#459 theoldmortuary ponders

Stepping softly into another week. January is a funny month. Not one that I ever feel particularly warm towards, but a weekend of crisp bright days has made me feel quite perky. Our trip to St Ives was 100% sunshine so we walked and basked as much as possible, turning our winter faces to the sun, like Sunflowers in August. We were staying on a tiny lane called The Didgy but our kitchen overlooked Virgin Lane and this beautiful door.

Both evocative of a different age. The beauty of being in Cornish fishing towns in January is the closeness, that it is possible to feel, to the history of these places. There are not so many people about and the sounds and smells of the town are just as they would have been centuries ago, minus perhaps body odour and poor sanitation. The first building on Virgin Lane was a bakery, it swung into action at about 7am in the morning. Bread, pasties and baked goods delivered from an out of town industrial unit. The romantic smell of baking created by modern warming ovens pressed against its 16th Century walls. However the smells are created, the effect was the same. 21st century people, wearing fishermen’s sweaters flocked to the bakery drawn out of their cottages by the smell wafted into every home in the vicinity. After shopping many of them then took a turn to the harbour where eager Seagulls hover in the hope of stealing a beakful of baked goods.

Coffee in hand, bread under one arm. 21st Century people, in fishermen’s sweaters, look out at resting fishing boats. Sunshine and peace makes romantics of us all.

#403 theoldmortuary ponders

It is a misty murky weekend in the Tamar Valley. I’ve been overwhelmed with a virus and have had to watch on as my fellow bobbers took to the water on the one day that our swimming zone was not treacherous.

But out of the gloom came a red dot indicating that I had sold a piece of art at the exhibition where I caught the virus earlier in the week.

I am super pleased as it was one of my experimental pieces with alcohol inks. Alcohol is also involved in other art projects this week. My ongoing urge to draw a Dublin back street complete with inebriated man having a pee. He is not so much the focal point, more a piece of street furniture as nearly every historic back street had at least one man relieving himself in a pool of light. I will spare you the Google images that I will be drawing from but there are days when I am glad my artistic researches are no longer tracked by the NHS IT department. There is a funny old system of on- call where you are only paid for emergency work that you actually do. In theory it can be done from home but often it was just easier to stay on site and do self interest work/ study in between cases. Mostly I did work related study but sometimes when I was doing arts courses. I would knock out a Fine Art essay. Me and IT got particularly close when I was researching ‘ Finding the Erotic in Nature’ . The nature of work in the NHS means that almost nothing except actual porn gets stopped by their filters. But fleshy looking plants really set the IT logarithms on me. Thankfully I had a good relationship with IT mostly because some of my colleagues could not keep their fingers out of the Porn Sweetie Jar that is the Internet, even at work. So they alerted me when my colleagues had transgressed. The quiet ones are the worst!

This plant, which makes beautiful tea was a very awkward search.

#248 theoldmortuary ponders

Look at these vivid flowers, they just revealed themselves near a local roundabout. Another revelation yesterday was Kate Bush doing an interview on Radio 4. She was discussing her surprise elevation to the top of the music charts in Britain and America with the single Running up that Hill ( A deal with God).44 years after it was first released. The single is part of the soundtrack for Stranger Things. A TV drama featuring teenagers and supernatural events and curious government behaviour in a mundane Indiana location.

What struck me as unusual in the interview by Emma Barnett and the preview piece by Caitlin Moran was that at no point did anyone discuss Kate’s looks or her fabled allure to men. How refreshing to just talk about music, life and gardening.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0018gqv?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

I realise that BBC sounds does not play everywhere so I have included a newspaper report of the interview.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/jun/22/the-whole-worlds-gone-mad-kate-bush-on-running-up-that-hills-success?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

The fact that this interview struck me as both unusual and refreshing is a symptom of how women are still judged differently to men. This may seem like an odd kind of theme for a blog but it struck a chord.

Earlier this week while I was swimming up and down the wide part of the Lido I had to regularly pass 5 young men playing with a ball, something I would probably not have done in my entire life for fear of the ribald or sexist comments. Confident that age has made me almost invisible I pressed on. But no, my crime as a woman, this time, was to be ‘ too old’ to be a threat to them.

#107 theoldmortuary ponders

A late ponder and a strange one too. I’m not yet done with St Ives but this ponder witnessed the great divide in our country yesterday. The door was on a street in St Ives and for the purposes of this ponder represents home, somewhere safe to live. Yesterday we witnessed a street cleaner very gently clearing the debris around a homeless woman, there was a lot of stuff and the whole time he was brushing and picking up litter he carried on an entirely upbeat conversation, as if they had just met. He exuded kindness and I felt awkward for just walking past, but in awe of the way he was handling a difficult situation. The interaction stuck with me. Just a couple of hours later we were walking near our home, there was a boat show in our local harbour.

These two moments are at either end of the financial scale of this countries wealth, its all a little mind blowing. The kindly street cleaner is the high point of the day, however pretty these boats look.

