Tag: Australia

#1387 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Anecdotes, Serendipity1 Comment

My car is iced up. There is frost on the grass . One month ago this was my reality. If the day was not, in itself, hot enough the hot colours of two of these beach huts raises the temperature a little more. ( I am not so sure about the lilac one/)

Just looking at this makes me feel instantly warmer.

Being in hot places in the run up to Christmas presented some delicious conundrums. Images of snow where it could never possibly fall and images of roaring fires in a home that requires near-constant air conditioning.

Returning home to the Northern Hemisphere just on the cusp of Peak Christmas has given me a very casual approach to post-Christmas. Can I be bothered with denuding my house of the festive gaiety I only finished putting up on Christmas Eve.

12th night purists, or Boxing Day, early tree strippers will look on in horror as twinkling lights continue to twinkle in our house well into January.

Christmas is a delightfully social time,  there have been several holiday anecdotes to share over a mulled cider and mince pie.

Naked swimming with a StingRay went down well with a Canapé.

Not only the actual and accidental naked swimming with a Sting Ray but also the Origin Story of my small habit of swimming naked on occasions. Just Because.

When I was 17/18/19 and on the cusp of leaving home for college in London, a new hotel was built in Brentwood, Essex that featured an outdoor swimming pool. It had the gloss and pzazz of California and the weather of Essex. People posed around it in long dresses and Dinner suits. The hotel was very popular with Ford executives from nearby Dagenham for parties and dalliances. I had a friend who was regularly booked to DJ at corporate events there. Brentwood was between London home and home home. So if he was doing a gig there I could catch up with him from either direction as an assistant who enjoyed a free to me party for dancing, I also lugged numerous boxes of vinyl as my part of the bargain. Dancing and lugging vinyl was hot work, even in December. Why not have a quick swim in a barely used pool before catching the last train home in whichever direction I was travelling. Long before security cameras I doubt anyone ever knew.

I pretty much gave up naked swimming in my responsible years but since becoming a year round sea swimmer the occasional urge to be at one with cold water and nature in just my skin comes upon me.

Nothing untoward has ever happened until my StingRay moment last month.

I had positioned a large swim towel for fairly instant modesty. A towel which I completely ignored once I realised I was  at one with nature that could quite possibly do me harm.

I scampered up this boardwalk butt naked with one name ringing in my mind. Steve Irwin.

A complete over-reaction I am sure, but my early years in the cold water of Brentwood, Essex had only prepared me for grumpy hotel staff. Not creatures with stinging, life harming bits.

#1383 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn FamilyLeave a comment
Sydney Harbour Bridge. The Opera House is just visible

This monotone image was my first sight of Sydney Harbour Bridge at about 6 am. I love it when nature dials down colour to monotone. Time is suspended and real life is presented, as if in a black and white film.

One month on I realise that this could not have been a more fitting first moment.

When I was 10 my Aunt, Uncle and Cousin migrated to Australia. There were complex reasons for this. It was my first experience of heartbreak not caused by death, but by distance-created absence. We had been an extremely tight familial group. Two sisters, their husbands and two girls, both only children. My cousin was severely handicapped and this was the reason the family sought a new life in Australia.

My uncle, who was a nursery man and landscape gardener,was employed to be a plantsman and landscape gardener for the Sydney Opera House Project and nearby botanic gardens.

Apart from occasional ‘bluey’ air mail letters our only contact was ardent following of news coverage of one of the great building projects of its time. All in black and white.

Which is why this image delights me.

Hello old friend. You look just the same as in 1960’s news broadcasts and papers.

Of course I promised you, theoldmortuary blog readers sunshine throughout January.

Two days later.

Funny to think that my uncle would have watched this building being built whilst leaning on a shovel or at the wheel of earth moving equipment. As was often the case in the sixties he did a really manual job while wearing country gentleman clothing. Brogue shoes, tailored trousers, a shirt and tie and a ‘Sports’ jacket with a fine knit Fair-Isle jumper.

Our story | Sydney Opera House https://share.google/Wg5elSKQnWeBIcIyg

©Sarah Barker

Although in the heat of Sydney he might have slipped off the jacket and rolled his sleeves up.

#12 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Box1 Comment
© Songlines The Box. The Seven Sisters.

My Wednesdays will be a real bright spot in the long,dark, drag of a British winter. Songlines a major International exhibition of the art of Australian First Nations People has opened today, Thursday, at The Box in Plymouth where I work. Yesterday was training and orientation day, like many such days in any subject I came away disorientated and aware of how little I know about the subject being taught, in this case non- western art. If those were my only thoughts on this wonderful exhibition that would be quite enough to deal with, but Songlines is not that simple. The subject matter of Songlines is both Ancient and Modern and is a thorny old subject to get my head around.

The heroines and positive energy of the Songlines in this exhibition are the seven sisters who use guile, magic and determination to protect themselves from a dangerous sexual predator who is named Wati Nyiru.

Shape Shifting and long distance travel are two of the methods used by the sisters to protect themselves. In the picture above, the seven sisters are expressed as highly decorated ceramic vases. Wati Nyiru is the malevolent vase lurking in the corner.

That is the limit of my day one understanding that I have the confidence to write down. I am in luck though. Such is the significance of this Exhibition, the BBC has made a T.V programme about it with Mary Beard . A Professor of Classics at Cambridge University, I have every confidence that Mary will shine a bright torch on this exhibition and succinctly explain all the nuances of these stories that it would take me forever to work out.

I have a date with her on Friday evening to watch her programme, Inside Culture. To be fair I often watch her either on a Friday or on catch up but never usually with the concentration that I will give this weeks programme.