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.
Describe your most ideal day from beginning to end.
An ideal day cannot be predictably planned and is perhaps only recognisable as ideal once it has come to an end. Because I was involved in doing Bloganuary many of my ideal days went unmarked because they did not fit with the Bloganuary prompts. There were many days that would be considered to be ideal in January especially as the sun came out a lot more than usual.
Sometimes the tide was just perfect too. Or the light was in just the right place to catch a wave.
On one occasion some Pilchard Street Art popped up.
In very similar colours to some doughnuts I had just seen.
By superimposing those two images I created the header image of this blog.
An ideal day is harder to categorise than I could possibly describe.
How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?
It is not how the significant things in life alter my perspective that fascinates me. Although like everyone my life has been radically altered by time passing and significant events.
What I love is the way tiny details in a day can spark a train of events that make some big,fat,gorgeous thoughts spring out of almost nowhere. Big, fat, gorgeous thinking is such a positive thing.
Yesterday I had to search out a portrait I had done of a dear friend. I had taken her photos after the last Covid lockdown . I spent the morning with her, a golden moment because we both knew that was the last time we would probably have together. I eventually tracked her photo down in my archive and in searching for it I found the picture that illustrates a golden moment so well.
It is also tiny things that alter perspectives and that is always a good thing.
The first bob of February was achieved yesterday morning. It was a somewhat monochromatic day. And for no particular reason quite a brutally cold swim at Tranquility Bay. There were only four bobbers, two bystanders and two dogs. A small highpoint was waving to the sailors on the deck deck and them waving back. An excellent way for us all to warm up.
Monochrome was the flavour of our outdoor life yesterday.
Two barrel hoops had dropped off a barrel near the Cooperage.
And much to the disappointment of Lola, one of her favourite cafes was shut.
Which leads me to today’s prompt rather nicely.
Something on your “to-do list” that never gets done.
February sees us back in home DIY mood. We are fired up by a very arty weekend away in Penzance.
Every inch of our previous home. The actual old Mortuary was designed and created by us and two wonderful builders, Jason and Dave who humoured our maddest ideas while still rebuilding a mortuary and attached cottage into a wonderfully comfortable home.
But fate took a turn in good ways and bad. We became the family hub and our family, which had been shrinking for many years, started to grow.
To paraphrase Chief Martin Brody in Jaws. We were going to need a bigger house. Our current home is an old Townhouse that had been owned by the same family for 60 years. It had been ‘done up’ to sell but has many original features. Without ripping out perfectly good things we are slowly remodelling the house to better represent and accommodate us. The to-do list will never be done. And we are just fine with that.
I love cooking anything with British summer fruits. Not a thing I do much of in the depth of winter. But where cooking fails, art steps up. I had ordered some romantically named water colours in the depth of winter, they arrived on the cusp of February and the little test piece I painted when they arrived, had all the piquancy of my favourite summer puddings.
The names themselves are delicious.
School Disco
Byzantium
Caravan Green
Gooseberry
Rowan berry
I doodled away giving everything except Byzantium a run out on paper. To be honest I was being sidetracked.
I was actually supposed to be creating a pillowcase from an old pyjama jacket.
But the temptation to try the new paints suddenly became urgent. Probably because sewing the slippery fabric was as difficult as it had been to sleep in the pyjamas.
I didn’t give Byzantium a moment on the brush. I’m not sure why. But it gives me a fine excuse to have another doodle this weekend.These paints are all hand made by Tansy Horgan.
I have a project in mind that will need Byzantium. I am slightly concerned that Byzantium may be a bit of a bully. Caravan Green turned out to be exactly that. Hugely versatile on his own, but a little bit of a bully when mixing with others. Gooseberry was a dream,fading out to something imperceptibly beautiful the more dilute I made it.
School Disco was a dream. As pink and pushy as Barbie. I was always a rather conflicted Disco goer, particularly the termly torture of a School Disco. I loved to dance, but in that dreadful hierarchy of teenage years my acne and bookishness cast me as a wallflower. Not that I needed to be picked to be danced with. I have always had enough chutzpah to dance as if no-one is watching, but the judgement of the school ‘beautiful people’ is a harsh spotlight to step into.
And lastly Rowanberry.
Does anybody apart from birds eat a Rowanberry? The paint was fab. A super bright red/orange with a bitter edge. I can’t wait to pair it with Byzantium on a doodle.
No more Bloganuary prompts. A reason to be cheerful. Signing up to respond to a daily prompt was very against my serendipitous pondering style. 31 days of responding/conforming to writing about a subject generated by an external source. I knew it would go against the grain. Predictably for the first few days I slightly dreaded reading the prompt, but just digging in and accepting whatever came my way, became a brief and limited new way to think about blogging. The prompts took me to different things to ponder. I absolutely missed my freestyle approach. I also missed the repetitive nature of pondering and blogging about the normality of daily life. But Bloganuary has given me more to think about and I may mix up my blogging offering as a result of my January/Bloganuary experience.
