Tag: dailyprompt

#804 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art, Food ( but this is not a food blog), pondering, Serendipity1 Comment

What’s your favorite thing to cook?

I love cooking anything with British summer fruits. Not a thing I do much of in the depth of winter. But where cooking fails, art steps up. I had ordered some romantically named water colours in the depth of winter, they arrived on the cusp of February and the little test piece I painted when they arrived, had all the piquancy of my favourite summer puddings.

The names themselves are delicious.

School Disco

Byzantium

Caravan Green

Gooseberry

Rowan berry

I doodled away giving everything except Byzantium a run out on paper. To be honest I was being sidetracked.

I was actually supposed to be creating a pillowcase from an old pyjama jacket.

But the temptation to try the new paints suddenly became urgent. Probably because sewing the slippery fabric was as difficult as it had been to sleep in the pyjamas.

I didn’t give Byzantium a moment on the brush. I’m not sure why. But it gives me a fine excuse to have another doodle this weekend.These paints are all hand made by Tansy Horgan.

https://tansyhargan.bigcartel.com/

I have a project in mind that will need Byzantium. I am slightly concerned that Byzantium may be a bit of a bully. Caravan Green turned out to be exactly that. Hugely versatile on his own, but a little bit of a bully when mixing with others. Gooseberry was a dream,fading out to something imperceptibly beautiful the more dilute I made it.

School Disco was a dream. As pink and pushy as Barbie. I was always a rather conflicted Disco goer, particularly the termly torture of a School Disco. I loved to dance, but in that dreadful hierarchy of teenage years my acne and bookishness cast me as a wallflower. Not that I needed to be picked to be danced with. I have always had enough chutzpah to dance as if no-one is watching, but the judgement of the school ‘beautiful people’ is a harsh spotlight to step into.

And lastly Rowanberry.

Does anybody apart from birds eat a Rowanberry? The paint was fab. A super bright red/orange with a bitter edge. I can’t wait to pair it with Byzantium on a doodle.

Apparently it is a foraging classic.

Easy Homemade Rowan Berry Jelly

©LarderLove

Goodness it is good to get back to classic @theoldmortuary pondering. February really does feel like the start of something.

#804 theoldmortuary ponders

#803 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn blogging, dog walks, SerendipityLeave a comment
Thursday February 1st 2024 9:15am.

No more Bloganuary prompts. A reason to be cheerful. Signing up to respond to a daily prompt was very against my serendipitous pondering style. 31 days of responding/conforming to writing about a subject generated by an external source. I knew it would go against the grain. Predictably for the first few days I slightly dreaded reading the prompt, but just digging in and accepting whatever came my way, became a brief and limited new way to think about blogging. The prompts took me to different things to ponder. I absolutely missed my freestyle approach. I also missed the repetitive nature of pondering and blogging about the normality of daily life. But Bloganuary has given me more to think about and I may mix up my blogging offering as a result of my January/Bloganuary experience.

But for February 1st I am straight back onto the daily repetition of the morning dog walk.

Embellished this morning by bright sunshine.

And the continued luminosity of the cows.

Happy St Brigid Day, patron saint of cattle, among her many other accomplishments.

Please disregard the prompt below. I am conducting a small algorithm experiment.

Write about your first computer.

My brain, nobody needs to read about that

#802 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn pondering, Serendipity3 Comments

What’s the thing you’re most scared to do? What would it take to get you to do it?

I am fairly risk averse so there are probably many things that I am scared to do. I just don’t confront them on daily, weekly or even annual basis. I am very far from a control freak but as an individual I very much like to be in control of my situations and destiny. Surrendering that control is a decision I like to make for myself. Trust, respect, experience, knowledge and love help me to surrender my desire to be in control. Anything that would make me take truly risky harmful decisions scares me and nothing is likely to change my thinking.

If that makes me sound timid or fearful. That is not the case at all.

‘ What’s the worst that could happen” is a fairly regular thought.

Creativity and knowledge grows in the spaces created by taking a calculated risk . It’s the uncalculated risks I avoid.

#801 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn weather2 Comments

What do you complain about the most?

Almost certainly the weather is the thing I moan about the most. Not perhaps to other people, but my internal dialogue is a vivid cacophony of weather considerations. I was not always a weather watcher, but ten years as a dog owner has made me appreciate the value of a walk without rain, or more unusually, a walk without scolding hot pavements. I have three weather apps on my phone. In addition to my dog walking considerations there is also the small matter of sea swimming. You might think that plunging into the sea year round would make the weather largely irrelevant,but storms and rainfall affect safety and water quality. There is also the small matter of changing after a swim. Rain on a salty body makes drying and dressing really tricky. Everything becomes sticky or tacky. Clothes that would normally glide on get caught in mysterious places or cling to the first piece of skin they touch.

Tiny garden weather stations are a thing. Controlled by a smartphone they provide hyperlocal weather information. I am a little tempted to get one. I might moan internally about the weather, but I have also become fascinated and intrigued by how the weather can change my life.

While writing this I realised I preferred the word mithering to moaning. The dictionary suggests there is nothing to choose between them.

I am not by nature a complainer or even a moaner in the normal day to day. But being a weather mitherer has something about it which I rather like.

#800 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Rituals, Serendipity, SportLeave a comment

What are your favorite sports to watch and play?

Sport does not feature on any of my favourites lists. I’ve often done sport and have watched with interest too. But I would say, that sport doesn’t really float my boat. But that would be to dismiss the only sport I have competed in, to a reasonable level. When I moved to Cornwall I discovered gig rowing. My first experience of actually enjoying being in a team. Coincidentally, and really significantly different, the only televised sport I actively choose to watch is the Oxford and Cambridge Boat race. It was the only sporty thing my family were ever interested in watching on the television, when I was young. I still watch it every year. There is no jeopardy, the same two teams compete on the same course every year. One of them wins.

