Category: Serendipity

#1344 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity1 Comment

Day 55 of 2026 and no signs of rain in the air or on forecasts. I did a long morning dog walk with no coat.

Day 55 of 2026 and four Novels finished. Just. No coats ever needed for books

Two of them were book club books, I won’t bother to name one of them which was not a great reading experience. The other, Pirenesi, was memorable, but maybe not as enjoyable as a book needs to be in the dark months of January and February.

Thank goodness for reading for pleasure. Two first novels also by women have filled these two winter months with different landscapes and eras

The Netherlands in the early 60’s.

The Artist

And Provence in the early 20’s.

I am not about to review either book but both of them have been a pleasure to read. I am in awe of both these first time authors for writing such brilliant books.

The first time I do anything I really don’t like what I have produced

Sometimes I feel the same about the 20th time I produce something.

The ponder of these statements is that by reading two brilliant first novels  my reading pleasure of 2026 feels like a really productive two months. Only one complete dud, one challenge and two gold-star books seems like a really positive way to start my reading year.

I regret that my two self chosen books were not from my book club because I would really love to chat about them with my book club buddies. But I am very glad that the two,more difficult books, were book club choices. Talking about an unenjoyable or difficult book really helps to settle it in my head. Sometimes I have gone back to read an unenjoyed book a second time and found it easier with book club insight. One was completely rehabilitated by a second read.

What is left for my day? Home jobs and starting my next book club book. The first one by a man in 2026. Lets see if book reading for the Book Club can improve alongside the weather.

#1340 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art, Box, Serendipity1 Comment

Timing is everything in blogging and life generally.

Who.knows how this blog would have gone had I written it six hours ago.

Trick question. I know exactly how it would have gone. Ranty, is the one word answer.

Life got in the way and the intended blog did not get written. Lucky for you the bobbers also got in the way.

They got my raw and furious rant caused by my second visit to the Beryl Cook Exhibition.

I apologised that they got my arty rant unexpurgated. Anne Bobber commented that they had just got an early version of the blog with more expletives.

My second visit to the exhibition was to see the supporting exhibition. Videos, books, newspaper cuttings and private family memorabilia. I was committed to watching all the videos and arrived at opening time because to do that it would be sensible to grab a seat on the solitary sofa.

My ranty pants were enraged by the misogynist questions and attitudes expressed by male television journalists, to a successful woman artist in the 70’s 80’s and early 90’s.  Had I been in the comfort of my own house I would have shouted at the T.V. As it happened In a public space I saved all my grumpiness for when I met the Bobbers and later my Tennis Club friends. On a non ranty note I marvelled at the developments of T.V and broadcast engineering in the last 30 years. Subtitling specifically.

One glorious subtitle blooper that I missed but am almost tempted to sit through the whole hour long broadcast for ran like this.

Beryl and a gay biker friend are off on an adventure on/in a motorbike and sidecar to buy some seafood snacks on the Barbican.  The stall has sold out of Winkles.

The subtitle straddles two sentences and should read

‘ No winkles. Really? Are you kiddingYou wouldn’t ever get that on Old Compton Street’

I realise the wit is lost because I cannot provide an image with the subtitle properly positioned as it would be in 2026.

Old Compton Street used to be the most gay street in London. A heady fug of aftershave and rampant testosterone filled the street with a spirit like no other. Everyone was welcome.

I realise now that it is the lesser known paintings that hold my interest. I am booked to go again next week. This may not be the last you have heard of Beryl.

 

#1327 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Box, Serendipity1 Comment
Elvira’s Cafe. Beryl Cook 1997

It is not often that an Exhibition of a famous artist’s work chimes so closely with my own life. I will write a more arty blog after another visit but today 3 paintings give me an easy feed into anecdotes. Elvira’s Cafe is very close to home. Before we moved here and were fully aware of the clientele of this cafe I ordered ‘ The Marine ‘ breakfast. Big mistake, I thought, stupidly, that the Marine word meant close to the sea. Oh no, the cafe is very close to the barracks of the Royal Marines. The breakfast was designed for military men with big appetites. I gave it my best but not very successfully. The meat sweats some hours later was a learning experience.

Another small picture caught my eye.

Walkies Beryl Cook 1988

Two women standing in front of The Belvedere on Plymouth Hoe.

My son and I both graduated from Plymouth University one year apart.

The Belvedere is the white structure. During graduation ceremonies a huge set of marquees are erected behind the Belvedere. The Belvedere has panoramic views of Plymouth Sound and benches to sit on. Two forceful women in our families settled the family group comfortably on the benches and set off on a hunt for canapes and prosecco. The first year they were very successful, the second year extraordinarily successful. Waiters came to top us up, I cannot imagine how they arranged that.

