Actually it was Friday sun and the image has been manipulated to make everything a bit more golden. Dreamlike perhaps.
There is a reason for this. Todays blog is about dreamscapes. I’ve noticed over the last week or so that my dreams that are close to reality have started to take place in pandemic world. Nothing dramatic, not nightmares. There are times when my dreams are so dull and humdrum waking up is a relief. It is these non interesting dreams that have shifted into Pandemic World. I’m not really sure why I’ve shared this, but as an observation of the progress of the pandemic I suppose it has some value.
Waking up today was a tiny shock to the system. We planned an early morning swim. Ooh it was chilly.
This last few weeks has seen bloggers around the world start to comment on the anniversaries of Lockdowns starting. I use the Bloglovin App and WordPress Reader to follow other blogs.
Being a daily blogger I have another 19 days before I need to confront an anniversary, but no matter what the style or genre of the blogs, that I choose to follow there are some common threads. Puzzlement and incredulity that a year has passed and the changes that they have experienced from the mundane to Life Altering.
Not needing to write my anniversary blog just yet but being aware set me thinking yeserday. We deliberately imposed restrictions on our contacts and travel well before the government imposed restrictions on us. For over a year now we have barely travelled 10 miles in any direction from the Tamar River and that includes periods when we could have gone further. Excluding a couple of essential trips to London , with some stops on the way, we have lived the travel life of the average person in pre World War 1 times. Within that small radius there are only about 5 locations that we regularly visit by car. Everything else is a walk starting at home. I’m certain my life has never been this geographically restricted ever before. Obviously like everyone I am also, culturally, socially and familialy restricted which are far more significant. But I am a Thursdays Child.
Loaded into a motor cycle and side car soon after birth and driven 15 miles from maternity unit to home. 10 miles is just not enough!
There has been a good bit of pondering over this blog today. No standout trail of random thoughts stood out yesterday ready for publication this morning. The tomato figurehead was a late arrival, its significance will be revealed later.
February is watercolour month @theoldmortuary . Not this year, the studio is partially packed away. I’ve not painted anything since a commission was finished before Christmas. Not able to quite control creativity I found something I can keep in a small bag, Lino printing is likely to become a method of illustration for these blogs once I get going effectively.
For similar reasons watercolour is my medium of choice in the dark months of January and February. It doesn’t require studio space, just a dining table which happens to be in the actual old mortuary, which is lovely and warm. ( Not a sentence associated with real mortuaries)
February is often about experimenting. So linoprinting is not such a great leap. Watercolour portraits, fascinate me. This one is of Fred, one of my schoolfriends. Painted a couple of years ago. I enjoyed the discipline and probably need an excuse to do more.
February is also about buying new art materials and getting to know them. The quickest way for me to do that is to revert to my earliest artistic endeavours and one that I only truly revisit on holidays ( no time soon I think)
Watercolour landscapes, a fine way to relax and experiment a bit. As a holiday activity it is unequalled, although many of mine are not truly watercolour as it is all too easy to dip a brush in my gin and tonic in error. This last watercolour will feature in tomorrows blog too, as it is a painting of the ‘Nearly There Trees’ a famed Landmark on one of the routes into Cornwall.
So back to the tomatoes. Inspired by The Lighter Side of Science on Facebook a page published by https://www.iflscience.com/
This site is perfect for the strange old mashup that is me. Part artist , part scientist, part ponderer.
I’ve reused and paraphrased their quote of today onto my painting. When else would l get the chance to use a painting of a tomato!
The storms keeping us out of the sea have abated , but only just. Overnight the rain has been torrential. There is a plan, this Sunday morning, for us to have a swim . I’m fairly freshly out of the dream state , illustrated above.
On waking I have immediately landed into the Procrastinate Zone. The, nearly year long, series of lockdowns and life restrictions have given me the luxury of time and in turn that has allowed procrastination to become a decision process. An alternative or extra option to add to any decision making moment.
This morning the cogs are turning slowly.
Shall I have a shower before I swim?
Can I actually bear to get out of bed and get into a hot shower?
No , there might be a moment of chill before the shower gets really hot.
Ok, I will just lay here. Procrastinate a bit and think about it in 5 minutes.
