Category: Serendipity

#1534 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn blogging, Serendipity1 Comment
Putting my feet up.

We are doing some extra grandchild care while my daughter recovers from a broken shoulder. The yard has gained a new facility. A paddling pool, after a day of frenetic activity the pool is a warm and peaceful spot to write a blog. The early morning dog walk is done and my next commitment is two hours away.  One of my early morning habits, a new one to go along with Wordle*, is to read my old blogs written on this day. I have enjoyed revisiting the last few years. They are all like old friends. I am a bit critical of some and wonder if they quite hit the right tone. But I remind myself that they are all about preserving the details of a day. In the spirit of putting my feet up I thought I would share the 7th of July with you all.

My Place-Brixton East

Pandemic Pondering #469

#261 theoldmortuary ponders

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#1353 theoldmortuary ponders.

July 7th 2026 has some predictable shape. Not thrilling, I will admit, but life is not all about the big ticket items.

A robotic lawn mower demonstration.

Some tennis club admin.

A quick dip in the sea.

Some art.

Of all of the 7ths of July, the one I most enjoyed revisiting was the 2017 one. Brixton East, a fantastic gallery space in London. 9 years later it has disappeared and is now a very swanky venue for weddings, celebrations, photo shoots and product launches.  I mourned the loss of the space for artists and easy accessibility to a beautiful space. Sadly in these 9 years it is not the only exhibition space to be reimagined as something different. Beautiful spaces to show art are becoming increasingly difficult to find.

Onwards to my day, I have a robot waiting for me.

#1533 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Concatenation, SerendipityLeave a comment
©theoldmortuary

Is a little chaos actually good for us?

Absolutely , chaos is a challenge to rigid thinking and over-planning. Too much chaos is a disaster but leaving space in life for a little chaos can be refreshing and educating.

I particularly like creating order out of chaos. It feels exhilarating, like riding a wild white horse through a swamp and arriving at your destination perfectly clean and tidy, not a hair out of place and perfect lipstick

In my professional life we avoided chaos at all costs with protocols and procedures. But chaos still found us,  and pulling victory out of a disaster felt so sweet.

In my artistic life I like to allow chaos to have a space. When chaos produces good results I call it serendipity or concatenation but when chaos does not a thing of beauty make  the bin becomes the winner.

I am neither a biker nor a pipe smoker but in my head I like to think that I view chaos with his calm contemplative aura.

Something tricksy to be tamed or something creative to be harnessed.

#1532 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Devils Point, SerendipityLeave a comment

Sunday Serendipity in Stonehouse. The only plans for the day were an early swim.  Demonstrating the things  I really missed during the skinny dip of last week.

#1529 theoldmortuary ponders. Part 1

My gloves! I dislike getting crampy hands and forearms when swimming so red palmed , cocktail length swim gloves are the essential essential for a swim. But skinny dipping is an all or nothing activity so for one night only the gloves were off.

But after the swim we fancied a walk and there was a Food and Craft market close by, where our favourite London coffee is served and where sausage and bacon baps might have caught our attention.

Then it was just a short walk to watch some more Gig racing.

With the perfect viewpoint to see the finish line and see some early victories.

How often is it this easy to watch an International event?

Our eyes were particularly peeled for one team.We  used to both row for Rame.

Our bums have been in these seats at the World Championships a while ago. The blisters are epic, and unforgetable.

Soon enough we had to turn for home, even more dull yardening jobs to be done before the weekend was done with us. And more Gig racing on TV when the sun was just too much for us.

#1527 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity, Summer1 Comment
Soft Summer ©theoldmortuary.

July 1st 2026. May and June have rushed by in a way that January and February never do. Every aspect of the early part of the first day of July in 2026 is soft, the colours are soft, the sea is soft, and there was a soft but nippy breeze.

Soft Steps ©theoldmortuary

Even the tide, gently falling, made soft sounds on the rocks. A gentle farewell as the sea pulls away from coastline. Like the soft hug of a temporary parting. I wonder how the rest of July will progress.

#1526 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Scrag End of Summer, SerendipityLeave a comment

Yardening and painting, a pondering.

Grasshopper in our yard.

My blog diary entries remind me that we moved here exactly 5 years ago.

Pandemic Pondering#461

The grasshopper on our mint plants is a lovely sign of what we have achieved in the yard in 5 years. We bought a home with a sterile, stone-walled yard with any flat surface covered in artificial turf that was used as a toilet by the two dogs that had previously lived here.

We moved plants from a rural cottage garden and an urban city garden. Some survived and thrived others failed.

The Yard in Summer

We increased our vertical growing area by increasing a north facing wall with a lateral slatted fence and planted climbing plants in pots. If there was an actual plan beyond attracting pollinators, we have forgotten it. The yard dances to its own tune. There is a well established jungle area in a south east facing corner, and anything else that does well are plants found in the Mediterranean.

The Yard in Summer

Our insect companions are very diverse. Yesterday was the first sighting of a grasshopper. But for two years now we have had our own colony of  Unarmed Stick Insects.

They live on a hugely successful climbing rose and apparently live a peaceful and non combative, sedentary life.

The pollinators love the jungle area.

When we moved into the house we were plagued by small black flies that came into the house during good weather. Making the yard more hygienic didn’t seem to make a huge improvement but this year, now the yard is more verdant there seems to be an improvement. But maybe at the scrag end of June I am talking too soon.

Five years on we are not the only creatures to have moved in.

I took these two photos within a couple of minutes in the yard yesterday.

