‘There are some losses that change the trajectory of your life’ P.Diddy
Puff Daddy, P.Diddy, Diddy or even Sean Combs his real name, is talking about the death of a woman he loved and shared three children with.
Significant losses or negative events do change the direction that life takes.
As an optimist and someone who likes to reflect on my half-full glass I am guilty of skimming over negative outcomes and always trying to find the best in people and situations.
Reflecting on the negative is not somewhere I feel comfortable but just acknowledging that negatives and positives have equal power to change the direction of life is somehow a quite relaxing thought. Just as the planned and unplanned have a similar capacity.
A ponder is not what I expected when I read an article about a Billionaire Rapper. Just one thoughtful sentence. Of course I have lived the reality of loss altering life’s directions. As has every human. But until today I could not have expressed that sensation so eloquently.
A rather strange summer in the UK has created some lovely flowers for autumn.
Which could be considered to be natural schadenfreude. Summers misfortune has made autumn thrive.
Schadenfreude has never been my bag. I really disliked those TV programmes that invited the public to send in videos of people having minor slips, trips and falls. I don’t like pranks or practical jokes. My moral compass doesn’t take any enjoyment from other people’s misfortune. Misfortune falling upon those that deserve it is sometimes satisfying, but no more than that.
I’m pondering this because I heard a sportsman being interviewed yesterday and he was asked if he had Schadenfreude when a team that did not renew his contract immediately hit a period of poor performance.
There was a long awkward radio silence, he then apologised for not knowing the words meaning. After the presenter rephrased her question there was another silence while he considered his answer.
” Why would anyone take pleasure in their friends and former team members suffering repeated defeats ” he asked.
I can only hope the interviewer squirmed at her question. She was clearly working her way through scripted questions, but had not registered that every one of his previous answers had demonstrated that he was a compassionate and thoughtful person.
I was going to ponder a different word today but Schadenfreude pushed Prescient from my mind, I should have realised that would happen!
This is quite a dry ,wordy blog but autumn flowers in cafes are brightening up the look of it if nothing else.
My big problem with schadenfreude is that there is no natural control. I once saw a man slip on a banana skin. It gave me brief pleasure to witness a cliche but ultimately he collided with a hard park bench and really hurt himself.
And so October blows in I wonder where the ponderings will take me.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Bobbing and the bobbers are a rich source of advice. So much so that isolating the best piece of advice would be foolhardy. But the wittiest piece of advice I gained from the big bobbing trunk of advice is really rather useful and it also makes me laugh out loud whenever I hear the first sentence in real life or on the radio or TV.
” Well, the ball is in their/his/her court” says the protagonist, following a disagreement or differing opinion on any number of subjects. This suggests to anyone who is listening that a point of understanding or neutrality has been reached after a period of tentative discussions or slightly uncomfortable negotiations.
The protagonist is suggesting that the next move is entirely up to the person or organisation that they have had a disagreement with.
A Bobbers additional sentence takes all illusion of control away.
” But the bat is up my arse”
Removing any scintilla of doubt as to where the real power lies.
Sketch for future project about cold water swimming.
What do you enjoy most about writing?
Writing gives me the chance to note down inconsequential things. As an artist I can sketch inconsequential things. Sometimes something of substance comes from these two activities. As September heads to a colourful autumn I am on the last leg of being out and about as an exhibiting artist. For the first time this year I did an event called Open Studios and am currently exhibiting in a gorgeous, medieval period, house called Cotehele.
Exhibiting this year has felt significantly different to the last couple of years. Writing, or capturing this thought gives me the chance to consider this sensation. Almost certainly 2023 felt like the first truly Covid worry free year for people who organise art events and for their visitors. Everything that people love about art shows was back. Sketch books, business cards and crowds. Boozy Private Views and long delightful conversations. There is so much to learn from the company of other artists and the people who love to look at art. The current financial climate has limited the amount of sales.
But the interactions with visitors have been wonderful. I have been so lucky. I’ve unexpectedly met some old friends and work colleagues for long leisurely conversations and put faces, names and personalities to people I barely knew before this summer. Some blog readers have also appeared which has been lovely.
What do I enjoy most about writing?
The ability to reflect and cteate a world that is both real and imagined , orthodox and surreal. A safe place to ponder. A place to take stock of the snippets of life that might go unnoticed.
I have so many favourite words that it would be too hard to choose one, but I do have a word that my mum loved to use in her frequent work rants.
Audacity.
I love that in my mind it can be both positive and negative.
Willingness to take bold risks is a fabulously empowering thing. Bold is not stupid or dangerous.
In my mums work world women took bold, audacious risks, always for the benefit of other women. Bold risks because they ignored rules and regulations to better improve the services and experience of their exclusively female patients.
Men in senior positions often had the audacity to question and try to control the decisions made by these women for women. This was always the subject of her regular work based rants, always down the phone to people hidden and anonymous to me.
Somehow Audacity is a really precious word, one that I never feel quite able to use in its negative tense with anything like the accuracy of my highly indignant mother. Could I ever be cross, at her near-nuclear levels?
On the positive,though, I love it. Audaciousness is very much something I respect in almost every aspect of my life.
Audaciously I am using a completely unrelated image for this blog. The audacity of it!
Spoiler Alert the answer to Friday’s Wordle is included in this blog.
My wordle guesses today made a 4 word poem that inspired two related reminiscences. Perfect ingredients for a ponder.
