Heatwave 5/2026 has left Firestone Bay. Leaving the Bay and surrounding area with normal, unpredictable August Summer Weather. This was the scene yesterday and the day before. The crowds of swimmers anxious to cool down have left the area. I had the water to myself for twenty minutes or so. Other bathers had just left and a few arrived as I left.
In a normal English Summer the bay would still be buzzing on a day like this. But 5 Heatwaves have made normal seem mediocre, lacklustre even.
More mediocrity.
Mediocre is not a word that is used often. It is one of those words that my synaesthetic brain loves.
Meaning neither good nor bad. It feels judgmental and not in a good way.
There are many things that I am pretty poor at doing. Doing them to a mediocre standard would be a considerable improvement. But if I were judged to have become mediocre that would not seem like a positive.
Good Enough is a phrase that feels similarly down beat when actually, for a lot of things , good enough is good enough.
Yesterday was a little lacklustre, mediocre even, but good enough in its own way.
Who wouldn’t want a bay to themselves for a lunchtime swim.
Breakfast of figs, fresh from the tree. Strawberries were from a supermarket.
We seem to be on the backside of the fifth heatwave of 2026. We woke up to an entirely different feel this morning. More normal for an English summer, some overnight rain and cooler. Dull.
Since May my days have been planned around heat avoidance. Today there is no need to take Lola out for an early morning walk to avoid her getting over hot and her paws getting sore from baking pavements. Today all thoughts of sun drenched and over-saturated colours have faded to greige.
I walk past this sign almost every day of my Stonehouse life. It protects a car park of 11 spaces overlooking one of the most interesting sea views in England.
Joy Sucking Car Park Sign
Every day I look at this sign and think. Surely this could be achieved in less dispiriting language and still deliver respectful and appropriate parking.
You can hear and feel the joy and colour being sucked out of peoples souls as they are confronted with this message in such a beautiful spot.
The Cafe itself does not suck joy. Drinks are served in ceramic mugs, the cheesy chips go down very well. Especially with fresh figs during a heatwave.
Their bacon butties ignite warmth in winter swimmers.
But that sign! Every day my heart slumps a little bit as I feel joy being extracted excruciatingly by words, harshly used, in a beautiful place.
A fifth heatwave looms, so Lola and I set off early to get a decent walk under our belts before things get too warm for her paws. Instinctively she pushes the walk , pressing me to add her favourite sniffy places as appendices to my planned and intended walk. At a basic level I need her to have had a couple of effective wees and a poo. She knows this. In the pouring rain both are achieved with speed and she turns her head for home with determination.
Days like today she holds on to her eliminations, rationing them until she has had her desired length of walk and her fill off sniffing other dogs wee messages.
I look at little boats and plan a painting.
Although right now I am supposed to be focussing on figure drawing not solitary row boats. Or indeed clearing out the campervan after a weekend trip. The art of art as procrastination.
This one tells of the late summer clear up. All family guests have moved on to different holiday destinations and our home has eased back from peak occupation. The crocs belonging to three small girls are gathered in a bucket by the back door while the girls themselves are away on different holiday adventures.
Using a similar colour scheme I am trying to tell the story of a set of swimming steps that are much quieter this week now the heatwave has moved on.
I am at heart a story teller either with words or pictures.
A regular blog reader, who is familiar with these steps, said yesterday that I had made them look very posh. That was not the intention, but I agree. They may have been posh once upon a time but shabby shic is a better description now. Most of the time they are entirely tolerable and are regularly washed by incoming very high tides.
At night they can be a gathering place for smokers of weed and men who like to do a wee. Not so posh then. Not so great as a swim destination either. Not so great a picture.
But I don’t need to tell that story about these steps.
Years ago a little pair of discarded crocs by the back door of the actual Old Mortuary used to break my heart. A small person and her family had left us to live abroad. That would not have made a great story or a great picture.
3 pairs of crocs in a bucket is a much better story.
However in the interests of story telling I also wanted to show the earlier set of steps at the peak of the August heatwave. I am not interested in the crowds of people who used these steps recently just the steps as a metaphor for extreme atmospheric and radiated heat. Just too much heat.
The heat blistered out of the rocks at night. And the sea languidly lapping the steps, warmer than we have ever known. Not quite cooling enough perhaps. Oleaginous even.
A different colour scheme. A completely different story.
What’s the funniest misunderstanding you’ve ever been part of?
On reflection and with the clarity of distance one of the funniest misunderstandings was one of my last work place appraisals. It was also one of those excruciating appraisals where I was told why I had missed out on a recent promotion.
I had missed out because I was over 50, had not been given a list of the interview questions by the lead interviewer ( the favoured and ultimately successful candidate got that ) and did not partake of some of the party activities my younger colleagues enjoyed.
I had mellowed enough from my initial furious mindset to enjoy the utter tripe that was coming from my line managers mouth. Then he served me a golden ticket of a comment.
“I think” he said,
“You use kindness to manipulate people”
Now at that point my thought bubble was an expletive filled explosion of great unkindness to him and his successful candidate.
After that I have no recollection of how we passed the time appraising me for the next year of my career.
Middle distance from the tidal pool
I remained fairly incandescent for some time. We never crossed intellects at an appraisal again. Curiously for reasons not unassociated with that meeting I chose to resign and move on without his weasel ways impacting me or my career.
Closer to the tidal pool
I still don’t believe that kindness is a tool for manipulation. I just feel it is a better default than unkindness. But is kindness a bit of a super-power? If people believe it has the power to manipulate in a good way then perhaps it is. It is certainly way more useful than unkindness.
I find my recollection of that appraisal just hugely amusing.
The other gem that my appraiser chucked out, that day ,was that he wanted to rekindle our previously good relationship.
