Today was a day when the stars aligned. Dog grooming appointment and high tide .No need for fantasy swimming, the real thing at Wembury was glorious. Then basking in the sunlight, all while the dogs were being primped just a mile in-land.
The real thing was very glorious but a few hours later as the tide dropped a massive field of seaweed revealed itself. I considered if crossing it was a sensible idea and decided that on balance it was. As it turned out balance was the problem and I soon slipped on the rocks made slippy by layers of seaweed. Like a wallowing hippo I splashed around in the shallow water. Neither getting deeper or getting out was an easy option.
Out was the sensible thing as other swimmers made the same perilous journey with similarly awkward results.
My bathing costume had become a bag of writhing slippery seaweed. Our beach day was over. The outdoor shower was too feeble to move the loathsome stuff to any great extent. My journey home was deeply uncomfortable. Maybe fantasy rock pool swims are a good idea
Coastal Grandma style has been a bit of a summer thing for the last few years. Regardless of ‘style’ I am, at many levels a Coastal Grandma even at my least stylish.
I live by the the sea.
My two children have made me a coastal grandma, although I am called Nana. I have three granddaughters who visit me by the sea.
Sometimes I wear beige/pale/cream clothes. But not always. Today coastal nana is wearing a denim blue t-shirt dress and a pair of heavy-duty green crocs with bright blue straps. While she does the post-visit laundry.
What is the ‘thing’. Certainly hard work in the home and in the workplace. Being there always for the significant people in my life and to an extent many others with whom I have shared a space or a moment. The ‘ thing’ is also about recognising and enjoying all the lovely moments of a life and surviving and then thriving with resilience all the bad stuff that has ever been done or said to me, or about me to others. It is about using criticism and harsh words as rocket fuel to jet me to my Coastal Space. The gorgeous thing about being a Coastal, or indeed Coasting Grandma is not about location , for me that is serendipitous. It is about a state of mind where the wonder of a two-year-old can mingle with a lifetime of experiences both good and bad and everyone gets something magical from the interaction.
Even doing the laundry had its magical moments today. One bed contained a Schleiche Lion wearing table glitter as a crown and a Schleiche Deer wearing a Sylvanian waistcoat. The other bed was scattered with lavender heads. Enough to have charmed a visiting Queen of England to stay a month in our spare room.
Coasting Grandma is probably a more appropriate title. Useful in so many varied locations.
Could ‘Great Thinkers’ be considered a profession?
I am at my most creative when I indulge in disordered thinking. I am more than capable of productive and ordered thinking. To do so, I always have to translate my disordered thinking into ordered thinking. Sometimes I have to allow my ordered thinking to have a little freedom to wander into the realm of creativity.
I admire the undesirable qualities of great thinkers. Selfishness, reliance on others, assuredness, arrogance, certainty, single-mindedness. Knowing, that in my hands those same qualities would not lead to great thoughts but to an insufferable person. The world does need more great thinkers but it does not need any more insufferable people.
I suppose I admire great thinkers in the same way that I admire great sports people. Knowing that something that is a great achievement would not be in my best interests or within my skillset.
My balance, or imbalance as a thinker is 60/40 or 40/60. Constantly switching from one foot to the other to find my own equilibrium. I admire Great Thinkers, I just don’t have it in me to be one.
This could be me dozing in a quiet leafy glade. Hair wild and a sleepy head resting on moss. The care of three fabulous granddaughters makes me yearn for just a tiny daytime snooze with dappled sun dancing on my face . But they, the granddaughters are busy little people and snoozing is not on their game plan.
Time with them all is a gift that should not be wasted by snoozing for either Nana or Nona or indeed the dogs. We all need to take some time to sniff the flowers together.
If you won two free plane tickets, where would you go?
Everywhere thank you very much. Unlimited flights in and out of Bristol for the rest of my life with any connecting flights that I might need to get to wherever I might fancy. Whenever I fancy.
Life can be full of surprises but not always the ones that you have been warned about. 8 years ago I was walking on the High-Line in New York and the signs were that I might encounter more floppy areas and flaccid bits, than usual in my encounters with other humans.
There were no signs that said you may encounter a really low trip hazard and wreck your right knee half way through your holiday.
The knee injury was way more significant than seeing naturists at large, but it is the sign that I remember. Is it a warning or an advertisment.
Comfort and reliable. Two answers in one. Neither are Fine Dining or by any stretch of anyone’s imagination interesting.
Comfort food=Marmite toast or any spread on top of toast with butter on it. My top 3
Marmite
Marmalade
Ground Black Pepper
In all iterations the butter must be real and salty.
Reliable food has evolved in my life. Good quality shop-bought lasagne if I am feeling reliably fancy. 35 years with a home in the far west of England has taught me that the humble Cornish Pasty made well is a lifesaver.
The Pasty Gold Standard.
