Something is up in blogland. Inexplicably my reader stats for this year have jumped. Not quite half way through the year my blogs have already been read by the same number of people who read my blogs in all of 2025.
A red letter day of sorts. It seems appropriate to share the blogs of past June the 15th’s.
Some time hopping for you all. Which is a really crafty way of throwing in a book review. This morning I was awake early finishing a book that I have loved. I just couldn’t quite finish it last night.
Time hopping in books is either to your taste or not. No spoilers here but the time hopping element in this book is as near perfect as any that I have read.
And if that were not enough the book stops almost exactly where my blogs for June 15th start. In a shop just after restrictions were lifted post Covid
Picture from June 15th 2020
In another quirky little coincidence the bakery, where I bought this doughnut, has been in business for 5 centuries. The exact time span of Tracy Chevalier’s book. Life is every bit as strange as fiction.
My 5 year effort seems pretty tame compared to 5 centuries.
The algorithms of my social media have had a bit of a hiccough/hiccup this week.
As a 60+ woman with a head of exuberant curls, marketing flat caps at me is going to land exactly no on-line sales. But relentlessly, this week, the cookies and the algorithms would really like me to buy a flat cap.
Writing this blog may well make the situation worse.
Flat caps do live large in my memory bank because my paternal Grandad was almost never seen outside without one. Indoors the cap, his gas filled cigarette lighter, Rizla cigarette papers and Old Holborn tobacco tin were never far from his side.
When I see a flat cap there is a vestigia of the fragrance of tobacco and lighter gas that flashes through my brain. When I went to London at 18 he had already been dead for 6 years . This building, the one on the tin, was on my bus route to Barts Hospital, when I first saw it the same little flash of fragrance zipped through my head, and I wished I could tell him that the building really existed.
Flat caps are a bit of a granddad thing. My maternal Great Grandfather makes an appearance on my family tree with a fine flat cap and moustache.
So I must admit to having a fondness for flat caps but not a need to buy one.
Once again my photo archive has come up with evidence that I have quite an archive of flat cap images. They do frame a face and set a tone which is significantly different to that of the rather over-popular baseball cap/hat.
Street Art on Union Street.Print by Annette WrathmelA singer in our London Songs ChoirAndy posingThe flat cap that got away
Clearly I do love a flat cap, but am never going to buy one.
And just like that a great flat cap wearer dies on the same day as I wrote about flat caps.
David Hockney has died, we were lucky enough to catch this exhibition twice. Once at the Royal Academy London and also at The Guggenheim Bilbao. Two reviews below.
I have been collecting friends since just before Infant school.
The friendship longevity record is held by my pre-school friend Juliet. I was named after her and always felt slightly in awe. Probably because she was older and wiser. Our friendship was forged by our mothers who had been friends from birth. In turn their mothers had forged their friendship simply by the serendipity of meeting on the post-natal ward of a small cottage hospital in Essex. The grandmother’s friendship was the most unlikely one of all. Juliet’s grandmother ran a shop and was warm, a fabulous cook and religious. My grandmother at the time, was a nurse, very irreligious and ultimately ran a pub. She was warm too, maybe too warm if you were a handsome man. I was never aware of her cooking. Three generations of friendship grown from a most unlikely pairing.
I have been collecting friends ever since. School. Work. Neighbours. Clubs. Some have been lost along the way.
I have always thought that finding a true friend is like finding love. A little bit of research this morning has proved that to be correct.
But here is the surprise !
Which is why Marc is the poster boy of this blog. Beyond his radiant smile, he always smells delicious. I can only dream of being consistently as fragrant as he is. Sometimes we worked 24 hours straight together and he always smiled and was always perfectly acceptable to be up close and personal with even in our worst of moments. Presumably I was in the thrawl of his invisible accelerator for platonic attraction. Who knew!
The reason this particular retirement gathering stands out is that it was the first of any such gathering after Covid.
By one of life’s great coincidences my very last social gathering before Covid, was with the exact same group of friends and colleagues in London. The last outing before Covid hit the world and almost certainly me and my first exposure to the Covid Virus, which has taken away forever a fully functioning sense of smell. And yet still I manage to make friends.
Thank goodness there are other pathways.
Before this mornings research I would say my particular friendship recipe would be.
A positive outlook.
A creative and enquiring mind
A little bit of non-clinical madness.
Vibing on a similar wavelenth
Good sense of humour
Loyalty and Kindness
My excuse for not giving access to the friend zone is usually.
” Not exactly my cup of tea”
Even with today’s research I am going to stick with that because it is a gentle rejection. Iron fist in a velvet glove perhaps but gentle on the outside
Saying someone just doesn’t smell right takes the rejection to all sorts of different places. But goodness me the smell theory really fascinates me because I have always thought there was something intangible involved. I thought it was my limbic system.
