What are the most important things needed to live a good life?
Shelter. Food. Love.
And the ability to create everything else.
theoldmortuary ponders.
#941 theoldmortuary ponders
A proper ponder on a Saturday. How on earth to link up two different subjects into a blog that makes sense.
Nobody ever tells prospective parents that becoming a parent strips off a few layers of skin that will never grow back. This loss of metaphorical dermis makes your eyes well up more easily, and sadness comes a little more readily because suddenly being a parent/grandparent/care-giver makes risk and loss more relatable.
This ponder doesn’t come from nowhere. In 1987 on the 6th of June my local towns of Shoreham-by- Sea and Worthing were full, as they always were around this date, of Canadian D-Day Veterans. Revisiting their training areas for the planned assault on Juno Beach in 1944.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_Beach
But in 1987 I had a 7 month old baby. As if from nowhere my empathy for the Canadians heroism and loss filled me with sorrow and melancholy. Their smooth balding heads under their regimetal berets were an acute reminder of the vulnerable head of my small son.
That feeling has never left me and I am much more sensitive to these things than I ever was before. But Thursday, watching the Commemoration of 80 years since D-Day seemed like a double layer of loss. There are those who never left those beaches 80 years ago. And those who survived to tell the tales, filling hotels and bars in Sussex with lively chatter, while they were in their fifties and sixties. Proudly wearing their regimental blazers and berets remembering their lost comrades but also revelling in being alive and being able to visit their old haunts with their fellow survivors. Most of those vibrant men are themselves now deceased. The links in this blog are a useful read and explain better than I can why Sussex was so special to them.
The Juno Beach Centre
I will always struggle when I see a bald head, a blazer and a beret. Being a parent has indelibly changed me. The two are linked, tenuously, I agree but linked never the less.
#940 theoldmortuary ponders.
List three books that have had an impact on you. Why?
I am a devourer of books, which is why I anonymised my book pile for this blog. My list of books that have had an impact would be bigger than 3. But in my reading life, 3 is the magic number. I tend to have 3 books on the go at any one time.Sometimes 4.
1. My current fiction book of choice.
2. A non-fiction book . History, Biography or some other subject.
3. A digital book or audio book stored on my smartphone.
(4) My Bookclub book if it doesn’t sit comfortably in 1,2 or 3.
Currently Book Club books are the books most likely to have an impact on me. 1,2 and 3 are self-selected and what I would choose to read, but a book club book often knocks me off my reading orbit. The most enriching thing about a book club book is my book club. Once a month I get to talk in depth or in a flippant way about the book we have all read.
There is something rather marvellous about being able to talk about a book that has been read by a group of people at the same time and then being able to talk about the book, regardless of whether I enjoyed it, with other people.
This month we read ‘Scenes from a Village Life’
The book was written in 2011 and nicely sums up my point about reading a book at the same time with a group of people.
If we had read this in 2011 the conversations that swirled around our different interpretations of this book would have been significantly different to the conversations that were had this week in June 2024.
The impact that any book has is dependent on when and where it has been read. That makes the word ‘impact’ a much more fluid concept.
Aren’t books wonderful?
An audiobook has had me crying into my white paint pot this week while I have been labouring on my white walls.
The idea of colour blocking outside came from an Interior Design Book.
How could anyone expect me to choose just 3 books?
Huge thanks to my fellow bookworms for opening the doors and windows of books, that I would never have crossed the threshold of without your company and some hand holding
#939 theoldmortuary ponders.
Another day, another paint pot, another direction. I had no idea how to paint one section of the yard walls. Complicated by mixed surfaces and under colours. I decided to use colour blocking , beloved by interior designers. Who knows how that is going to work out.
But the big reveal is the, almost psychedelic, colours that appear when painting white on a west facing wall in the morning. Nothing like that happened when I painted the north facing wall at any time of day. A most odd sensation. I sense the big old chunk of concrete that forms a seat is also going to need painting. Whilst waiting for paint to dry I let the digital tweak make some patterns from my paint pot .
Time to do that next coat. This blog will grow as the day progresses and I need to let paint dry…
And as it turns out, sunshine and shadows quite like my colour blocking.
“What is the point of doing anything in life, if you know what the exact outcome will be.”
#938 theoldmortuary ponders
A day of transforming a yard from off-white to white turned out to be both extraordinarily colourful and a self-limiting occupation. The colour change can be seen just by the O of off-white. The early morning dog walk set the colour bar high when I noticed that the luminous cows had moved.
To make way for a very fancy shoe, advertising a Theatre show.
Nature also created wild flower paths between cows and shoe
Dog-walk over it was time to flip off the paint pot lid. With just a moment to tweak Pure Brilliant White into something a little more lively, with fingers still clean enough to touch my phone.
Radio at the ready and I was off.
6 hours later, I had not reached the end of the job but the end of the pot of paint was a most welcome sight.
So much for providing myself with many different audio treats, mucky fingers meant I was stuck with Radio 4 for the day. My ears and mind were taken to places I might not necessarily have chosen. Other people pondering the concept of unconditional love. Very thought provoking. I had some thoughts to add, but radio isn’t like that unless the show offers a phone-in and I would not have had clean enough hands for that sort of shenanigans. Rolling news reports. And some poetry, who could possibly have predicted gentle tears while painting.
#937 theoldmortuary ponders
What does a blank page in the diary and a favourable weather forecast predict for me in June. More white wall painting is the answer. A job where radio, podcasts and pondering will be my only companions.
