A new word on a stormy day. Chrysalism.
The act of feeling tranquil while being indoors in a storm.
I feel that that could also work for feeling tranquil indoors during a pandemic.
I’m not sure lockdown at home is always quite as tranquil as a chrysalis but just like Peggy we will emerge from this state of Chrysalism altered creatures.
Late April and early May brings a simple pleasure to the walls around the old mortuary. It’s so simple I couldn’t really think how to weave it into a ponder. The area immediately next to our house was an old quarry which means there is an abundance of walls around us, presumably built with rocks from the quarry.
Daisies, however implausible it may seem, just stick themselves to the rock and grow. Early in the season they are lush and beautiful, later on the they get scraggy and ugly. Not Surprising really.
I took these photos yesterday with the idea of a future blog but overnight Cornwall has been hit by a fierce storm.
Given their precarious existence serendipity may have made me photograph them on their last day of lushness.
Update
After the storm
Even in the midst of this pandemic there is some great thoughts and conversations happening around how we will remember this period of our lives.
A smart phone has made diarists of us all. My phone is set deliberately to store all the pictures my family and friends send me. I delete some but most are kept as a personal archive.
This blog contains my pictures and ponderings shared to those who care to read it. Facebook and Instagram are more public. Instagram is the quickest, I think, to give a flavour of the times. I just scrolled through my Instagram grid to check out how 45 days of restricted living and Lockdown looked in picture form from @theoldmortuary.
This grid marks the end of normal life. The bottom 6 pictures are from the days running up to the official lockdown. The next row up shows a poster for a cancelled art exhibition and the offer of local help plus the all important hand washing picture.
The cancelled art exhibition poster also marked the beginning of Pandemic Ponderings.
The top row are images from early Ponderings. In private I was pondering on the madness of thinking I would find something to write about, every day, when life was so restricted.
This second grid shows a life of settling into Lockdown. The bottom row shows memories of foreign travel. A wet footprint on some decking in Hong Kong, it was so hot that image lasted less than 5 seconds as it dried off. The picture represents my first meeting with our adored granddaughter in 2018,We thought it was awful that she was thousands of miles away and our meeting with her was so brief. Then her mum and dad decided to move home. Just 50 miles between us and still we rely on phone calls to chart her progress.
The Pangolin pictures in the middle were an homage to the poor creatures caught in the middle of the controversial ‘Wet’ markets where this pandemic is said to have originated.
An image of coffee shows our early pangs of missing out on coffee shops and the bottle of Cuban rum marks the beginning of our cooking obsession.
This last grid shows us settled into Pandemic lockdown life. No longer worried about the subject matter of Ponderings I just natter on about any thing. There are two images that mark slight freedoms. The roots on the second row up were photographed when it was made clear that we could drive a small distance to take exercise and the cogs on the top row were photographed on our first trip to a proper independent coffee shop this Saturday. Yesterday, the very first picture on the grid above, there was of course, Cake.
Sunday takes a similar shape to any other day in the pandemic lock-down but there are accessories to the day which make it different. Sunday permits laziness in the hours that would normally be spent with family and friends. The dogs get walked , books and newspapers get read. There is always cake. Cake in a Pandemic is a serious business, there is nothing flimsy about our pandemic cakes. They are always home- made and are described as having ‘heft’.
Everything about our cake choices is hefty. The flavours are strong, Guinness, Cocoa, Strong Coffee and the textures are extreme. Super moist brownie, deep black dense texture or richly golden crumble.
We seem to be adopting bold colours and bold flavours during this lockdown. I wonder if it’s because the world seems brighter when we are allowed out so our indoor life has to get brighter and bolder too.
The tulips in the house are feeling pretty bold too. Or are they hefty?
A pondering in which we queue for good coffee in Plymouth. Saturdays are made for good coffee. For the 6 weeks of lockdown we’ve not had a coffee made with love and care by a proficient barrista. Given the Coffeeshop in question you could say we’ve missed out for 6 months. Hutong which closed in October for a rebuild, ‘popped up’ today at The Lord High Admiral.
Queuing for coffee is not unknown to us as Monmouth Coffee at Borough Market is another favourite coffeeshop.
Hutong coffee is worthy of the queue. The new environment at The Lord High Admiral is pretty cute.
On reflection , it was lovely to see George…
and Emma who didn’t make it into the mirror.
Perfect Social Distancing throughout the process we took delivery of our coffee.
