If you won two free plane tickets, where would you go?
Everywhere thank you very much. Unlimited flights in and out of Bristol for the rest of my life with any connecting flights that I might need to get to wherever I might fancy. Whenever I fancy.
What’s your go-to comfort food?
Comfort and reliable. Two answers in one. Neither are Fine Dining or by any stretch of anyone’s imagination interesting.
Comfort food=Marmite toast or any spread on top of toast with butter on it. My top 3
Marmite
Marmalade
Ground Black Pepper
In all iterations the butter must be real and salty.
Reliable food has evolved in my life. Good quality shop-bought lasagne if I am feeling reliably fancy. 35 years with a home in the far west of England has taught me that the humble Cornish Pasty made well is a lifesaver.
Not all pasties are made equal and at their worst they are a pappy meat and potato pie with a faint aroma of human body odour. At their best they are a peppery blend of beef and onions combined with swede/turnip and potato wrapped in perfect golden pasty.
Yesterday was a spreadsheet kind of day. If everything went well there was a twenty minute gap in which to eat a pasty before an art exhibition, Private View and a trip to the Theatre to see Hamilton. The spreadsheet day and the pasty.
As a tick box exercise the spreadsheet day went well. With. 95% success rate. We dropped 5% because the Artist at the Private View made a speech at the beginning. So fine words were heard but not a single brushstroke of paint passed before our eyes.
Hamilton was fabulous and the pasty fed us both before our evening started (warm) and at 11pm (cold) . That is a reliable, even comforting comestible.
It is almost 7 years since I last had a formal interview of any sort. I am completely out of practice of describing myself to others.
Does anyone really listen to, or remember a self-description?
How would you describe yourself to someone?
People are so busy making their own judgements and assessments of the person they see before them.
I care less and less what people make of me as I get older. First and chance encounters are just that. Repeated encounters build a more accurate, nuanced portfolio of my character traits.
I can think of people who have quite the wrong idea of me. But their narrative suits their purpose. Others perhaps know me a little better than I know myself.
I always think people, myself included are a lot like Avocados. Their core values and attributes exist within the enormous seed, but the pulp changes and develops over a lifetime, while the skin just slowly ages but shows evidence of the good times and the harms that shape the whole fruit. The skin of course, is all that is ever seen until a sharp knife is applied. Time to halt the avocado analogy I think.
My Life as an Avocado- the autobiography I will never write.
What’s the story behind your nickname?
No nickname ever and so no backstory. The closest I get to a nickname is ‘Bobber’.
As a founder member of a swimming group of just under 20 people including past members who predominantly swim in one location we, as a group are recognisable, we have named sweatshirts, and have a certain positive notoriety in the swimming boom at Firestone Bay.
Groups are not for everyone and ours is as unstructured as a group can be. Just a WhatsApp group to organise our swimming time so no-one has to swim alone.
” So are you a bobber” is a fairly regular question.
Followed by ” Why are you called Bobbers”
Because mostly we just bob about nattering, some focused swimming is involved, but actually the most valuable thing is the bobbing and nattering. Putting our many worlds to rights and our sense of belonging to a supportive and caring community.
What bothers you and why?
It has been a blisteringly hot week. I have always been a lover of hot weather but as I have aged my tolerance is reducing. I have a new understanding of seeking out shade, a light breeze, avoiding the hottest parts of the day and sun hats. Sleeping at home daily has become like the giddy first nights of a holiday trying to adjust to flimsy bed coverings.
Abroad I love the abstract shapes that sheets form after a night of fitful sleep in a foreign climate.
This week I have had abstraction at home.
Which I agree does not look all that exciting, but by reducing the detail and adding some colour my bed looks like a sculpture.
Something I might never had discovered if my tolerance for heat had not diminished. So maybe I am not so bothered after all.
Is that why the Italians in particular are so brilliant at creating folds of fabric from marble. Bright Sunlight and folds of bed linen every morning before they even get up.
What could you let go of, for the sake of harmony?
Sharing my opinions, is something I am willing to withhold for the sake of harmony. As long as I value the harmony I am preserving. But there are times when you just have to cast harmony to the wind and fly an opinion up the metaphorical flag pole to catch the same wind. Opinions are like the devices put on beaches to keep the sand in place.
Sometimes they work, other times they don’t.
And sometimes, for the sake of harmony, opinions are just not required. There is a path to harmony without them.
Describe your most memorable vacation.
