This morning October pulled out a fabulous combination of sunshine, good sea temperature and excellent biscuits. 8 bobbers, 3 dogs and a non-bobbing bobber caught an early high tide and filled the bay with chatter and some swimming, before we all departed for almost a whole day of doing stuff elsewhere. There was a bit of bounce to add to the experience, not as much as I created in the picture below but we never look this cheery when the sea is actually this rough. Grim determination is the facial expression on those days , this morning the smiles were genuinely generated. It really sets you up for the day.
It is Plymouth Art Weekender this weekend. Always a fascinating festival of all things art. Missing on our cultural horizons for 4 years.
More of that later in the week but an early installation in one of my local shopping areas had me on the back foot a couple of weeks ago.
A moment when travel broadening the mind has done too good a job.
I have travelled in remote parts of the U.S where a rural supermarket is the social hub for thousands of square miles . Wedding invitations posted by the checkout, open to all who bring a plate of food. Obituaries of regulars stuck on notice boards and with shades of the old Wild West, mugshots of shoplifters or other undesirables.
So it was with some surprise I saw a couple of pictures of people inside the window of my local Co-op.
That’s unusual for here, I thought, while also thinking that the photo of one of the miscreants was quite arty, handsome and maybe familiar. It was very early in the morning.
The gymnastics my mind did in those moments thinking a friend’s Dad had been a bad man. The thought was unimaginable. Then I hoped nothing bad had happened to him. More travel awareness. Obituaries on lampposts and telegraph poles in Greece.
Art was not on my mind at 7 am, not much was. But it woke me up and made me think. Always a sign of good art in my opinion.
Is it a significant day when the first appointment that needs to be written into my paper diary of 2025 occurs?
I am a reluctant accepter of the last quarter of 2024. I think the constant rain of 2024 is to blame. Today is wet and foggy. If I met a person who was wet and foggy I would give them a wide berth. Fog horns and low visibility are not my thing. But in this strange year of weather the yard continues to create growth and produce. My climbing plants are still climbing and the tomatoes still fruiting.
I have had my last haircut of 2024. Mid-October seems extraordinarily early for such a thing and it is the reason to unwrap the diary as my next appointment is January 2025. If this curious weather keeps up I might just about be eating my last outdoor grown tomato at the same time.
I wish I were a better diarist of the mundane things in life, like haircuts and tomatoes. Sometimes it is the little things that are the glue that hold memories together.
2022 home grown tomatoes at Christmas.
2023 no home grown tomatoes at Christmas.
If I kept better written records of the mundane I could predict the likelyhood of tomatoes in 2024.
In my dreams as a ten year old I was going to keep a diary as encyclopaedic as the very best. My parents bought me a five year diary, with a lock.
The lock stayed firmly locked, nothing occured for five years or indeed 50 or so years that I felt the urge to record in a diary. Then daily blogging occured which is as close as I have ever got to keeping a diary of the mundane.
I am ashamed of my paper diaries, they are a curious cross of notebook and reminder.Scrappy notes with underlinings and arrows fill the pages. Every year I look at a new one and vow to do better. What if I suddenly become famous how will I ever write my biography. The diaries will say I had a lot of haircuts and that a lot of different events had some random notes written but there is nothing significant in them. All that stuff is stored in my head. What will happen when my head starts to fail?
October 14th 2024 a pledge to myself to keep a better written diary. Not starting as you might expect on the January 1st 2025 but starting today in the old diary.
October 15th. Haircut.
October 16th. Ate outdoor grown tomatoes. It was foggy.
Riveting stuff, lets hope I don’t get famous any time soon.
I wonder if this ponder on diary keeping has been caused by my misunderstanding of the word ‘Nostalgia’ I had always thought it simply meant remembering the past or indeed retrieving the past by discussing it with other people. I realise now that nostalgia has an element of thinking the past was better or more comfortable, longing is a word often used. I think I see the past more as a foundation for the now. A resource for learning and often a reason to be grateful and a pathway for the future.
Am I allowed to look back without ‘longing’ but just interested.
Is the last line of a poem that has shaped my thinking ever since I first read it.
The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost.
I have always known that any decision taken, sets me on a certain path. There is always an alternative.
Poetry resides in Autumn for me, possibly because of this poem. A Yellow Wood speaks to me of Autumnal colour changes.
This poem suggests that free will and decision making go hand in hand. That is not always my experience. Pragmatism is often the path of choice. No matter how verdant the alternative seems. Regardless , right now I have chosen the path of more poetry. Two books, quickly reserved on my Library App.
A poem or two before bed will be my new Autumnal habit.
