The past, on the other hand, arrives in chunks, sometimes when you least expect it or sometimes unreliably when you really need to remember something important or significant.
We are doing a little more grandparent caring at the moment as my daughter has a fractured shoulder.
I read such a lovely quote about Grandparents today. In a book that I have bought for a gift, but just reading the acknowledgements made me need to buy a copy for myself.
The last acknowledgement in Where Sleeping Women Wake by Emma Pei Yin is just the most gorgeous and significant quote about Grandparents and their grandchildren.
‘ Grandparents, in this life we were fated to meet yet destined to part’
But not just yet, there is loads to do before any parting happens.
Hugo enjoys Glastonbury on the radio in the comfort of his own home.
This weekend is traditionally a big Festival weekend. Most years Glastonbury is happening. We don’t ever get tickets but we love to listen in to anything that is broadcast. Festivals attended in real life are a great chance to experience unknown music or to dance for as long as possible on uneven ground in a tented environment.
Glastonbury is on a Fallow Year, this year but there is a festival less than a mile and a half a mile away across the river from our home.
We can lay in our back yard and listen to the music just as if we were at a festival relaxing in our camper van away from the main stages. In fact our yard is closer to the main stage of Morvala than a lot of camper van fields at festivals.
We swam on Friday to the catchy tunes of The Bay City Rollers. Something that would hugely have excited 14 year old me. Distance lent enchantment.
I was never a super massive fan but I did have an excellent pair of tartan Oxford Bags bought from a Grattan Catalogue book. Oh the 70’s
Tonight we will be able to lie in our yard with a hot chocolate and skip 20 years to the nineties and listen to Ash.
Time marches on but music can make everything seem like yesterday.
Looking back at my photos from festivaling at home there was another more recent brush with the past. Hugo enjoying the teepee. He has been in another realm, (Maybe one where dogs can actually attend festivals) for 6 months now. Time enough for these photos to be lovely memories of a dog life very well spent.
Just to add a note for other dog lovers.
Your dogs don’t cross the Rainbow Bridge. They wait for you there.
Heatwaves certainly focus the mind. Chores, domestica and essential tasks are done as early in the mornings, as soon as they can be achieved.
Our little corner of the world had a reprieve yesterday . A sea mist shrouded us in greige for the first couple of hours.
Postcard from the Edge
The greige stayed with us until midday but the temperature gradually rose until we were fully in the hot zone. The Bobbers had a Friday date with a high tide. No more freezing our tits off (twice) as we did on the longest day only 5 days before.
4pm yesterday, after 3 days of an official heatwave, we hit peak pleasure at our watery home.
We do not swim in the tropical waters of Plymouth Hoe West. We swim west of there. There is a commercial port between us and the Tropic of West Hoe.
At the time we were not aware that we were being so short changed by the Sea Temperature Mermaid Goddess.
But really the Bobbers were not the big story of the day. Bobbers bob together for safety. The delightful and multi-faceted friendships are a perfect and wonderful side effect. Safety is enhanced by Coach Andy.
Wet legs for Coach on Solstice Sunday
Coach keeps an eye on our stuff and on us. He has had a really big week bobbingwise, not only did he join us in the water for the Solstice. Only to mid thigh, you have to keep special equipment dry, his phone. Thank goodness for phone probity, yesterday his phone was used for its first ever call to the coastguards.
A passing, off duty, coastguard saw some paddle boarders, perhaps in trouble, being taken beyond the island. But he was not prepared for sea based drama, he had forgotten his phone. Luckily Coach has his phone in pocket and for the first time it was used for dramatic and safety reasons. Completely unbobber related.
Another day another heatwave. Lola and I were up early, to achieve plenty of cooler weather walking and domestica. Freeing up the hotter hours for chatter and chilling. A meeting in the morning required not one but two iced coffees. Then there was an art attack. Not of the Coronary variety. ( I may be from Essex, but I do not drop my aitches, although curiously we do pronounce aitch as haitch)
An actual art attack, when a piece of original art fell off the wall and landed noisily between myself and my gentleman companion. Cool, even in a heatwave we did not skip a beat. Exchanging funny anecdotes is not the time for drama of the arty sort.
Swimming was the antidote to both the heat and art attacks.
Firestone Bay
Less people than the day before, so no need to create a postcard image to protect the identity of beach goers. No big boats to watch. Just a really fast lifeboat. So fast I missed it twice.
And a cute sailing boat, the sailing boat did, however, need the postcard effect because the photo was so bad.
To create the postcard I used the colours of the rocks of Firestone Bay to fill in all the detail lost by very bright sunlight.
The rock of Firestone Bay through Polaroid Sunglasses
Et Voilà
Sailing in Firestone Bay
Not all heatwave days are the same even in the exact same location. Unexpected things always add a different texture to a day.
The bonus of yesterday, was meeting so many people, unexpectedly, for random conversations whilst we were all dodging the effects of overheating.
Overnight we had huge electric storms. The heatwave may be over, we are back to greige, how very drear!
Not very much as it turns out. Keep doors closed and blinds down. Write the blog at 4 a.m in the yard, drinking tea.
Yesterday’s planned social dog walk turned into four women sat on a hillside trying to catch a breeze with our feet in a childrens paddling pool. There was a romantic view over recently cut hay fields towards a river estuary. Romantic until a farmer, working at the peak of the day, started to turn the hay to dry. Dirt, dust and a plague of horseflies sent us scattering, wet- foot to our respective homes. Grateful that we were not that poor farmer. My afternoon of sweaty domestica was rewarded by a swim in the sea. Hundreds of people had found their way to our usually quiet beaches.