There is no logic to this thought, in an hour or so I’m going to be stepping into the sea for fifteen minutes of swimming in water that is about 8 degrees. It is unlikely to be as beautiful as the picture below, but this is the mental image that will get me out of bed and into the shower.
If thats not enough then at the weekend there is the added promise of good coffee.
None of these lovely images are actually persuading me to make that move into the shower. Writing about it , has of course given some legitimacy to procrastination. I could have just posted a different blog and got on with the shower but burbling on about procrastination has kept me in bed for an extra fifteen minutes and now there is no time for a shower.
Sometime soon I’m going to be back in a real world.
Yesterday was Valentines Day. Over commercialised and lacking originality the day is often the same year after year. 2021 though , felt a little different because everything feels different. There seemed to be less of a focus on romantic love and more on community love. Which is jolly convenient as the image above is about all sorts of Love. The picture above is the Love Tree , found just outside Saltash in Cornwall and the subject of a blog last year. Link below.
It is a local focus for fetish objects to do with love of all sorts. Talisman and mementoes are hidden in roots and the cracks and crevaces of the trunk of this old Elm tree. The custom is hundreds of years old.
The image of the tree was supposed to be artfully printed in gold foil on an abstract watercolour background. The original image and the painted backgrounds are lost in a print shop , victims of the Lockdowns. The exhibition they were intended for never happened. Soon I am going to learn to do Linocut Printing so that this image can have a new and different future.
Different as it turns out is the theme for this blog.
My Valentines Day was made very different by attending a local sports club to receive my first Vaccine against Covid 19. A brilliantly organised and efficient service staffed by happy and helpful volunteers. A triumph of Science and humanity against a difficult adversary. Aided and abetted in this country by poor political decisions.
My umbrella, needed, on the day, because of the torrential rain, but also, as it happens, as a metaphor for a brighter future post vaccine.
I’m not even sure which day of Lockdown 3 we are in. The day is probably irrelevant and can, of course be fact checked later. A daily blog in a time when we are not supposed to do very much might seem something that could be a struggle. But as a writer or recorder of things my bar is set extraordinarily low. Todays ponder is officially about the boundary between Devon and Cornwall, very specifically either side of the Tamar Bridge. Which is why the pretty image of the bridge heads up this blog. Before that however I wanted to share a side ponder not truly worthy of a full ponder. One that really would scrape the boredom level if I were to illustrate it. Lockdown 1 was the lockdown of some personal and public anguish and a lot of getting things done.
Lockdown 2 . Anguish accepted as a way of life on a sliding scale of severity depending on the day. Beyond that it was full on-prep for the Christmas that never was.
Lockdown 3 . Eat all the food puchased for the Christmas that never was. Emerge from that lifestyle to one that is not normal and also doesn’t feature a lot of getting things done. Stuff still happens though, no day is a void.
Over the weekend we watched a Christopher Plummer film. Not the Sound of Music but Beginners. The implausibility of The Sound of Music would have gone unnoticed but watching Beginners felt implausible not because it was the story of a 75 year old man embarking on his true life as a gay man but because the film featured almost impromptu parties. It felt so unbelievably wrong in a way that a family saga involving the Third Reich and clothes made from curtains never feels.
A small point I agree but this side ponder is about small points.
Small point number 2, in the mornings I wake up and am excited that the first cup of tea with caffeine is about to happen. Since the insomnia of Lockdown I , I have become tediously fastidious about no caffeine after 1pm. Were I to have some after 1pm , I could get giddy and throw a party. No I wouldn’t , but you get the picture!
If there were to be a party, I would almost certainly wear new thermal underwear. Today was a red letter day. New thermal leggings arrived. Essential for getting my 10,000 steps during my permitted, outdoor exercise. Such excitement!
Back to the Bridge, I have used this bridge regularly for nearly half of my life. I only realised this weekend that travelling west I am welcomed into Cornwall.
Welcomed in this instance is a loaded and slightly disingenuous word. I was not born in Cornwall, I have been a second home owner, I do come from ‘ up the line’ and for a long period of time I was from ‘ down London way’. The likelihood of me truly being welcomed by everyone in Cornwall is extremely unlikely but entirely livable with. Devon in the easterly direction offers no such welcome, genuine or otherwise.
