Inadvertently we chose the first Sunday of May to banish mould and grot from the yard. If mould and grot are works of the devil with slugs and snails as devilish familiars then we did a good job. The yard is ready to welcome summer just as soon as Spring takes things seriously. In an entirely pragmatic way some beer traps have been set to encourage slugs and snails not to eat the new growth on our awakening plants.
We found this extraordinarily dense spider web in an unused plant pot.
A bit of digital tweaking and it becomes very beautiful.
And, as we live in the West Country I can pick out the face of the Devil/Winter retreating as the pot is cleaned and ready for planting up.
There was a little bit of Christmas in our Brunch outing yesterday. We had a voucher for a restaurant in Tavistock for Christmas. We love both the restaurant and the town but not its weather. So the minute predictable good weather was forecast we took a trip to Tavistock and had a great brunch seated outside on a Mediterranean/ West Devon Balcony.
The sun was shining and birds singing. Christmas-red shoes and nails were a nod to the occasion.
The dogs were welcome and approved of the quality of the sausages. Remarkably the sun kept shining so an adventure further out to Brentor was planned.
On good weather days Brentor church can be seen from miles and miles away.
Dinky red shoes and a maxi dress are not normal attire for climbing the Tors. I ditched the dinky shoes and put on something a little more rugged.
The maxidress, while not particularly suitable gave me a fabulous perspective to how women before 1920 would have felt clambering their way to worship, celebrate marriages and births or to mourn at funerals.
Billowing fabric and winds are great as sails at sea but not so useful climbing a hill.
The views were worth every gusty moment.
The church itself is small and simple.
The memorial to Percival Cocks shows that getting married at the later than average age of 43 , in a church on top of a Tor was not the bravest thing he did that year.
Bluebells filled the tiny church with their scent.
A sunny morning filled perfectly. Sensation at every turn.
First , proper sunshine swim of the year yesterday. We thought it would never come. The refreshing end to a day with the normal day to day events all achieved without a raincoat or indeed any coat at all. Even better the stone steps and walls in our swim zone had been warmed by the sun and radiated a little heat out as we changed after the ‘bob’
May the 4th be with you. A late start to Spring.
Thanks to Facebook Timehop I have been able to look at other more Spring-like May 4ths.
A vintage road trip
A Fox on the table.
Both London May 4th’s
Wisteria
And a delightful English Eccentric
Both West Country May 4th’s.
Who knows what today will bring but I am hugely happy that one of my favourite months has finally heralded some Spring Vibes. We have a destination of choice and so far, as I write this the weather of choice and we are off to enjoy a Christmas gift.
For full disclosure, I must admit to getting a little over-hot as I weeded the yard yesterday. The irony was not lost on me as that thought skimmed through my head.
4 days late welcoming May, what kept you?
Even my phone got a little giddy in the sunlight yesterday. This photograph took itself as I threw the phone into my swim bag.
Giddy is one of my favourite words, in my head it means silly exuberance caused by an external force. When I was a small person I was often told to ” Stop playing the giddy goat”
Are goats giddy creatures? My only real experience of them is at Agricultural shows or in Greece. In those environments, they always seem rather doleful animals. 50% of them suffering from over-large and cumbersome testicles.
Goats came to mind and then giddiness because two of our regular ‘bobbers’ were unable to swim with us yesterday . They sent this picture of their walk in Sussex.
Getting our backyard into shape after a long wet winter/spring involves little tweaks of DIY and trips to my favourite hardware store. A store that has been in the city since 1927 when Union Street was very posh. The street is a lot less posh now but as I love a bit of faded glamour it is a good place for an urban dog walk when I need to visit the store.
Not all the faded glamour is all that glamorous. This street was once infamous as the Red Light District and bustling hub of the city’s nightlife. The street art in some of the less-than-salubrious nooks and crannies is wonderful though.
And if I needed any illegal drugs this would be just the sort of place to find them.