Hot pink and bright green is one of my favourite colour combinations. When I was under 16 it was a favourite colour pairing to doodle with.Since then not so much. Last December I was thrilled to see the colour combination used for the Sugar Plum Fairies in a production of the Nutcracker in Hong Kong.

Their inspiration is easy to see in any Asian market.

At the time I remember thinking I should experiment a little with these colours at home. I had completely forgotten this until exactly this moment.

Maybe July will become a month for dabbling in hot colours and vibrant greens.

#1525 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity, YardeningLeave a comment

All before and after projects should have before and after photographs.

But we didn’t know we were on any sort of before project until we were more than half way towards the after part.

The Heatwave has waved goodbye, leaving us with entirely normal weather. But our heads did not know the heatwave had departed so we were up at 5:30 am to start the day. So loads of jobs got done in the cool , then the heat didn’t arrive so then more jobs got done.

The Derek Jarman, Prospect  Cottage inspired outdoor loo and yard storage.

The Yolk Yellow door got its door furniture and all the benches got a lick of paint.The patio was scrubbed.

And a very old lady got a paint job.

The headless, legless, armless lady has been with us for many years. She came from TK Maxx (TJ Maxx in some places) For about ten years she remained pristine. But after that she lost her lustre and has required a paint job every few years. She has been blue and gold and versions of her original  stone. Today, because her glow up was unplanned she got some rather old black exterior paint that I enhanced with twinkle graffiti spray paint that I had left over from an art project from quite a few years ago. I think this might be her most magnificent iteration. She looks as if she has been carved from a Bible Black coalface.

If only I had known she was going to get a glow up today I would have taken a before picture.

She was really pretty grotty. Faded and peeling and inhabited by spiders and bugs and all manner of creepy crawlies. She has scrubbed up well!

Although between coats of paint an intrepid spider crawled out from wherever he has been hiding and cast a web between her buttocks. The glitter spray made the whole thing quite gothic for a moment.

Living her best nightlife with fellow survivors and repurposed items, the head injury Buddha and the wonky watering can.

#1524 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Books, SerendipityLeave a comment
Firestone Bay

The past, on the other hand, arrives in chunks, sometimes when you least expect it or sometimes unreliably when you really need to remember something important or significant.

We are doing a little more grandparent caring at the moment as my daughter has a fractured shoulder.

I read such a lovely quote about Grandparents today. In a book that I have bought for a gift, but just reading the acknowledgements made me need to buy a copy for myself.

The last acknowledgement in Where Sleeping Women Wake by Emma Pei Yin is just the most gorgeous and significant quote about Grandparents and their grandchildren.

‘ Grandparents, in this life we were fated to meet yet destined to part’

But not just yet, there is loads to do before any parting happens.

#1523 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Music, Serendipity2 Comments
Hugo enjoys Glastonbury on the radio in the comfort of his own home.

This weekend is traditionally a big Festival weekend. Most years Glastonbury is happening. We don’t ever get tickets but we love to listen in to anything that is broadcast. Festivals attended in real life are a great chance to experience unknown music or to dance for as long as possible on uneven ground in a tented environment.

Glastonbury is on a Fallow Year, this year but there is a festival less than a mile and a half a mile away across the river from our home.

We can lay in our back yard and listen to the music just as if we were at a festival relaxing in our camper van away from the main stages. In fact our yard is closer to the main stage of Morvala than a lot of camper van fields at festivals.

We swam on Friday to the catchy tunes of The Bay City Rollers. Something that would hugely have excited 14 year old me.  Distance lent enchantment.

I was never a super massive fan but I did have an excellent pair of tartan Oxford Bags bought from a Grattan Catalogue book. Oh the 70’s

Tonight we will be able to lie in our yard with a hot chocolate and skip 20 years to the nineties and listen to Ash.

Time marches on but music can make everything seem like yesterday.

Looking back at my photos from festivaling at home there was another more recent brush with the past. Hugo enjoying the teepee. He has been in another realm, (Maybe one where dogs can actually attend festivals) for 6 months now. Time enough for these photos to be lovely memories of a dog life very well spent.

Just to add a note for other dog lovers.

Your dogs don’t cross the Rainbow Bridge. They wait for you there.

Lets hope there is a festival on the other side.

#1521 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn 2026, Serendipity, Storms, Summer1 Comment
Another Postcard from the edge.

Another day another heatwave. Lola and I were up early, to achieve plenty of cooler weather walking and domestica. Freeing up the hotter hours for chatter and chilling. A meeting in the morning required not one but two iced coffees. Then there was an art attack. Not of the Coronary variety. ( I may be from Essex, but I do not drop my aitches, although curiously we do pronounce aitch as haitch)

An actual art attack, when a piece of original art fell off the wall and landed noisily between myself and my gentleman companion. Cool, even in a heatwave we did not skip a beat. Exchanging funny anecdotes is not the time for drama of the arty sort.

Swimming was the antidote to both the heat and art attacks.

Firestone Bay

Less people than the day before, so no need to create a postcard image to protect the identity of beach goers. No big boats to watch. Just a really fast lifeboat. So fast I missed it twice.

And a cute sailing boat, the sailing boat did, however, need the postcard effect because the photo was so bad.

To create the postcard I used the colours of the rocks of Firestone Bay to fill in all the detail lost by very bright sunlight.

The rock of Firestone Bay through Polaroid Sunglasses

Et Voilà

Sailing in Firestone Bay

Not all heatwave days are the same even in the exact same location. Unexpected things always add a different texture to a day.

The bonus of yesterday, was meeting so many people, unexpectedly, for random conversations whilst we were all dodging the effects of overheating.

Overnight we had huge electric storms. The heatwave may be over, we are back to greige, how very drear!