#551 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Hugo and Lola, Serendipity, Wet WeekendsLeave a comment
Inside @ Hutong

Rather a greige weekend to report but there were colourful and opportunistic highlights. The coffee shop on our regular dog walk is very popular and there is rarely a chance to sit inside and shelter from inclement weather. The weather conditions frightened off most coffee drinkers and only the most hardy were out and about. A free table turned us to people and dogs who were ‘in and about.

An entirely acceptable way to walk dogs in the rain. All the tulips on our walk were very woebegone, wet and droopy. Creating a double exposed image is a far more pleasing image to view than the poor drenched blooms were actually feeling.

©theoldmortuary

In other bad weather news, the little moss heart that I found for Saturday’s blog had been blown off her last posing location and laid broken on the pavement.

#549 theoldmortuary ponders

I picked her, the moss heart, up Sunday evening and brought her home to safely rest in my wild garlic. I have no idea if wild garlic can fix broken hearts but you never know.

Wet weekends, enough now, roll out sunshine please.

#550 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Art for sale, SerendipityLeave a comment
© Clare Law

What would be the wisest thing to do on a dreadfully greige day that is coincidentally World Earth Day. We took ourselves off to a fabulous friends solo art exhibition at Cotehele in the Tamar Valley. Clare creates landscape magic with a palate knife.

Wonderful pictures of landscapes at their vibrant best.

© Clare Law

She is also super clever at creating realistic and enticing, to cold water swimmers, waterscapes.

Clare and I have sat at opposite ends of the same Wisteria Pergola on Drawing Days at Pentillie Castle

I don’t think she was as troubled as I was by the black labrador.

©theoldmortuary.design https://theoldmortuary.design/2023/04/12/532-theoldmortuary-ponders/

Link above for the dog story. Image below to more clearly see her painting.

You night even see me at the far end of the picture… I joke of course, I would have been off canvas interacting with a big dog!

World Earth Day, a greige old day spent in glorious technicolour. Clare’s exhibition is on at Cotehele House until May 1st.

#549 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity1 Comment

Jot down the first thing that comes to your mind.

Goodness me that Prosecco hit the spot last night. It bubbled gently into the fissures, sulci and gyri of my brain and loosened up random thoughts that I felt obliged to share. Thank goodness it was a talking party and not a dancing one. Undoubtedly Prosseco would have given me the misguided belief that I was flexible.

On the way to the party we found a little moss heart. Tossed to the ground by birds impatient to get their nests built.

It is the time of year when something soft and yielding provokes a sinking feeling as we walk in our street. The instant reaction is that it is a poo left behind by an inattentive dog owner, or worse a fox. Such a sense of relief when it is just a bit of carelessly dropped moss. The little heart had three locations to pose in on our short walk.

Stark wooden boards.
Craggy church wall.

I would not have been so creative with a poo.

‘Jot down the first thing you think of’

It could have been worse.

#548 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn abstract photography, SerendipityLeave a comment
Dew Point

Not exactly a low tide blog today. But ‘ Tide and Time wait for no (wo)man.’

My personal tide has been a little on the low side, hence the somewhat late Friday Blog. I have been a blog gatherer with so much new stuff to write about and no time to do it.

Hardening off near the looks.

The last two days have been a bit mad, planned things failed to materialise and unplanned things filled the gaps.

My usual early morning blogspot was taken by early morning photography for a Tennis Club that I do a little Social Media work for.

Then every available moment to blog was filled with imperative stuff. The most exciting, was taking delivery of this seasons art cards to be sold at exhibitions.

The first card has already gone to a new home as this evening we toddled off to a party and used one as a thank you card. Rather too much Prosecco was involved and, lucky for you all, I was only briefly guilty of over- sharing. Time to, moderately, share one of this mornings pictures of an old wheelbarrow taking a rest in the corner of the Tennis Club.

Stone House Lawn Tennis Club

#547 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Beach LifeLeave a comment

A fresh and brief lunchtime blog. Knowing that I was delivering the dogs for a lunchtime pampering session at Wembury I planned for their second walk of the day to be at low tide on the beach.

So much messy fun to be had with a huge area of beach to scamper on and hunt for seaweed.

But even better fun to be had when an impressionable young pup could be chased at high speed.

Nobody needs to see the inside of my car once I could persuade them to leave the beach. I will have to clean it before I pick them up as pristine pooches in a few hours time.

This weeks, unintentional, low tide theme is proving to be fun.

#546 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity2 Comments

Mudflats and meditating may not seem closely related. But mindful that I have fallen into the theme of low tides for this week I thought I would share again the mudflat that was close to my home in Cornwall for many years. I have photographed this mud many times. I have never physically experienced it between my toes. But I do know and love the feeling of soft warm mud between my toes. So much so, that often at the end of yoga sessions when I am mentally sinking into my yoga mat, I imagine sinking into the soft silt of low tide in and near the Thames Estuary near where I grew up.

Hardly most peoples choice of paradise but I know the texture of Essex’s coastal mud so much more intimately than other swankier muds that I may have experienced.

I never thought to photograph Essex mud so Tamar Valley mud illustrates this whole mud hagiography.

