Another day another heatwave. Lola and I were up early, to achieve plenty of cooler weather walking and domestica. Freeing up the hotter hours for chatter and chilling. A meeting in the morning required not one but two iced coffees. Then there was an art attack. Not of the Coronary variety. ( I may be from Essex, but I do not drop my aitches, although curiously we do pronounce aitch as haitch)
An actual art attack, when a piece of original art fell off the wall and landed noisily between myself and my gentleman companion. Cool, even in a heatwave we did not skip a beat. Exchanging funny anecdotes is not the time for drama of the arty sort.
Swimming was the antidote to both the heat and art attacks.
Firestone Bay
Less people than the day before, so no need to create a postcard image to protect the identity of beach goers. No big boats to watch. Just a really fast lifeboat. So fast I missed it twice.
And a cute sailing boat, the sailing boat did, however, need the postcard effect because the photo was so bad.
To create the postcard I used the colours of the rocks of Firestone Bay to fill in all the detail lost by very bright sunlight.
The rock of Firestone Bay through Polaroid Sunglasses
Et Voilà
Sailing in Firestone Bay
Not all heatwave days are the same even in the exact same location. Unexpected things always add a different texture to a day.
The bonus of yesterday, was meeting so many people, unexpectedly, for random conversations whilst we were all dodging the effects of overheating.
Overnight we had huge electric storms. The heatwave may be over, we are back to greige, how very drear!
Summer’s here and I have become The Grumpy Urban Cat Abhorring Lady.
Oh how I dislike the urban cat. The Shitter in my plant pots. The Pisser on my garden chairs. The ever present observation from high places. The disupters of my dog. The fragrance of your ever available testosterone- boosted tom cat urine.
Small blog, big feelings.
Why do I find urban cats abhorrent? Because we are trying to teach a three year old not to use the word hate. I am being creative with my use of words.
The term ‘intangible cultural heritage’ was new to me recently. It describes:-
Oral traditions and expressions: Includes language, stories, legends, proverbs, and songs passed on by word of mouth.
Performing arts: Covers music, dance, theater, and other forms of artistic expression.
Social practices, rituals, and festive events: Encompasses community habits, rites of passage, holiday celebrations, and religious or secular ceremonies.
Knowledge and practices concerning nature: Traditional ecological knowledge, herbal medicine, and practices related to the universe.
Traditional craftsmanship: The skills and techniques required to make traditional clothing, pottery, instruments, and other handmade objects.
These all seem entirely tangible to me.
The whole concept of culture being intangible is a mystery to me. Made all the more puzzling at a live music gig that I went to this weekend.
Looking at Devon from Cornwall
Held in an old chapel overlooking farmland and the River Tamar.
My attendance was entirely accidental, a spare ticket landed in my lap because of life/work exhaustion and toothache.
The gig was held in Calstock, a village oozing with cultural heritage, where even the shelter at the train station is beautiful.
Tangible or intangible there is a lot of cultural heritage in this one picture.
I realise this is just me pondering an idea and the use of words but cultural heritage is not something whimsical or disposable.
I was in Calstock to hear Cara Dillon a contemporary folk singer from Ireland. By chance the man sitting next to me was of Irish heritage. He took pleasure in the performance in an entirely different way to me. He felt the music and inhabited it. There was so much joy in him, generated entirely by his innate and experienced cultural heritage. Vibrating through him when both he and the singer were so far from home. He was having an entirely tangible experience.
Cara Dillon and Sam Lakeman
It is funny the things that bother me overnight. Calstock is a village where I have participated in so many varied experiences that are certainly worthy of the title ‘Cultural Heritage’ I am enriched by experiencing the things that have enhanced the lives of other humans throughout history. 5 years ago, 50 years ago or 500 years ago. All worth preserving I feel. Overnight pondering took me down the internet rabbit hole. Luckily I landed on another WordPress Blog. Far more erudite and knowledgeable than my ponderings, I will share it below.
The word ‘intangible’ really doesn’t touch the importance of such things!
The link to Calstock Arts, the venue I visited is below. Somewhere that does its very best to promote the intangible culture that is so vital to us all.
Did we really expect to still be doing it 5 years later. Probably not. But wherever Bobbers are in the world we all try to swim on the Solstices.
For me it is a celebration of being alive and still kicking. A ritual of gratitude and celebration with friends,most of whom were strangers 5 years ago. The Silver Lining of a Pandemic that forced us all to pause, change direction, and do things differently.
