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.
I have fairly firm, certain,views on uncertainty and am a little uncertain about the order I should write about uncertainty.
Uncertainty should play no part in certain aspects of life, for those parts of life you need to know what you are doing, have a plan,the skills and materials to turn uncertainty into certainty.
Uncertainty can be banished by confidence and training.
Intuition is a great tool against uncertainty.
Uncertainty can be allowed its own sweet time to resolve.
Uncertainty is not always a bad thing, particularly in the creative world or when dealing with other humans.
Personally I love the serendipity of uncertainty. I prefer people who embrace uncertainty but not to the point of being irritatingly whimsical. People who are forever certain are not my cup of tea.
This prompt arrived less than 12 hours after I deliberately avoided a fellow swimmer who I don’t really know. She is impossible to have a casual conversation because she is certain about everything, often wrong and talks in a series of statements. A little diffidence would benefit her social skills.
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.
A marvellous place to muse or mull. Or even ponder
Yesterday was a musing or mulling kind of day. Nothing serious, just a delicate or sensitive situation, tennis club based that needed good handling. I was extremely lucky to get a favourite swimming spot to myself so I could mull or muse uninterrupted.
A good overnight brought me some clarity for that problem. But then trivial ponderings made me wonder why I had not called my blog ‘theoldmortuary muses’ or ‘theoldmortuary mulls’
theoldmortuary ponders follows on from Pandemic Pondering. That title obviously had a time limit but on a writing course I was advised to leave the pandemic behind, before it left me behind. It was also suggested that I make my blog more personal. theoldmortuary is my creative space and although a pseudonym that feels pretty personal, not for a moment did I consider dropping the word pondering. Mull would never have been chosen but muses might have done.
I do wonder if I have rather devalued the essence of a ponder by pondering such trivial, benign, repetitive or quite frankly flimsy thoughts on a daily basis.
Muse does seem slightly more appropriate but for now, pondering will be the thought process. Leaving musing and mulling for more serious thought processes.
Back to to the swim where I mulled or mused a tricksy tennis problem. From my ridiculously elite swimming spot I swam to the very popular beach.
And then I swam back. This is a truly trivial,benign,repetitive and flimsy ponder.
Early morning dog walk for voting. So early that I had to wait for the coffee shop to open.
I rewarded myself with the laminations of a croissant.
I have a habit of voting early, having missed the vote once when I lived in Lambeth. I had left for work before the Polling Stations had opened and due to the unpredictability of working in Cardiac Cath labs arrived at the Polling Station with only a half an hour to go. Almost the minute I got off my train there was a strange vibration in the air. The Polling station was less than five minutes from the train station. There were outside broadcast camera operators and journalists and an enormous queue. Some sort of drama had occured and there were record numbers of voters. There was no way that everyone in the queue would get to vote and no chance that anyone joining the queue, like me, would get the chance. To queue, to make a point or not to queue. Either way I was denied my constitutional right.
The Lamentations of a choice, no croissants involved. The cafes were all closed.
In the 1990’s I was a busy working mother of two, wishing that Plymouth was more like Brighton.
My Brighton life was mostly carefree. Plymouth was the settling of my new life,consolidating being a parent and doing a job that I didn’t care for to make parenting easier. The comparison was not kind to either city. In the 90’s two bands in particular kept me sane . The Verve, all dirgy, and melancholic and Daft Punk, Electronic Dance music with something extra
Plymouth was represented by the Verve.
Brighton got Daft Punk.
I love them both but Verve love is hollowed out . Daft Punk the love of escapism.
With tthe distance of time I can see that both loves have equal merit as do both cities
Which is a long preamble to natter about a contemporay ballet I was intoxicated by last night.
Two distinctly different choreographed ballets that might seem, and were unconnected . Maybe a pairing not for anyone but to me they made perfect sense. Both hugely expressive pieces using gorgeous, perfect human bodies to unfold a story or a feeling. The music of Part 1 was not at all Verve like but Androgynous dancers performing such mind blowing emotion took me to that hollowed out place that I felt as a newish parent in a strange place. I had no care for the gender of the dancers, just mesmerised by the places they were taking my head too. There should be more words for erotica and sensual.
