This painting is on a noticeboard near one of my regular dog walks at Mount Wise. I see it so often and yet until yesterday I had never given it time. It is painted in the style of an Old Master and features a rural bucolic theme of a shepherd tending his sheep, overlooking the Hamoaze. For the first time ever I realised that the painting has modern super yachts moored at one of the pontoons. I am going to have to go back and actually read the noticeboard now. Give it some time in fact.
I suppose I was alert to incongruity yesterday.
Yesterday a German warship sailed, as they often do, up towards Devonport Dockyard. Not something that would have been calmly observed in 1943!
It was firework night last Sunday which gives me an excuse to share this wonderful photograph by my friend Bill. Bill is married to Polly who I met while working at The Heart Hospital. The Heart Hospital no longer exists except in the hearts of the many people who loved working there. Work friendships are what keep us sane while we are doing our jobs, some of them escape the boundaries of work and become real life friendships. Many of the friendships forged at work go on to be real but only possible via Social Media which is where most of my Heart Hospital friendships continue now. Distance is the problem, where once we were working shoulder to shoulder, saving lives. We are now scattered all over the world. But the threads of friendship are as strong however we maintain contact. Social Media has allowed Hybrid friendships to occur. Sometimes people who were peripheral friends in real life become closer on-line because you discover more interests in common. Sometimes a friendship occurs that will never be ‘ real world’. I find the evolution and maintenance of friendships in the age of the World Wide Web fascinating. I know that for many the internet can be a hard and unpleasant place to be; but good friendships can be embellished and enhanced in a way that would not always be possible in real life.
Yesterday was a ‘sun’day and this is a frangipane,almond and raspberry brioche which formed an early part of my day. My ongoing symptoms of anosmia ( loss of smell and taste) has made me mad for the combination of almond and raspberry baked goods. I know it is a traditional and even classic pairing of flavours but it was never a favourite of mine.That is until my last bout of Covid, 18 months ago, which seems to have permanently damaged my olfactory system. My grip on taste and smell has always been odd. When I was younger the first sign of an incoming migraine was a hypersensitive smell ability. For about 8 hours before the migraine arrived I had such a powerful sense of smell I could have been a police tracker dog. My sense of smell was so acute. This was not a good thing for a woman who worked in hospitals. Then came the crushing, piercing head pain, for however long it took, and then a few days of total anosmia when I had to stop cooking from scratch and eat food other people had cooked or readymade meals. For several days after I would have to ask my fellow diners what I was eating.
So here I am now with about 20% smell and taste and my lifelong personal preferences turned on their head. Cheese straws my #1 baked goods are just pap and a bakewell tart, about #90 for most of my life is now my new idea of Nirvana. Taste and smell are also transitory and fragile, one mouthful is like a flavour bomb and maybe 20 seconds later there is just nothing. In the bright sunshine of yesterday Drakes Island was just like my flavour experience. One minute it was there.
And 20 seconds later it was gone.
Eating now is about discovering the things I can taste which is, in many ways, so liberating.I can no longer head straight for what I know I like on a menu but experimentation is a whole gorgeous new world.
32 years ago this was not even a question. The first website went up in 1991.
In 1991 a favourite website looked like this.
In 1991 we would all have been quite used to questions about our favourite music, food or books and any other of millions of experiences. For most of us these questions cause a fair amount of thinking/pondering. Favourite things need placement, timing and circumstance. You could ask me to create a list of my ten favourite things today and I could probably come up with an interesting list. Tomorrow that list might have some different answers. Next year my list may be significantly different. I am fairly certain a favourite website will never feature in my lists. However reliant I am on the World Wide Web I can’t see a time when I would ever bother to have, or even think about having a favourite website. The real world is so much more worthy of being favourited.
An early or timely blog appears hard on the heels of a late one. Today’s prompt from my blog hosts is a strange one for a whole host of reasons, all of them impractical. But for the sake of a fantasy natter I would choose the ages of 15 and 16 to repeat. In much the same mindset as repeating an exam that I failed or required a higher mark from. Do it again and do it better.