They looked nothing like these two women but they did have very similar conspiratorial looks on their faces, having pulled off a catering and viewpoint coup.

One of them has been dead for ten years, the other for a couple of weeks. I loved seeing this picture which reminded me of a moment.

Picnic at Mount Edgecumbe. Beryl Cook. 1990

Picnics at Mount Edgecumbe, walks at Mount Edgecumbe, cafe visits at Mount Edgecumbe. I’ve done it all with friends, family, children and now my grandchildren.

A place that creates joy on every visit

For a proper experience of this exhibition follow the link below.

Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy | The Box Plymouth | Bloomberg Connects

#1426 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn SerendipityLeave a comment

It is not like me not to question the origin of a festival or tradition. It seems I have been somewhat lax in that regard to Valentines Day.

I have always found it to be a bit uncomfortable. Icky even, and paid it little attention. Many reasons.

This year by coincidence 5 of us went for supper on Valentines night. Five laughing women on a big table surrounded by many couples on little tables. The table decorations were lovely fluffy hearts added to the usual cacti that adorn the tables . Rather a metaphor for the whole love thing which is never without its prickly moments.

Unusually, Valentines Day is not a sanitised or convenient appropriation of a Pagan festival. On this occasion the early Christian Church pinched this one from the Romans.

Early Christians named the Day for St Valentine.

Then the Victorians turned into the mushy, sentimental and commercialised thing it is today.

Maybe now is the time for me to share a couple of my examples of my antipathy but also that Christianity has tried to put a pretty spin on certain festivals, but humans will be humans

When I was 14 I worked in a small department store. A Newsagents with ideas above its original purpose. Women would simply buy a card for their loved one. Men on the other hand would quite often buy 3 items. A card, a gift from our fabulous range of home wares and a couple of magazines from the top shelf.

The transactional element was not lost on a nerdy and acne plagued teenager.

Fast forward 40 years or so and I worked in the City of London. Valentines Day would arrive early canoodling in the bushes or on the benches of St Pauls Churchyard. By the evening litter bins would be used to dispose of hastily discarded cards given to work colleagues, dumped before people returned to their home lives and regular relationships. Status Quo maintained.

St Valentine might blush but Lupercalia would just nod sagely and smile.

A bit of red for Valentines weekend.

#1425 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Box, SerendipityLeave a comment

After all my moaning in yesterday’s blog, the sun came out today.

#1424 theoldmortuary ponders

We walked the streets, giddy with the freedom of wearing no weather protective garments and giddier still no coats at all.

We did still have to keep our eyes slightly downwards looking to avoid puddles.

But the puddles have become blinding beacons of illumination in the sunshine. Lola was very keen on a coffee shop stop but we kept making excuses, reluctant to be indoors when there was Vitamin D to be harvested.

This harbourside walk is a regular one but we have not been for three months. In that time a new and benign sailor has been installed, sitting by a favourite Sailors drinking spot.

We queued to take a photograph of him. The only people in the queue who did not want to cuddle up or pose provocatively against his high-gloss resinous surface.

He is there to publicise an exhibition at the local Museum and Art Gallery featuring the work of Beryl Cook.

Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy | The Box Plymouth https://share.google/s0UM3sl5BNjtD0H7x

Future blogs will feature trips to the exhibition. There may even be moments at a comedy club and a silent disco when I crack out my extensive collection of Animal Print Garments and a bright red lipstick.

But rub myself over a Sailor on a bench in the sunshine. That has never happened.

© Products – ourberylcook https://share.google/UU9WT4REzgkRcpM6a

Although Plymouth’s gene pool and that of many other ports have been immeasurably enhanced because others have not been quite so fastidious.

Products – ourberylcook https://share.google/UU9WT4REzgkRcpM6a

A sailor of my acquaintance tells me that such welcomes in port are not an urban myth. His particular U.S.P, or strategy was to sit at an outside cafe reading a nerdy book.

I can see how that would be tempting.

#1420 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity2 Comments

The epitome of greige.

My cheery alarm call goes off at 7:15 with a local weather forecast. By this time most mornings I have already drunk the first cup of tea and will be contemplating the first cup of coffee. So it is not a wake-up alarm but more of a fleshing out the day review.

