Quite a red letter day @theoldmortuary . Nearly time to get on a train and take a trip to my old workplace. St Bartholomews Hospital in the City of London.
I’ve always loved the contrast of City and Country/Coastal life. Today is a fine day to leave Cornwall. A huge blanket of fog has settled on the peninsular over the last 24 hours. Somewhat perverse as the Worlds press has descended on the area to cover the G7 meeting. The famed beauty of Cornwall is wearing a murky mask just like rest of us. The slow trickle of VIP helicopters on Tuesday never got going yesterday and film crews search for scenic backdrops is going to be fruitless for a day or two. Yesterday was Ocean Day, our tiny corner of the Atlantic didn’t really make an appearance.
Luckily the ‘ bobbers’ brought some colour to the coast.
Picture not taken yesterday!
Last nights swim was really pleasant at 14 degrees and a high tide that we could just step straight into. Not a single photo opportunity that would lift anyone’s spirits though!
Luckily for tomorrows blog I’m briefly off to the bright lights.
A sign of a good night out in London has always been how late a return to home is. With the certainty of a train timetable I know I will be getting home at 5:30 am. Great night out guaranteed even under Pandemic restrictions and by 10:30 I will be back in the sea.
This is how dense the fog is, there is a house 10 yards from this wall.
In some exciting news, a sign of loosening of Pandemic Restrictions I’ve just booked a Cheap Day Return ticket to go to a party in the City of London with old work colleagues. Home again by 5:15 in the morning , exactly like old times. The relevance of this to Pandemic Pondering is that the last time I saw any of this group of people was Pandemic Pondering # -24 . A blog that didnt exist but possibly should have. We had a wonderful weekend seeing friends and family. @theoldmortuary had what was assumed to be a very nasty cold and was a bit under the weather. There are very few photographs of the weekend.
This typewriter is the only interesting picture. I love old typewriters.
The rest of my pictures are really interesting to me but hardly represent the usual pictures of London.
Fanny, one of the famous London ‘ Station Cats’
Then another Gipsy Hill Blue Plaque.
Annie Besant swapped Gipsy Hill for India and California. I walked Hugo and Lola past her house every day before work. Gipsy Hill not California, sadly.
She founded what is now known as The Besant Hill School of Happy Valley. Kaffe Fassett was educated there, his autobiography lives in my colour theory book pile.
One last underwhelming image of London is this street sign.
Time for another googling moment dear readers. Orinoco is not only a river but a Womble who cares for Wimbledon common.
Along time ago @theoldmortuary used to row pilot gig boats competitively and have even rowed in World Championship competitions, but a busy working life in London stopped all that .
The clip below shows an on board perspective of the sport.
What an amazing day! First a perfect un weather-damaged Poppy bloomed.
And the sun came out, so hopefully pollinators were busy later harvesting this tasty purple pollen.
Then I got to take a friend, who is recovering from surgery, for a little road trip to visit the exhibition. We also met another friend there so some nattering occured. The red of the morning poppy was much in evidence as we looked round the works on show. Red dots all over the room. Red dots are the traditional way to denote that a piece of artwork is sold.
There are several columns like this around the exhibition showing the success for many artists in selling work. As one of the co- curators of this exhibition it is incredibly exciting to see so much work selling. Even better was the huge hug I got from a very happy Allie Cole who was so thrilled to sell a new style of work. She still has two more to sell but her happiness felt better than seeing a red dot on one of my own paintings!
We couldn’t have picked a better day for a small trip out , the sunlight was amazing and the views across the valley as stunning as ever. The sunshine lasted through to the evening swim.
A fab day of sunshine, friends and red dots ( of two sorts).
About this time of year @theoldmortuary are sometimes to be found at the Chelsea Flower Show. Picking up gardening inspiration for our own patch of horticulture. Our next project is going to be a courtyard garden and with the Flower Show cancelled for a second year we will have to go it alone using photos we’ve take in previous years. The Islamic garden above is quite beyond our talents but we could get close to something similar to the one below.