Is there an age or year of your life you would re-live?
There was much, in my opinion, that I got right. But goodness, some confidence would have made things better. One thing that I wish I had realised I got right was my choice of Lipstick. If only I had known that No. 7 Plum Beautiful, was the Pinnacle Lipstick of choice for me. Life could have been simpler if I had known that my first tentative purchase at a make- up counter was ‘the one.’
It would not be the ages of 15 and 16 if I don’t mention sex. How I wish I had known less about it, my mother ran sexual health clinics. The nuts and bolts. The nitty gritty. The facts plain and simple, felt indelibly etched onto every part of me. I wanted no part of it because I knew too much. I hid myself in books. Lord of the Rings and War and Peace. Books so big and so lacking in any form of romance or lust that I could immerse myself away from the hurly burly of a normal adolescence.
I discovered a love for live music and dancing. Happily attending gigs all over the place, often alone and relying on public transport. That world was not a scary space for me.
If only I could have lived those vivid, vibrant years with wisdom and more friends.
All my own faults of course, nobody forced me to be that way. Thank goodness I got the lipstick right.
Sometimes I wonder if I should read The Lord of the Rings and War and Peace again…
It is not often that the days ponder must wait until after the sun has started to set. Today this was always going to be the case. I was up early to buy croissants to fuel a morning of lively conversation with the bobbers. Straight after that a chat with some fellow Bookworms and then deep conversation with a one year old. My day was replete with gorgeous, gregarious women who all talk about anything and everything with wit and wisdom.
A chance encounter with a word perked up my day even more.
Some time ago the bobbers swam in a sea filled with Pilchards and White Bait. The seagulls thought all their Christmases had come at once, with a huge shoal seemingly trapped in Tranquility Bay. They swooped and dived as we bobbed and swam. Their disturbance causing millions of fish scales to be loose in the water. We emerged, twinkling like a troupe of exotic dancers. Fish scales stuck to our skin so tenaciously that even vigorous rubbing could not remove them until we used soap and hot water.
R.Morton Nance revealed a word precisely designed for this phenomenon which afflicts fishermen all the time.
Gollowillians are fish scales incidentally attached to humans.
Now this may be the first time Gollowillians knocks tatterdemalion into second place in a blog. I had planned to natter on about things that are dilapidated but that will have to wait for another day. Because the sun has finally set.
Storm #3 of the storm season has had quite an impact.
Not perhaps in the way I may have thought though. Ciarán reminded a friend that I had painted Storm Agnes and wondered if she was for sale. She is as it happens and now she is off to a new home.
Storm Agnes
Storm Babet didn’t really impact us too much although she did take out the road to one of my regular beaches.
In the eye of the storm at 2am
I know how I would paint Babet, a voluptuous storm, who caused chaos in an unexpected place with less energy than you would think. A storm directed from a chaise long perhaps.
Ciarán though, no clues in the name . Until I looked him up known as ‘ the little dark one’ Keir-on is how the weather forecasters pronounce the name. Ciarán is doing dramatic, theatrical stuff on our coast. Attention grabbing and flamboyant splashing and crashing on the outdoor lido, the sort of thing that gets you noticed. Hyperlocally Ciarán has been less wildly beautiful. More of a truculent bully, pushing over the bins and scattering domestic rubbish on the streets. Here he is just bashing the steps down to the tidal pool.
I have a little idea how he will be painted now. The little dark storm
November blows in on a storm. Yesterday was dog grooming day. A very recent storm had damaged the road that would normally take me to Wembury beach after I dropped them off for a couple of hours of pampering. The weather was already pretty unpredictable so I had packed a raincoat, a large beach towel and a tin containing greetings cards. I was determined that my dog-free hours were going to be well spent. Weather and the tide, not fate was going to be the deciding factor on how I spent my morning. At the point that the beach access road was closed I took off, up steep valley lanes that were covered in slippery, damp fallen leaves. After two hair raising reversing events I found a car park at a place called Wembury Point.
