Yesterday was Valentines Day. Over commercialised and lacking originality the day is often the same year after year. 2021 though , felt a little different because everything feels different. There seemed to be less of a focus on romantic love and more on community love. Which is jolly convenient as the image above is about all sorts of Love. The picture above is the Love Tree , found just outside Saltash in Cornwall and the subject of a blog last year. Link below.
It is a local focus for fetish objects to do with love of all sorts. Talisman and mementoes are hidden in roots and the cracks and crevaces of the trunk of this old Elm tree. The custom is hundreds of years old.
The image of the tree was supposed to be artfully printed in gold foil on an abstract watercolour background. The original image and the painted backgrounds are lost in a print shop , victims of the Lockdowns. The exhibition they were intended for never happened. Soon I am going to learn to do Linocut Printing so that this image can have a new and different future.
Different as it turns out is the theme for this blog.
My Valentines Day was made very different by attending a local sports club to receive my first Vaccine against Covid 19. A brilliantly organised and efficient service staffed by happy and helpful volunteers. A triumph of Science and humanity against a difficult adversary. Aided and abetted in this country by poor political decisions.
My umbrella, needed, on the day, because of the torrential rain, but also, as it happens, as a metaphor for a brighter future post vaccine.
Lunar New Year and a good luck envelope. My Pandemic good luck is to have a Covid-19 vaccination today. It is remarkable that 14 million people have had their first dose already in Britain.
May the year of the Ox bring us all better fortunes.
It was a ‘Tiara Bob’ today. In other words a Bobbers Birthday.
Also a two bob day.
Our informal ‘Bobbing’ group only has one rule. There always needs to be one non-swimmer for safety and photograhy.
Two bobs were called because Birthday Zooms were needed at the optimum tide . So we split into two groups, one for birthday zooming and one for optimum tide grabbing.
The birthday group were bouyant. The birthday bobber got gifts and Pandemically acceptable hugs.
In the afternoon the Optimal Tide Bobbers were obliged to not swim in the sea as the currents at our favourite beach were a bit too strong. Instead we opted an Atlantic Infinity Pool with a wave splash feature.
6 years ago I was preparing for an exhibition in Brixton, London. At the time I was working in Central London and knew that in order to encourage my work colleagues and friends to an Art Gallery over a weekend I would need to advertise the areas proximity to a wide variety of places where people could mingle , drink and socialise into the small hours of the night. Somewhere culturally significant.
Electric Avenue*, Brixton.
By co-incidence, currently, I am helping to prepare for an exhibition. To encourage visitors to the exhibition I am advertising its safety, the fact that you can visit it alone and from the safety of your own home.
* Electric Avenue. Built in 1800, the street was the first in the area to get electric street lights. The street is home to a famous multi- cultural street market and was made doubly famous by Eddie Grant, who wrote the song “Electric Avenue” in 1983 . At the time he was working as an actor at The Black Theatre in Brixton.
Fridays , not what they used to be but today I bet I have gifted you an earworm**
** An earworm, sometimes referred to as a brainworm, sticky music, stuck song syndrome, or, most commonly after earworms, Involuntary Musical Imagery (INMI), is a catchy and/or memorable piece of music or saying that continuously occupies a person’s mind even after it is no longer being played or spoken about.
Book club reading gave me the perfect word for the current Pandemic. Perturbation! The word came from Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. Time to find some Welsh landscape.
Perturbed is a very useful word but I had never expanded it to perturbation.
It works so well with Pandemic and encapsulates our current times without too much jingle jangle alarm.
This months book choice is anything Welsh. I chose Dylan Thomas mostly because I remember Richard Burton narrating Under Milk Wood very effectively. Our next meeting is scheduled for March 1st St Davids Day the Patron Saint of Wales hence the theme.
This blog has accidentally become a book club blog, possibly the only sort of place I could share this odd photograph.
Here I am finishing last months Book Club book, inadvertently dressed to match.
I’m not even sure which day of Lockdown 3 we are in. The day is probably irrelevant and can, of course be fact checked later. A daily blog in a time when we are not supposed to do very much might seem something that could be a struggle. But as a writer or recorder of things my bar is set extraordinarily low. Todays ponder is officially about the boundary between Devon and Cornwall, very specifically either side of the Tamar Bridge. Which is why the pretty image of the bridge heads up this blog. Before that however I wanted to share a side ponder not truly worthy of a full ponder. One that really would scrape the boredom level if I were to illustrate it. Lockdown 1 was the lockdown of some personal and public anguish and a lot of getting things done.
Lockdown 2 . Anguish accepted as a way of life on a sliding scale of severity depending on the day. Beyond that it was full on-prep for the Christmas that never was.
Lockdown 3 . Eat all the food puchased for the Christmas that never was. Emerge from that lifestyle to one that is not normal and also doesn’t feature a lot of getting things done. Stuff still happens though, no day is a void.
Over the weekend we watched a Christopher Plummer film. Not the Sound of Music but Beginners. The implausibility of The Sound of Music would have gone unnoticed but watching Beginners felt implausible not because it was the story of a 75 year old man embarking on his true life as a gay man but because the film featured almost impromptu parties. It felt so unbelievably wrong in a way that a family saga involving the Third Reich and clothes made from curtains never feels.
A small point I agree but this side ponder is about small points.
Small point number 2, in the mornings I wake up and am excited that the first cup of tea with caffeine is about to happen. Since the insomnia of Lockdown I , I have become tediously fastidious about no caffeine after 1pm. Were I to have some after 1pm , I could get giddy and throw a party. No I wouldn’t , but you get the picture!