The Naked Swimmers
Maybe the Bobbers need to rethink our dress code next year…
I am not sure how long we have owned this coffee pot. It lives in the camper van and performs the morning ritual of coffee wherever the van is. It came into the house for the post holiday wash and has not returned, so yesterday it posed on a mirror for some sketching and water colour action.
I am a one cup of coffee a day woman. Unless the day, or I, am flagging. Or being social.
Yesterday I was social, two cups of coffee were enjoyed, one with cake. Which is almost certainly why there was no post-lunch slump and I felt the urge to paint a still life. I also pruned things in the yard and gave Lola an extra walk.
Caffeine is a wonderful thing! I have wanted to paint this little coffee pot for years. Inspired by a sculpture made entirely of these pots by Robert Fabelo.
Cafédral (detail) by Robert Cavelo
Cafédral is a shed sized building made entirely of old coffee pots. Since seeing Robert Caveo’s work I have had to resist rehoming coffee pots like this when I see them in charity shops. But yesterday I got such pleasure from painting our pot and his reflection I wonder if I might collect just a few for a bigger still life moment…
June is making herself very hard to love this year. Recent mornings she has turned up with a very November look on her face. The word greige and June have no reason to appear in the same sentence.
I thought I would share a local weather explanation.
Last year our yard was vibrating with heat and colour.
It is hard to think that yesterday the weather stopped any serious yardening and the only time I crossed the yard was to take washing to the tumble dryer.
It did not look this pretty.
The day was not without some colourful excitement. One of my hybrid images from my Meddled Photographs x Watercolour project has been chosen to be printed onto glass to create a unique splash back in a recently renovated kitchen.
The full description of my project is here.
I am sure there will be a splashback reveal soon. Currently there are many blue squares of wall adhesive on the freshly delivered glass.
It is the Meddled Photograph of the same location as the glum picture at the top of this blog.
Then late in the afternoon a conversation starter was posted on one of my arty Whatsapp groups.
My comment is the green one. What I love about this brief, arty exchange of ideas is that it is timeless.
Artists of all types would have had just this type of discussion throughout history.
As someone who has always had to embrace new technology. I am used to the challenges and the.convoluted thinking that these things often require. I would be really interested in what anyone who reads this thinks.
As it turns out, a greige day was quite the fertile place for creative thinking.
Creatively I have grown like a weed. I chose to step away from exhibiting at formal art exhibitions for a year and just let art and photography grow in their own way.
The kite surfers at St Michaels Mount were the first sign that something was up . Goodness knows why I had never considered that the skills, both analogue and digital that I used in Medical Imaging could be transferred to photography and art.
The epiphany occurred on Mounts Bay beach during a cold winter weekend in January 2025. I could get mediocre photographs of a great location and some kite surfers but nothing particularly Zingy. Until I tried sticking three photos together and slightly altering their angles and magnification.
18 months in and I happily stick anything that I have photographed or painted together, to create an image which pleases me. Along the way I have used screen printing tricks like deregistering and sometimes registering, different renditions of the exact same subject. Altering perspectives, angles, magnifications and colours. Anything goes really. No guarantee of success, the failure rate is high, but when the serendipity goddess is in a good mood then anything can happen.
Like all experimental creative processes there are more duds than there are successes. But there is always some learning lurking even in the duddiest of duds.
Sometimes I flip the process and paint one of my amalgamated images as an original painting.
Yesterday’s blog featured one of my hybrid images that I was always planning to paint.
There was more flipping, flipping because the image was of a small yacht haven on the Peloponnese in Greece. Just a tiny jetty that offered overnight, safe mooring just off a shingle beach. Double flipping because my digital image was created using three different photographs, superimposed, simplified and then overlayed on a hand painted watercolour background.
Then flipped colour wise because everyone knows that all images of boats in Greece should be represented in shades of blue, green and turquoise. But I wanted to represent the warmth of the evening and the moment.
Painting this image yesterday I abstracted it a little further.
I also had a go at doing a digital deregistered double image. A pencil sketch overlayed on top of the watercolour.
Just like growing weeds, I never quite know what will pop up next .
Just like weeds quite a lot of these ideas end up in the bin.
One person’s weed however can be someone else’s flower.
Something is up in blogland. Inexplicably my reader stats for this year have jumped. Not quite half way through the year my blogs have already been read by the same number of people who read my blogs in all of 2025.
A red letter day of sorts. It seems appropriate to share the blogs of past June the 15th’s.
Some time hopping for you all. Which is a really crafty way of throwing in a book review. This morning I was awake early finishing a book that I have loved. I just couldn’t quite finish it last night.