It was every bit as good as we knew it would be. Right to the bottom of the cup.
If you are in Plymouth next Saturday the Hutong will ‘pop-up’ again next Saturday 9th May from 8am. The other ‘pop-up’ at The Lord High Admiral, Knead Pizza had sold out all their Pizza slots today and I think all of next week’s are sold out too. We were too slow for Pizza for both weeks and actually missed out on Hutong bacon butties today.
Note to self, get up earlier!
What to do after a Hutong Coffee? Drive to Stonehouse and do the usual walk.
This could not have been a better decision.
Firstly we parked up near Elvira’s,
who were serving bacon butties. By a strange coincidence we queued up at Elvira’s with a couple who had also been at the earlier coffee queue. They were much braver than us and ordered take-out Eggs Benedict. I would have been wearing egg yolk all day if we had ordered that.
Obviously once you’ve queued twice with people, observing social distancing, you can talk for ages even though they are complete strangers. (Pandemic observation, talking to strangers is a lovely thing now we all have more time)
Our Stonehouse walk is one we do often but everything in Lockdown is changed , there seems to be more to see.
Even at Elvira’s we saw these two lovely unusual things.
Non-local people can have a chuckle at the name of this location.
Admiral’s Hard; another saucy Plymouth location is Pennycomequick.
I just threw that in, it’s nowhere near our walk.
Stonehouse did not disappoint, we met another complete stranger at the proper distance, for more lovely conversations and Devils Point itself thought it was on the Mediterranean.
Pretty houses on the way back to the car.
Saturdays and Sunshine
Hutong Coffee
Elvira’s Bacon Butty
Lockdown rules all applied
May Day Ponderings start with a mosaic of flowers I’ve captured during Lockdown.
MayDay is pretty significant in Cornwall , usually, with Fairs and Parades.
In Essex where I grew up it was less significant, I remember watching, on TV, parades of military hardware in Communist Countries.
For no particular reason my primary school set up Maypole dancing classes. A riot of tangled ribbons where badly behaved boys sabotaged the less than accurate danced weavings of the girls. I think there was the promise of us doing a demonstration dance somewhere. I don’t think the Manor Street Primary School Maypole team was ever called into active service.
Here I am in Cornwall on one of its favourite festive days and I have nothing to report,but I can share a last image of pale blooms until next year.
May Day 2021, lets all get as giddy as Maypole dancers and hug each other until our bones hurt. It’s a date.
P.S
If you enjoyed Pandemic Pondering#18 about loo rolls , I’ve just read a fabulous blog written on 28th April 2020 about the history of toilet rolls.
Follow this link for enlightenment.
https://www.bloglovin.com/blogs/londonist-792557/toilet-roll-in-london-a-feculent-history-7444378015
I’m not normally a lover of alliterative phrases linked to days of the week or names of the month, although I do quite like cleverer, less trite, alliteration. Today though #ThrowbackThursday, works for me, as the glasses featured are very retro.
Today the weather in Cornwall is strange. It’s been windy and stormy overnight and the heavy rain of the early morning, interspersed with bright glorious sunshine, was at one point replaced by icy hail. I realise that this scenario is just local to us and it set me thinking.
It is said about Covid- 19, Coronovirus that we are all in the same boat in the storm.
But we are not all in the same boat , we are not even all in the same storm.
We all share a storm in common, but we also all have our own storms and boats that determine how we cope with the shared storm.
In common with many, we are cooking a lot more, remembering dreams more vividly and are craving coffee and curiously bright colours.
Which brings me to the point of this pondering. I got caught in the Hail storm this morning whilst walking the dogs, it’s not what I expected in late April, but I also didn’t expect a sharp bright shaft of sunlight to give me such pleasure this morning.
We’ve been using some 1960’s or 70’s glasses to brighten up our water drinking during the lock-down. They were a gift from our friend Steph who gave them to us as a keepsake from her parents house.
They go in the dishwasher just like any other glasses. When I got in from the hailstone walk, sunlight was pouring through the window and then onto these freshly clean glasses. The Abstract patterns that illustrate this blog were created on the work surface for about five minutes between showers and absolutely illustrate why a slightly quixotic decision was a good one.
We are not all in the same boat
Or even the exact same storm
Surprising things will happen
Sometimes fresh out of the dishwasher.
A dandelion clock caught in a street lamp.
Wednesday finds us with 5 dumpy bags of green waste and a super tidy Cornish Hedge.