I just find street art so fascinating. I love this eye because, reflected in it is another piece of local art. A sculpture by Antony Gormley which is at West Hoe.
Look II by Antony Gormley. (Rusty Reg)
While fact checking this blog I was charmed to see that google maps use the ‘ local’ name rather than the official one
In some interesting digital circularity I created this image.
The Buddha I was refurbing*, hence the trip to the hardware store, got a brief moment of wide- eyed giddiness when I superimposed street art and Rusty Reg over contemplatively closed eyelids.
All this arty pondering and I have not mentioned the really puzzling thing about my city walk. There was deer poo on the grass at the back of Union Street. What on earth was a deer/deers doing in the city centre? So unlikely I am at a loss to even ponder such a thing.
Do deers slip into the city to buy illegal drugs?, Do they attend live music gigs? Do they do DIY ?Do they like Street Art?
May 2nd and it is still raining. We have had this Buddha for some time. A long enough time for a fair amount of wear and tear. In a few moments of dry weather I gave Buddha a quick spray job of rose gold. On close inspection Buddha has become a bug hotel. Spraying Buddha was inspired by a Buddha factory and wholesale Buddha Emporium that we stumbled on in downtown Bangkok, this time last year.
We couldn’t take photos in the factory but Buddhas great and small were being moulded, built and sprayed in a production line and were for sale in wholesale numbers. Some were so big they were created in pieces.
Buddha 10 years ago in South London
My old, blue, tatty Buddha probably started life in such a place.
Tatty no more. Sprayed a bright golden coat and now waxed to give some protection against the relentless rain. The bugs who stay in this unusual bug hotel were unbothered by my renovations. This morning Buddha was adorned with webs of all shapes and sizes each one adorned with twinkling raindrops.
Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?
I could quote something really meaningful here, but to my shame, my often thought of quote is rather passive-aggressive. Rarely said aloud but thought of through gritted teeth while smiling.
” You are mistaking my tolerance for indifference”
These 7 words have a whole scale of thoughts behind them. 90% of the time the response is of no consequence outside of my thoughts, just me thinking that I am a bit annoyed or really annoyed but nothing really earth shattering . But the 10% can be an unexpected fierce retort or worse the icy chill of some final invisible line being crossed.
I hear you thinking what relevance to the picture of Kingsand Clock tower is my admission of passive-aggresive thoughts.
Well, when the sun came out on Sunday we were sat at the bottom of the clock tower basking in delicious sunlight. Coffees in hand and calm happy dogs resting on the beach. The beach was big, as the tide was out, and there were very few people about. I was pondering that our exact position on a calm and beautiful day was sometimes under 40 foot waves as the worst of winter storms hit this coastal village. Images and news article below.
My pondering and basking were interrupted by 4 people and a large dog choosing to sit right next to us. They were not basking and pondering sort of people. Noisy, competitive, faffers without a scintilla of calm about them. With a whole beach to choose why sit next to the only other people sitting peacefully pondering?
I had about twenty minutes of tolerance in me. My coffee was done, and my pondering about massive waves was unnerving me slightly. Time to remove my intolerant self from the location with one of those statements that may or may not have been heard.
” Shall we move on?”
“This is about as relaxed as my bum after a hot curry”
Oh dear!
Proof of how empty the beach was.
A clear case of me hiding a case of grumpiness in some beautiful surroundings. In a world of so many wonderful, positive quotes the few negative ones I hold onto are easier to recall.
Moving on, have you ever seen a more gorgeous village hall.
At no point in blog #900 were we more than 2 miles as the seagull flies from home. But as you can see from this map we live in a complex place water-wise. To cover that 2 miles as non-seagulls involves either a long drive involving a toll bridge. A car ferry or a foot ferry.
When I moved from Cornwall to Devon people questioned the decision but being a woman from Essex I always felt rather more like a Tamar Valley resident than a Cornish one. Cornwall can be tricksy with people not born there. Devon has a more open heart. The small move to Devon was, and is no big deal.
