Evening dog walks are getting a lot more twinkly. I love this completely contemporary festive home. Nothing tacky about this house
This festive property takes a more traditional approach, and diligence to lightbulb placement. At home we have gone for something a little less ostentatious.
Our home window is a work in progress, the next stage is baubles in every shade of garish. Lime green and pink anyone?
New handrails to the sea. There have been some refurbished steps through the rocks into the sea for a couple of months. Yesterday the steps were fitted with new and much improved hand rails. Despite only being a small walk from our usual beach this access point can sometimes be safer if the sea is rough at high tide. The new handrails make it an even safer option. Yesterday Spearmint the seal also chose the safer option for her morning swim.
Flipping things even further a diver had to get out of the sea in order to take underwater photos of her.
For all of us winter swimming has properly started now. The cold water buzz is back.
A life before Covid-19 or a ghost of Christmas past? Both really. Carnaby Street in 2018. We had recently returned from South Korea and Hong Kong. In both countries mask wearing in public was a fairly common occurrence but beyond the fastidiousness of some Asian tourists mask wearing in public was unimaginable in the joyous throng of people enjoying the Bohemian Rhapsody, themed lights,of London’s Carnaby Street.
Two years on in 2020 and the World is in full Covid-19 swing and we are one month into,experimental, Winter cold water swimming. A ghost of Christmas future, or more accurately future winters.
As it happens exactly that. One year on from that sunny November beach scene and this is the pot of hot coffee that is pre- warming us before this mornings swim, the croissant is already gone. We are discussing the ‘Are we mad theory’ the same theory that we will discuss this weekend when we return to London to see Christmas Lights.
Were we mad?
Yes we were and it was one of the most tranquil, gorgeous swims of the year. Will we be mad enough to visit some of London’s Christmas lights this weekend. I really hope so.
Illumination in the countdown to Christmas. Rain, Petrol and a rusty gulley. Whats not to love! Rain was the predominant weather today and would have featured somehow. The plan was to write a bobbing blog with accompanying rain seascapes. Nature thwarted me. We met at high tide, which coincided with dreadful rain. We procrastinated a good bit. The thought of a plunge into cold water while being drenched by cold rain was not enticing. The precipitation was persistent but eventually we shrugged off our warm dry clothes to a certain fate of getting damp while we swam, not a great help when trying to dress. Beyond getting out and dry I had also planned some gorgeously grey shots of Plymouth Sound. When my hands had warned up enough to take a post swim photo the weather decided to put on its party face.
Not what I had planned at all but useful as another Illumination shot on the countdown to Christmas.
And there’s more.
You just can’t trust the weather, I’m sure to get gloom sometime soon
There are two static cranes preserved at the Royal William Yard a nod to the former industrial/naval history of this location. As we get nearer to Christmas the area is getting a little bit busier in the early evening as we go for our twilight walk. As part of my countdown to Christmas all I need to do is walk to the other side of the crane.
A burst of cerise lighting lights up the cab. To be fair the cab is lit up all year round but now the days are so short the illumination is a key location on my evening stroll. By complete contrast our morning outing was illuminated with some gorgeous sunshine.
And a visit from a local celebrity.
Short days, filled with variety.
Late blog alert. I’m not sure what happened to the early morning. I am in the grip of making Christmas presents that cannot be purchased this year for a variety of reasons. Brexit, Coronovirus, Supply Chain. Like an idiot I thought I would blog about my endeavours and realised mid-morning that that was a pretty mad idea if I am also aiming for an element of surprise. The picture above is a cheeky hint that I have been burning the candle at both ends to source recycled materials to create these gifts.
Giving nothing away I have to comment that my sewing machine needle appears to have shrunk its eye. So tricky was rethreading the needle I wondered if I was sewing by candlelight.
An illuminated magnifying glass, not recycled had to be purchased. The only glitch, so far in my drive to be more sustainable with this project.
Still giving nothing away, some of the recycled or repurposed materials last saw the light of day in 1974 when sewing by candlelight was actually a thing in the 3 day weeks. Electricity use was restricted to conserve energy as Industrial Action by rail and coal workers was limiting the ability to generate enough power for normal activity.
All will be revealed in exactly one month. Counting down to Christmas Now!
Its been a funny old festive season @theoldmortuary . We have a smallish family circle and a larger circle of friends. We are very lucky. One Christmas lost to being decent citizens, who stuck to the rules, is not actually a ‘ lost’ Christmas just a diminished one without all our treasured people around us.
Today it is 360 days until Christmas 2021. Our strange distorted world will look very different.
And while it can never turn the full 360 degrees to return us to our pre-pandemic normal. ( We can’t ever turn back the clocks.) Things will look and feel very different 360 days from now.