Last dumpy bag and Cornish Hedge picture.
In other news we rescued another neighbour who had taken a tumble, sprinting when we heard her fall. The sprinting obviously enhanced by our late arrival at the daily exercise videos produced by Joe Wicks
We opted to do the classes later in lock down because we knew we were coming to the end of the physical tasks @theoldmortuary.
https://www.thebodycoach.com/blog/pe-with-joe-1254.html
Enhanced sprinting and improved early morning fitness is the aim. Hugo and Lola love the half hour exercise regime,particularly the floor exercises when additional cuddles are apparently needed. A brief blog today , there is only so much excitement to be had in a day of pruning.
40 goodness me that’s a significant number. And it’s Tuesday, Tuesday!!!
Last Tuesday I was pondering life settling into a new routine and that Tuesdays tend to be when we run out of food. Not so this week. It could be Friday before we need to shop.
Tuesday finds us halfway down the hill or halfway up the hill depending on your perspective.
The Cornish hedge that forms one of the borders of the garden is as out of control as our hair. At some points it is 12 feet high and normally we pay someone with hard core tools to get the job done. That’s not an option this year and unlike our hair we can’t just leave it. The local or county council, whose responsibility both the hedge and the rough ground were before the age of fiscal austerity, are quick to point out any overgrowth. Despite never having asked us if we would take over the responsibility for these two areas once they arbitrarily decided not to bother.
We warmed up on Monday doing the easiest half.
Rain is the new weather pattern, after weeks of sunshine,not particularly conducive to hedge trimming. We also have a problem storing all the prunings, the easy end of the hedge yesterday filled a whole builders dumpy bag. This morning’s dog walk saw us visiting a very close building site and being gifted two more bags by builders who were more than happy to give them away.
Before I thrill you all with a photo of dumpy bags. Here are two roses we also met on the dog walk.
Full dumpy bag.
Empty dumpy bags.
Half done Cornish Hedge.
Maybe this is the time to thank everyone who gives me feedback on this blog. I love knowing that people enjoy the blog even though it’s subject matter is pretty mundane. Apparently lots of people are really picky about brownies. Hix Fix cocktail was very popular and that is a little sad as the Hix Restaurant Group is a business that has succumbed to Coronovirus Covid- 19, something I discovered whilst trying to correctly credit them and share a link. So for all of us the derivative version is the best we can get.
Hix Oyster and Chophouse, Cowcross Street, Farringdon, was close to Bart’s Hospital where I worked for a while. Eating there was a huge and rare pleasure. Too bad I never ventured to the Cocktail menu. I think I went there for breakfast so it’s an entirely understandable oversight but still lamentable.
Once again I digress, onward to hedge trimming day 2.
Well, thank goodness I digressed, there will be no denouement on the taming of the Cornish Hedge today. We’ve filled the two new dumpy bags gifted by the builders this morning and still have about 6 metres of it to chop, trim and tidy.
For today’s blog this is the end of the road.
Sunday was cooking day for us. I made Brownies from a foolproof recipe which I had to adapt because we couldn’t get all the ingredients. That then makes it not foolproof of course.
The reason I needed a foolproof recipe is fussiness. I only like a brownie that is dry or crisp on the outside and very moist on the inside. I was browsing the internet on a completely different quest when another blogger claimed the same fussiness and presented the ‘perfect’ recipe. Normally I would have waited until I could get the correct ingredients but yesterday I had all the pandemic time in the world and a yearning for a perfect Brownie.
My necessary adaptations caused no problems and the resulting brownie was so lovely I’m going to have to adapt and rewrite the recipe to use forevermore.
The things I couldn’t get were , unsalted butter and milk or dark chocolate nibs.
Here is the brownie served with ice cream and cream. A serving suggestion first brought to my notice by the wonderful Jessie and Lennie Ware on the Podcast , Table Manners.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06r2m8d
Try it, you might never go back.
The brownie is versatile and is equally happy with a cup of tea.
We also stepped into the world of Nigella Lawson and made a tray bake chicken supper that involved frozen peas and Cinzano Bianco.
We employed social distancing and distributed chocolate brownies to a few friends.
The dogs didn’t have to social distance and enjoyed Mel’s hard work rejuvenating her water feature during one delivery.
The Poppies are putting up quite a show on the tidied up rough ground.
People are stopping to take their portraits. At a Social Distance naturally.
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