As our guests slip away, fully charged with Christmas love, the house falls silent after a week of gentle feasting and serial socialising. We are left with the colours and shapes and flavours that are left behind. In the top picture we have Korean Tea. The subtlest flavour of our festive season but one that will drive us to Exmouth Market next time we are in London. The company tag line. The harmony of emptying cup and mind together. 2023 goals.
Belatedly I created a tropical Christmas decoration. I love it so much it may become permanent.
We have spent a couple of years pondering exactly which sort of blue and white china we should buy to replace our servicable white. The lightbulb moment of this Christmas was to ask for bits from three different manufacturers.Genius!
I am usually quite poor at being on- the-ball for Christmas Cards, my international friends get the best deal as I can get those done in November. Once December hits I am like a rabbit in the headlights, this year was my most startled year ever. The postal strike in the UK compounded my own innate festive failure. Foreign parcels went out on schedule. Cards not at all.
So for all my friends and family, my apologies for this year, but you know I am a ‘skin of my teeth’ kind of card sender, and this year I was down to my dentine. The postal strike was one reason but the other was Post Office Fury!
I spent a good bit of money on posting a tracked parcel to Hong Kong. 19 days later it was still tracking to the excellent Post Office in Stonehouse. By coincidence I knew it had left that building, because my parcel went straight into the sack that left the building before I did. Every day I attempted to track it, and every day it was still tracked to Stonehouse. Every day that happened I resolved not to give the Post Office any more of my business. 19 days later we were on the cusp of the last posting day for cards to arrive for Christmas. I drove to the local Post Office HQ and made a mild complaint that I had paid for tracking. No problem said the person on reception. Her answer though was so far from acceptable I lost my mind slightly.
“Oooooh” she said with wonder in her voice.
“It’s up country”
Up Country or Up the line is a far South West England statement that covers anywhere beyond Plymouth and loosely extends to any international border in the UK. In Cornwall it means anywhere beyond the Tamar Bridge.
There is always a slight sense that, Up Country or Up the Line is in every sense inferior in every way to Devon or Cornwall.
And that my friends is why no Christmas cards have been sent from @theoldmortuary this year. I am having a postal huff.
As luck would have it I was sent this lovely card featuring British Military personnel. Which brings me rather nicely to my charitable donation in lieu of sending Christmas Cards.
This gentleman broke the world speed record for swimming a mile with only one arm in our own favourite Tranquility Bay, on Christmas Eve. He fund raises for Reorg. We watched him break the record and donated to the charity that supports ex- servicemen for which Mark Ormrod is an ambassador.
This humble little pot has been in my family for longer than I have. Denby Manor Green was first made in 1939 but production was paused during the war and started again in 1953 which is probably when my mum first got hers for her 21st Birthday. For her ‘bottom drawer’. Domestic items given to women to prepare their lives as homemakers once they were ‘inevitably’ married. In Essex, where I grew up this curious tradition was called Bottom Drawer it may have had different names elsewhere. Without knowing it is hard to look phrases up. Google suggests that this was a nationwide term, but that household linen was the focus.
My mum did marry but actually chose to have her household china in a different colourway.
Denny Homestead Brown
The green pot was definitely not her favourite item. It was used for low grade Christmas jobs like pressing an Ox Tongue or as a mould for home made brawn. To my mind grizzly tasks but in the sixties Essex essential Boxing Day food. As a small person both required prep that horrified me.
Ox tongue is self explanatory but the prep required was horrific. A large ox tongue was purchased from the butcher who also ran the local slaughter house. It was taken home and boiled with chopped onions, carrots and celery. Soffrito as we know it. After what seemed like hours of boiling it was removed from the pan and while still hot the tongue had to be peeled by hand and the placed in the green pot with a little of the strained boiling fluid. Then a saucer was put on top with a huge weight and the tongue was pressed as it cooled and then for a couple of days. To be revealed on Boxing day evening as a great culinary triumph. The sign that my mother was an accomplished cook who knew her way around controlling the chattering part of a cow. Brawn was an even worse delicacy. I will share the first part of the recipe and a link if you wish for further information.
