The love-child of Zephyrus and Nortus gave us a good old going over last night. Not that I knew that at the time. I have been researching the blowing faces that are sometimes seen on old maritime maps. Mistakenly I thought they were cherubs, they are in fact wind Gods although many look a good bit like a cherub probably because they are blowing as hard as a trombonist.
I have a plan to create a painting that is a mash up of an old nautical chart and a Google map. My wind will be the lesser God of the South West Wind. Inconveniently the South West Wind is not the love-child of Zephyrus/ Favonius, the West wind and Notus/ Auster the South wind. The God of the South wind is Lips/ Africus. His parents are assumed to be Astraios and Eos. He is a winged man holding the stern of a ship and if last night is a sign of his strength he is capable of a good old blow. Drawing him is going to be blast, in my picture he will be holding the peninsular of Stonehouse. Currently he is just superimposed on an old painting of a stormy sea. And that my friends is the wind-God, rabbit-hole I have been down today after a windy and sometimes sleepless night at home.
Sometimes while procrastinating I watch videos on art techniques, I am fascinated by the Japanese art of Kintsugi. Where broken porcelain is repaired, the repair is enhanced with gold.
I find the whole process mesmerising but am both self aware enough to know that I don’t have enough broken china in my life or the the tolerance for this meticulous craft. But knowledge can always be adapted.
This Christmas I was gifted a female torso vase. She had rather pneumatic breasts, if she were real I think she would almost certainly have ‘had some work done’
For some time I have felt the urge to depict the curious sensation of swimming in really cold water with a shortie wetsuit on.
Pneumatic Nancy is now officially a bobbing woman. Modified Kintsugi shows exactly the sensation of water finding it’s way into the openings of a wetsuit and then rivuleting over mounds and crevasses as it streams downwards. To be completely accurate the gilding should be done in ice cold silver. A project for another day, and another torso.
Procrastination creates gaps where serendipity can flourish.
January 1st heralds the end of 2022. The end of Advent+2022 and the end of the cheese footballs. A tasty snack that delights and disgust in equal measure. Savory wafer biscuit wrapped around powdery cheese and shaped like footballs. A Festive staple food for most of my life. You can take the woman out of Essex but you can’t get Essex out of the woman. Other classier snacks are available @theoldmortuary. Port, Stilton and Christmas cake drags me slightly closer to polite society.
Talking of my Essex roots I am thrilled to say that a fellow Essex artist has been given a Knighthood. At last someone prepared to take his responsibilities seriously.
Sir Grayson Perry
2023 off to an interesting start. No predictions, no resolutions, no expectations. Let’s see how it runs…
10 years ago my neighbour in London sent me this picture from his New Year’s Eve location. A holiday chalet on Whitsand Bay. By no stretch of mine or anyone elses imagination did I think that 10 years after this photograph was taken I would be living 25 minutes away from this spot. Exactly 10 years after this picture was taken I was just a little further up the cliff at a family reunion in a different holiday chalet. Celebrating our new grandaughter with her extended family and celebrating 4 generations of one branch of her family being together.
New Years Eve is traditionally a time for predictions, life has taught me not to put too much faith or time into predictions but instead to embrace Serendipity and Happenstance and ride them, like a surfer, onto the beach of reality.
Last blog of Advent+2022, lets see what 2023 delivers.
I made myself laugh yesterday on another wet and windy dog walk. I caught a glimpse of myself in the full- length glass doors of a closed cafe. I was completely dressed like the dogs.
The weather was dire so I couldn’t get a photo, but this bathroom shot gives you an idea. Even the architecture of the walk seemed to have got the ‘salted caramel’ dress code.
Long ago this was the entrance to my Fine Art Studio complex.
Then my task for the day was to create gift packs from a Photo Shoot * that my family were involved in at the height of summer.
The evening light and our choice of clothes was also Caramel coloured. Once again the dogs were perfectly colour co-ordinated.
Although Hugo could not be trusted to pose. As regular readers will know he is on a one dog mission to rescue every frond of seaweed from the sea. Sorting these pictures was like playing snap with my family. Six packs of selected images were the reward for a couple of hours of checking and checking serial numbers.
It was a Salted Caramel kind of day!
* we are not really a photo shoot kind of family. However meeting Rachel at Ruby Light was a very relaxed experience. I can happily recommend her.
I am usually quite poor at being on- the-ball for Christmas Cards, my international friends get the best deal as I can get those done in November. Once December hits I am like a rabbit in the headlights, this year was my most startled year ever. The postal strike in the UK compounded my own innate festive failure. Foreign parcels went out on schedule. Cards not at all.