As I arrived the heavens opened which negated any value my raincoat had, the beach towel was already useless as I was now very many metres up from sea level. The tin of greetings cards it would have to be. So here we have it, confession time.
I am dreadful at sending out Christmas cards in a timely fashion. I have made all the excuses in the world and often opt for the donating to charity option. None of that helps my guilt as the cards from more diligent people drop through our letterbox in December. This year I made a plan. I have bought Charity Christmas cards and some note cards. The note cards can be written at any time, no pressure no deadlines and no excuses. Inside I have popped a small Christmas card bearing the words ‘This may be your 1st Christmas card of 2023’
Creating a specific tin with everything that I need has transformed my task. If I know I am going to be hanging around doing nothing more than scrolling through my phone, I grab the tin and write notes to friends and family. Yesterday 12 cards were written and posted in the time it took for a storm to pass.
I even had one of those moments when a forgotten address just floated into my head when I wasn’t actually thinking about it.
With an hour or so left the rain had cleared enough for me to do a clifftop walk. The area where I was walking was formerly a naval establishment called H.M.S Cambridge. Only a small radar station remains and the land around is being gently returned to nature. The groundworkers making the transformation are not human.
Dartmoor ponies have been moved to Wembury point to gently graze the area back to a more natural state. When I set off on my walk they were all hard at it. But on my return a lunchtime rest had prevailed.
Not only ponies, when I returned to the car park two large refuse collecting lorries had parked up for their crews to enjoy a break with beautiful views. This was absolutely in my favour. As they started their engines to leave I decided to follow them down the narrow lanes. No awkward reversing stand-offs with oncoming drivers on slippery lanes. Nobody expected two refuse lorries to reverse and so, as a convoy of three, we returned to civilisation easily with other people backing up.
Two groomed dogs, 12 notes with cards written and a good walk. Time to get on with real life.
Here I am the original Halloween grinch starting a blog with a carved pumpkin on the 31st of October. Needs must. I have 3 granddaughters, something has to give. Hannah, who has lived in North America, feels much warmer towards the event and carved a vomiting pumpkin.
I am going to have to find a way around my long held dislike. Eventually I can introduce the small people to the Mexican Day of the Dead. A festival I very much admire, who wouldn’t want one last party before entering a different realm.
Maybe we will enter a new phase of marking Halloween with pumpkins good food and wholesome autumness. A Harvest Festival/ Halloween mash up. Maybe with some magic wishes from good witches thrown in.
As if by magic, coincidence or me being sneaky the blog host suggestion for today mentions wishes from a genie. Agnostic in the mystical world and the religious I will take my wishes from whatever source is offering them.
You have three magic genie wishes, what are you asking for?
World Peace and good health for all knocks off two wishes instantly. But the third would have to stay in my pocket. I would need to observe the chaos I had caused by using the first two. No one ever gives parameters or protocols with wishes. The strength or longevity of the wish is never mentioned. Surely wishes should come with a set of instructions or a users guide. Improvising or just hoping for the best seems somewhat irresponsible. Maybe my very first wish should be for some learned guidance, in life and in fantasy.
People who work 24 hour shifts should not be allowed into retail spaces after the shift ends. 10 years after this shop was just a short bus ride from my place of work my art materials store still holds weird and wonderful art materials that I bought from this very specialised shop. Their website suggests they sell hard to find items.
Not hard enough to find, for my art material acquiring habit. I knew exactly how to get there. Even when running on zero energy I loved to look at and then purchase some of the amazing things they sell. A little bit of sparkle or deeply pigmented paint brings me deep joy. Some of my supplies are so special I will probably never finish them.
Money well spent I think, madly perhaps, when I wasn’t thinking straight but goodness do they give me pleasure. Sometimes I just look at them , colourful moments of potential creative pleasure.
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