Sad news from our iddylic swimming/ bobbing spot. Over the weekend a local woman died from a heat related medical event at Tranquility Bay. Flowers from the swimming community absolutely reflect the vibrancy of the people who regularly swim here and who will be feeling her loss.
Firestone Bay was popping this weekend. Early dog walks to avoid the heat. High tide swims to mitigate the heat. Evening dog walks to avoid the heat again. + A piece of outstanding good luck.
On one of our walks we found this mirror in a yard give away. It was very hot to carry such a heavy thing home so we hid it in a bobbing friends garden and drove around to collect it in the cool of the early morning. It is going to live on a wall in our yard.
For now it is propped at ground level but it will be mounted so that it reflects the Olive Tree.
The Olive tree is also planted in a pot that a neighbour gave away. Serendipitous finds.
Alongside the heat of the day a feisty wind sprung up this afternoon . My afternoon swim or dip was spent in a large rockpool. I only ever bother with it in the winter months usually . But today with the heat and waves pouring on it was like a salty jacuzzi.
Sunday Serendipity in Stonehouse. The only plans for the day were an early swim. Demonstrating the things I really missed during the skinny dip of last week.
#1529 theoldmortuary ponders. Part 1
My gloves! I dislike getting crampy hands and forearms when swimming so red palmed , cocktail length swim gloves are the essential essential for a swim. But skinny dipping is an all or nothing activity so for one night only the gloves were off.
But after the swim we fancied a walk and there was a Food and Craft market close by, where our favourite London coffee is served and where sausage and bacon baps might have caught our attention.
Then it was just a short walk to watch some more Gig racing.
With the perfect viewpoint to see the finish line and see some early victories.
How often is it this easy to watch an International event?
Our eyes were particularly peeled for one team.We used to both row for Rame.
Soon enough we had to turn for home, even more dull yardening jobs to be done before the weekend was done with us. And more Gig racing on TV when the sun was just too much for us.
Gardening, Gig Rowing, Yardening, Gig Rowing. Saturday was the second day of the European Gig Racing Championships in Plymouth Sound. It was also Gardening Saturday at the Tennis Club I help to run. We could look up from our garden chores and watch gigs racing past our club.
While listening to classical guitar, from Walter who had swapped out his secateurs for something more beautiful.
The afternoon was Yardening time. Not by any stretch as exciting or colourful as the morning session. Some white wall painting and repotting of plants. But the entertainment was the same. This time watching the Gig racing on TV as we sought refuge from the sun.
The drone shots showing us what we know already.
That our tiny corner of Devon/Cornwall is rather lovely.
For regular readers and Bobbers, our normal bobbing area was one of the regular spots where race progression was filmed
I never managed to catch the tennis club on TV. That would have been a great drone shot especially as the gardens were freshly primped. A project for tomorrow.
Link to small reel about the races.
Friday was always going to be a full day of creating images. There was a fair amount of digital manipulation to create some images of the previous evenings skinny dip and an afternoon of watercolour and ink work, to depict the wind which is always, to my frustration, the hidden element in all art work. Painting wind is a little project I return to now and again.
In the future I would quite like to add a wind cherub to my wind paintings, those fat cheeked toddlers who appear on the sides of old maps.
Wind cherubs are quite a niche interest, I suspect our local library will not rise to that particular subject in their reference section.
So currently my wind paintings are sans windy cherubs.
The day of working in the studio was missing something else too.
The chocolate digestive did not work. What my creative juices required was a piece of fruit cake. Not a rich winter version but a pale sort of fruitcake. Often sold by the slice in plastic wrappers at the lower end of the cafe industry. There should always be a cherry in every slice.
Not expecting to appear in public I was wearing an old sundress, no bra and my gardening crocs. A quick trip to Lidl might just provide me with the cake I desired without meeting anyone I know.
This is where the day took a lovely and awkward turn. I blame the blog
Lidl had no cheap fruit cake. I did not meet anyone I know. But I did meet someone I don’t know who reads the blog. A friend of a friend etc. We could have talked about the blog but she really kindly, said that she saw me about often and admired my style. She didn’t mean my writing style. How thoughtful and delightful. We chatted briefly and I did not move from the back of my car. Not a single part of the day’s outfit was visible to her. No illusions shattered and no fruit cake.
Friday completed
Bobbing and bobbers are a regular feature of this blog. Less than 10% of the blogs get a mention because they follow more or less the same structure every time. This is a blog that celebrates the everyday mundanity of life by finding nuggets to ponder. But even I know the detrimental effect of pondering the same nugget too often.
However last night’s bob was special we were all naked.
Sarah, in the middle of this group wanted to walk naked into the sea for her 60th Birthday. It would have been unbobber-like to let her do it alone. Tide and time were perfect yesterday evening.
What a fabulous experience, more laughs and a birthday wish completed.
Heatwaves certainly focus the mind. Chores, domestica and essential tasks are done as early in the mornings, as soon as they can be achieved.
Our little corner of the world had a reprieve yesterday . A sea mist shrouded us in greige for the first couple of hours.