But for February 1st I am straight back onto the daily repetition of the morning dog walk.
Embellished this morning by bright sunshine.
And the continued luminosity of the cows.
Happy St Brigid Day, patron saint of cattle, among her many other accomplishments.
Please disregard the prompt below. I am conducting a small algorithm experiment.
What’s the thing you’re most scared to do? What would it take to get you to do it?
I am fairly risk averse so there are probably many things that I am scared to do. I just don’t confront them on daily, weekly or even annual basis. I am very far from a control freak but as an individual I very much like to be in control of my situations and destiny. Surrendering that control is a decision I like to make for myself. Trust, respect, experience, knowledge and love help me to surrender my desire to be in control. Anything that would make me take truly risky harmful decisions scares me and nothing is likely to change my thinking.
If that makes me sound timid or fearful. That is not the case at all.
‘ What’s the worst that could happen” is a fairly regular thought.
Creativity and knowledge grows in the spaces created by taking a calculated risk . It’s the uncalculated risks I avoid.
Almost certainly the weather is the thing I moan about the most. Not perhaps to other people, but my internal dialogue is a vivid cacophony of weather considerations. I was not always a weather watcher, but ten years as a dog owner has made me appreciate the value of a walk without rain, or more unusually, a walk without scolding hot pavements. I have three weather apps on my phone. In addition to my dog walking considerations there is also the small matter of sea swimming. You might think that plunging into the sea year round would make the weather largely irrelevant,but storms and rainfall affect safety and water quality. There is also the small matter of changing after a swim. Rain on a salty body makes drying and dressing really tricky. Everything becomes sticky or tacky. Clothes that would normally glide on get caught in mysterious places or cling to the first piece of skin they touch.
Tiny garden weather stations are a thing. Controlled by a smartphone they provide hyperlocal weather information. I am a little tempted to get one. I might moan internally about the weather, but I have also become fascinated and intrigued by how the weather can change my life.
While writing this I realised I preferred the word mithering to moaning. The dictionary suggests there is nothing to choose between them.
I am not by nature a complainer or even a moaner in the normal day to day. But being a weather mitherer has something about it which I rather like.
Sport does not feature on any of my favourites lists. I’ve often done sport and have watched with interest too. But I would say, that sport doesn’t really float my boat. But that would be to dismiss the only sport I have competed in, to a reasonable level. When I moved to Cornwall I discovered gig rowing. My first experience of actually enjoying being in a team. Coincidentally, and really significantly different, the only televised sport I actively choose to watch is the Oxford and Cambridge Boat race. It was the only sporty thing my family were ever interested in watching on the television, when I was young. I still watch it every year. There is no jeopardy, the same two teams compete on the same course every year. One of them wins.
Not being passionate about sport feels unusual. I have really enjoyed any sporting occasion I have attended or taken part in, but I sense that it is the people watching and the sense of occasion that excites me, not the sport itself. The spark of interest has never turned into a flame.
Oh how I wish the prompt for pondering #800 had been a subject I could really ponder about. But we are coming to the end of January/Bloganuary and I have stuck to my commitment. Not subscribing to Dry January has allowed me to enjoy a hot pineapple and rum cocktail while pondering #800. The pictures in this blog are very much about my normal blogging behaviour. A gentle meandering through the thoughts and activities of the day.
Some coastal path walking, at Cape Cornwall and the Penwith Heritage Coast in the far West of Cornwall. Pondering on a sofa by a fire with my dogs.
Maybe I would take up playing the nose flute. There is no sense of scale to this question which makes it imponderable. A £10 win would barely register, a win of millions would be life altering and probably not just for me. Neither would make me any better at playing the nose flute.
Which I suppose is the definition of something money can’t buy.
Wikipedia and Google are available should you feel the urge to investigate nose flutes. The nose flautist in the picture is on my current regular dog walk. I am rather charmed by him but not perhaps his choice of music making.
I have learned that regular mouth flautists have a range of extended techniques. One of which sounds fascinating. Flutter tonguing. A nose flautist has no such entertaining conversation points or indeed techniques to practice. Most of us being incapable of eliciting so much as a tremble from our nostrils.
Would you ever buy a second-hand nose flute?
I realise I have used a possible extended flautist technique to answer a prompt that seems pointlessly unanswerable.
The book I want to read this weekend is a David Bowie biography by Dylan Jones. What will stop me? Possibly my location, a Georgian house in Penzance full of fabulous things, and the weather which is crisp and bright with sunshine that wouldn’t be out of place in May.
I even have the perfect snuggery for reading.
But with that snuggery comes the temptation of other books.In particular one about Interior Design by Barta Heuman. Oh my goodness a cornucopia of advice about living with things that make every room sing.
David Bowie is instantly on my back burner while I greedily tuck into her book. Imagine a Swedish Designer who encourages ‘stuff’. No sleek minimalism for my new favourite designer. Oh no, she encourages eclecticism and individuality.
theoldmortuary.design 