Easing of lockdown in England and Cornwall. There is a joke here as Cornwall believes it is, in many ways, a separate entity from the rest of the United Kingdom. Unlike Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland which have some self-determination, Cornwall has not been able to stick to comfortable, safe lockdown.
We were obliged to travel into the rest of the UK this morning across the Tamar Bridge.
Watercolour © theoldmortuary
We’ve had to do it a few times during Lockdown but always in very controlled situations where social distancing has been easy. Shopping at Marks and Spencer and Holland and Barrett in Drake’s Circus, in Plymouth, was entirely relaxing and easy, but one other destination was just too much contact with other humans. We quickly left.
Emerging from Lockdown is going to be a strange and challenging experience. We felt like country mice suddenly being thrust into the Hurlyburly of Christmas shopping on Oxford Street. In truth the experience this morning was nothing like that , but that’s how we felt.
A Jack and Jill Book . 1962©Fleetway Publications
The illustration is from a book I had as a child and it always made me anxious, although Katie Country Mouse was always quite a role model.
The project for today was to sort out our glass jar storage area on the Cornish Range and label the jars , as many of our new healthy eating ingredients look similar. It was quite the task, but meditative and relaxing, which was just what I needed after the jarring retail experience to get the bloody labels. Now I’m a bit further away from the expedition it’s easy to see why it was quite stressful. The store was just too big and we probably saw more people than we’ve seen in two months. Everyone was pretty good at social distancing but there were too many people there and too many who should not have been out, let alone in a large retail store. I’d be struggling if I had been told to isolate for 12 weeks and I might also have slipped out for a bit of fresh air. A massive shop is not the place for those with compromised health. My worry for them made me sad.
Anyway back to the jars. All filled up and properly labelled whilst I watched Sewing Bee on the TV.
Link to The Great British Sewing Bee.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03myqj2
Two friends have sent me something, via digital media, today. Both are appropriate for the end of a blog.
One is a quote from someone I’ve known since I was 11, we share a love of language.
What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make beginning. The end is where we start from.
T.S. Eliot.
The other is a sunset over Plymouth Sound from someone I’ve known two weeks. We’ve shared a large space in a coffee queue.
Happy Hump Day
We finished the day with a cup of tea and a scone. The scones were traded to us by a neighbour for the loan of our hedge trimmer.
A cup of tea is a fine way to end a blog on VE Day. The last image of the day is my favourite WW2 picture from the South West Image Archive. The Archive is held by The Box, Plymouth and is of a woman, drinking tea while sitting on the rubble of her destroyed home near Plymouth Dockyard,
In other news the cutlery drawer is tidy.
The dog walk/ permitted exercise took on a whole new shape today. We took a picnic and the delay gave us the chance to see nature just highlighted by a setting sun.
Finally some lovely texture randomly created by a pile of stuff actually in the old mortuary.
Painting the decking is a simple task, it usually takes me a day of moving stuff, cleaning, painting and moving stuff back. In normal times getting supplies is a simple matter of going to the local industrial estate to click and collect.We were fooled by two half full cans of our favourite decking paint in the shed. Two of them should have rung alarm bells but it didn’t. Given the luxury of time the deck painting this year has the added glamour of a borrowed power washer, a scrub with soap and some gentle moisturising.With two of us painting this was going to be simple. We would each start at opposite ends and meet in the middle.All went well, the sunshine was fabulous and we made good progress. The paint looked a little different from what we were painting over but we were confident of drying resolving any concerns. Drying did not present us with a gorgeous dark charcoal. More like the charcoal of a barbeque, multicoloured from white to black.The decking paint possibly from two different summers had not overwintered well. On reflection our decking takes a tin and a bit to give good coverage. We had used the partial left over tins left from two previous seasons. Loads of time made us hugely tolerant. We would just consider this an undercoat.In Britain DIY businesses are running click and collect services during the lock down so buying a new supply of our regular Decking Paint shouldn’t have been a problem. Well that was a rabbit hole I hadn’t expected to disappear down for quite so long.Locating the paint was easy enough on many sites but having it in my basket and purchasing it any time before Christmas proved to be impossible. It seemed a multi grey deck would be the look for us this year. To say nothing of the stern warnings about my frivolous purchase being way down on anyone’s delivery schedule. In the face of such opposition I gave up.Our town has one of those huge, cheap outlet stores for food and many other random things you didn’t know you needed. We were in there for some essentials when Charcoal decking paint from an unknown brand grabbed our attention.So cheap we couldn’t not buy it. Two tins so we could use the same technique of both painting at the same time. Not all Charcoals are the same, this one was quite a vivid, lively grey. Not our thing at all but needs must and we finished the job, same technique. When we met in the middle we matched. Then the internet got involved. What you need with grey decking apparently is a ‘ pop’ of vivid orange. Asking an artist for vivid opens up a world of tangerine/orange/ yellow/red or in our case some old theatre prop paint in fluorescent orange. Swifter than you can say Seedless Jaffa an old fruit box that we use as a garden coffee table was turned into a fluorescing creation of truly orange vibrancy.
In a heartbeat the decking was restocked with chairs for five people , the vibrating orange table and various planters. Not only that but the cheap out of town store had forced us to buy solar panel Christmas lights, so at night we twinkle,and like something from science fiction the fruit box glows.The simple job took 4 days …
theoldmortuary.design 