#92 theoldmortuary ponders

A photograph never lies. Digital photography is certainly a big liar and analogue photography was not so squeaky clean either. Check out dead child Victorian photography to see how photographers altered the truth.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-36389581

Less macabre but also deceitfully the Cottingly Fairies were also a photographic hoax.

https://qz.com/911990/the-cottingley-fairy-hoax-of-1917-is-a-case-study-in-how-smart-people-lose-control-of-the-truth/

No deliberate deception is intended by my window picture but one quick glance might suggest now is a good time for the early morning elimination walk for the dogs. It is not a good time, the rain is blowing sideways and no amount of the ‘ right’ clothing is going to make any walk this morning a pleasure. Maybe the dogs are cleverer than I think, they got me up at 5 this morning for a quick comfort break in the back yard.

None of this is actually the point of this blog. This house is surrounded on three sides by the sea. The fish in our window are swimming in the only direction that would take them to dry land. Having only just realised this I feel compelled to turn them around. Having done that I now wonder if they were always fleeing predators.

#88 theoldmortuary ponders

The first sunrise picture of 2022. The temperature has plummeted and even the coastal pigeon is feeling the chill.

Over Christmas I read a fabulous paragraph that has engaged my pondering head enormously.

A fact is information minus emotion. An opinion is information plus experience. Ignorance is an opinion lacking information, and stupidity is an opinion that ignores a fact.

The first pure ponder of 2022, it’s enough to make a pigeon stare.

Pandemic Pondering #361

Friday!

There is a tranquility in this picture that I’m not quite feeling.

Yesterday I took the scissors to my hair. With a month to go until stylists are allowed to open up it may have been a rash move. Im not even sure why yesterday was the day I decided to do it. Too many Zoom meetings or calls I think. I spend most of my life not looking at myself . Meetings have become a liitle mad. Talking to a group of people, myself included, on Zoom shows me everything Ive ever wondered.

Did I Look Ok.

Do I look interested when others talk and I am listening.

Did I say what I needed too.

Can anyone tell Im also using my phone.

The last worry shouldn’t be a worry, additional devices are the current equivalent of arriving with a sheaf of papers. My actual papers , an old- school reporters notebook is just about full after a year of Zooming. It has a life of its own . There was a plan early on to use different colours for different Zooming. In the excitement, that has been lockdown life, Ive misplaced some of the colours. Without fail for at least the last three months I have forgotten to replace the notepad. In consequence my notes now fill borders and gaps between notes made months ago.

Yesterday I found 6 unused pages in the middle of the pad. The excitement in my room was palpable!

There is a quote in my head , I have no idea where I got it from.

” There is no point in an archive if there is not an efficient way of retrievals”

My Lockdown brain has got this covered!

Ask me for a certain date or point and I get too it really quickly. Somehow remembering the colours or patterns , doodles might be another word, where any particular meetings notes were jotted down. This could all have been done more efficiently with dedicated note books but I wasn’t planning on going on like this for a year. The notepad was temporary. I may never give it up.

If only I knew shorthand it would be a thing of true abstract beauty. A modern version of papyrus with stenograhic symbols merged with hieroglyphs.

The reality is messier. As was my hair.

The notebook is a keeper, the hair is gone.

Friday another week done .

Pandemic Pondering #293

Some days a pondering is burning to get out but perhaps doesn’t quite have the legs to fulfill enough interest. Today is one of those days. A pondering that has been poddling about in my brain for days runs headlong into another pondering and boof!! They find they have something in common and off they run onto the blog taking some nice images with them to expose themselves on a Saturday. The 10 on the header image is the common link and it is superimposed on Seaton Beach where we harvested some more vitamin D.

©googlemaps

This morning Google maps showed me all the locations I visited in 2020. Thank goodness there has been no major crimes on the M4/ M5 corridor last year. I do not have an alibi or a distant location to hide behind. The point of putting this in the blog is that I’ve worked out the last time I had such limited travel was the year I turned 10!

The age of 10 is also the last time I wrote down the word ‘ ornery’ until PP#347

As mentioned in previous blogs my life as an only child was filled with reading. I got ‘ornery’ from Mark Twain and Brer Rabbit. It, the word, lives mainly in my head as a fairly regular descriptive of certain people.

PP#347 was possibly the first time I have written it down since I was 10. I’m not sure if shame, indignation or fury has stopped me using it.

At age 10 I threw it into a composition during an English class at my primary school, soon after I was marched to the headmistresses office. In terms understandable to a child I was told that I must not copy other authors sentences into my essays. Apparently my sentence construction was too good to have come from my own skillset and imagination.

The Headmistress and my form teacher were unmoved by my referencing to the stories of Brer Rabbit and I was warned never to copy again. Ornery has remained a word for private usage until this week. I was seething. So seething that when I read a glowing obituary of that particular Headmistress in Other Lives in the Guardian Newspaper I could not contain my irritation as I remembered that and another misjudgement of my character.

©Claudia Winkleman

Lockdown reading has brought me to this book just this week. In the very first chapter Claudia uses the word ‘ornery’ and boasts that she knows how to use it correctly. No marching off to the headmistress for a published author!

Liberated! The minute I felt slightly dyspeptic, crotchety or even waspish about President Trumps’ shenanigans this week I whipped out ‘ornery’, if Claudia can use it in public without humiliation then so can I!

So there we have it. Pondering around the theme of 10. While taking in Vitamin D on Seaton Beach.