Not all pasties are made equal and at their worst they are a pappy meat and potato pie with a faint aroma of human body odour. At their best they are a peppery blend of beef and onions combined with swede/turnip and potato wrapped in perfect golden pasty.
Yesterday was a spreadsheet kind of day. If everything went well there was a twenty minute gap in which to eat a pasty before an art exhibition, Private View and a trip to the Theatre to see Hamilton. The spreadsheet day and the pasty.
As a tick box exercise the spreadsheet day went well. With. 95% success rate. We dropped 5% because the Artist at the Private View made a speech at the beginning. So fine words were heard but not a single brushstroke of paint passed before our eyes.
Hamilton was fabulous and the pasty fed us both before our evening started (warm) and at 11pm (cold) . That is a reliable, even comforting comestible.
It is almost 7 years since I last had a formal interview of any sort. I am completely out of practice of describing myself to others.
Does anyone really listen to, or remember a self-description?
How would you describe yourself to someone?
People are so busy making their own judgements and assessments of the person they see before them.
I care less and less what people make of me as I get older. First and chance encounters are just that. Repeated encounters build a more accurate, nuanced portfolio of my character traits.
I can think of people who have quite the wrong idea of me. But their narrative suits their purpose. Others perhaps know me a little better than I know myself.
I always think people, myself included are a lot like Avocados. Their core values and attributes exist within the enormous seed, but the pulp changes and develops over a lifetime, while the skin just slowly ages but shows evidence of the good times and the harms that shape the whole fruit. The skin of course, is all that is ever seen until a sharp knife is applied. Time to halt the avocado analogy I think.
My Life as an Avocado- the autobiography I will never write.
No nickname ever and so no backstory. The closest I get to a nickname is ‘Bobber’.
As a founder member of a swimming group of just under 20 people including past members who predominantly swim in one location we, as a group are recognisable, we have named sweatshirts, and have a certain positive notoriety in the swimming boom at Firestone Bay.
Groups are not for everyone and ours is as unstructured as a group can be. Just a WhatsApp group to organise our swimming time so no-one has to swim alone.
” So are you a bobber” is a fairly regular question.
Followed by ” Why are you called Bobbers”
Because mostly we just bob about nattering, some focused swimming is involved, but actually the most valuable thing is the bobbing and nattering. Putting our many worlds to rights and our sense of belonging to a supportive and caring community.
The absolute silence in this reflective image of Sutton Harbour last night, does not in any way reflect the aural reality. The harbour had the rich sounds of the harbour through history. Tuesday evening dog walks around the harbour have the bell ringers of St Andrews Church as a regular and welcome soundscape. Seemingly performing perfectly, Tuesdays are their practice nights.
Coupled with the nearly still water in the harbour the acoustics were perfect last night. It was also the last day of the school summer term so families were filling the cafes, and their exhausted teachers were finding their way to the bars. The pavements filled with strange adult crocodiles of walkers. Large groups of colleagues making their way to their selected bar informally but formally, two by two. The only thing missing from the human crocodile were the luminous pink-tabarded attendants at either end.*
Live music spilt out from the bars across the harbour, and dancing girls made their, uncertain, way to a Salsa Bar. High heels and cobbles are tricksy at the best of time without the added uncertainty of a pre-class drink in the evening sunlight.
As seagulls circled, greedy for chips, the only thing missing from this moment , which could have been heard any time in the last 500 years, were the Fishermen and Sailors in any significant number. Fish are landed in Plymouth but the huge fish market is just a holding space for the fish auctions that are held on-line. I’m not sure what handsome young sailors en-masse do on Tuesday nights but they were not easily visible. Represented only by middle- class, older men, in two’s and fours. Pink trousered with those non-uniform, uniform caps they all wear to silently call one another from across a world crowded out by non-sailors.
The harbour hubbub and the people watching was just serendipitous concatenation at its unpredictable best last night.
A Golden Moment, I might say.
* I only realised the significance of the teacher element of last nights bar activity when I heard the crisp steps of a man walking from one bar to another. Who walks from one bar to another with recognisably crisp steps?
A man, or woman, who regularly crosses purposefully from one classroom to another. A warning sound of impending trouble that we all learn to recognise from age 5.
*Of course such a lovely evening was rich pickings on which to ponder.
A painting ponder was to sketch Sir Francis Drake and his wife Mary Newman in the contemporary attire of Summer 2025. She will be wearing a spotted flared dress for a night on the cobbles and he will be wearing the older casual sailor outfit with one significant difference. Those pink sailor trousers will be cropped to show off his shapely calves and feet in deck shoes with no socks.
Something that will require a lot more pondering is how to replace the phallic symbol of the hilt of his sword. I suspect an uncapped bottle of beer will have to do. Over-sized of course. No cold weather posing for Frank.
Sir Francis Drake on Plymouth Hoe ( a Spanish seagull has taken revenge on this day)
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