Convoluted meanderings of the mind. I am very grateful to not be a perfectionist in the sense of this article.
I slide about on the ‘good enough’ scale. White wall painting needs to be fairly close to the perfect end of the scale. Aesthetically pleasing and competently executed will do for me.
Creatively I love happy accidents, these are not born from perfectionism or control. Being a little casual is the thing and knowing when to stop is the golden rule of being creative. Knowing when to stop is not a retrospective skill.
With the potential of a whole day to paint walls white, knowing when to stop is going to be essential. There is going to be a nail biting moment when I am going to need to be creative. Impossible to imagine I know, but when it happens the blog will be the first to know.
#937 theoldmortuary ponders
Monday of the first week of June and possibly the dullest subject possible for a blog reveals itself. Painting white walls white and then, just to own the cliche, waiting for the paint to dry.
After the excitement of having the slatted trellis extension to the yard wall fitted, we skittered about repotting plants and finding them their happy places in the yard. Skittered is rather a bright word for the backbreaking effort of some of our repotting , but skittered is how I like to think of the process.
This weekend should have been a consolidation phase with simple tinkering but a ‘back of the mind’ irritation had formed last week, and a large pot of white paint was purchased for future white wall painting.
It is, however, impossible to sit in an imperfect white yard when there is a pot of paint winking at me in the corner
I had an hour to spare and a small corner that could be completed.
Now I have started the job I’ve made a pledge with myself to get the job done by the end of June… Let’s see how that goes.
I once pledged to write a daily blog for 3 months . 4 years later I am still at it, no end in sight. To bring some colour to this endeavour I am going to use the new digital tweak that my camera phone offers. Simply put the tweak knows the sort of digital edits that I routinely use and the images that I then save. Yesterday the surface of my white pot of paint was transformed into one of my colour block paintings.
Watching paint dry for the whole of June. You have been warned!
#936 theoldmortuary ponders.
I love a complicated image, first thing in the morning. Coffee and a complicated image, which is what this was, is even better.
On reflection, I fear I may have been a bit harsh with May. All my moaning on, about rain and dull days. I blame my genes. I was reading about the wettest and dryest cities in England yesterday. If you were to draw a triangle with each corner being a top 3 driest city. Cambridge, London, Chelmsford. All in the East of England. 75% of my gene pool comes from that geographical area, making me wet-intolerant. The other 25% comes from Wales and Norway. If I was a plant nobody would set my roots in the 3rd wettest city in England , Plymouth, and expect me to thrive. But that is exactly what I have done to myself. So if I am a little droopy in the long, wet, autumn/winter/spring months I have only myself to blame.
On a positive note the roses of Plymouth are just fabulous this year. Our local municipal park has an informal memorial rose garden and after a few days of proper good weather the fragrance and colours are vivid in the late afternoon. I am hoping for a similar transition myself.
I may even do a whole blog about roses, particularly those with their roots in cremated remains.
I am not usually a fan of formal rose gardens but the randomness and slightly scruffy haphazardness of this particular one intrigues me enough to go back.
Somewhere in a cupboard I have a cremated cat called Jasper,I wonder if he fancies going in a pot with rose roots , he might make a wonderful show.
P.s My parents cremated remains are buried in a dry old spot in the East of England, their choice.
Not for them the gaudy,giddiness of a mish-mash of blowsy multicoloured roses. They have a quiet country churchyard and were dug up by moles. I think I prefer gaudy giddiness as a memorial.
#935 theoldmortuary ponders
A milky sunset to say farewell to May. Where did that month go. Normally my favourite month, this year May has felt shorter and less productive than usual. I think my dissatisfaction is just weather-related. First World problems!
The hard graft in our yard is done . Everything is back in place and just tomatoes and courgettes to be planted into their summer positions.
There is an element of both fantasy and fact with our back yard.
Very firmly rooted on the Devon coast, we have learned over three years that Mediterranean planting is the way to be successful in the yard.
Open fencing/ trellis on the walls has given us the height for climbers. In the week since the work was finished stray climbing plants have found their way into our garden from friends and a new Wisteria has been bought. My finger hovers over a Bougainvillea on a nursery website. To be honest my finger hovers over a lot of things. A great big bucket of exterior white paint might actually be the most sensible starting point. Or I could take the fantasy to a whole new level and lose some of the walls.
Which would be a waste of good trellis. So for June, a bucket or two of white paint it is. Welcome June.
#934 theoldmortuary ponders
I don’t paint people much, which is strange as I find people fascinating. I don’t think I have any more planned exhibitions for 2024, so I could set myself a summer project. The few people I can pull out of the digital or even real-world portfolio are all thinking about something.
Maybe that is my thing, I hadn’t realised. Even a pair of dancers are not truly engaged with one another or the viewer. Lost in their individual worlds despite being physically dependent on one another.
Even my recent cold water swimmer is lost within the tiles of the shower.
The more I look the more pensive people I find. Storm Agnes, raging but full of thought.
There is even a portrait of me in our hallway , pondering.
Seems that pondering is a creative theme. I had no idea!
P s In the interests of research I went in search of a painting that has been stored here for many years.
My first portrait from my Foundation degree, hiding in lofts, attics and barns for 25 years or so.
In one of life’s uncanny twists, I discovered recently that my DNA is 10% Viking. But that is not particularly important to this ponder. I seem to have always liked people in my paintings to be deep in thought. A point worth pondering I think
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