Halfway across the bridge drivers or walkers enter the City of Plymouth. No mention of Devon, no warm welcome. At no point on the A38 are travellers welcomed to Devon. Most skirt Plymouth on the Devon Expressway. Once they have left the environs of the Plymouth City Boundaries they are left uncherished until they cross the county boundaries of Dorset or Somerset when other counties offer them an unconditional welcome.
The far South West of England, one welcome, not as whole hearted as you might think and one completely absent one.
A toddler dropped a much loved Zebra in the water near the Royal William Yard. The tide was high and, sadly, Zebra had to be left to his watery fate. Some time later members of Plastic Patrol paddled past.
They swiftly recovered the Zebra and, as luck would have it, Archie and his parents were waiting for a take out-coffee.
Wednesday, ‘Hump’ Day. Definable for a week but when will England pass the ‘ hump’ day of the 3rd Pandemic Lockdown. Pedaling uphill with no summit in sight and no promise of a freewheel to the end is so much harder in these winter months.
I’ve always enjoyed February so it feels unfaithful to not be so keen this year. February is the month we make plans for the rest of the year.Meet ups and even, dare I say it, when holidays with family and friends are planned.
This time last year I was preparing to curate a Spring Exhibition , although I had a sneaking feeling by the end of February that we might well be planning in vain. Working closely with other artists in any collaboration isn’t ever a waste of time and I gained a good friend, who has proved to be a valuable pair of ears in this pandemic, while planning the exhibition that never was. We may never have cemented a friendship without the unique circumstances of the pandemic.
She is not the only friend @theoldmortuary has gained in this unusual year. Funny to think that we have friends that we now know really well who we have never hugged or even been closer to than a metre. All these new friendships come from a tiny geographical area close to home. Less than ten miles certainly. Meanwhile friends and family old and new are out there locally and in the rest of the world also unhugged. For the forseable future they will remain unhugged.
I suppose the best I can hope for from this February is to just keep moving forward on a metaphorical bicycle, no plans but with a basket full of hugs, waiting to spill out on the downhill when my feet are off the pedals and the future is a little more certain.
It’s not often that February gets quite such a welcome, but @theoldmortuary January seemed to drag its feet a little. Probably not the months fault. With Lockdown III starting moments after non- Christmas the normal January ennui started sooner than normal. Cold water swimming has pulled us through the month with twice weekly swimming.
Strange that in a month with more time to read, I had forgotten about this book until yesterday. When I was working and commuting in London the electronic version of this book was my daily read. I never felt moved to read it out loud on the bus or train as people who read the Bible or Koran were sometimes moved to do. Now I’ve refound it I may throw in the odd snippet or morsel of London history into the pondering mix.
February the first is not so interesting , and none of my favourite diarists bothered with it but in 2021 just getting to February 1st feels good enough.
January did not slip away unnoticed yesterday. An irregular swimming companion joined us for a lunchtime beach walk.
The greige is back! This picture is in full glorious colour but you would never know it, only a life jacket on the pontoon gives a tiny splash of colour. Headlines are a starker version of greige, the United Kingdom has recorded an excess of 100,000 deaths linked to Covid.
This picture is also in full glorious colour again there is a tiny splash of colour on a pontoon . On this occasion the splash of colour is an office building painted a curious shade of salmon pink. The thing neither of these pictures show is the unrelenting rain. What they do demonstrate is why safety equipment is painted red, or in unusual circumstances Salmon Pink. The salmon pink office is part of a Royal Navy Munitions Depot. Barges, called Lighters, make their way to the Jetty, on which it stands, from the Dockyard to collect armaments to transport down the river to load onto warships. I had often wondered why the building was pink. I presume now that is is because Salmon Pink also stands out in Greige. There would not be a jetty if the barges had trouble seeing it.
As ponderings go this one is biased towards the dismal end of the spectrum. Late January, dreadful pandemic statistics, jetties solely built to deliver weapons are not the ingredients for a joyful blog particularly set within a background of a third lockdown.
Thankfully Facebook timehop gave me an eight year old image, also with some obvious red to twink the mood a little.
Hugo loves a drink of tea. He is never too fussed about the design of the mug, but for the purposes of this blog I’m quite grateful he chose this one for his morning refreshment. A tiny uplift of encouragement in a world that is rather greige.
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