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.
For some reason I just accepted the name without ever looking up its meaning . To be honest I thought it was rather a clunky name for something quite so pretty. Moving on to yesterday evening when our dog walk took us to the furthest part of Devils Point and the Royal William Yard. There was a beautiful sunless sunset and this historic gas lamp had been fitted with a bulb that glowed with a warm light.
Only moments earlier at the top of the staircase I had seen delicious clouds basking in the light of the departed sun.
In a perfect world I would have been on this spot five minutes earlier. Those clouds deserved a visible light source. I stuck the two images and came up with this one.
I was never going to pretend it was genuine but felt it needed a name. Only to discover the French word for twighlight.
So , I am doubly educated . I no longer think my rose has a clunky name and I am quite delighted to realise that I planted it , by accident, so that when it has grown the sun will set behind it. Both crepusculing together.
My answer was correct on the 4th attempt. The word slipped easily out of my brain and I shared my result with my Wordle Whatsapp group.
The word slipped out of my brain almost at the same moment I realised I had no idea what it meant and that I had certainly never used it in a sentence.
I have looked it up now and realised why I have never used it. The word has two uses, musical and psychiatry.
My head has always been full of random thoughts and ideas. Not archived or catalogued in any useful way.
My storage system for knowledge has two distinctive visualised locations. A smart office block where all the necessary and acquired knowledge for life, work and survival is stored. Calmly efficient, beautiful streamlined architecture where busy archivists work happily and effectively. Pulling out information as and when I need it.
The other location where all the fun and interesting, life enhancing stuff is stored is a warm and welcoming Town House with 4 floors. There are always comfy chairs , interesting rugs and warm fires near the haphazard shelves and overspilling store boxes. The archival system is managed by happy individuals who wear a lot of velvet and softly worn linen. Always smiling they serve tea and snacks while I patiently wait for an answer that I know is somewhere in their domain. Mostly they are as efficient as the streamlined, smart office block.
Sometimes however I am turned away from the cosy repository with the promise of an answer arriving later in the day. And so it does. Arriving gently, as if delivered by a silent hot air balloon or by a tiny feather caught in a summer breeze.
Puzzled by my inability to remember, I set off on another task only to be gently disturbed by the arrival of the random fact or piece of knowledge I required 3 hours earlier.
Below is the Wordle word of the day . Do not read on if my spoiler would spoil your day.
I now know exactly why Fugue was in the Townhouse and not the Office Block.
J.S Bach Toccata and Fugue.
I met this piece of music when I was under 6 and knew its name. Which I thought was exactly that, a name.
Like Tom and Jerry, or Laurel and Hardy.
In 60 years I had never given it a thought or a refile.
I absolutely understand both uses of the word.
But what is to happen to poor old Fugue, resting comfortably in a warm and cluttered townhouse of random knowledge for 60 years.
Is he, Fugue was always male, about to be rehoused in an office block of known and retrievable facts. Has he taken his last featherlight balloon trip into my thought processes. I suspect so.
Will Fugue the character be in a psychiatric fugue of his own.
I will allow him a free pass to either dwelling, I know where I would rather be.
The thing I ought to have done today is to keep a better eye on my timekeeping. Primarily because poor timekeeping made me miss my hair appointment yesterday, and talking too much landed me in the most horrendous rainstorm. So today I ought to have kept my chatting a little more under control but today there were no appointments just domestic admin and cooking. Things that ought to be squeezed into the spaces in between lovely wide-ranging conversations. And squeezed in they were, which makes the ‘ought to’ somewhat irrelevant. But there are days like yesterday when I ought to have kept an eye on the time. Missing a hair appointment is really very thoughtless. What is even worse is that an hour or so later I was telling a friend I had lost track of time and missed an appointment. She looked at me in horror and said.
“Oh my goodness , I shouldn’t be here either. I ought to be at a community thing”
When I was younger I certainly thought ‘ought’ and indeed ‘should’ were words of diligence rather than desire,but now I feel more kindly towards it. Ought is a word used out of respect. I can be flimsy about my own time keeping but not when it affects other people.
I also really like the idea of an Oughtobiography. An epic tale of all the things I ought to have done. There may be more blogs on this topic…
Scour the news for an entirely uninteresting story. Consider how it connects to your life. Write about that.
Headlines always fascinate me. I know that they are written to grab attention and are largely forgotten once readers take a deep dive into the nitty gritty of the story.
What is a week’s worth of honey?
And to whom is it a weeks worth.
The answers are endless.
What does a week’s worth of Honey look like to you?
A jar lasts me about 6 months so my answer would be, about a teaspoon.
That would never satisfy two bears. But it might easily be a full weeks production for a busy bee.
The absolute silence in this reflective image of Sutton Harbour last night, does not in any way reflect the aural reality. The harbour had the rich sounds of the harbour through history. Tuesday evening dog walks around the harbour have the bell ringers of St Andrews Church as a regular and welcome soundscape. Seemingly performing perfectly, Tuesdays are their practice nights.
Coupled with the nearly still water in the harbour the acoustics were perfect last night. It was also the last day of the school summer term so families were filling the cafes, and their exhausted teachers were finding their way to the bars. The pavements filled with strange adult crocodiles of walkers. Large groups of colleagues making their way to their selected bar informally but formally, two by two. The only thing missing from the human crocodile were the luminous pink-tabarded attendants at either end.*
Live music spilt out from the bars across the harbour, and dancing girls made their, uncertain, way to a Salsa Bar. High heels and cobbles are tricksy at the best of time without the added uncertainty of a pre-class drink in the evening sunlight.
As seagulls circled, greedy for chips, the only thing missing from this moment , which could have been heard any time in the last 500 years, were the Fishermen and Sailors in any significant number. Fish are landed in Plymouth but the huge fish market is just a holding space for the fish auctions that are held on-line. I’m not sure what handsome young sailors en-masse do on Tuesday nights but they were not easily visible. Represented only by middle- class, older men, in two’s and fours. Pink trousered with those non-uniform, uniform caps they all wear to silently call one another from across a world crowded out by non-sailors.
The harbour hubbub and the people watching was just serendipitous concatenation at its unpredictable best last night.
A Golden Moment, I might say.
* I only realised the significance of the teacher element of last nights bar activity when I heard the crisp steps of a man walking from one bar to another. Who walks from one bar to another with recognisably crisp steps?
A man, or woman, who regularly crosses purposefully from one classroom to another. A warning sound of impending trouble that we all learn to recognise from age 5.
*Of course such a lovely evening was rich pickings on which to ponder.
A painting ponder was to sketch Sir Francis Drake and his wife Mary Newman in the contemporary attire of Summer 2025. She will be wearing a spotted flared dress for a night on the cobbles and he will be wearing the older casual sailor outfit with one significant difference. Those pink sailor trousers will be cropped to show off his shapely calves and feet in deck shoes with no socks.
Something that will require a lot more pondering is how to replace the phallic symbol of the hilt of his sword. I suspect an uncapped bottle of beer will have to do. Over-sized of course. No cold weather posing for Frank.
Sir Francis Drake on Plymouth Hoe ( a Spanish seagull has taken revenge on this day)
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