The greige stayed with us until midday but the temperature gradually rose until we were fully in the hot zone. The Bobbers had a Friday date with a high tide. No more freezing our tits off (twice) as we did on the longest day only 5 days before.
4pm yesterday, after 3 days of an official heatwave, we hit peak pleasure at our watery home.
We do not swim in the tropical waters of Plymouth Hoe West. We swim west of there. There is a commercial port between us and the Tropic of West Hoe.
At the time we were not aware that we were being so short changed by the Sea Temperature Mermaid Goddess.
But really the Bobbers were not the big story of the day. Bobbers bob together for safety. The delightful and multi-faceted friendships are a perfect and wonderful side effect. Safety is enhanced by Coach Andy.
Coach keeps an eye on our stuff and on us. He has had a really big week bobbingwise, not only did he join us in the water for the Solstice. Only to mid thigh, you have to keep special equipment dry, his phone. Thank goodness for phone probity, yesterday his phone was used for its first ever call to the coastguards.
A passing, off duty, coastguard saw some paddle boarders, perhaps in trouble, being taken beyond the island. But he was not prepared for sea based drama, he had forgotten his phone. Luckily Coach has his phone in pocket and for the first time it was used for dramatic and safety reasons. Completely unbobber related.
Another day another heatwave. Lola and I were up early, to achieve plenty of cooler weather walking and domestica. Freeing up the hotter hours for chatter and chilling. A meeting in the morning required not one but two iced coffees. Then there was an art attack. Not of the Coronary variety. ( I may be from Essex, but I do not drop my aitches, although curiously we do pronounce aitch as haitch)
An actual art attack, when a piece of original art fell off the wall and landed noisily between myself and my gentleman companion. Cool, even in a heatwave we did not skip a beat. Exchanging funny anecdotes is not the time for drama of the arty sort.
Swimming was the antidote to both the heat and art attacks.
Less people than the day before, so no need to create a postcard image to protect the identity of beach goers. No big boats to watch. Just a really fast lifeboat. So fast I missed it twice.
And a cute sailing boat, the sailing boat did, however, need the postcard effect because the photo was so bad.
To create the postcard I used the colours of the rocks of Firestone Bay to fill in all the detail lost by very bright sunlight.
Et Voilà
Not all heatwave days are the same even in the exact same location. Unexpected things always add a different texture to a day.
The bonus of yesterday, was meeting so many people, unexpectedly, for random conversations whilst we were all dodging the effects of overheating.
Overnight we had huge electric storms. The heatwave may be over, we are back to greige, how very drear!
What do you do in a blistering heatwave?
Not very much as it turns out. Keep doors closed and blinds down. Write the blog at 4 a.m in the yard, drinking tea.
Yesterday’s planned social dog walk turned into four women sat on a hillside trying to catch a breeze with our feet in a childrens paddling pool. There was a romantic view over recently cut hay fields towards a river estuary. Romantic until a farmer, working at the peak of the day, started to turn the hay to dry. Dirt, dust and a plague of horseflies sent us scattering, wet- foot to our respective homes. Grateful that we were not that poor farmer. My afternoon of sweaty domestica was rewarded by a swim in the sea. Hundreds of people had found their way to our usually quiet beaches.
Warships, Ferries, landing craft, commercial shipping and Police boats all passed the swimmers by. More people doing their normal jobs in the relentless heat.
Normally I like to photograph Firestone Bay looking interesting but largely uninhabited. Yesterday was not normal. The area was heaving with people. Normal photography wasn’t very pretty. Too much sunshine, too many people, just too busy.
Simplifying an over busy photograph to the style of a 20th Century postcard makes the whole scene more calm. At a highish tide every possible sitting space on these cliffs was filled with people. Many with lap tops and headphones ‘ Working from home’
Today is going to be another record breaking day. More postcards from the edge , I think.
Three weeks of an artyfarty anxious wait. I received a commission to create a piece of art for a newly installed kitchen. Not a big ask you might think for someone whose job is creating images. But the commission was to recreate one of my own original images in Portrait format instead of Landscape and then to make the image suitable to be turned into a kitchen splashback. There always has to be trust and flexibility between an artist and their clients during the commissioning process. That was the easy bit. For framing and reproduction of my paintings I always use local independent companies. People I can go and talk too. But reproducing an image on very expensive safety glass was organised locally but created elsewhere. All information shared digitally as you would expect. This was the harder bit and I fretted like a mother duck who had lost a duckling. Just concerned really that I had done everything correctly for a new to me process.
I had made one particular pink my worry point, it needed to be slightly translucent, more like a blush than actual colour.I need not have worried. The company doing the glass printing was brilliant. Every colour was exactly as I wanted it.
The glass arrived two weeks ahead of schedule.
Yesterday I went to see it for the first time. I am so impressed with what the glass company has achieved.
But now I look at my own , rather dull splash back and think…
What if ?
Splashbacks For Kitchens UK | Union Glass Centres https://share.google/GVK2prfYpE6bOmEuP
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