Today was forecast as intermittent drizzle throughout the day. Intermittent drizzle suggests very light rain with moments of no rain. Not the incessantly bleak greigeness enlivened by constant heavy rain that is my reality

My orange raincoat was the only bright colour in the landscape. Now I would not normally photograph my rain coat. But I threw my phone on the floor as I wrestled my wet clothes off and the camera took a passing shot of the raincoat as my fingers slipped on the wet case.

Instant sunshine

All this rain reminds me of a moment of enlightenment that I had in the National Gallery of Victoria, in Melbourne,  2 months ago.

I was on an amazing race against closing time in a gallery that I could have spent hours and hours in. This picture got less than 5 minutes of my attention but I think about it nearly every day

It could so easily be a regular swimmer walking towards the sea on a rainy day. He appears to be checking his phone. He isn’t. I was spellbound by the beauty and tenderness of this painting, entirely painted in shades of greige. An anonymous man captured calmly walking through rain, shower, or voile curtains.

I was shocked to see such a peaceful picture painted by Francis Bacon. Shocked that this picture cannot be of a naked man checking his mobile phone. I cannot unsee my first incorrect thought on seeing this painting, before I realised who the artist was and when it was painted. Shocked too that greige could be so beautiful. I would even hang this greige painting in my house. Which is a big thing to say in the depth of a very wet winter.

Greige has been slightly rehabilitated.

Travel, as they say, broadens the mind. 41 days of rain shrinks it.

#1419 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art, SerendipityLeave a comment

Are there any activities or hobbies you’ve outgrown or lost interest in over time?

I think there are many activities and hobbies that have, quite correctly, lost interest in me. The big one would be Radioligy/Radiography. There was a brief flutter of renewed interest in me during Covid but now we are in agreement that making pictures with  X-Rays is in my past. Retirement from a scintillating career. The Physics definition.

On a good day I can be quite the scintillating conversationslist too. She said modestly.

I have kept my transferable skills and transferred them to other things.

Team games were never my thing until I discovered rowing. It was probably the only team sport I had an aptitude for. But we have had an amicable parting of the ways for some time now.

Drawing. Painting. Sketching. Printing. All things that have not given up on me. I was still at school when I realised that sketching a quick cartoon of a teacher was a pathway out of nerdiness and into ‘almost’ cool.

A skill that stayed with me during a long career in the N.H.S. A quick cartoon of an arrogant doctor or an ineffectual colleague handed over at the same time as a handover sheet was better than a hundred tactful words and lightened the mood considerably. I was never caught.

Everyone has worked or studied with a dick or two.

Acting gave me up.

Serious singing and dancing the same,  but lower down on that particular spectrum and I am quite the unqualified success! Art however, we are together for ever.

P S sometimes in the NHS other departments had the same problems with the same characters. There may have been cartoon requests to lift the moods of other beleaguered colleagues.

#1416 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Dartmoor, Serendipity1 Comment

Yesterday was a rare sunny day, at home. Two dog walks achieved with no changing of clothes needed. When a couple of free hours revealed themselves. I decided to do a quick sketch. What did I choose? A rain soaked pasture on Dartmoor. Misty enough to create a halo around the moon.

My only excuse for a rather sombre image, is the political storm that was billowing around me from the radio.

A classic tale of who knew what, when  in the world of powerful men, disposable women and lots of money and influence.

I wanted to use the word turgid to describe the political clusterf**k, that has been emerging for some time from the fall out of the Epstein Files on Britain.

The situation is indeed turgid with both meanings of the word and my picture is a bit turgid, but over the last couple of years turgid+badger is a phrase that reminds me of a happily eccentric holiday spent in Abersoch, Wales.

For no particular reason I think it would be a fabulous name for a rock band or a trendy coffee shop. Or a graphic novel.

We were staying with some friends in a large house. In the early evening I had spotted a badger snuffling on  the edge of a quiet path in a large garden. I mentioned it to our host.

“Ah ” she said.

“I have never seen a live one,but that does explain the turgid badger I found in my water butt”

Not a sentence I would expect to hear ever.

I wonder why it has stuck with me.

Firstly it was a lovely few days with friends that we don’t see often enough.

We were all slightly discombobulated by our surroundings and a way of life that we were unfamiliar with. Champagne at 4pm on an emptyish stomach gave none of us the maturity that matched our chronological ages.

The words themselves are delicious when paired together. So I am a little protective of the word, turgid.

I am not prepared to gift it to dodgy politicians and their even dodgier friends. I might just allow it for a painting.

Difficult times.

If badgers were not such lovely creatures the term could become a massive insult.

“You, Sir are a turgid Badger”

Turgid waters. Dartmoor