So for all my friends and family, my apologies for this year, but you know I am a ‘skin of my teeth’ kind of card sender, and this year I was down to my dentine. The postal strike was one reason but the other was Post Office Fury!
I spent a good bit of money on posting a tracked parcel to Hong Kong. 19 days later it was still tracking to the excellent Post Office in Stonehouse. By coincidence I knew it had left that building, because my parcel went straight into the sack that left the building before I did. Every day I attempted to track it, and every day it was still tracked to Stonehouse. Every day that happened I resolved not to give the Post Office any more of my business. 19 days later we were on the cusp of the last posting day for cards to arrive for Christmas. I drove to the local Post Office HQ and made a mild complaint that I had paid for tracking. No problem said the person on reception. Her answer though was so far from acceptable I lost my mind slightly.
“Oooooh” she said with wonder in her voice.
“It’s up country”
Up Country or Up the line is a far South West England statement that covers anywhere beyond Plymouth and loosely extends to any international border in the UK. In Cornwall it means anywhere beyond the Tamar Bridge.
There is always a slight sense that, Up Country or Up the Line is in every sense inferior in every way to Devon or Cornwall.
And that my friends is why no Christmas cards have been sent from @theoldmortuary this year. I am having a postal huff.
As luck would have it I was sent this lovely card featuring British Military personnel. Which brings me rather nicely to my charitable donation in lieu of sending Christmas Cards.
This gentleman broke the world speed record for swimming a mile with only one arm in our own favourite Tranquility Bay, on Christmas Eve. He fund raises for Reorg. We watched him break the record and donated to the charity that supports ex- servicemen for which Mark Ormrod is an ambassador.
This humble little pot has been in my family for longer than I have. Denby Manor Green was first made in 1939 but production was paused during the war and started again in 1953 which is probably when my mum first got hers for her 21st Birthday. For her ‘bottom drawer’. Domestic items given to women to prepare their lives as homemakers once they were ‘inevitably’ married. In Essex, where I grew up this curious tradition was called Bottom Drawer it may have had different names elsewhere. Without knowing it is hard to look phrases up. Google suggests that this was a nationwide term, but that household linen was the focus.
My mum did marry but actually chose to have her household china in a different colourway.
Denny Homestead Brown
The green pot was definitely not her favourite item. It was used for low grade Christmas jobs like pressing an Ox Tongue or as a mould for home made brawn. To my mind grizzly tasks but in the sixties Essex essential Boxing Day food. As a small person both required prep that horrified me.
Ox tongue is self explanatory but the prep required was horrific. A large ox tongue was purchased from the butcher who also ran the local slaughter house. It was taken home and boiled with chopped onions, carrots and celery. Soffrito as we know it. After what seemed like hours of boiling it was removed from the pan and while still hot the tongue had to be peeled by hand and the placed in the green pot with a little of the strained boiling fluid. Then a saucer was put on top with a huge weight and the tongue was pressed as it cooled and then for a couple of days. To be revealed on Boxing day evening as a great culinary triumph. The sign that my mother was an accomplished cook who knew her way around controlling the chattering part of a cow. Brawn was an even worse delicacy. I will share the first part of the recipe and a link if you wish for further information.
The fact that this dish was wonderfully tasty shows just how good a cook my mum was even if I recoil from these foods now. Because on Boxing Day day the green pot was the star of her show people started giving her their unwanted Denby Manor Green. She didn’t really want it either for most of the rest of the other 364 days of the year. She bought and loved using the brown version. The brown version did not survive the daily toil of family life. The unloved Denby Manor Green has passed into my kitchen and is used much more frequently by me than it ever was by her. Although not at all so skillfully.*
*One year something went wrong, the tongue for whatever reason had not become one solid slab of cold meat. As the big reveal occurred the tongue flopped out of the casserole line a giant, pink, sloppy slug. Quickly returned to the kitchen it was reshaped using a scaffolding of cocktail sticks and carved in such a way that most people did not get too much wood.
May your Boxing Day be free of any Offal related incidents. Link below for the the History of Boxing Day.
Bring out the Christmas Gourds. As a lover of all things pumpkin and an absolute Grinch of all things Halloween I have never really decorated our home with Pumpkinalia. Until a cold snap frosted these Gourds in a friends garden. Being somewhat cheeky I asked her if I could have some of her gorgeous gourds to use as models for a watercolour. Then fate took a hand and gave her Covid for fifteen days. We no longer met at the museum where we both work, until this week when four fat gourds landed in my locker. Just in time for Christmas!
Frost on this wonderfully warty gourd inspired me to create an unusual but personally pleasing Christmas centrepiece for the table.
