Our morning walk gave us a familiar surprise in an unfamiliar place. We used to live in London where street stabbings were, not commonplace, but not unheard of. Street memorials sometimes lasted years. Supermarket flowers and mementoes, kept fresh by friends and family.
Although we knew there had been a street stabbing on one of our dog walks it was a bit of a surprise to find an informal flower memorial to the person stabbed last month.
Sometimes the unexpected makes eyes a little blurry. As we returned people were tidying away the dying blooms. What a very sad job for anyone to have to do.
Monday’s blogs are either early or late. Not because I am sleeping on the job like this sloth. Mondays we do childcare and choose not to be on our phones when she is around. So a blog is written early or late.
This is the late variety while our small person sleeps. I love this picture from a friend’s recent holiday in Costa Rica.
I am very fond of sloths and envious of their lifestyle under normal circumstances.
But dozing like a sloth in a tree and proper pondering is not for me today.
The normal order of things has arrived in our house out of the normal order.
Bunches of daffodils arrived over the weekend. Normally the first cut flowers of January, they were overtaken by beautiful blowsy tulips who arrived en masse for a birthday just over a week ago.
The weather of this curious winter is doubtless to blame. Tulips come from elsewhere and are grown in controlled greenhouses for the early part of the year. Daffodils come from just down the road and suffer the same weather as I do.
The daffodils in our kitchen probably started life as cut flowers a week or so ago in fields near Penzance. Then travelled in temperature controlled luxury to London, were distributed to Marks and Spencer, where they were purchased and then driven down to us over the weekend.
Normally we can reliably buy daffodils by the roadside from early January . Everything is a little bit late and battered by the storms that keep rolling in. Even snowdrops seem a bit behind their usual schedule.
These clumps of snowdrops are usually much more open to posing for photographs. The green stripes of their underskirts are one of my favourite shades of green.
Flowers in January bring a twinkle to the listless, slightly unfocussed days of mid-January. Arriving out of order is a discombobulating experience. But now the daffodils are in the kitchen and everything should fall into place. Onward to the second half of winter. Bring it on and let’s get it over with.
If we are lucky twixtmas is a lull with a little more thinking time than the hurly burly of Christmas and the optimism or trepidation of moving gently into a new numerical year. Perhaps a time to appraise relationships both past and present. My blog hosts posed this question overnight. As we gather people close to us this is a hugely significant question.
What relationships have a positive impact on you?
I would say there are three quality stages of relationships.
Close / Loving.
Intermediate with affection, respect or a combination of the two.
Fleeting.
Of the three I would say only the last can be purely positive, or indeed purely negative.
All other relationships are a balance of positive and negative impacts. Hugely positive relationships come with some inevitable negatives when people close to you break your heart in some way, not always intentionally. Intermediate relationships can be surprisingly lovely with less impactful negatives.Fleeting relationships can be amazingly positive, the negative aspects more easily brushed off.
Some relationships are negative all the way but circumstances force you to carry them around like a piece of pointless heavy luggage.
Twixtmas is a time to reflect on the texture of our relationships. Some regrets but a good balance of loveliness would seem to me to be the optimum choice for a positive impact. We all have to take the rough with the smooth to a certain degree because nobody is perfect or right for us all the time. Or us for them.
Sometimes dumping the pointless heavy luggage is just the absolute right decision and brings the joy of a negative action creating a positive outcome. Not always easy to do.
That is a good old waffle as I stare into the Christmas tree but the festive season often makes us confront some difficult thoughts alongside all the lovely positive ones, about people we share or have shared Christmas/ Life with. The luxury of the time to be able to consider relationships past and present, close or fleeting has a positive impact in itself.
P.s this blog was not written to be downbeat or forlorn. I may have struck a wrong note. I was simply observing that even the most lovely experience will have a piquancy of sadness if you are fully invested. When it ends for instance. And when a dreadful experience stops there is an uptick because the dreadful is gone.
Big question on a blog with a lovely number. #1111.
My favourite month is May with September as a very close second.
September
Weather, nature and crowds are my parameters. Late May is a gorgeous, vivid time of year with nature bursting out in all directions . The holiday season has not quite cranked visitor numbers up to intolerable, even if they are essential to the local economy.
In September Nature is a little dusty and depleted by the Summer and Visitors but the weather is usually kind.
If May is Glamorous,then September is Shabby Chic, both fabulous in their ways.
A bit of googling suggests that my first choice is popular. The second not so much.
I have never worked in education but September always feels like a month of new beginnings and May the sharpness just before the languor of Summer.
May wins because it welcomes Summer but only by a little bit. May also has one extra day.
A Sunday perspective. Are Sundays about reflecting on the past week or looking forward to the coming week?