You might think that gardening and sea swimming have very little in common, and you would be right, but in our post swim natterings the subjects we cover are wide ranging. Some would make a nun blush, and quite possibly do, as we swim and natter just below the walls of a convent. Gardens though do feature a bit in our conversations because that has been the only place we have been able to meet friends and family. Bobbing has become a bit of a social club and we are looking forward to gathering together, with our clothes on, in each others gardens during the summer. The picture below popped up on our bobbing WhatsApp page, most bobbers thought it was a garden designed to be open to the public. But it is actually a Bobbers Garden!
Also featured this week, in the the Bobbers Whatsapp group photos, is Flossy, a guinea pig, who has recovered from a recent illness, which kept her mum away from bobbing for a while.
Life is starting to stack up. With every slight loosening of government restrictions our lives @theoldmortuary get a little busier. In many ways it feels as odd as the sudden deceleration of our lives over a year ago. We are not even pushing ourselves to the max possible.
Lunch indoors with one set of friends yesterday followed later by a meal inside a pub with different friends was lovely and an enormous pleasure but it felt both exotic strange and exciting to behave almost normally for once . Just as lockdown deeply affected my sleep patterns, last nights sleep was disturbed by recalling the days events. We also have some longstanding domestic admin that keeps us awake and an art exhibition to organise at the end of the week. Just as Covid-19 has the physical nasty that is Long Covid, all our lived experiences will suffer from the after effects of this pandemic for a long while even if we have been lucky enough not to catch the wretched disease.
Another period of sleeplessness will not be welcome in this house.
Some people are, of course, oblivious, although even this doggy naughtiness is Covid related. Thermal socks for outdoor socialising and post swimming are the best for chewing and there are plenty of pairs to be stolen.
In other news, the Advanced Blogging course has been announced for October. Alongside this announcement, the delightful Gentle Author has decided to return to teaching the art of blogging. I will pop a link below, his courses are wonderful.
Yesterday was a drawing day. A chance to sit out at a beautiful location and sketch. May in Cornwall has been a bit lack lustre. Cold and wet. By now I should be boring you all with pictures of vibrant poppies growing wild and wilful at the side of @theoldmortuary, it has not yet happened. Similarly the Wisteria at Pentillie Castle yesterday was pretty much still in bed when I sat at the arch, pencil in hand.
Sleeping Wisteria
I managed to sketch in the bare bones of the arch before two, or three forces of nature sent me scuttling indoors for shelter. Two beautiful dogs took a huge liking to my fat Posca Pens and joyfully stole them, only to return them , directly onto my sketchpad with the addition of copious amounts of dog slobber.
A fine sketch of weaving, mostly bare, Wisteria branches and metal supports was never going to happen on a sketch pad pre soaked with dog juices. Then the rain arrived! Time to retreat to shelter and deploy a vivid imagination.
Time also to consider an alternative strapline for Posca Pens.
Life on a beach and on a ramble. Same beach different weather today set us up for a swim in conditions that were more appropriate for surfing, but we were not going to be stopped two days in a row.
We found a secret path and a hidden river. But mostly we just found big, crashing, exciting waves.
And beautiful spume. The swim was exhilarating.
The morning swim and the bacon bap that followed were the fuel for an afternoon of footpath rambling in Feock.
Spring Flowers were the main feature of our walk but these stepping stones were the stand out image of the day, caught, as they were in a brief moment of sunshine.
Perambulating and pondering the plants and the pandemic with friends filled a lovely afternoon of delicious earthy smells.
And a surprising, little known, fact. Kissing gates are not for romance.
On the footpaths that follow the ancient paths around Feock there are many ‘Kissing’ style gates. Primarily this style of gate enables easy access and egress to a heavily laden human using only one hand while keeping livestock safely enclosed. The word Kissing could simply be a descriptive of the mechanics and structure of the gate where moving the gate allows the movable part to touch, or kiss, either side of the boundary. Almost certainly the name is not historically used for the meeting of lips. More prosaically the name is most likely derived from Kisting, an old word for casket. Kissing gates were originally designed to allow coffins to respectfully be moved across boundaries without the need to place the deceased on the ground. Old kissing gates are found on footpaths near to old grave yards, in all directions, which makes the original purpose a much more plausible one than a chaste place to lock lips.