The fact that this dish was wonderfully tasty shows just how good a cook my mum was even if I recoil from these foods now. Because on Boxing Day day the green pot was the star of her show people started giving her their unwanted Denby Manor Green. She didn’t really want it either for most of the rest of the other 364 days of the year. She bought and loved using the brown version. The brown version did not survive the daily toil of family life. The unloved Denby Manor Green has passed into my kitchen and is used much more frequently by me than it ever was by her. Although not at all so skillfully.*
*One year something went wrong, the tongue for whatever reason had not become one solid slab of cold meat. As the big reveal occurred the tongue flopped out of the casserole line a giant, pink, sloppy slug. Quickly returned to the kitchen it was reshaped using a scaffolding of cocktail sticks and carved in such a way that most people did not get too much wood.
May your Boxing Day be free of any Offal related incidents. Link below for the the History of Boxing Day.
Advent +2022. Peace on Earth. An old industrial building on the morning dog walk. There was a lot of weather going on, on all four sides of this building. For just a moment the wind dropped, the rain stopped and the clouds parted to allow daylight through. Allowing just a moment of quiet reflection. Merry Christmas one and all.
Coffee this morning in a local coffee shop and gallery. There were some amazing prints on the walls by local Primary School children. I’m not someone who loves the naivete of children’s’ art, much of it is unremarkable and some could only be appreciated by parents and grandparents but this stuff was gorgeous. Each little creation printed on a square of paper about 14 cms square.
There is magic in the air when teachers can conjure such interesting images from the hands of small people, simply by teaching them a new technique.
Wouldn’t it be fabulous if in the world of work instead of team building with physical or mental challenges. Colleagues could be set loose in a print room, given some instructions and then allowed to let their imaginations run wild with colour and shape.
So sad that the end of Primary School is the beginning of the end of most peoples regular engagement with creative processes. Art and music slip from the grasp of most people by the time they are 14.
That is a sombre old thought for Advent+ 2022 but if children under 11 can produce such lovely work what would happen if everyone remained creative in some way throughout life. The world might be a better place .
Bring out the Christmas Gourds. As a lover of all things pumpkin and an absolute Grinch of all things Halloween I have never really decorated our home with Pumpkinalia. Until a cold snap frosted these Gourds in a friends garden. Being somewhat cheeky I asked her if I could have some of her gorgeous gourds to use as models for a watercolour. Then fate took a hand and gave her Covid for fifteen days. We no longer met at the museum where we both work, until this week when four fat gourds landed in my locker. Just in time for Christmas!
Frost on this wonderfully warty gourd inspired me to create an unusual but personally pleasing Christmas centrepiece for the table.
Gilding on Gourds may become a new Christmas tradition. Advent 2022+ Twas the night before, the night before.
I really loved gilding the warty gourds and then pondered on the pleasure that could be gained from gilding a warty toad. Obviously that would be entirely wrong but a little digital magic and I have created my own Golden Toad, I am a happy woman.
When I was a child our annual holiday was always taken in Devon. Getting there, or here as it is now for me,involved setting off from Essex in the dead of night in order to be at Glastonbury by sunrise. We did this every year without fail. Not to mark a solstice but simply to experience the stones at dawn. We were nearly always the only people there. Our car the only one in a chalky stoned car park with minimal fencing not too far from the site itself. We had foil-wrapped bacon sandwiches which emerged from a towel filled cardboard box, in my memory they are vaguely warm with the bread damp from softened butter. We sat on a blanket with our backs against the chosen stone and my dad made tea with a primus stove surrounded by whatever new contraption he had invented to make the process more slick. We ate our sandwiches, drank our tea, watched the dawn, packed up and went on our way. Dawn was at about 5:45, we were usually at our destination of choice, in Devon,by about eight in the morning and would park the car somewhere, usually by the sea, and sleep until lunchtime when the holiday properly began. This all seems mildly eccentric with hindsight. Although this was the sixties my parents displayed no other outward appearances or attitudes of being in any way New Age. The last time we did this my dad had filled the Primus Stove with fertiliser instead of fuel. There was no tea that year and never again was the strange holiday ritual enacted. The Primus Stove did not survive the fertiliser incident and with the loss of this one item, the spell, whatever it was, was broken. No photographs have survived of these events. I suspect there weren’t any, there were only ever three people in our little family and a photograph could only ever have shown two.
I drive past Stonehenge many times a year and am never tempted to stop. Now the ancient monument is protected from human touch for most of the year. Commercialised and controlled in the name of heritage preservation. I feel the urge to be with those stones but not in any way that is possible now. A mass experience would not be the same at all, but perhaps I could tolerate it with a warm bacon sandwich in my pocket.
