This greetings card has a flavour of our Sunday morning.
Our view this morning is timeless, this view was a favourite of the author, Enid Blyton who chose this hotel for her holidays in the 1930’s and 40’s. She always chose the room next door. Have a good and gentle Sunday.
Our winter swimming- hut had been attacked by vandals overnight. This is the only piece of their graffiti that is reproducible. Strangely prophetic, as,unknown to me, there was a surprise morning party planned to follow the swim. We also regularly eat cake and drink tea in this particular hut. This morning Facebook memories reminded me that 3 years ago I was in South Korea and a quick visit to my photo archive brought up a piece of actual street art that featured tea and cakes.
South Korea also provided us with actual tea and cakes, of course!
And coffee and cakes.
And indeed coffee and breakfast.
Which has nicely removed this blog away from the nasty homophobic, racist, mysogynist, violent graffiti that we were confronted with yesterday, by focusing on the one sentence that offended no-one. Note to the writers of the graffiti, the teachers and word nerds in our swimming group were not impressed with your grammar or punctuation. The artists among us thought your anatomical drawings were pretty rudimental.
Goodness me, another late blog for the best of reasons!
November is my birthday month so I always get a boost of love and gifts in one of the darkest months.
November 2019 was pretty stormy and in November most normal human beings knew little of what the next 4 months would do to the whole of the worlds population. At a more granular level we certainly thought life would evolve and change at a fairly normal pace. In November 2019 we got our kicks on my birthday walking on stormy beaches Then a pandemic happened and strange and unsettling things changed our lives forever. Wind on two years and we get our kicks swimming in stormy seas in November and any other month. What started as an alternative to swimming in swimming pools during lockdown has become at least a twice a week habit. Winter swimming in particular is addictive and hugely rewarding, the buzz after a winter swim is hard to explain.
Todays swim was pretty rough and bouncy but enormously energising.
And then the bobbers had a surprise in store, and this is the reason for the late blog. After our 9:30 swim we had an 11:00 birthday party. The sugar and carb rush of party food on top of the post swimming high is an extraordinary feeling. We may never give this sea swimming malarkey up and with 14 of us in our group now there will always be the occasional party!
Sunrise over Plymouth Sound on Armistice Day. Both my great uncle and grandfather sailed to war several times from Devonport Naval Dockyard. My great uncle as part of the Canadian Expeditionary Forces in World War 1 and my grandfather in a submarine in World War II. It is funny to think of them as young men spending their last nights ashore on Union Street. A nearby street famed world-wide for night life. Certainly a world away from their rural upbringings in Essex and Cambridgeshire or in the case of my recently migrated Great Uncle, rural Ontario. I hope their heads were not too sore as they sailed past Drakes Island.
I have a fascination for empty staircases, this one caught my eye, not particularly because it was empty on this occasion but because some tiny reflected lights appeared to be moving up the stairs. Like small invisible creatures climbing the stairs with hand torches.
Empty staircases often tell a story, this quietly grubby staircase resonated with Dance Music most recently as the unused back staircase of a fabulously glamorous night club housed in a building that has been a pleasure dome since the 1930’s
I love everything about it apart from the smell of old wee. But my imagination of the historic encounters that would have occured on this staircase just a few steps from the dancefloor give it a mingled,musky, secretive vestigia that spans almost a century of pleasure.
Not so these steps to a now unpermitted destination.
Which are the exact opposite of the steps below.
So many permutations of places and directions for the mind to travel. This particular photo is a real life encounter with a scene from one of my recurring dreams. A fine place to end a blog. I have stuff that needs to be done upstairs.
It has been complicated. In truth not much has gone on in the last 36 hours apart from wallpapering or thinking about wallpapering. Almost no time to ponder really, especially in daytime hours when natural light was essential to our pattern matching. The new-to-us house is built almost at the top of a hill and runs down the hill northwards and westwards. Such was the diligence of Georgian builders, that to gain the appearance of symmetry and regular shaped rooms some very odd wall angles and floor levels disguise the almost 30 degree slopes in two directions. This does not make wallpapering easy. Dog walking has, of course, continued and, thank goodness for this blog, the night walk is illuminated and interesting. The window above overlooks the green where the dogs like to snuffle, overlooked by model cows and fairy lights..