All vacations are windows into a different world and are almost all completely memorable for a wide variety of reasons. To choose one over all the others at this precise moment would be bonkers. Maybe when I have had my actual last holiday and I have time on my hands and feet, in some other realm, I could make a spreadsheet and engage with a futile holiday comparison. Every holiday, mini break, weekend away is a privilege. Each is a unique experience. Describe my most memorable vacation? Not a chance. I may not have had it yet and in all honesty my bandwidth for things being memorable, both good and bad is huge. But every vacation really is a window into someone else’s world. A moment to be treasured not graded.
Written from my window into other worlds.
What’s your definition of romantic?
My mother, who was in most ways a very pragmatic person, had a guilty secret. She loved a romantic novel.
I have inherited her pragmatism but not her taste in books. Romance books are not my thing unless the romance is just one facet of an engaging narrative. Romancing, romantic gestures etc, just feel a little icky and coersive in specifically romantic novels. There is nearly always a power imbalance or jeopardy involved in the interactions between the people involved, there would be no story without such things.
However, as a woman whose glass is habitually half-full there must be a huge dose of my mothers love of romance residing in my soul, because life is sometimes shitty and yet I always try to find something positive in whatever situation.
The tidal pool was my destination for the morning dog walk and later I swam from the beach beside it.
For both visits it was rather a seaweedy experience.
But my glass-half-full, romantic head will only ever remember a beautiful morning walk and a delicious lunchtime swim, not the weed that made the pool unusable and stuck on my skin. Romance is seeing beyond irritation, embracing the moment and finding the golden nuggets in every experience. However mad that seems.
Not paying too much attention to the seaweed of life.
Harold S Kushner* emphasized the importance of finding good in every situation, stating, “If you concentrate on finding whatever is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul,”.
*
Soul nurturing, that is pretty romantic in my opinion.
Are there things you try to practice daily to live a more sustainable lifestyle?
I try wherever possible to buy second-hand things. Clothes, books and items for our home in particular. More so in the last 20 years, to a lesser extent for the last 50. I also buy canvasses for my large paintings from charity shops. The large box canvasses that retailers sell in their thousands for people to adorn their walls with instant pre-curated art which are then abandoned for the next easy home switcharound.
I have been doing it long enough to be confident in my purchases. I would say that my success rate is slightly higher than it was when I used to buy more new items.
The world has caught up with me and passed me by. Second-hand, thrift, vintage, pre-loved are the current trending trends. There are a huge variety of new ways of doing what I have been doing for decades and yet I stick to the methods that work for me.
1.Charity Shops. Giving wisely and receiving all in one transaction.
2. Ebay- used with caution and learned wisdom.
3. Gifts or swaps with friends. One woman’s error is another woman’s gem.
Fast Fashion teases and traps me on occasion, and I feel no shame because however fast it is at inception I know that the garment will be with me for the long haul and will be styled with something from the last century. On a woman from the last century who sometimes puts pockets in things that didn’t start life with pockets.
Today I commented that two of my friends looked fabulous. Both whispered the word ‘Primark’ and then the word ‘Pockets’.
Will I be able to keep away..
I will try.
Are there things you try to practice daily to live a more sustainable lifestyle?
Sometimes I can be very trying.
How important is spirituality in your life?
I would say spirituality is one of the great intangibles. It presents in so many ways. I have no idea where I sit on the spirituality spectrum. Nowhere near the elite end, but probably more spiritual than a broad bean.
Proof of how intangible spirituality is I looked up the broad bean only to discover that it is quite the Spiritual Legume.
Broad beans, also known as fava beans, have a complex symbolic history, particularly in relation to death and the afterlife. While not universally considered spiritual, they have been associated with funerary rituals and the belief that they contain the souls of the deceased in some cultures. However, other traditions view them as symbols of resurrection, good luck, or even royalty.
Here’s a more detailed look:
Symbolism related to death and the underworld:
Symbolism related to resurrection and reincarnation:
Other symbolic meanings:
Research is a fabulous thing. I have just learned that Fava beans are Broad Beans. I had no idea, but I also discovered that spirituality-wise I am exactly a broad bean.
I have been enlightened.
*The Buddha with the fractured skull lives in our yard and has lived in my last three gardens.
She was a regular,uninjured, deity until a freak mini tornado in South London picked her up and tossed her against a garage wall. Her left Temporal bone was caved in. An earthly rather than spiritual injury.
Instantly she was turned from a peaceful piece of garden adornment into a unique planter. Her scars and missing bits of skull are covered by plants as she lays serenely in our yard.
theoldmortuary.design 