Winter Solstice, the sun rises on the shortest day of the year and in Stonehouse there is no scaffolding on the prettiest terrace of houses. Some of these old houses have needed a little facelift this year. The sound of scaffolders, plasterers and painters has been the background noise of morning walks for most of 2022. The other morning constant is a trip to the tidal pool, as a treat to mark the Solstice a golden cloud has been, briefly, trapped in the still water of the early morning. Small pleasures.
Tomorrow morning thousands of people will celebrate the end of the longest night at Stonehenge, a live stream event will be broadcast from 7 am tomorrow. Available on Youtube from English Heritage.
The sunrise at Stonehenge has been celebrated by gatherings of people for thousands of years.The rock monument at Stonehenge is a man-made structure. The sun has been rising over Drakes Island, Stonehouse for considerably longer. Less fuss, fewer people.
Those of us who live by the sea or large rivers know the debt of gratitude that is owed to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution in Britain, a volunteer service of water-born rescuers who keep our island nation as safe as possible while on our coastal waters and rivers. 41 years ago 8 lifeboat men lost their lives while trying to rescue the crew of the Union Star, a ship whose engines had failed in Mounts Bay off the South Coast of Cornwall. The Soloman Browne lifeboat was launched from Penlee Lifeboat Station near Mousehole in rough seas. The lifeboat rescued four of the ships crew members but both the lifeboat and the Union Star were overwhelmed and lost at sea. 16 lives in total were lost.
41 years ago news gathering was much slower. The news leaked out to the wider world in hourly news updates on the radio. Locally the news moved slightly quicker by word of mouth, much as it would have done in seafaring communities for centuries. The BBC have created a radio docudrama that gives a sense of the event unfolding in real-time and being reported as it would have been 41 years ago. Worth a listen.
It has become tradition, in Mousehole,to honour the lives lost at sea in what has become known as the Penlee Lifeboat Disaster by dedicating, to them,the illuminating of the small fishing village of Mousehole each December.This tradition started in the sixties and the lifeboat was launched to a backdrop of festive lights. Money raised from the hundreds of visitors goes to the RNLI.
When seeking images for Advent+2022 this snowy image appeared. I was not really certain how I could weave it into a ponder. Yesterday @theoldmortuary went out for our works ‘do’ and a ponder was born. The Kings Head, Westmoreland Street, Marylebone was opposite The Heart Hospital where I worked for quite a while. On occasions, if a patient ‘got lost’ between the wards and various clinics they could be found propping up the bar or having a fag by an outside table. The Kings Head is like a country pub that has become rehomed in the city. Although not a regular occurrence it was not intimidating to have to cross the road in scrubs and go and find a patient. Sometimes they were obvious because they were there with their drip stand. The Kings Head was once the home of John Wesley.
He is the glue that sticks this ponder together.
Earlier this week when the weather was brutally cold and icy we decided on a very local pub as the location for our ‘works do for two’. Our journey would be easily manageable in the cold snap. A five minute walk to the Cremyl Ferry and a ten minute crossing on the Edgecumbe Belle to reach The Edgecumbe Arms on the Cornish bank of the Tamar.
Note below taken from Plymouth History Festival 2020
Cremyll Ferry
This ancient crossing is thought to have originated in Saxon times and was first documented in 1204. It was worked by rowing boat, then steam boat and now motor boat.
This postcard features a coloured photo of the landing stage at Cremyll Point, with the quay, Edgcumbe Arms and cottages in the background. The HMS Impregnable training ship in the Hamoaze can be seen in the distance. Bystanders and passengers are waiting on the quay and there’s also a horse-drawn carriage. It’s postmarked 1907.
This postcard also dates from the early 1900s and shows the other side of the Cremyll Ferry’s journey at ‘Admiral’s Hard, Stonehouse’. It features the landing stage and quay just off Durnford Street. The ‘Armadillo’ ferry is approaching. A horse and cart is waiting in the water at the end of the slipway, and several men can be seen in small boats alongside the jetty.
Yesterday the weather changed. South westerly winds blew the cold away and brought rain and stormy seas. The ferry crossing was rougher and longer than we have ever experienced. Longer because there are absolutely treacherous currents that run on this particular stretch of the river. The tides and weather of yesterday meant the ferry had to head out towards the sea to find a safe place to cross.
Waves were crashing over the boat and we rolled and dipped alarmingly. Alarmingly for a journey that most times we don’t notice. We were, of course in expert hands. Waiting for our return journey I discovered that John Wesley of Marylebone had made the same journey in difficult circumstances.
Wesley also uses the old name of this stretch of water. Crimble Passage which in itself is a useful addition to Advent+2022.
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