The cows are a reminder that the whole of the Royal William Yard was a factory for stocking up Royal Navy ships for long voyages at sea. The green, where we walk the dogs, was used by livestock that had recently been delivered, live by sea,and would soon pass through the slaughtehouse to be processed and packed onto ships. The view below is the one taken from the tunnel that leads onto the green.
The green is also well stocked with deck chairs. A reminder of pre-Covid times when we could come here to watch Open Air Cinema, Live Theatre or live streamed sports events.
On the other side of the yard we walk along the side of the River Tamar and Stonehouse Creek. A business and industrial area that is always lit up at night.
The path we take runs along the length of the Royal William Yard. As luck would have it I took a photo of this side of the yard last week from the Tuesday river cruise.
There are many different routes for us to take each evening, although winter walks stick to the areas that are well lit and dry underfoot, most evenings on the route home we see the same message. Which works just as well for the end of todays blog.
A wet Monday morning in November. Quite the opening sentence! Halloween ( eugh) and Firework Night ( yay) both over for another year. Remembrance Day next Sunday is one more significant day in a month that I have always loved. There is something relaxing about November once the frenetic first week is over.
The morning sea was very inviting.
But we had another full day of wallpapering to do!
Finished with half an hour of natural daylight to spare but no residual energy for an evening swim. There is always tomorrow for a quick dip.
Another tale of the riverbank from Tuesday. This is the rail bridge linking the Bere Peninsular with a suburb of Plymouth. On this occasion it is viewed from a boat, for 20 or so years I could see this view just a few steps from my home. A long time ago I painted it during my Fine Art Foundation course, it is impossible to tell from this old photo but it is on a super chunky frame that I built myself.
Once again this week this is a late blog. We had a morning filled with friends and family and an afternoon filled with wallpapering.
A Sunday well filled but not with blogging!
Waking up on a clear November morning prompted me to share three boats from the Tuesday river trip. The acidic yellow of this one almost makes me want to blink against its brightness. A proper wake up and take notice colour.
Not that we needed anything to wake us up this morning, a pocket call from Hong Kong woke us for a brief conversation about trampolines and needing a wee with our granddaughter. Urgency, and necessity, made the call short and sweet and left us awake enough to enjoy a cup of tea and the sound of a winter dawn chorus. The call was a video call and another boat on the river fairly accurately depicts what our side of the call looked like.
Last night was firework night, when most of Britain ‘celebrates’ the attempt in 1605 to blow up the House of Lords as part of a plan by Catholics to overthrow Protestant James the First and replace him with a Catholic head of state. Normally I love fireworks but post supper ennui and a genuine wish to just quietly sit this one out, won over. The first year in a new house made us slightly hesitant to leave the dogs at home while we headed out to watch fireworks, not knowing how much flashing and banging was happening at home. The answer was loads of banging and no flashes, the dogs were untroubled by any of it. Leaving this calm blog untroubled by pictures of flashy pyrotechnics. Just calm boats snoozing in bright autumnal sunshine.
The reason for yesterdays late blog and slight discombobulation of the daily blog schedule was that I was scurrying around to get tasks done so I could be in a calm frame of mind to attend an on-line broadcast of a funeral. While such things are never easy this particular funeral had lovely and unexpected music. Ave Maria by Sarah Brightmam to start. Mr Brightside by the Killers to end.Proper wake up music for the soul . No one ever expects a gift from a funeral but hearing new music was exactly the gift from yesterday. New York by Riopy which calms the soul and may become a headphone favourite on my dog walks. Too good to not share!
Something lovely to just take some time out and enjoy.
https://youtube.com/user/Riopyjp
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