Gilding on Gourds may become a new Christmas tradition. Advent 2022+ Twas the night before, the night before.
I really loved gilding the warty gourds and then pondered on the pleasure that could be gained from gilding a warty toad. Obviously that would be entirely wrong but a little digital magic and I have created my own Golden Toad, I am a happy woman.
When I was a child our annual holiday was always taken in Devon. Getting there, or here as it is now for me,involved setting off from Essex in the dead of night in order to be at Glastonbury by sunrise. We did this every year without fail. Not to mark a solstice but simply to experience the stones at dawn. We were nearly always the only people there. Our car the only one in a chalky stoned car park with minimal fencing not too far from the site itself. We had foil-wrapped bacon sandwiches which emerged from a towel filled cardboard box, in my memory they are vaguely warm with the bread damp from softened butter. We sat on a blanket with our backs against the chosen stone and my dad made tea with a primus stove surrounded by whatever new contraption he had invented to make the process more slick. We ate our sandwiches, drank our tea, watched the dawn, packed up and went on our way. Dawn was at about 5:45, we were usually at our destination of choice, in Devon,by about eight in the morning and would park the car somewhere, usually by the sea, and sleep until lunchtime when the holiday properly began. This all seems mildly eccentric with hindsight. Although this was the sixties my parents displayed no other outward appearances or attitudes of being in any way New Age. The last time we did this my dad had filled the Primus Stove with fertiliser instead of fuel. There was no tea that year and never again was the strange holiday ritual enacted. The Primus Stove did not survive the fertiliser incident and with the loss of this one item, the spell, whatever it was, was broken. No photographs have survived of these events. I suspect there weren’t any, there were only ever three people in our little family and a photograph could only ever have shown two.
I drive past Stonehenge many times a year and am never tempted to stop. Now the ancient monument is protected from human touch for most of the year. Commercialised and controlled in the name of heritage preservation. I feel the urge to be with those stones but not in any way that is possible now. A mass experience would not be the same at all, but perhaps I could tolerate it with a warm bacon sandwich in my pocket.
When seeking images for Advent+2022 this snowy image appeared. I was not really certain how I could weave it into a ponder. Yesterday @theoldmortuary went out for our works ‘do’ and a ponder was born. The Kings Head, Westmoreland Street, Marylebone was opposite The Heart Hospital where I worked for quite a while. On occasions, if a patient ‘got lost’ between the wards and various clinics they could be found propping up the bar or having a fag by an outside table. The Kings Head is like a country pub that has become rehomed in the city. Although not a regular occurrence it was not intimidating to have to cross the road in scrubs and go and find a patient. Sometimes they were obvious because they were there with their drip stand. The Kings Head was once the home of John Wesley.
He is the glue that sticks this ponder together.
Earlier this week when the weather was brutally cold and icy we decided on a very local pub as the location for our ‘works do for two’. Our journey would be easily manageable in the cold snap. A five minute walk to the Cremyl Ferry and a ten minute crossing on the Edgecumbe Belle to reach The Edgecumbe Arms on the Cornish bank of the Tamar.
Note below taken from Plymouth History Festival 2020
Cremyll Ferry
This ancient crossing is thought to have originated in Saxon times and was first documented in 1204. It was worked by rowing boat, then steam boat and now motor boat.
This postcard features a coloured photo of the landing stage at Cremyll Point, with the quay, Edgcumbe Arms and cottages in the background. The HMS Impregnable training ship in the Hamoaze can be seen in the distance. Bystanders and passengers are waiting on the quay and there’s also a horse-drawn carriage. It’s postmarked 1907.
This postcard also dates from the early 1900s and shows the other side of the Cremyll Ferry’s journey at ‘Admiral’s Hard, Stonehouse’. It features the landing stage and quay just off Durnford Street. The ‘Armadillo’ ferry is approaching. A horse and cart is waiting in the water at the end of the slipway, and several men can be seen in small boats alongside the jetty.
Yesterday the weather changed. South westerly winds blew the cold away and brought rain and stormy seas. The ferry crossing was rougher and longer than we have ever experienced. Longer because there are absolutely treacherous currents that run on this particular stretch of the river. The tides and weather of yesterday meant the ferry had to head out towards the sea to find a safe place to cross.
Waves were crashing over the boat and we rolled and dipped alarmingly. Alarmingly for a journey that most times we don’t notice. We were, of course in expert hands. Waiting for our return journey I discovered that John Wesley of Marylebone had made the same journey in difficult circumstances.
Wesley also uses the old name of this stretch of water. Crimble Passage which in itself is a useful addition to Advent+2022.
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