If there were to be a party, I would almost certainly wear new thermal underwear. Today was a red letter day. New thermal leggings arrived. Essential for getting my 10,000 steps during my permitted, outdoor exercise. Such excitement!
Back to the Bridge, I have used this bridge regularly for nearly half of my life. I only realised this weekend that travelling west I am welcomed into Cornwall.
Welcomed in this instance is a loaded and slightly disingenuous word. I was not born in Cornwall, I have been a second home owner, I do come from ‘ up the line’ and for a long period of time I was from ‘ down London way’. The likelihood of me truly being welcomed by everyone in Cornwall is extremely unlikely but entirely livable with. Devon in the easterly direction offers no such welcome, genuine or otherwise.
Halfway across the bridge drivers or walkers enter the City of Plymouth. No mention of Devon, no warm welcome. At no point on the A38 are travellers welcomed to Devon. Most skirt Plymouth on the Devon Expressway. Once they have left the environs of the Plymouth City Boundaries they are left uncherished until they cross the county boundaries of Dorset or Somerset when other counties offer them an unconditional welcome.
The far South West of England, one welcome, not as whole hearted as you might think and one completely absent one.
Storm Darcy brought windchill factors of -3 to -5 . Beyond that the weather was gorgeous and while doing two walks, that have been in many blogs, the bright winter sunshine gave Plymouth the look, if not the feel of Greece.
Leviathon
The Leviathon was looking pretty sparky this morning. While a doughnut from a 400 year old bakery fueled our 10,000 steps.
Just having my hands out for long enough to eat my share of the doughnut was enough to lose all feeling in my fingers but a huge positive was that the jam was so solid we didn’t end up wearing it.
The harbour looked Mediterranean.
And ultimately dogs and humans found a sheltered beach to bask and scamper.
Morning walk done, it was time to return home for a few hours of domestica before the next little dose of Mediterranean sunshine.
Hugo and Lola wait patiently for the return. No chance of a 10,000 step walk this evening after the ‘Bobbers’ have had a swim but warm snuggles in front of the fire is a great substitute in the middle of February.
They don’t have to wait too long for the ‘bobbers’ to return.
This blog is not going the way I planned. But it can start with Brunch which is not a bad way to start the week.
Brunch featured egg islands. Fried bread with a fried egg served in a hole in the middle of a slice of bread and the remaining circle of bread also served fried, to dip in the egg. Fried bread for both of us is something our Dads did well.
Both our fathers also loved blood oranges which was the planned route this blog was going. We could have pondered on over tea and cake about our fathers and their domestic skills. My domestic skills, however blew a hole in that comforting scenario.
So successful was the whole orange cake I made last week, I planned to make another one today using blood oranges for extra flavour. The boiled oranges were good subjects for photography.
The ripe red orange colours of the days cooking stop right here.
There was an error in the making of the cake. Instead of adding Baking Powder I used Baking Soda ( Bicarbonate of Soda) Any other cake would have just looked beautiful but tasted nasty with this error. An Orange cake containing three whole oranges was a completely diiferent matter. Bicarbonate of Soda reacts crazily when combined with acid. The acid of three oranges combined with Baking Soda was a thing not dissimilar to an erupting volcano. Not realising the extreme cause of the problem I trimmed off the extra crust and binned the volcanic run off caused by effluvial action and had something resembling a cake, passable only to a desperate woman who wanted to serve gorgeous slices of cake to prove the afternoons efforts were not in vain. Eating the slice was worse than looking at it. Bitter and cloying are not words that are ever said between mouthfuls of comestible pleasure.
There is no sumptuously moist photo of domestic triumph to neatly end this blog. Instead all I can offer is some flowers that match rather well with the now extinct, in this house, Blood Orange Cake. The flowers are anonymous, I found them in a supermarket.
A toddler dropped a much loved Zebra in the water near the Royal William Yard. The tide was high and, sadly, Zebra had to be left to his watery fate. Some time later members of Plastic Patrol paddled past.
They swiftly recovered the Zebra and, as luck would have it, Archie and his parents were waiting for a take out-coffee.
The sea swimming community in Plymouth is very welcoming.
When you drive along Durnford Street at 10am and see a woman walking along wearing a Tiara, it is a fair assumption, and in this case correct, that she is a sea swimmer celebrating something.
A double celebration as it turns out, a birthday and retirement.
The beauty of this lovely community is that everyone looks out for each other, in or out of the water. It is entirely normal to ask a complete stranger why they are wearing a tiara. Talking to this particular stranger gave me the heart image at the top of this blog. Her husband had made this heart on their gate to celebrate her birthday.
The smiles are not just reserved for Tiara wearing. Just doing a sea swim makes us smile inside and out.
Some other facial expressions!
But mostly smiles.
People are always willing to share their expertise. On this occasion, not swimming related, how to use drainage holes to frame photographs.
Two of our images.
And someone using their newly acquired knowledge.
As it happens within our ‘Bobbers’ group we have had two recent birthdays. Unaware of the informal Tiara rule, we just exchanged cards. (In future, tiaras will be involved!) ‘Bobbers’ also do original art.
Hugo and Lola by Debs Bobber
Sea swimming is an amazing activity. We plan ours using Tide times and weather forecasts.
For local and constantly updated information, we often refer to Plymouth Open Water Swimmers. Link below.
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