” How do we polish a turd” he asked.
” By being kind ” I might have said and really wished I had. Of course that comment came to me moments after the appraisal finished. I wasn’t on any stairs, but I might as well have been.
Wednesday is hump day. I have the hump, or the grumps with a side order of entitlement. This week has not been kind. What I needed was an early morning walk with Lola and a swim at high tide from any one of the three beaches near my home. Tough weeks require some head clearance and swimming is my place to do that. That is my entitlement in a nutshell.
All three beaches had large black dogs off their leads with no direct supervision from their swimming owners. Not to my taste or Lola’s. Both Lola and Hugo were attacked by the same large black dog on two different occasions. Lola has a long but not specific memory. She takes a very dim view of all large black dogs, on her behalf I exercise caution around large black dogs off leads. To find one on each of the swimming areas was dispiriting to say the least.
I settled into the arches above the middle swimming spot and tried to enjoy a three day old Pain au Chocolat from Lidl. While they are delightful fresh from the Lidl oven they are like old boots 3 days later. The hump/grumps were not resolved.
Even worse the two women using the middle swim spot took forever to get in the water and their dog was all over the place. There is only a narrow entry way to the sea.
Me in happier, more privileged swim times
So I took my humpy grumpy self off to Tranquilty bay where the large, free- running dog had disappeared. I had a fabulous swim and Lola basked in the sun on my towel. Afterwards, as I walked past the middle swim zone the two women and their dog were just climbing the steps to leave. Without a backward glance Lola and I were down the steps and swim/ basking #2 happened.
Can you believe this? The last beach, as I walked past was completely empty. #3 swim/ bask occured.
The hump/grumps are not completely rinsed out of my system and nothing can rejuvenate a three day old Lidl Pain au Chocolat.
But with patience the black dogs will leave the area both metaphorically and in real life. I just have to give these things some time.
The black dogs were real. It is only as I wrote this that I realised that sadness can also be described as ‘ the black dog’
Funny things can spark a creative patch. For me it can be a deadline, a creative itch, or a commission, but this month I am aware that my creativity is directly linked to an ‘artistic difference’
I have been mulling over my comments and the comments of others. I am in the happy place of being content in agreeing to disagree. Now, my happy place thinking may affect decisions I make about which arts organisations I join in the future, but it may not.
But for now I am glad my painting mojo has returned with some lovely energy.
These two people on the beach are not having an argument. They are inspired by the many memorial benches I pass on my daily dog walks. The combination of names on benches who have enjoyed overlooking Plymouth Sound are not always traditional couples,sometimes they are friends, neighbours or colleagues. Names however come and go in fashion. Some pairings may never be popular again. Were my parents to have had a memorial bench it would be dedicated to Joy and Keith. One set of grandparents would be Gladys and Leonard. Or in a different marriage Gladys and Reginald. Not pairings I expect ever to be fashionable again.
This couple sit, overlooking an unchanging seascape. I sat them on wooden deckchairs to enhance the timelessness of the scene. The figures are androgynous and could be any two people of any gender or age or race. Most importantly they could be Edith and Herbert, Sharon and Tracy or Amir and Tulip. Just two people enjoying the view any time since 1886 when the deck chair was first patented
I needed a bit of space to add the quote. So the painting needed a good gap where not much was happening.
The artistic difference was based on a statement that ‘real artists’ don’t use digital manipulation tools that could be considered to be on the slippery slope towards AI .
As part of my creative process I use digital manipulation on occasions, but also get painty and dirty just like any other real artist.
Here my initial sketch and the subsequent watercolour have been digitally combined.
Later on I may work into the watercolour with pen and ink to get a similar appearance.
I do rather love the effect a minor disagreement has had on my creative thinking and more than happy to agree to disagree with’real’ artists. Real or not I have been hard at it today.
Detail of the finished piece. I am undecided about my ultimate presentation. As above with lots of space in landscape format or tighter cropped in Portrait.
May mornings are a gorgeous wake up. I am always a little obsessed by birdsong in May. If I need to get up early I like a few minutes in the yard just listening to the chitter chatter of birds starting their day. Just hearing the dawn chorus has always been enough but a curious family connection has brought me a new Birdsong Identification App on my phone. It was developed by Cornell University, there is a tissue thin family connection which makes my ears prick up when Cornell pops up when I listen to nerdy things on the radio. The Merlin Bird App was mentioned on the radio a while ago, I downloaded it and now I know who is chattering to me with my cup of tea.
Of course bird listening is no longer confined to the morning cup of tea ritual. I walked back from the tidal pool 2 days ago and caught 6 birds, all unseen, nattering away.
Any person walking the same path 400 years ago would have heard a similar mix.
The European Herring Gull is the most bombastic. Has to make its conversation the least interesting and loudest. If a European Herring Gull was at a party I would certainly avoid her.
” Oh dear Herring Gull has arrived, nobody else will get a word in edgeways”
” Far too fond of her own voice, and her kids have already swiped all the pasties”
” No wonder her husband spends all his time at sea”
I have no idea if this character assassination is ornithologically correct, and the whole party idea is fairly flawed. But give a woman a new app and who knows where her mind will take her.
Sticking my neck out I would suggest that Spring has arrived on the Stonehouse Peninsula. Three days of sunshine but the temperature and wind are nothing like Springy enough yet.
The strong breeze certainly took my Giraffe off his feet for every one of his morning poses.
This one had him tumbling into a rockpool. But in clambering down to retrieve him I found a sheltered sun trap, where we could bask and harvest vitamin D for a few minutes.
Sticking my neck out predicting the arrival of actual Spring might come back to bite me on the bum tomorrow. The current ten day forecast has not a single drop of rain illustrated. So for now that is good enough
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