But then with a little more research I discovered something that I had forgotten. The Olfactory bulb lives within the limbic system.
So I was right all along.
Five years ago this bunch of friends were my cup of tea and they all smell just wonderful.
Tennis Club admin, rat eradication and emails were my target for the day.
Pest control took a little longer than planned and a Summer rain storm soaked me through. For reasons that I can’t quite put a finger on I decided that a rain storm was exactly the moment to paint a sea pool in a heatwave.
I am physically painting a lot less this year, and yesterday was an absolute joy. This painting is a mixture of traditional water colour and water colour pencils.
Water colour pencils are my quick/ holiday/travel medium of choice. A pencil case and a sketch book take virtually no space in a bag and water is always easy to find.
The other travel tool is my smart phone. Digital manipulation can sometimes rescue a failing painting. The Sea Pool at Conleau did not need rescuing but I did have a little half hour of tweaking.
To be honest I dont think these digitally tweaked images have a huge amount of value. They give me the slight AI ‘ick’. But looking at them gave me some ideas on how to improve my painting. They offer a different perspective. Just one digital manipulation pleases me.
A much simpler less vivid image. Not at all Conleau in a heatwave. But certainly a nod to the 1930’s history of the emergence of Conleau as a tourist destination.
Digital dabbling is a great learning experience and I can do it on my phone whenever there are a few spare minutes in a day
But nothing beats creating art using my hands and art materials. Who could possibly pass up sharpening pencils. Such a satisfying task.
In the last week or so I have added a new morning ritual.
The new feature from my blog hosts.
My morning rituals occur, in no particular order . The earliest they start is at 2:30 am, if insomnia kicks in, the latest start time would be about 6:30.
The first one is always the Wordle of the day. Today was a good one.
After that in no particular order:-
Tea
Coffee
Plan but not always write the blog
The new ritual is reading blogs written on this day since 2017.
I have loved reading my ponderings presented as a historic daily timeline.
Starting sporadically in 2017 but developing into a daily habit. Reading them as a record of my life and the world around me is surprisingly enjoyable. And yet why would I not enjoy it. The published diaries of famous people have always fascinated me alongside the daily records of ordinary people,which are far less available, but almost more interesting because of their rarity.
I have promised not to share them too often here, but sometimes I will . Today I thought I might share the little pleasures I have taken in this last week.
Bittersweet Crocs
We have three granddaughters, two live abroad and we do not see them often enough. For a long time a little pair of turquoise crocs were by our backdoor, we couldn’t bear to tidy them up because they belonged to a small person many thousands of miles away. These orange crocs belong to a small person just 10 miles away.
Dahlia June 8th 2020
This dahlia bloomed on the day we attended our first Covid era video funeral. A dearly cherished friend had planned his own funeral. It was the most beautiful and haunting experience. A funeral with no hugs, no human touches of condolence and love. A funeral we didn’t walk away from. The live stream just stopped, and there we were in our own sitting room, a bit wrung out and wondering what on earth we had just witnessed.
Not all June blogs make me sad, thank goodness.
Bobbers 2023
The Bobbers pop up pretty often in my blog of the repetitive nature of daily life.
June is also not spared my occasional strong opinions.
Fantasy South West Coastal path view. 2025
A year ago I went to see The Salt Path, a film of a book that I always thought was a work of fiction tethered loosely on truth and reality. Just weeks after this film was released, Raynor Winn the author and advisor on the film was exposed as being economical with the truth.
Oh my inner bitch rejoiced. I had so often disagreed with people ( the majority) who thought the book and the author were wonderful. The inner art bitch also got an outing for this blog in 2025. I stuck three of my own different coast path locations together to illustrate a fictional coast path location. Raynor Winn, of course has made millions from her falsehoods. Me nothing.
Which is why my blogs will always be from the perspective of an ordinary person. Who only occasionally lets the inner bitch out!
Here is a really old blog, very far from daily. From a time when I hoped to be a proper ‘Arts’ writer. Like so many things ,Brexit and Covid, put a stop to that aspiration. As one aspiration slams a door the draft forces another door open. Daily blogging slipped in quietly when the other door closed.
I am not really the best person to give hints and tips on building self-confidence because as a character trait in others I find it can be built on pretty flimsy foundations. I would make a rather wild observation that often the most self-confident people build their confidence on the most unstable and unreliable foundations. So I view unquestioning or showy self-confidence with a fair degree of scepticism and distrust.
I constantly question myself and really believe that every day is a schoolday. Knowing that the foundations of my confidence are constantly under review might sometimes make me seem less than confident but actually I might just be reviewing and reflecting on new information or the shared wisdom of others. All waiting to be stored in my confidence foundations ready for future use.
So before building self-confidence always check that your foundations are sound, because self-confidence in the wrong hands is dangerous, unattractive and nothing to be proud of.
1500 oldmortuary ponderings, before that the Pandemic Ponderings. Pandemic Ponderings started the accidental habit of a daily blog.
