Oh the loveliness of concatination, and having friends in High Places. This shot from a TV shows my friend Jenny, standing on the outside walkway of the lighthouse on Plymouth Hoe. A T.V crew getting a much better view of the goings on at the Hoe yesterday than I did. She watched the T.V in case she was on, and she snapped this pic.
She and I were chattering because I was suspicious that I had also caught her up a lighthouse in one of my meddled photographs. ( A sentence I never expected to write)
It is lovely when serendipity and concatination come together.
Then on my way home nature got all serendipitous. Look at this beautiful pansy making the most of a difficult location. Now just as I went to the Hoe and saw nothing yesterday,my pansy growing is not the most successful, slugs believe I am their artisan food producer. But leave a pansy out of my direct control and they manage very nicely just growing away in a drain.
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.
Saturday 11th September 2021. I woke up this morning with a surprise realisation. It is 20 years since 9/11. Obviously there have been documentaries and news articles swirling around this week. The simple difference between how the U.S and the U.K write dates down in short form gives the annual anniversary a lack of specificity. Here the anniversary of 9/11 occurs on 11/9. This simple difference spins my head around. I have mild disnumerancy and have to work hard with numbers. Because of this 9/11 represents not just a day but a whole season of memories. 20 years ago I had just started University as a mature student studying Fine Art, something I should have done long before I became mature. I was creating digital art for established musicians and I was a busy working mother. I had no personal involvement with the events of 9/11. The consequences of it changed my life.
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