Or maybe completely new words that describe sublime pleasure of being cocooned in the moment of contemplation by writhing human bodies who are just there to make you think, nothing sexual or intimate. Just thoughts.
Part two was so much closer to my 90’s Daft Punk vibe and similarly thought provoking. It was by its nature, bawdier,closer perhaps to sensual and erotic. With May Day vibes of flesh and lust sanitised by white drone like and sexless creatures. Just there doing their thing perfectly and simply to make us think.
Not knowing or caring what gender any individual dancer was, allowed for a huge amount of buttock envy. My goodness those dancers had the most amazing bottoms.
My head was quite properly blown. All that gorgeously stimulated thinking and some absolutely peachy bottoms. What a night out.
I am still thinking about it. Wondering at the ability to have my head completely taken over by movement and music. Loving the hollowed outness and the escapism in equal measure.
If only we could have two new words to express the joy of being made to think unexpected thoughts in a theatre by honed and expressive bodies.
Yesterday I was seeking some quiet perfection at the Tennis Club. Quiet perfection was not available. The club was overrun by feral children and some minor but sensible rules were being broken. But as I left, this beautiful Calla Arum Lily caught my eye.
On top of the feral children and minor rule breaking there had also been some mansplaining, which can irritate the tits off most women.
So not only was I not particularly relaxed but I was mentally very flat chested.
The day was not lost though, I discovered a new- to-me word.
In fact, as luck would have it, the father of some of the feral children had adopted a braggadocious tone when I remonstrated with one of the children who was climbing on the roof of the clubhouse.
” Oh don’t worry about that” he said braggadociously.
“They do far more dangerous things elsewhere”
Perfection
Perfection is not always what you seek but what is delivered to you.
I suspect my face may have not hidden all of my thoughts on his comment.
Moments later he offered me a cold slice of his left over Pizza.
I first met the word ‘drear’ in 1977. Raymond Briggs used the word in Fungus the Bogeyman. A graphic story book.
Of course before that,the word dreary was commonplace in my thoughts. Who could not have been young in Britain in the sixties and seventies and had the once a week experience of dreary Sundays. No shops open, no cinema. I could add to that no pubs/ bars open but I was too young for that and my grandparents owned a country pub so actually Sundays there were not so dreary. A time when a little more freedom was allowed without worrying about the paying customers or patients who attended their G.P in a curiously formal room at the front of the pub.
The word dreary has always made me feel a bit sad, melancholy even.
Taking the ‘y’ off the end is curiously liberating for me.
I can use the word drear quite happily as a descriptive and not feel plunged into a gloomy, fog-like head space.
A drear planting scheme.
The Spring of 2026 in the West Country has , so far, not failed to disappoint. It is drear but not dreary. There have been glorious bursts of sunshine but they are accompanied by colder than usual temperatures and are unable to sustain themselves for too long.
Yesterday we planned a Spring walk in cold sunshine. By the time we got to the location, drear had set in. We were not at all dreary though.
Just losing the ‘y’ makes my head so much happier. Drear has an acceptability that dreary will never have.
One of my digital photo manipulation apps has a new ‘Romantic’ filter. I never normally use just one app or just one setting,preferring to amalgamate different settings from different apps to create a more unique and interesting image from my daily walks . But ‘Romantic’ seems to be a bit of a wonder filter. My daily walk never looks like this but there is nothing in this picture that doesn’t exist at some time of day or at some time of year from this viewpoint. Never, though all together. My romantic head conjures up something similar to this when I am away from home and imagining what our regular swimming beach looks like. The other thing I love about this ‘Romantic’ image is that someone wrapped up warmly against the cold and sitting enjoying a cup of coffee is obvious in this digitally enhanced image. I had completely missed them on the original photo. Are they reading or sketching?
How do I even feel about romanticising things as someone who believes that I am a pragmatist at heart?
A deep dive into quick AI definitions throws my pragmatist belief into a quandary.
Honestly who could imagine a filter causing so much thought. If only the app had called it a beautiful filter that would have been fine. I would have tried it the minute it appeared on the drop down menu, but the word romantic put me off for several weeks.
Just another pair of words for me to float between.
theoldmortuary.design 