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.
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.
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