Last weekend I collected some lovely textures from Marylebone High Street. Possibly my favourite High Street in England. I know it like the back of my hand and after a three year absence it felt as familiar as ever. It is decidedly upmarket and glam but holds all the shops you should expect from a normal English High Street. Supermarkets, charity shops, butchers, bakers, cafes and chemists.
Hardware Store
I’ve walked Marylebone High Street with so many friends,family and colleagues. Attended summer fetes and Christmas Markets, all with a little more twinkle and pizzazz than normal. I have left a little part of my heart in Marylebone.
Charity Shop
It is always good to step back into a place that has so many happy memories. A place to give thanks, to absent friends and fabulous moments.
City walks in January need plenty of stop offs. The last time I was in this glorious Tom Dixon interiors shop was in February 2020. I was feeling as ill as it is possible to feel and still be more or less functioning. In reality I very probably had Covid and could barely appreciate the joy of his designs or the fragrances of his beautiful candles. Three years have passed and my personal score of Covid( before testing) Novid ( – test, all the symptoms) Covid (+test minimal symptoms) My pleasure in the visual remains high, but sadly the pleasures of fragrances have all but left me.
The barge, glimpsed through the window says it all. So much has been lost by so many over those three years my sense of smell is a small loss to bare. A January afternoon in the Tom Dixon store is such a feast for the eyes I barely missed the fragrances.
Our day started, as it went on, doing entirely normal things in unusual locations. A visit to our favourite bakery seemed very standard until I decided to use the loo. Only to discover that it was in the strong room, the bakery was in a former bank.
Unfortunately the name of the Strong Room could also be considered a judgement of my years of expertise in enjoying bakery products. No such judgement on the next stop.
Be-oom a Korean tea shop whose outdoor space was very unexpected.
I was particularly thrilled by the nearby what3words location.
After the tea, this silver author wished for somewhere cosy to relax after my rose petal infusion. There was no relaxation, though, in a day of long city walks. The last of the normal things in unusual spaces was a book shop on a canal.
And just to bring this unusual blog to a close is a clever door stop.
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.
theoldmortuary.design 