Less
And more.
Merry Christmas, who needs a big blog on Christmas morning, probably no one . What we all need is our friends and family around us. The hurly burly of traditions all bound up with over crowded homes and too much food. What we have this year @theoldmortuary is the time to go and look at Christmas lights after last minute shopping.
And the chance to make home made cranberry sauce.
While watching Christmas Carols from Kings College, Cambridge.
Very peaceful and lovely, but not normal. We love and miss our festive season regulars, the irregulars and those in other realms. Love to our families and friends far and wide. You light up our lives.
Christmas Eve 2020, what to say! Facebook reminded me yesterday that the day before Christmas Eve is usually Christmas Jumper Day, if it is a work day. Not @theoldmortuary we usually rock a festive t-shirt, you can hide it under scrubs and flash when appropriate.
Which is very fortunate for this meandering blog . Facebook also shared a video with me this morning. It seems only right to share it on here too.
My favourite Christmas tune of all time.
It’s very strange looking into a fridge on Christmas Eve and still see spare capacity. It’s also odd to feel able to crack open the festive treats, Cheese Footballs, without a pang of guilt that I am depriving my children of a heritage, festive, comestible. No family for us this year, just an empty table where sometimes there have been over twenty. Not this actual table obviously.
Back to Cheese footballs.The more retro cheese footballs become the more significant it is to hunt them down early in the festive shopping season. I’ve had these little chaps since September. I have even supplied other families with them. I am obsessed!
In these Covid times where even trivial things have disappeared I thought I would share my personal timeline of cheese footballs
My grandparents owned a country pub for most of their lives. A substantial meal in their establishment was a pickled egg and a bag of crisps.
High days and holidays were marked by bar snacks. This was long before the health hazards of such things was common knowledge. Christmas was marked by swapping out the dry peanut and raisin combo for Huntley and Partners Cheese Footballs. The tin below is the retail version. Pubs could get a substantial size catering pack in the same design. Nobody ever knew that my greedy hands helped themselves to the Christmas stock long before it got to the bar, which for reasons explained below is a good thing!
Time moved on and pubs like The Red Cow have disappeared. The illustration of the building above is an image I found earlier today on the internet.
Bar snacks have been tested and declared a bad idea because, pre- Covid, the words man, pub toilet and hand washing rarely appeared in sentences or real life. High levels of transferred urine and faecal matter could be detected in free bar snacks within half an hour of being placed on the counter. Women may also have been guilty of the non hand washing crime.
Cheese footballs not unlike the England football team are a long way from their golden years of the sixties. Every September they can be spotted in the Seasonal aisles of a few supermarkets. Dressed up in a fancier tub and sold by KP.
At this point pondering took a curious path. I googled the Red Cow to see if the internet had an image. It did and a whole lot more.
I can share with you an article from the Daily Mail discussing the conversion of the Red Cow to a dwelling. The toilets get a mention. Fascinating too that the new owner was a microbiologist.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/property/article-2174208/amp/How-turned-Red-Cow-Daisy-Cottage.html
Somewhat stranger is an image of my grandfather’s grave in Wethersfield Cemetery that appears on the same Google. Something I have never seen before. My family did mild dysfunction long before it was a ‘thing’. My grandmother , Gladys, is buried in Melbourne, Australia.
As it turns out this is exactly the right blog for Christmas Eve 2020. A curious mixture of festive, reflective, emotional and pragmatic. I urge you to view the video, it is gorgeously poignant.
Merry Christmas, thankyou for being here.
P.S Following the publication of this blog a local history group sent me two photographs of The Red Cow.
Thanks to https://wethersfield-history.org.uk/ for sending these.
The top photo is how I remember the pub but with the signage of the lower picture. The pub was a Ridley’s establishment or house as it would have been known.
I’m not certain visiting a new part of the coast is entirely sensible at dusk and low tide, particularly in late November. Despite being fairly close to home, Hannafore Beach is completely unknown to me. After a walk towards Talland Bay and back I thought I would give the dogs a low tide rock pool scamper. They loved it.
I’m just not quite so sure myself. Apologies to the many people I know who really love this place and find it restorative. Alone on an incongruous concrete pathway leading out to sea at sunset I felt a sense of foreboding and menace. There was a sense of dead seafarers souls winding round my ankles like silken slippery manacles.
Having thoroughly spooked myself, with fanciful imaginings and uncertainty about how the tide would come in, we called it a day. Two exhausted dogs and an overactive imagination. Time to research shipwrecks in Looe Bay and put my mind at rest , or not.
P.S. I found this dog centric page on line. A much more positive vibe! I’m clearly just inventing my own ghost stories for these dark days around the winter solstice.
Dog Friendly Hannafore Beach, Looe
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