Category: Serendipity

#1172 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn SerendipityLeave a comment

Visits to Art Galleries and Museums are one of my life-long pleasures. I really loved my visit to Penlee House and I am sharing the Bloomberg Connects QR code to explore the Galleries for yourselves.

This blog is more trivial than an appreciation of a really great gallery.

The artist responsible for the rainy promenade picture is Norman Garstin, his daughter Alethea was also an artist.

It was this fact that jumped out at me.

Many years ago when I was first pregnant my mum had lent me one of her guilty secret novels. Guilty secret, because she didn’t always read great or worthy books. She often read books that she described as ‘ pulpy kidney novels’.

The heroine of this fiction book was a talented artist called Alathea Heron.

I have no idea if the author deliberately chose two Cornwall based artists to create the name. Alethea Garstin and Patrick Heron.

Unusually for one of my mum’s pulpy kidney books this one was very readable.

My hormones were madly in a state of flux and I immediately thought I would call my possible foetus Alethea and that she would become a great artist.  At the time I was an obstetric ultrasonographer in Brighton and I quickly realised my foetus was a boy and the name Alethea dropped out of thought and mind until this week.

By the time I was pregnant with a daughter I was living in Cornwall and despite being very aware of Cornish artists, when I chose her a Cornish name Alethea did not cross my mind.

Which led me to a very trivial ponder. Do people carry over their name choices for each pregnancy. Should I have kept the name Alethea close to my heart until I actually had a daughter or is it entirely normal to discard the unused name and choose afresh for each pregnancy.

I suspect my daughter is very grateful for my fickle mind, her actual name is much more suited to her character.

This whole trivial ponder has just cost me 75 pence with free postage! The book was published 40 years ago but Abebooks had several. I wonder if the heroine will impress me as much as she did 39 years ago, or was it just hormones?

No Alethea or Alathea here.

#1169 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Bobbing, Serendipity1 Comment

Monday morning with more murmuration. Really couldn’t help myself there. Although of course that was actually Sunday night. Here is a bright morning photo from Sunday too.

Bright dawn sunshine lights up a rust stained wall at our swimming zone.

We chose an area very similar to our home zone, with ladders and handrails to ease our way in and out.

Looks can be deceiving. This was not an easy location to get in, but it is the choice of local dippers.

Yesterday was a day of wrapping up warm and enjoying the smug sensation of a sea swim achieved early and a whole day left to warm up in the sunshine.

A pub roast dinner and a day of basking and walking in winter sunshine completed Sunday.

Morab Tropical Gardens

Let’s see how Monday shapes up.

#1167 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Holidays, Home and Away, Serendipity1 Comment

Here we are in an Airbnb in one of our favourite towns. Penzance in Cornwall. Part pleasure, part work, this trip is a brightener for January. As I washed up this morning I realised the universality of the Airbnb experience.

We have Airbnb’d around the world and the international common denominator is often furnishings and homewares from IKEA interspersed by local crafted items.

I realise for many people, this is a terrible travesty of consumerism, but I realised this morning that I find it to be comforting. Holding a hot drink in a familiar-looking mug makes me feel at home wherever I am. Just as I felt at home immediately in Soule and Marrakech with an IKEA mug in hand after a long journey into the heart of significantly different cities.

Local Art.

#1165 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art, SerendipityLeave a comment

Grumpy greige was banished by bright sunshine and a -1 degree temperature. The local ferry was caught in a sunbeam. Sunbeams bounced off windows as I walked to meet fellow artists at our regular monthly meetings.

The prevailing natter was predominantly about exhibitions in 2025. One of which I am fairly well prepared for and another that I am not at all prepared for.

I started a doodle as I talked which is the first time brush and paper have met one another in 2025.

Honestly sunshine and talking to other artists is the best way to spend a morning.

#1164 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity1 Comment

Three of my October pumpkins mingle with apples, grapes persimmon and tangerines from the festive season. This bowl was so pretty that I prioritised eating the fruit from other bowls, but now there is a gap, and the red surface of the plate is visible. Surely a sign that my mid-winter snacking is coming to an end. Persimmons were new to me, and I can’t say I will rush to buy them again.