Devon on the horizon, Cornwall at my feet. Sometimes the other way round. Just like Jam and Cream or indeed Cream and Jam
The big deal is of course the way I serve scones.
Geography and Cream. Critical!
If in doubt eat a cheese scone no jeopardy with a cheese scone.
#900, I should write something epic and meaningful. And as it happens I can say that yesterday just like life, was about the journey not the destination. Although the destination was certainly the plan.
Cawsand, as viewed from the round window was the destination, but the weather got in the way. Heavy rain kept us prisoners in the van in a rather dull carpark so we chose to relocate to a car park with views . We had lunch, books and newspapers with us and all the facilities of our campervan. We drove to Maker Church and enjoyed the views. There are footpaths from Maker that link to the nearby South West Coastal path, we have parked there often. But never since we have had a camper van and the luxury to enjoy a lunch with comfy seats and a view. Then the rain stopped. The church and churchyard were bathed in bright sunlight. We decided to walk the dogs in the ancient churchyard.
The old churchyard was full of blue and white bluebells and a smattering of wild garlic.
The fragrance as the hundreds of flowers warmed up, was unexpectedly powerful, not sweet but heady and musky with a hint of garlic. Since I have never heard of a bluebell perfume I assume it is a redolence that is hard to replicate by the beauty industry. I could have rolled around like an excited dog in fox poo. Obviously I didn’t do that but a smell so gorgeous could easily make me do giddy things. What I did do is study old grave stones.
I love this one wearing a spring garland.
If I were ever to write a novel I would search old graveyards for character names. Yesterdays top name for a character was Philadelphia Jago.
Philadelphia Jago
Although unphotographed there was an unusual amount of Samson or Sampsons buried in the old bit of the graveyard. I wonder if that is a Cornish thing or if the name was just much more popular 200 years ago. My son is a Sam but his full name of Samuel means ‘name of God’ or ‘God has heard’ . Had I called him Samson or Sampson his name would have been far more appropriate as that means child of the sun and he, very much, is a sunny kind of person. I wonder how well Samson would have worked for him in the classrooms of the nineties.
Maybe I should finish this 900th ponder with some views from a country churchyard. They were spectacular.
Below is the morning question from my blog host. Is camping only considered camping if an overnight has occured. Yesterday was definitely camping light. Hours avoiding rain in a snug van with enough to read and eat and then much later than planned we arrived at the actual planned destination of the day. But that is a blog for another day.
I am erratically productive. Naturally most productive from 7 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon. Sunshine helps enormously. At 3 I am ready for lunch sometimes the first meal of the day. Then there is a creative hiatus until about 7 in the evening. 7 pm is my creative planning and thinking phase. Unrecognisable to outside observers who might think I am just being a regular human doing regular human stuff, but outside appearances can be deceiving. Inside my skull, all sorts of schemes are being hatched and discarded. Google Research is my friend at 7, both ends of the day if I get the chance.
Colour was my stimulation yesterday. Some Green Man Choir singing is always a good inspiration for some thinking,usually about the patriarchy and folklore. When I got home there was a lovely, accidental, Primary colour placement of some supermarket lemons.
Actually all the citrus fruits were feeling photogenic yesterday.
Ruby Grapefruit masquerading as an orange.
Only purple was missing from the mornings colour ponderings but as luck would have it Facebook had a timehop from more than 10 years ago in my Cornish garden. Obviously, a better Spring than we are having this year.
Creativity is such a strange phenomenon. Trapped by being close to the results/ punishment/rewards cycle of Productivity. Nobody gives credit for creative/productive thinking or experimentation. A huge amount of creativity never creates a tangible ‘thing’. But sometimes intangible things gather together to become something. Sometimes failure becomes success and sometimes the other way round. Sometimes I creatively ponder around in circles.
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