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.
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.
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.
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.
The sun got to me yesterday. The shadows on the moss made me think of a lateral skull X-ray. Overnight my silly head kept thinking about it. I even dug out my old Grays Anatomy. The book, not the TV series. Just to satisfy my poor insomniac head that wanted to sleep.
” What keeps you up at night”
“Just random nonsense”
Some of the proportions are a bit wrong and the stick to the back of the neck is rather a lethal look. But a bit of superimposition shows why it was a hard thought to shift.
And so as the first page of a 2025 diary turns. I must return my twinkle garments to the wardrobe. No more sequins or clever play on words.
2 t shirts like this one blue one black.
I have promised my green sequin skirt a possible summer outing but for now they are off for a well earned rest.
I talked to a friend about our shared love for twinkle garments for the festive season. She said the only problem is that all our festive photos look similar no matter what the year.
A point well made but of no consequence to my simplistic thinking.
Talking of observing time passing, I have had an awful shock. A 10 X magnification, illuminated mirror arrived with Santa. We have a 5x travel mirror, which I last looked at in September. Let’s just say the shock of 10X v 5X was not a gift. The wrinkles are im-pres-ive in the new mirror. 5X has been telling lies on my holidays or the last four months have been particularly harsh. My face looks like a geography contours project. Waterless fjords have appeared on my face. Smiling makes things worse. I may spend 2025 being enigmatic.
We were out early for New Years Day on the Barbican. Earlier than the street cleaners.The Barbican is the hub of nightlife and revelry in Plymouth and has been for centuries. New Years Eves are vivid, giddy, lustful and excessive. This morning saw plastic glasses and fast food wrappers skittering round in the wind, small brightly coloured pools of sick were easily avoided on the historic cobbles.
Detail Night Out on the Barbican
Maybe not to everyone’s taste but I captured the sensation of a Barbican Night Out on a painting a few years ago. It doesn’t reproduce well as it is a glossy resin piece,but to me it represents the hedonism and joy of a great night out. Uniquely, in Plymouth, it is done with high heels and cobbles. What could possibly go wrong.
Is this peak twixtmas? Christmas has started to ebb away and the usual Sunday feelings of a new week ahead has the added frisson of a New Year to consider. My Saturday newspaper looked back. The Sunday newspaper, should I choose to buy one may well look forward. Meanwhile the mist/low cloud/ greige continues to cover our days. Which are also enhanced by the cold viruses we picked up from Merry Mingling over the festive season.
Happiness is knowing where the dry tissues are and making sure the soggy ones are not left in the pockets of garments destined for the washing machine.
Twixtmas comes but once a year, I love the informality and shape shifting of days that never quite know who or what they are. Punctuated at any moment by a snack or drink, sometimes normal year round fodder other times a giddy combination of festive left overs.
Twixtmas, a magical week of slight discombobulation when no day is quite as it should be and the question on most peoples tongues is.
“What day is it actually today”
You get to build your perfect space for reading and writing. What’s it like?
With that in mind my perfect space for reading and writing is any space I find myself in. I just allow myself to dwell there a little longer during Twixtmas. I like Twixtmas with the extra ‘T’ after the X it gives the word a little more gravitas.
A vital time to recharge our winter batteries before 2025 gallops into view. Not that Christmas 2024 has left me depleted in any way. But Twixtmas is definitely a time to indulge whims and ponders.
The digital age has altered everything about reading and writing at home.
This box bureau in a 1960’s Ladderax unit holds everything I need for actually writing and my laptop for the digital stuff.
Rather trendily I perch on the sofa arm to replicate a standing desk.
But this blog, almost exclusively goes out from my smartphone. That makes my reading and writing space anywhere I choose it to be or where I find myself. Perfect in my opinion. I rarely have exclusive use, wherever I am and that suits me just fine.
Boxing Day. Stillness after the flurries of festive activity and the incremental excitement of the build up to Christmas Day.
I took this picture at 9pm at the end of a lovely Christmas Day with our family. These road and rail bridges carry people into and out of Cornwall. I love it when a great picture of them presents itself. Looking west to east always makes my heart sing, the thought of journeys from the county of Cornwall, across to Devon and on to the rest of the world always fills me with optimism. Big thoughts.
By contrast some of my seasonal small thoughts, ponders if you prefer, can be shared on this last ponder of the festive season.
The big, small one for me this year is the Sellotape question. How many human hours are lost around the world trying to find the end of the sellotape?
How do presents get mislocated by people like myself, who think they have a foolproof system. Obviously my system is not foolproof, but it is a matter of some bafflement that gifts simply disappear or end up with the wrong recipient.
Alcohol before breakfast, how is that ever acceptable? But yet an early morning Mojito was just the thing for Christmas morning. Surprisingly it was a crisp, bright reminder of high Summer . Zings of mint and lime dancing across my tongue on a day that always brings more weighty unctuous osensations.
Last day of 26 Days to Boxing Day. Z is for Christmas Books.
Thanks to author C Pam Zang neatly filling the Z space with her surname.
Reading is the best thing about Boxing Day… and the chocolates of course. Happy Christmas one and all
theoldmortuary.design 