The last packet of mince pies has been opened and the Christmas cake is down to a third of its original size. Christmas Day and New Years Day are 1/2 weeks in the past but festive themed snacking  will almost certainly last until the end of January. This is exactly how I like things to be. Midwinter is a time of snacking and reading Christmas books while real-life floods in to fill the gaps where festive used to be.

Meetings have crept back into my diary with plans to be made and decisions taken to shape the character of 2025.

Soon enough this red plate will go back into the cupboard of festive homewares. But in the shorter days of January, I still need a little bit of comfort and joy on the table.

#1163 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity, Wet Weekends3 Comments
Fantasy Dog walk.
Real Dog walk

This is my real world dog walk after dropping the Christmas Tree off at the recycling centre. This photo makes the day look O.K but really it was dreary and muddy. There were rumours of snow but the reality, at sea level, was just more rain. The top image would be my perfect snowy walk but I know it is a fantasy in so many ways. Oh how I wish I could learn to love rain. But the truth is I can only truly embrace the puddle aftermath of a rainy day.

Puddles of joy.

Maybe I should adjust my attitude to being afflicted by rain. But I think that is unlikely to ever be a genuinely  altered character improvement.

Clean snow and puddles are as close as I can get to loving the wet stuff. But for now the sun is out and I am off to bask for a bit.

Sunshine 1- 0 Rain

#1162 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Hugo and Lola, Serendipity1 Comment

Pyjama Day/ Gotcha Day

The need to de-rig Christmas was derigueur yesterday.

Not because I always adhere to the custom of the 12th night. But because I had done half a job on Saturday, and half a job is worse than no job at all.

To motivate myself, I started early and decided to do the job in my pyjamas, promising myself that I could not shower or dress until the job was done. Not a popular decision with two dogs who love an early walk.  By 11:30, everything was done, and some Christmas lights had been converted into winter lights to pull my summer-loving soul through a gloomy mid-winter towards Spring.

Pyjamas Day explained and on to Gotcha Day.

Hugo st 8 weeks in London

12 years of Hugo, the original urbane city gent who moved to the Cornish countryside and then relocated to the coast and currently lives the life of an old seadog. His current good looks are still a little lopsided, but nothing a few more weeks of hair growth can’t cure.

#1161 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Procrastination, Serendipity, Words2 Comments

Bring on the Winter lights.

Life is what happens whilst we are making plans.

Life rather joyfully overtook the plans for a De-Christmas of our house.

Significantly I remembered that I had also Christmassed up the Tennis Club Clubhouse. She who puts it up inevitably has to take it down, so my morning was spent removing twinkle and baubles from a community space. This led to many lovely conversations with people, both familiar and unfamiliar, around the club. 

What I did not achieve was any sort of real Christmas progress at home.

But I did remove one set of lights from a live tree and reposition them in old turquoise coloured glasses to give our whale some greenish winter lights for his shelf unit.

The live tree needed to be settled into the yard . Which required more footling about, which took time .

Then planned friends came round ,and still the actual Christmas Tree stands resplendent in baubles and red lights until 4pm arrived and we had to go out.

Definitely a day when procrastination and circumstance won. I have decided that De-Christmasing is actually a whole weekend project.

Less footling more action.

#1160 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity1 Comment

I discovered this new blue plaque about 1/2 a mile from home a few weeks ago. Over the Christmas period a late birthday gift from my ex-husband arrived. A subscription to the National Geographic magazine.  The front cover story was the discovery of the Endurance.

One of my favourite bits of the festive season is the time and space to read. It was such a lovely coincidence to find the blue plaque and have the magazine arrive within the same month. Although I had googled Shackleton’s adventures it was so much more of a pleasure to read a magazine article.

I imagine this weekend will see the slow de- Christmassing of our house. Yesterday I made next year’s gift labels from our Christmas cards.

They have joined the gift labels I made last year and forgot about. It feels about right to step out of my festive cocoon and embrace all that January 2025 has to offer. But I will retain reading time and some festive lights to perk up and enhance the short days of January and February.

But definitely time to de-clutter.