yard is like accepting an arranged marriage. The chain of mingling stretches from a very happy free gift from a friends garden, a winter jasmine, in the most exposed part of the yard and travels via a semi subterranean garage to a golden fruit producing passion flower that was a gift from Dan, the man who built our boundary extending trellis in May.
In between there are climbing roses, evergreen honeysuckle, more jasmine and a potato vine.
Just like an interfering busy body I am often out in the yard trying to introduce plant tendrils to one another
Sometimes they get the idea of mingling but other times I need to interfere with hairy garden twine.
This morning I decided not to wait for on-line nurseries to restock and called into a local one on the off chance of them having an evergreen clematis. Just one rather sad looking individual was skulking behind much showier climbers. She came home with me and a new ball of hairy twine. My planting of climbers in 2024 is done. Just the mingling to sort out now.
This headline popped up on my newsfeed last night. For us, in the South-West of England we have one more week until we see our last 8pm sunset. Our house lies in a perfect East/West position so sunrises are observed from the main bedroom and sunsets from the kitchen and studio. Both are easily viewed by walking the dogs at the right time of day. The sun rises over the sea and sets as we look up the river.
Yesterday was International Day of the Dog, and it is the dogs that have made me much more aware of sunrises, sunsets and all the natural changes that occur in landscape. Hugo arrived 11 years ago and with his arrival came the daily habit of walking the dog. A three times a day, wander for about twenty minutes minimum, wherever we happen to be. If I had never owned a dog I would never have known the pleasure of small changes and repetition. Before Hugo I would have said I was a keen walker, someone who liked to go for walks when I had the time, was on holiday or some other delightful reason. Before Hugo I probably had specific clothes and shoes that I knew were comfortable/ appropriate for walks. Now I never mention walking as a quasi hobby, I do it in whatever I happen to be wearing and I do it whenever it is needed. In all weathers.
Walking is the beginning and the end of my day. I had no idea what I was missing before I owned a dog.
I realise that I could easily do frequent daily walks without a dog . Just as I could write daily without a blog. But I doubt I would do either without a reason.
Scrag end of summer in a wildflower meadow. Late August always feels a little worn around the edges but these wild flowers were as fresh as daisies this morning.
The sunflowers were turning their heads to the sun and all felt right with our world.
I enjoy the transition phases of the seasons. Autumn into winter is my least favourite but Christmas and the shortest day pull me through that slump. But right now the joy of sunflowers makes me smile.
A day of ambling in a favourite market town. Inspired by using up a Christmas voucher for breakfast out. While at The Annex I had a weird, but unponderable familiarity with a picture on the wall.
Oh the magic of a good night’s sleep. This was the picture on an album I carried around when I was in the sixth form at school.
This is not the subject of today’s ponder, but how strange that my sleeping head pulled this out of the archive. Stranger still that 16 year olds went to school with a mountain of books, and in an effort to look cool, also lugged vinyl records around in the vain hope that the communal record player would be available to play their favoured album, during the precious ‘free’ periods.
Tavistock is one of my favourite towns. I worked there regularly but have never wanted to live there. Every day there is a market and no two days are the same. Tavistock is within the Dartmoor National Park, and because of its location on a moor, the weather in the town turns out a bit wetter than I can tolerate. But visiting is just fine, whatever the weather. The market today was its usual jumble of stuff.
And country hats for country chaps.
Vinyl
And as luck would have it some copper.
Copper is significant because Tavistock is an ancient Stannary Town. Mining of tin being the early source of wealth. Copper mining and the wool trade came later but copper makes a much prettier picture. But this winter picture of sheep shows just how the landscape has looked forever.
Town history below.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavistock
It is the texture of Tavistock that I love. So much history and bustling with civic activity since 961 AD. Something is very thrilling about being in a market town that has been a market town for so very long. Knowing that apart from my clothing and possibly my lack of body odour, nothing would have stood out about our visit or purchases yesterday, and time travel permitting we could easily have been at the very first market. A loaf of bread some green vegetables and a coal skuttle. No sheep at the market yesterday but below is a Greyface Dartmoor I met some time ago.
Every time I visit I wonder why I don’r go more often.
Tell us about the last thing you got excited about.
This Instagram post made me chuckle. Excited one step removed really. My dad loved to store pieces of wood. He even bought wood from a wood merchant that he loved with no actual project in mind. His dad and brother were both avid storers of bits of wood. When my grandad died they would have shared the bounty.
When my dad died my uncle told me not to ‘worry’ about the shed ( or wood store) . I didn’t worry. The random bits of wood were guaranteed a good home even if they never made it to an actual construction. I still love the smell of a well kept wood store. Curiously I never photograph them. So some grotty old pallets will have to do.
theoldmortuary.design 