So perhaps the answer is that I turn up nearly every day and increasingly so do many of you. Not so long ago 20 readers logged by WordPress was one measure of my daily reach. Recently things have become a little giddy and 200 is not unusual.
Like all big questions in life I don’t have definitive answers but a few principles that work for me.
A Quirky Moral Compass
I never set out to have a quirky moral compass, it has just formed over the years. I know it is not perfect but I always distrust perfection. Wabi-Sabi is neat Japanese phrase that sums up my feeling.
Not being perfect has always seemed a good path to travel and I know that that is hugely controversial. And also not for everyone. But knowing when to stop is every bit as valuable as starting.
I can do perfect, but for personal perfection I aim a little lower.
Maybe that is the secret to building anything worthwhile.
Subscribers
A Family
Friendships
There is an interesting footnote to this. Although I am an avid manipulator of images. I build in deliberate error, using several different apps and hand drawn or painted elements.
The rise of AI in image creation is unstoppable. Recently every organisation seems capable of producing posters to advertise events that are retro, homely or ( even worse) wholesome. The absolute perfection of these posters makes me feel queasy. A genuine physical response not too dissimilar from mild travel sickness. I can’t really explain it. Maybe my desire for slight imperfection is more significant than I realise.
What’s something you’d love to see in the future, but know you probably won’t live to witness?
There are many reasons I write a daily blog. Witnessing is one of them. I have always been fascinated by the day to day lives of ‘normal’, run-of-the-mill, people , like myself. Not the famous, infamous,grand, important, iconic,good, bad and ugly( beautiful) people who habitually occupy the world’s media.
I just love the observation of people going about their daily lives.
As a British person with a peculiar interest in normality I would love to see how Britain between January 2020, when we left the European Union and May 2023 when the World COVID Pandemic was declared over, is viewed with the retrospective wisdom of 100 years.
British people are a blended island nation, who talk a lot about the weather. Sometimes about Wars. And unlike any other nation, have a couplet of 21st Century woes.
Businesses failed because of the joint enterprise of Brexit and Covid.
Relationships failed.
Communities broke up.
People took the fork in the road that they would never have considered were it not for Brexit/Covid.
It is not in the least unusual to hear
” Well, of course, there was Brexit and then Covid”
We are a nation whacked by a double whammy.
As an individual, Brexit/Covid galvanised me into daily blogging/ diarising. Something I had wanted to do all my life but life got in the way.
I used to dream of keeping a five year diary. I never achieved it, despite being nerdy, and at times, an insular child.
Jetpack, the app that supports my WordPress blog page has a new-to-me feature.
Suddenly I have my 6 year diary pages to look back on.
I promise not to share these here too often but I find them fascinating, of course I do.
The great ponder of the day is, will they survive 100 years, and what will my great-grandchildren make of them?
Go on a walk today and share a photo of something that catches your eye.
This is a prompt for a suggested blog today, from my blog hosts. Every blog I have ever written features a photo or photo’s of something that has caught my eye, accompanied by random thoughts and some minutiae of daily life.
What will catch my eye today. 1st of June 2026?
Let’s just see shall we?
Marilyn Monroe 100 years old today. Except she only got to live for 36 of her beautiful years.
How lucky am I to have lived 68 of my 100 years. Less beautiful, less troubled. Less dead!
Of all the Marilyn stuff I read today one was particularly troubling.
A businessman, Richard Poncher,bought the tomb above hers and demanded that his coffin was placed in his tomb upside down so that his body could gaze face to face with hers for eternity. That is just weird, entitled and wrong.
The man’s wife had no qualms at a later date about trying to sell off the tomb and presumably her husband’s corpse in order to make some extra cash. There were no bidders. There are some strange people about. Mr and Mrs Poncher clearly deserved each other.
Today is a Monday, nearly always a Nana and Nona day care. It is a day of Ferry spotting.
Cremyl Ferry at the Royal William Yard.
Hide and Seek.
And Dog walks.
So what caught my eye.
That a ferry travelling backwards actually produces a better photograph than when it goes forward.
Which I inadvertently added to by having a chocolate croissant dipped in my coffee while writing yesterday’s blog in bed. Coffee and croissant all over me and the bed. If the blog was a paper diary yesterdays page would be the colour of old parchment and the ink would be indistinct. In yesterdays blog I said I shared a birthday with the first use of a lighthouse on the Eddystone Rocks. 14th November 1698. If that were really true I would be writing on old parchment.
Anyway back to the holiday plus washing. Thankfully Stonehouse did not get the memo that the heatwave was over. The yard was still capable of drying washing yesterday long after the sun had set.
There has been only one major yardening crisis whilst we were away. Our lavender tree has curled up his fragrant toes and died, draping himself dramatically over a stoic Olive tree. Jobs for next week I think.
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