Warships, Ferries, landing craft, commercial shipping and Police boats all passed the swimmers by. More people doing their normal jobs in the relentless heat.
Normally I like to photograph Firestone Bay looking interesting but largely uninhabited. Yesterday was not normal. The area was heaving with people. Normal photography wasn’t very pretty. Too much sunshine, too many people, just too busy.
A Postcard from the Edge
Simplifying an over busy photograph to the style of a 20th Century postcard makes the whole scene more calm. At a highish tide every possible sitting space on these cliffs was filled with people. Many with lap tops and headphones ‘ Working from home’
Today is going to be another record breaking day. More postcards from the edge , I think.
Three weeks of an artyfarty anxious wait. I received a commission to create a piece of art for a newly installed kitchen. Not a big ask you might think for someone whose job is creating images. But the commission was to recreate one of my own original images in Portrait format instead of Landscape and then to make the image suitable to be turned into a kitchen splashback. There always has to be trust and flexibility between an artist and their clients during the commissioning process. That was the easy bit. For framing and reproduction of my paintings I always use local independent companies. People I can go and talk too. But reproducing an image on very expensive safety glass was organised locally but created elsewhere. All information shared digitally as you would expect. This was the harder bit and I fretted like a mother duck who had lost a duckling. Just concerned really that I had done everything correctly for a new to me process.
I had made one particular pink my worry point, it needed to be slightly translucent, more like a blush than actual colour.I need not have worried. The company doing the glass printing was brilliant. Every colour was exactly as I wanted it.
First sight with Tim
The glass arrived two weeks ahead of schedule.
Yesterday I went to see it for the first time. I am so impressed with what the glass company has achieved.
But now I look at my own , rather dull splash back and think…
Summer’s here and I have become The Grumpy Urban Cat Abhorring Lady.
Oh how I dislike the urban cat. The Shitter in my plant pots. The Pisser on my garden chairs. The ever present observation from high places. The disupters of my dog. The fragrance of your ever available testosterone- boosted tom cat urine.
Small blog, big feelings.
Why do I find urban cats abhorrent? Because we are trying to teach a three year old not to use the word hate. I am being creative with my use of words.
The term ‘intangible cultural heritage’ was new to me recently. It describes:-
Oral traditions and expressions: Includes language, stories, legends, proverbs, and songs passed on by word of mouth.
Performing arts: Covers music, dance, theater, and other forms of artistic expression.
Social practices, rituals, and festive events: Encompasses community habits, rites of passage, holiday celebrations, and religious or secular ceremonies.
Knowledge and practices concerning nature: Traditional ecological knowledge, herbal medicine, and practices related to the universe.
Traditional craftsmanship: The skills and techniques required to make traditional clothing, pottery, instruments, and other handmade objects.
These all seem entirely tangible to me.
The whole concept of culture being intangible is a mystery to me. Made all the more puzzling at a live music gig that I went to this weekend.
Looking at Devon from Cornwall
Held in an old chapel overlooking farmland and the River Tamar.
My attendance was entirely accidental, a spare ticket landed in my lap because of life/work exhaustion and toothache.
The gig was held in Calstock, a village oozing with cultural heritage, where even the shelter at the train station is beautiful.
Tangible or intangible there is a lot of cultural heritage in this one picture.
I realise this is just me pondering an idea and the use of words but cultural heritage is not something whimsical or disposable.
I was in Calstock to hear Cara Dillon a contemporary folk singer from Ireland. By chance the man sitting next to me was of Irish heritage. He took pleasure in the performance in an entirely different way to me. He felt the music and inhabited it. There was so much joy in him, generated entirely by his innate and experienced cultural heritage. Vibrating through him when both he and the singer were so far from home. He was having an entirely tangible experience.
Cara Dillon and Sam Lakeman
It is funny the things that bother me overnight. Calstock is a village where I have participated in so many varied experiences that are certainly worthy of the title ‘Cultural Heritage’ I am enriched by experiencing the things that have enhanced the lives of other humans throughout history. 5 years ago, 50 years ago or 500 years ago. All worth preserving I feel. Overnight pondering took me down the internet rabbit hole. Luckily I landed on another WordPress Blog. Far more erudite and knowledgeable than my ponderings, I will share it below.
The word ‘intangible’ really doesn’t touch the importance of such things!
The link to Calstock Arts, the venue I visited is below. Somewhere that does its very best to promote the intangible culture that is so vital to us all.
Bright lights at the end of the longest day. Summer Solstice and Fathers Day.
Marked by the bobbers with swimming at sunrise and sunset. In between we celebrated Fathers Day with a Camper Van Adventure. We absolutely filled every minute of the longest day with activity. Most were planned but a trip to A and E was on nobody’s schedule. These things happen.Wrestling with a new Rock and Roll bed in a camper van is not an even fight. Van 1- Human 0
Curiously swimming at sunset was a good bit quieter than the sunrise swim and involved absolutely no nudity.
We have been doing this for 5 years. Blog from the first Solstice Bobbings below.
Did we really expect to still be doing it 5 years later. Probably not. But wherever Bobbers are in the world we all try to swim on the Solstices.
For me it is a celebration of being alive and still kicking. A ritual of gratitude and celebration with friends,most of whom were strangers 5 years ago. The Silver Lining of a Pandemic that forced us all to pause, change direction, and do things differently.
The Naked Swimmers
Maybe the Bobbers need to rethink our dress code next year…