Things are warming up on the creative side of @theoldmortuary . This cunning device is squeezing the air out of greetings cards that I packed yesterday , ready for the Spring Exhibition of Drawn to the Valley. Who could have guessed that a fan annual from the seventies would create the perfect size to support a heavy weight to exclude air in the wrapping envelope. In the interest of honesty and with respect to Mr David Essex this annual has not been under my pillow for ever. That would just be very strange.
An old friend sends me gems like this from time to time. I could also have used a David Cassidy Annual from the same era and source but yesterday I chose David Essex to spread the load.
Added to my current domestic admin, of which there is lots, I now have Exhibition Admin, which is much more pleasurable.
#mayinthevalley
The closing date for the exhibition has passed and now myself and the rest of the organising team have the pleasure of sifting through the entries. Some of which are featured on the #mayinthevalley Instagram posts above from the artists_of_the_tamar_valley Instagram page.
All this activity and business is an exact replica of the work we did last year only to have to cancel the exhibition at two weeks notice.
This years exhibition will be unimaginably different . 50 artists who have lived through a pandemic. 50 diverse experiences of love, loss, isolation and change. There is an amazing energy exuding from the works we are unwrapping ( currently in the digital sense )
The Spring Exhibition is always about new beginnings but the Spring Exhibition of 2021 is promising to be an altogether more zingy new beginning than usual. On a more self interested level I still haven’t got the gold leaf on my little pictures or even started the large one. It is a theoretical picture right now.
New beginnings are one thing, just getting started is the current problem!
Our second Mayday weekend of the Pandemic has passed. In many ways that seems more something to reflect on than Easter weekend. Mayday is associated with joyous events in our corner of the world. @theoldmortuary there is no particular pattern or traditional behaviours. Locally we have a May Fair, a rare event in our locality to wander the main street and bump into people that we know. In comparison to other May Day events it is no great shakes so we are not always faithful to it. The picture above is of a local gentleman who is always there and always dresses up in a meticulous costume to bring a smile to peoples faces.
One Mayday we hired Mr Blue Sky as a belated birthday gift, we all have birthday s around Christmas so belated gifts are not unusual. Mr Blue Sky took us to the Gower Peninsular, for happy, but chilly, camping.
Last May Day the world was reeling from the realised impact of the Pandemic and @theoldmortuary we were reeling from various life changing events that were landing on us to add to the burden of Pandemic angst. Life felt a bit like this safety sign for the quiet lanes nearby, where horse riding and cars share the space.
The sadness and difficulty of this time last year have given us all a push in new and unexpected directions. We have to see the world through the lens of our communal and personal losses and experiences of the last year.
In my experience all things tend to follow Newtons 3rd Law of Physics.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
The things that made last May Day and the surrounding period of life quite shitty have altered the world and each persons perception and lived experience of this May Day, and all days.
A year ago @theoldmortuary would not have considered sea swimming to be a natural part of life and yet this year it couldn’t be more natural than to take a dip in the sea and feel utterly captivated and joyous about it.
We’ve bonded with some lovely people over the last 6 months in chill sea and the socially distanced warm up after.
Also last year or any previous year a trip to Ikea would not have been on our acceptable activities list. But yesterday we made a small list and joined a Disney length queue to get into our local, Exeter, store.
Because of Covid restrictions the store was not packed with people but it was packed with texture and colours and smells. The stand out smell was the carpet department, just delicious!
Sadly no meatball lunch as indoor eating is still not permitted. But looking through our altered lens the trip to Ikea on a Bank Holiday weekend was an absolute pleasure not a chore.
It unexpectedly lit up our life.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Sometimes you just have to look for it.
theoldmortuary.design 