We are on a little weekend break to Torbay. Only one hour from home it was one of the holiday destinations of my childhood when it was a seven or eight hour drive.
The weather has been very kind to us and we have walked and basked in autumn sun.
We visited favourite holiday spots from my family holidays of 60 years ago and for the most part they remain almost unchanged. Fairly unchanged too from the Victorian boom years of holiday travel.
Torbay became a holiday destination during the Napoleonic Wars , 1803-15 when European wars forced wealthy British people to stop travelling in Europe. Tourism at that time made the Torbay area one of the wealthiest locations in Britain. Agatha Christie was born in Torquay. Other authors who have lived there include Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, Wilfred Owen, Mary Shelley, Charles Darwin, James Joyce, Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lord Tennyson, James Joyce, Beatrix Potter, T.S Elliot.
My parents visited in the post World War I I era when Torbay was still a hugely popular destination before mass tourism moved on to mainland Europe.
Great physical beauty and slightly faded glamour are good reasons to visit in the 21st Century.
For us the motivation was just to spend some time together as a three +2 dogs who are allowed to run wild on beaches open to them after the summer dog bans.
Lola is not in a photograph as she prefers to dig deep holes in the soft red sand. Not photogenic, and when she involves herself in dead crabs she is not too fragrant either.
Nostalgia also played a part in our little jaunt. We paid a visit to a pub/restaurant I first visited at age 5 with my parents. Built in the 17th century as a fish cellar and net store, the building remains very much as I remember it. The internal decor changed but the physical space not at all. I gave myself free reign to choose from the menu. 5 year old me was only permitted a couple of choices.
Harbour Light, Paignton.
20,000 steps well used and ultimately well rewarded with good food.
I am a great procrastinator and very easily sidetracked. Over my many years I have developed strategies and excuses for this behaviour and believe I have turned them to be positive attributes. Others may disagree. Doing things at the right time is a much better use of energy than doing them too early when things may change and the task needs to be modified or even abandoned. Being sidetracked is just a different phrase, from the more accurate one of doing research on future projects. Today I fully plan on both procrastination and being sidetracked. We are on a jaunt with no firm plans. Since adopting the habit of daily blogging I have learned to fully embrace the serendipity of procrastination and sidetracking. Allowing Ispace in my life for unexpected things to happen enriches daily life and in turn the blog. Sometimes I procrastinate on writing the blog and it changes direction completely if I am gainfully sidetracked.
When was the first time you really felt like a grown up (if ever)?
Grown-up-edness arrived at a cricket match when I was in my mid-twenties.
My father-in-law had been diagnosed with a rare form of stomach cancer. The cricket team we were with, was formed of young medical people. The talk was about how hopeless his case was. It dawned on me that this was us being propelled into true adulthood. His diagnosis was the end of youthful free will. We were both only children, and the buck, at that moment, very clearly stopped with my husband. 16 years later 3 parents had endured terminal illness and death. But we had two gorgeous young children whose arrival had kept us sane in rather difficult times. Sometimes in life, you just have to play the ball that is bowled to you, not the one you imagined.
This is not, as you may at first think a fire, but a glorious autumn, stormy sunset. At the very bottom of the street are the wharf steps where we either walk down to a beach or, at high tide, enjoy the sound of flisvos on old stone steps.
As Florida waits for Hurricane Milton to touch land, calm views like this seem such a privilege. We will all know how bad it has been by the time our sun rises again.
My favourite artists are my friends who happen to be artists. And artists who I meet and like, whose work interests me.
I realise this may be a poorly written question trying to probe which are my favourite works of art, but just as I would in an exam I will answer the question, not what I think the question is.
Obviously this only works for contemporary artists or artists who I feel I know through reading biographies, autobiographies or watching documentaries.
I am far too much of a diplomat to write about artists and their art that I dislike, but I can say that I love the work of Rothko but I rather doubt if I would have liked him one bit.
Marks and Spencer are using the words Big Autumn Energy as their current call to purchase. September rushes in with a frenzy of activity after the languid, sun soaked days of High Summer, but beyond that moment, I never feel Autumn to be a season of high energy. So Big Autumn Energy is not my vibe. I feel it is the consolidation season after the energy of Spring and Summer. But the word consolidation is never going to sell anything in Marks and Spencer or any other retailer. But it gives me the chance to use my watercolour of harvested apples to good effect.
A slightly darker energy was created when I overlaid a Red Admiral Butterfly who was basking in the sun yesterday.
She was soaking up sunshine and stored heat, on a stone wall while I gently stalked her, quietly consolidating her autumn.
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