A long time ago I was at a work Christmas party in a Private Members Club in Poland Street in London.
The club was in a basement and I needed to leave to get a phone signal. On returning I entered the wrong door and ended up in a Bear Bar, the sort of place burly gay men, dressed in plaid go to meet other burly gay men or cubs, who are diminutive or much younger men who are attracted to burly men in plaid. I had a perfectly pleasant half an hour or so talking to an Australian Army Captain who was there to hook up but had no problem entertaining a woman who found herself in the wrong club.
At one of my workplaces I worked with a predatory male colleague. He was a constant pain and often harassed or proposition many of the women he worked with. One Monday at work he was in quite a flap, he had been away in a strange town and had made the exact same mistake as I had done in London. He also favoured the plaid shirt look but when he stepped into a Bear bar in a strange town suddenly the predator became the prey. Karma I feel.
This is what procrastination looks like. An unfinished painting on a Friday night. True enough there have been other interruptions to the creative process this week but goodness I give procrastination quite a free hand in my life.
One of the interruptions is still making me laugh. I was running a Social Media series for a local organisation. They are holding an event this weekend and will be serving cake and tea in a garden close to the Ocean. I thought I had found the perfect backing track for a reel.
The title Cake by the Ocean completely suited the event until someone,several hours after the reel had been published, and with wisdom unavailable to me at the time.Pointed out that the whole thing was a euphemism for an adult activity in sand dunes. Live and learn.
While we are living and learning one of the many subjects that popped up at the Bobbing session last night was the Merkin.
Just have a look at the salesman’s beard.
We were discussing the Pubic wig as seen above but a quick research shows that the word is also associated with the Ocean.
Procrastination and Digression, it is a wonder I get anything done some days/weeks.
Yesterday I was stopped in my tracks by a piece of prose written by Dame Judi Dench. Not being able to match this in any way. I will just share without pondering at all.
“Don’t prioritise your looks my friend, as they won’t last the journey. Your sense of humour though, will only get better with age. Your intuition will grow and expand like a majestic cloak of wisdom. Your ability to choose your battles, will be fine-tuned to perfection. Your capacity for stillness, for living in the moment, will blossom. Your desire to live each and every moment will transcend all other wants. Your instinct for knowing what (and who) is worth your time, will grow and flourish like ivy on a castle wall. Don’t prioritise your looks my friend, they will change forevermore, that pursuit is one of much sadness and disappointment. Prioritise the uniqueness that makes you you, and the invisible magnet that draws in other like-minded souls to dance in your orbit. These are the things which will only get better.”
A grey morning has quickly made me realise how wonderful the recent sunshine has been. The beauty of planning to do holiday type stuff, but from home and then getting great weather is that the pressure is off. There is no need to make the most of every moment because you are ‘away’
A forest of Echium at dusk.
Not being away, we gave ourselves permission to watch a couple of dramas over the long weekend. Great dramas for certain but rather too close to home for us.
Maryland on ITV x and Supernova on BBC. Both recommended by friends and coincidentally both about planned suicide by someone in the mid-stages of Dementia.
Both of our mothers died traumatic deaths. My mother had early onset dementia that started in her early 40’s and had her well and truly gripped by 50. Hannah’s mother was killed by a car in her early seventies as she walked her dog. Neither of them planned suicide. But Dramas always use leitmotif to punctuate the air with acid sharp poignancy. They are a stab in our hearts and souls and are seemingly unavoidable but two consecutive dramas using them exhausted us over the long weekend. Hence the blue illustrations, by the end of the second one we were tearful and sad, incapable of cooking or eating supper.
How do these things affect people with no experience of such moments? Do they set the scene and give depth and umami to the drama. A patina of feeling or experiencing something that most people are lucky enough not to experience.
Our list.
The first time your mum does not recognise you.
Identifying a body in a mortuary with a Police Officer.
Being allocated a Social Worker or a family liaison officer.
The sound effects of a car on human collision.
Police officer at the door.
Air ambulance flying over head.
Having to rescue a dementing parent from a difficult or dangerous situation that they have placed themselves in.
I realise this might seem a bit glum, and we were pretty glum having daftly watched two sad dramas with no light intermission. But my point, now I have got to it, is that writers could construct drama that is entertaining and informative without using this ‘bingo-card’of set scenarios. A clear indication that they are simply writing fiction with no depth of empathy or experience. Just ticking off boxes for dramatic and entertaining effect.
All that moaning, I would still recommend them as a good watch. But not back to back.
We had a little lunchtime trip to Mount Edgecumbe on Wednesday. A day off from house moving stuff, exhibition stuff and tennis club stuff. The weather around the Wisteria was deceptive. We were blown about when we later walked on the parkland but none of that is the subject of this blog.
The glorious Wisteria sent me searching in my photo archive for a series of photographs of a special Wisteria spider that I photographed on my own isteria some years ago. My apologies to spider haters but I was really thrilled to get a photo of the spider actually making the silk for her web.
This should have been the focus for the blog, but while searching for the spider I found a cat.
I have been looking for this image in my archive for years and never been able to find it, despite using all the right key words. I took this picture a few years ago in Brixton Market and couldn’t believe my luck in getting such a brilliant piece of visual wordplay. No words can express how happy I am to have finally found this picture again.
I knew this photo had to be somewhere, I am so very pleased to have located it again. Suddenly Thursday has been gingered up!
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