Time hopping in books is either to your taste or not. No spoilers here but the time hopping element in this book is as near perfect as any that I have read.
And if that were not enough the book stops almost exactly where my blogs for June 15th start. In a shop just after restrictions were lifted post Covid
Picture from June 15th 2020
In another quirky little coincidence the bakery, where I bought this doughnut, has been in business for 5 centuries. The exact time span of Tracy Chevalier’s book. Life is every bit as strange as fiction.
My 5 year effort seems pretty tame compared to 5 centuries.
The algorithms of my social media have had a bit of a hiccough/hiccup this week.
As a 60+ woman with a head of exuberant curls, marketing flat caps at me is going to land exactly no on-line sales. But relentlessly, this week, the cookies and the algorithms would really like me to buy a flat cap.
Writing this blog may well make the situation worse.
Flat caps do live large in my memory bank because my paternal Grandad was almost never seen outside without one. Indoors the cap, his gas filled cigarette lighter, Rizla cigarette papers and Old Holborn tobacco tin were never far from his side.
When I see a flat cap there is a vestigia of the fragrance of tobacco and lighter gas that flashes through my brain. When I went to London at 18 he had already been dead for 6 years . This building, the one on the tin, was on my bus route to Barts Hospital, when I first saw it the same little flash of fragrance zipped through my head, and I wished I could tell him that the building really existed.
Flat caps are a bit of a granddad thing. My maternal Great Grandfather makes an appearance on my family tree with a fine flat cap and moustache.
So I must admit to having a fondness for flat caps but not a need to buy one.
Once again my photo archive has come up with evidence that I have quite an archive of flat cap images. They do frame a face and set a tone which is significantly different to that of the rather over-popular baseball cap/hat.
Street Art on Union Street.Print by Annette WrathmelA singer in our London Songs ChoirAndy posingThe flat cap that got away
Clearly I do love a flat cap, but am never going to buy one.
And just like that a great flat cap wearer dies on the same day as I wrote about flat caps.
David Hockney has died, we were lucky enough to catch this exhibition twice. Once at the Royal Academy London and also at The Guggenheim Bilbao. Two reviews below.
I have been collecting friends since just before Infant school.
The friendship longevity record is held by my pre-school friend Juliet. I was named after her and always felt slightly in awe. Probably because she was older and wiser. Our friendship was forged by our mothers who had been friends from birth. In turn their mothers had forged their friendship simply by the serendipity of meeting on the post-natal ward of a small cottage hospital in Essex. The grandmother’s friendship was the most unlikely one of all. Juliet’s grandmother ran a shop and was warm, a fabulous cook and religious. My grandmother at the time, was a nurse, very irreligious and ultimately ran a pub. She was warm too, maybe too warm if you were a handsome man. I was never aware of her cooking. Three generations of friendship grown from a most unlikely pairing.
I have been collecting friends ever since. School. Work. Neighbours. Clubs. Some have been lost along the way.
I have always thought that finding a true friend is like finding love. A little bit of research this morning has proved that to be correct.
But here is the surprise !
Which is why Marc is the poster boy of this blog. Beyond his radiant smile, he always smells delicious. I can only dream of being consistently as fragrant as he is. Sometimes we worked 24 hours straight together and he always smiled and was always perfectly acceptable to be up close and personal with even in our worst of moments. Presumably I was in the thrawl of his invisible accelerator for platonic attraction. Who knew!
The reason this particular retirement gathering stands out is that it was the first of any such gathering after Covid.
By one of life’s great coincidences my very last social gathering before Covid, was with the exact same group of friends and colleagues in London. The last outing before Covid hit the world and almost certainly me and my first exposure to the Covid Virus, which has taken away forever a fully functioning sense of smell. And yet still I manage to make friends.
Thank goodness there are other pathways.
Before this mornings research I would say my particular friendship recipe would be.
A positive outlook.
A creative and enquiring mind
A little bit of non-clinical madness.
Vibing on a similar wavelenth
Good sense of humour
Loyalty and Kindness
My excuse for not giving access to the friend zone is usually.
” Not exactly my cup of tea”
Even with today’s research I am going to stick with that because it is a gentle rejection. Iron fist in a velvet glove perhaps but gentle on the outside
Saying someone just doesn’t smell right takes the rejection to all sorts of different places. But goodness me the smell theory really fascinates me because I have always thought there was something intangible involved. I thought it was my limbic system.
But then with a little more research I discovered something that I had forgotten. The Olfactory bulb lives within the limbic system.
So I was right all along.
Five years ago this bunch of friends were my cup of tea and they all smell just wonderful.
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