Not being passionate about sport feels unusual. I have really enjoyed any sporting occasion I have attended or taken part in, but I sense that it is the people watching and the sense of occasion that excites me, not the sport itself. The spark of interest has never turned into a flame.

Oh how I wish the prompt for pondering #800 had been a subject I could really ponder about. But we are coming to the end of January/Bloganuary and I have stuck to my commitment. Not subscribing to Dry January has allowed me to enjoy a hot pineapple and rum cocktail while pondering #800. The pictures in this blog are very much about my normal blogging behaviour. A gentle meandering through the thoughts and activities of the day.

Some coastal path walking, at Cape Cornwall and the Penwith Heritage Coast in the far West of Cornwall. Pondering on a sofa by a fire with my dogs.

#799 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Daft Questions, Serendipity1 Comment

What would you do if you won the lottery?

Maybe I would take up playing the nose flute.  There is no sense of scale to this question which makes it imponderable. A £10 win would barely register, a win of millions would be life altering and probably not just for me. Neither would make me any better at playing the nose flute.

Which I suppose is the definition of something money can’t buy.

Wikipedia and Google are available should you feel the urge to investigate nose flutes. The nose flautist in the picture is on my current regular dog walk. I am rather charmed by him but not perhaps his choice of music making.

I have learned that regular mouth flautists have a range of extended techniques. One of which sounds fascinating. Flutter tonguing. A nose flautist has no such entertaining conversation points or indeed techniques to practice. Most of us being incapable of eliciting so much as a tremble from our nostrils.

Would you ever buy a second-hand nose flute?

I realise I have used a possible extended flautist technique to answer a prompt that seems pointlessly unanswerable.

#798 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Books1 Comment

What books do you want to read?

The book I want to read this weekend is a David Bowie biography by Dylan Jones. What will stop me? Possibly my location, a Georgian house in Penzance full of fabulous things, and the weather which is crisp and bright with sunshine that wouldn’t be out of place in May.

I even have the perfect snuggery for reading.

But with that snuggery comes the temptation of other books.In particular one about Interior Design by Barta Heuman. Oh my goodness a cornucopia of advice about living with things that make every room sing.

David Bowie is instantly on my back burner while I greedily tuck into her book. Imagine a Swedish Designer who encourages ‘stuff’. No sleek minimalism for my new favourite designer. Oh no, she encourages eclecticism and individuality.

©Instagram

Other peoples books… and mine.

#797 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Food ( but this is not a food blog), Hugo and Lola, Serendipity1 Comment

Write about a few of your favorite family traditions.

This question caught me on the hop. We are a very small family. Beyond meeting up, and supporting each other, on the good days and the bad, we pretty much conform. We have high days and holidays. Long walks, short walks. Shared experiences and adventures. We also do the humdrum and the mundane. Our one idiosyncratic tradition is the purchase of chocolate eclairs to celebrate, commiserate or just perk up a dull day.

Specifically, a chocolate eclair marks the death of a family member who was run over and killed while walking her dog. She loved chocolate eclairs and never needed an excuse to buy a box of four to share with a cup of tea. Our continued purchase of eclairs, after her death, doesn’t come from a place of sadness. It is a sense of solidarity.

I was caught on the hop because I have never bothered to photograph eclairs and to many who read this blog an eclair may be a mystery. One shockingly bad photo in my archive.

Maybe one of my tasks in 2024 should be to learn to bake eclairs. Not as a replacement for the traditional ‘box of four’ but as a useful life skill.

Our dogs are the colours of a chocolate eclair.

#796 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn SerendipityLeave a comment

What do you enjoy doing most in your leisure time?

Here’s the thing. I slightly struggle with leisure time. My parents spent their leisure time doing practical things. My Dad relaxed by doing DIY to exacting standards. My mum made clothes and cooked to similar standards and knitted while watching T.V or listening to the Radio. So leisure leisure did not exist in my childhood. My parents were both the epitome of the Silent Generation.

I, of course, am a Boomer. Apart from Competitiveness I am Classic Boomer. I am mildly competitive but not driven by it as many boomers are. Unless someone is a horrible human in which case I am like a sneaky assassin. Covert competitiveness is my super power, but not a leisure pursuit so irrelevant to this blog.

My leisure time activities are not as completely practical as my parents. But not far off. All my leisure time activities are goal orientated except perhaps one. Coffee, cake and people watching, even with that there is a level of disappointment if any of the three components fail to deliver. Maybe I should attempt something utterly futile to increase leisure quota, life may never be the same again.

#795 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity1 Comment

I moved to the Tamar Valley about 35 years ago. The area is both an AONB, Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and has many SSI’s, Sites of Scientific Interest. For a long while I had a job that required me to travel through the length and breadth of the region. An area stretching from the North Devon and North Cornwall coast down to Plymouth on the South coast.

Name an attraction or town close to home that you still haven’t got around to visiting.

For this reason I am very familiar with every town and many villages in the area. Some of them are not even that close time-wise because the roads are not the quickest. Exploring an area by working was fascinating because like a television anthropologist I met the people of the region. Although, thank goodness, I didn’t need to creep around in hiking gear followed by a camera operator and a translator. ( Sometimes a translator would have been very useful)

I’ve not been as diligent with attractions but I am fairly confident that I have not missed anything that would have embellished my life indelibly.

As we edge out of January there is an accidental attraction. Roadsides throughout the Valley start to sprout daffodils. A lovely consequence of World War II. The Tamar Valley used to grow millions of daffodils to supply the rest of Britain with early cut flowers. During the war the fields were needed to grow food and the bulbs were tossed into the hedgerows. For the next three months the descendants of these discarded bulbs will brighten our journeys.