I have migrated from the East of England to the West with some long term living in London and the South East. On this map I grew up in pale blue and have lived on both green and dark blue areas. I currently reside on the cusp of red and grey my words for the evening meal have never altered.
Lunch occurs between noon and 2pm.
Tea is almost always just a drink unless it becomes an event with cake and sandwiches and is called afternoon tea. Small children have a late afternoon snack which I could call tea but never do.
A meal after 6 pm is supper unless I am in a restaurant choosing from a ‘dinner’ menu but I would still call it being ‘ out for supper’
All this written before breakfast which seems pretty secure in its identity as the first meal of the day unless it slips rather too close to lunch and becomes brunch. Actually my favourite meal.
The tree, although beautiful, did not take our attention. The dogs filled the mental space where pondering could have happened.
But this tree turns out to be the perfect specimen for my current experiments with an easy image to double and treble expose digitally altered grey seascapes. I can’t say that I am entirely sure where all this fettling about is taking me but January skies are a lot more interesting with some tweaking.
Here we are in the actual mid-winter. Mid January to Mid February. Lola had a moment of a real photo opportunity on a red Chesterfield in a Bikers cafe today. She is a dog that loves both sofa’s and cafes. Her perfect life would be as the companion dog for a food critic. Lola is not a fan of mid-winter.
I was feeling a bit mid-wintery this morning. Just a bit bored of my winter clothes and wishing for sunshine. Last weekend’s glorious days were just too much of a tease for me to happily revert to the greige of this weekend. The cure was a jar of marmalade.
I have absolutely jumped the gun with this purchase. A good friend makes the best marmalade on the planet. But she is a purist and only makes it when Seville oranges are in season and available in February. Hers is dark, bitter and bursting with flavour. Only Frank Cooper gets close and on a day when the sun has failed to make an appearance I need marmalade to bring some colour to my life almost as much as Lola needs a sofa!
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?
Morning para surfers at St Michael’s Mount. Not a bad way to start a week, I was wrapped up warm with hot chocolate in hand.Penzance is being very good to me today. Sunshine and warm enough to go without a coat once the sun was properly up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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