I am never sure. During the past week we caught up with some former colleagues over a cup of coffee. We had the most delicious conversations about third party former colleagues, that we had all worked with at differing times or hospitals.
Two military men cropped up. The resulting conversation is unlikely ever to be forgotten.
” Oh X, he was always so lovely, I can’t believe you didn’t realise he was gay”
” Y, nice chap, quite a stickler, maybe homophobic”
” Did you know he became a Wizard”
Conversations like this are the bricks and mortar of good friendships. The laughter in that moment was golden.
Here is another golden Sunday perspective. A super low tide and a long walk to the ferry.
Monday fakery, this picture did not make it into the autumn leaf blog yesterday. My Google Pixel phone generated it from one of my photos in the ‘stylised’ setting in picture editing. Stylised uses my favourite settings and gives me a picture I might create for myself. Mostly the image is an epic fail, in my opinion, but sometimes the result is gloriously accurate, as it has been for this picture.
If I suffered from ‘Monday Morning Malaise’ this is a picture that could encourage me to ‘ get a wiggle on’.
My long term career was a seven day a week job so Mondays were not quite as significant to me, but commuting into work in London using public transport it was easy to feel that ‘Monday’ feeling emanating, if not dripping from my fellow commuters. And from the 9-5ers who arrived at 9 on a Monday and worked alongside those of us who worked shifts and On-Call rotas. I was also spared the ‘Sunday Night Dread’. Although the ‘on-call’ dread was very real any day of the week.
Now, I live a self-directed week; my Monday mornings are a little more significant than they have ever been. Monday morning is like unpacking an Amazon parcel. I don’t quite remember what is planned this week. (I can never remember what I ordered) My first job is to check my diary and I am good to go. This picture rather joyfully sums up the optimism of most of my Mondays. I realise I am lucky.
Writing a daily blog is a constant evolving habit. Some days I know exactly where the blog is going, other days I respond to a question from my blog hosts. Some days I wait for a nugget of inspiration as the day unfolds. The only rules are that I write something each day and give some thought to my subject matter.
Not particularly blog related but I regularly like to look at my photo archive held on my phone or in the ‘Cloud’ and see what was uploaded on previous 24th Octobers. Or any other date for that matter.
Doing so proves to me that within lifes repetitive cycles there are always significant moments.
The colourful land crab at the top of the blog was actually photographed on the 20th October 2015 in Sai Kung, Hong Kong but on the 24th October I cropped and edited the photograph to use as my screensaver on my phone on the 24th October.
Wembury
Late afternoon in Wembury 2012. 24th October. Wembury is somewhere I take the blog often. On this particular day I was pondering the fairly recent death of my fathers friend who despite coming from Essex was very familiar with this coastline. When I was a child my parents friends were just part of my childish outer circle but knowing my parents friends as an adult was a lovely experience and it is sad when those connections are lost.
Brick wall, City of London 2018
This was a brick wall in an underground car park in the City of London between Smithfield Meat Market and St Bartholomews Hospital. I only ever parked there once despite working at Barts, but was thrilled to find this really old wall and an advert for a long lost coaching inn nearby.
The underground car park had originally been an underground railway station in the 1800’s for the meat market at Smithfield. It was also the location of the MI 5 headquarters in the James Bond film, Skyfall.
Which moves me on, pondering to another wall on 24th October 2017.
I had a new app on my phone that meant I could ‘hang’ any of my pictures on any wall I chose. Giddy times. Finally 24th October 2021.
Cafe Au Lait
My peak moment at Dahlia growing, the last dahlia of our last dahlia season at the actual Old Mortuary. The Dahlias were lovingly moved to our new city home. The Dahlias were not impressed with city living and checked out. Who knew they could be so fastidious.
24th October a routine kind of day but stuff still happens.
If you had a million dollars to give away, who would you give it to?
I’ve pondered sudden windfalls of large amounts of money for most of my adult life. I have also pondered just how long the words One million would still have the cachet of seeming like unimaginable wealth. I realise all these things are relative.
Lets chip away at the One Million Dollars.
£ 765,155 pounds would not even buy me my first flat in South London which had 3 bedrooms.
A suburb where people with ‘normal’ jobs owned or rented normal sized flats in unremarkable streets.
Going back further to when I was first properly aware of the true value of money and how I had to work to earn it.
Right now if I had a windfall of £765, 155 the last thing I would be doing is giving it away, away. My family could be more comfortable and I could make a difference to small, local organisations and charities by making bigger donations than I do now.
How much longer can the word Million continue to pretend that it represents unimaginable wealth?
In theory, rather empty, but my head has the most delightful, personal Juke Box, playing in my subconscious, on demand. Sometimes in the form of earworms, when I least expect it.
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