The fantasy remains perfectly orchestrated in my head even though I know sharp objects and slippery creatures lurk just below the surface. Beauty treatments involving mud are also a personal weakness.Mud and adobe houses, sweat lodges, wattle and daub dwellings. Mississippi Mud Pie.I’ve even painted landscapes using local to the area mud. On one remote occasion in an American National Park I attracted an audience of sixty or so excited tourists as I painted in the many shades of red dirt that could be found close to hand.

But on a Wednesday morning all the muds I have ever loved fill my mind at the end of a yoga session.

#545 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Devon, StonehouseLeave a comment
©Hannah @theoldmortuary

Without any planning this week is turning into a low tide kind of week. Hannah did the late evening walk and caught this beautiful image, which is exactly as it presented itself to her. This is an unused wharf,which again we rarely photograph. In fact, just like an old fisherman tale, it is the site of the ‘ one that got away’ We were here last summer with our granddaughter VV, who was visiting from Hong Kong. She,at 3,was a very diligent dog walker, taking complete care of Lola’s needs for the whole walk. This, in turn required us to be hypervigilant so no chance of a quick smartphone photo. The tide was in and the day was very hot with no shade. Something was going on in the water, there was a lot of fishy activity. We all looked intently into the water. Basking in the shade of floating seaweed we spotted a small shark or a large dog fish. Most likely the Lesser Spotted Dogfish which is common in these parts,where it is also called a Murgey. Just like fishermen, this one who got away from our photography, was larger than average. For an excited 3 year old there was no Murgey or Dogfish about the find. We had gone on a dog walk and found a shark. A Shark! At the end of the road!

Nothing to see here.

#544 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Peninsular LifeLeave a comment

Our familial needs on beaches are significantly different. Yesterday the human bobbers took themselves off to their favourite beach, for a somewhat gloomy, just after high-tide swim, at 4 pm. We like to swim near to high tide, as an incredibly useful set of concrete stairs lead us into chest high water, with no need to pick our way across seaweed strewn rocks. The dogs however prefer a low-tide beach precisely because they can pick their way over a rocky seaweed strewn beach. At 8 pm we went to their favourite beach for a low tide meander.

I almost never photograph this beach at low tide. On the opposite side of the peninsular to our swim beach, it faces the Hamoaze, a broad section of the River Tamar as the river meets Plymouth Sound and then the Ocean. Centuries of old industrial stuff washes up on this beach from the dockyards, one of which, no longer an active dockyard, is in the background of this shot. Hugo could spend hours here, rescuing seaweed from the waters edge. Lola is less enthralled, as am I, particularly on a gloomy day. However there is often some quite fancy sea glass, my pockets often return home with a few little glass triangles of ‘ Pirate Treasure’ . The washing machine engineer takes a dim view of ‘Pirate Treasure’ in the filters. Evidence that I am not a diligent pocket emptier.

Anyway, however gloomy it was yesterday, a little arrangement of sea debris caught my eye. A broken periwinkle shell, an oyster encrusted on a rock and some foraged, by Hugo, seaweed.

Nothing big to write a blog about but a little highlight of the day.

#543 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Gardens and gardening, Serendipity3 Comments

I am a lover of the absolute serendipity of daisies. Daisies are free -spirited, establish themselves wherever they choose and turn their heads to the sun. If only life could be this simple. These daisies are growing at a Lawn Tennis Club that is soon to open the gates to the public to raise money for local charities. Just beyond this photograph there are men and machines spiking and prepping a lawn to look the very best for the ‘Big’ weekend. These daisies are almost certainly gone for now, but men and machines are no long term match for diligent daisies. They will be back.

#542 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art4 Comments

Timehop on Facebook is an interesting feature. Just as nature has seasons, so do artists. My time hop over the last few weeks shows photos and comments about me getting ready for exhibitions over many years in March and April. I will happily admit that the exhibition title for the exhibition above was not the jolliest but look at the address! Isn’t Old Paradise Yard the perfect place to address death and transition. It was an exhibition that really made people talk. I showed two paintings, at the time I was working in a world of actual death and transition, a Cardiac Catheter Lab. Thankfully the transitions there are usually in the happiest direction from challenging health predicaments transforming to greater health stability. But sometimes a different direction is taken. Either way there is frantic, sometimes ferocious activity followed by calm and peace.

Both my pictures sold, I have no recollection of one but a small part of the other was on a poster. In my memory the paintings have become secondary to the absolutely great conversations that were had about death and our human relationship with it. Just lovely informal natterings during the Private View and the first early days of the exhibition. People from all over the world and with many different life experiences exchanging thoughts and observations. It was all going rather well until a therapist ( of what variety I have no idea) who was a friend of one of the artists decided this was far too big a subject to be left to amateurs and took it upon herself to be there for the last few days of invigilating, or stewarding the exhibition. I don’t know if her presence ever made a positive impact on the informal discussions on the days I wasn’t there. But on the afternoon I shared with her, the conversation did not take organic twists and turns in the exciting and meaningful way I had experienced earlier in the exhibition.

Her obvious experience and authority on the subject were like someone pouring bleach on the conversations. All the colour and warmth of shared or unique opinions seemed to be lost. I know her offer of being in attendance came from a good place. She was concerned that the conversations could lead to some dark places that she could help and support with, but her presence somehow restricted the flow. Certainly no one got into a dark place but conversely there was no joy in the gallery either and no stimulating conversation to reflect on at the close of the day.

People can be trusted to get there on their own.