Summer Solstice started with a burst of colour over Firestone Bay as two bobbers and about 100 other swimmers took to the sea at dawn, the conditions were perfect.
Then the Solstice took a more practical turn as twenty volunteers, including two bobbers, took on the annual task of painting the Tennis Club Clubhouse with preservative.
Then it was back to the sea for more swimming at sunset.
So much exercise in one day and not a gym in sight.
A day painted perfectly.
Painting the Summer Solstice at Stonehouse Lawn Tennis Club.
In other news, the Solstice was celebrated in the local Tinside Lido.
Another lonesome bob and a few minutes of tinkering with a phone camera and some Polaroid sunglasses and wet rocks.
Like all rocks, the rocks in our swimming zone are infinitely more colourful when they are wet and Polarised lenses enhance that effect.
This image is constructed by digitally double exposing two separate images a second apart and with some inevitable movement both me and an incoming tide.
What it demonstrates is exactly why this area is called Firestone Bay.
Lonesome Bobbing is not my normal way of sea swimming, but it is not unheard of. Bobbing with the Bobbers is the normal way of things for safety and sociability. Is it even bobbing if you are alone?
I wasn’t even truly alone on my lonesome bob. Two neighbours and a dog, were there before me. And thank goodness they were because in an attempt to capture a pet portrait I dumped my keys in the sea.
I was so busy doing the constricted-undressing- in -public towel wrestle I didn’t even notice their loss. When Tim noticed the brightly coloured key cutters bands and rushed in to rescue them. The photo is a fake, post-processing tweakery. They dried out quickly on a warm step,retrieving them I noticed the vivid colours ,created by bright, morning- sun and my sunglasses at a really low angle, close to the incoming tide. I popped my sunglasses over the lens of my phone camera.
Using my sunglasses as a filter.
Blurry but interesting, this impromptu image needed a little tweakery, but I might make a little polaroid filter for my phone camera for these brightly sunshiny days.
We are a long way from the sterile, plastic- lawned, dog toilet yard that we bought four years ago. Our planned urban jungle has leapt into action this year. A warm dry Spring has been followed by a very wet early summer. This is the corner that overlooks a semi-subterranean garage and is about 4 feet above the back lane behind so it has the feeling of a very substantial balcony.
Like all good balconies there is an element of privacy whilst observing others. There is very little visual observation of other humans except an occasional shadow of an unknown neighbour. Deliberately oversized in these pictures because the shadow represents all the shadowy figures who enliven our viewpoint.
Aural overlooking, overlistening if you like, is the thing. The back lane is a stone-walled corridor that links a small car park with the road that leads to the sea or the city. We can hear but not see the people walking up and down. Swimmers chat animatedly, dog walkers are quieter. Largish groups of Royal Marines who occasionally run down the lane have two distinct personalities. One is heavy and mildly worrisome when they are fully kitted up with guns and big boots. The other is more chattery and indeed fragrant as they do the same run in sports gear.
Evenings are quieter, couples and groups heading out to restaurants or the cinema.
But early mornings are my favourite thing. There is a sweet spot when all the singing birds are at their peak, just before the seagulls get up and move them all on.
This blog could go one of two ways or it could just celebrate the first Passion Flower of the season. Passion flower plants were a gift from our builder last May. He gave us three leggy plants to trail over the trellis he had just installed on the top of our wall. They put on a bit of growth last summer and were repotted this Spring. A flower and later in the season edible Passion Fruits is on our wish list.
Not on our wish list was a domestic fatburg. When you buy an old house things like drains are a bit of a dark art. With no warning our kitchen drain failed spectacularly this week. The first sign was when the dishwasher suffered from reflux and bleated pathetically. We did not recognise this as an early symptom of an apocolypse. Dynarod were booked but not for several days. In a very busy week I had planned myself a day of domestica yesterday.
The blocked drain was a bit of a head scratcher. We do not have the modern luxury of an inspection cover or any means of identifying the direction of flow or indeed stasis in our case.
This being an Edwardian house I attempted an Edwardian solution. Boiling water/ Bicarbonate of Soda/ white vinegar. A lava like eruption of gunge bubbled away at the access point of the drain. Probing with a stick revealed standing water to a depth of almost 3 feet, a metre even.
Armed only with a pair of surgical gloves for human examination* and a plunger more serious intervention was required.
What I needed was veterinary gauntlets for Cow Gynaecology.
Laying on my belly I plunged my arm and plunger into the depths and achieved a very good attatchment to something. My plunger resolutely hung on to whatever unseen object I had chanced upon. One hand in the supersoft and slippy water was not enough so another hand had to go in. This is taking moments to write but it was easily two hours of time as I pondered and considered each next move.
After several awkward pulls on my plunger there was a sudden movement and a giant domestic fatburg was delivered at face level. Not a pleasant experience. Dirty water gurgled and then settled, only at a slightly lower water level. I waited a bit, hoping for a miracle but none was forthcoming. So I repeated the plunger experiment. This time things were a little easier. One more two handed pull and a second fatburg was delivered and with that the grungy water disappeared with hollow glugs and the sound of a minor victory.
Dynarod cancelled.
And so back to the Passion Flower, and there is a connection. Firstly the passion flower cheered me up on my many trips back into the house, once to receive a parcel, for a neighbour, that required photo evidence. Not a bit of me was a photo opportunity yesterday.
The colours of the fatburg were very similar to the Passion Flower. Mostly creamy with evidence of culinary adventures with turmeric, chilli, tomato, beetroot and inexplicably a blueberry colour.
Twin fatburgs and a plunger and a Passion Flower. Quite the Day.
Except in this village in a city, the pavements are littered with quotes from the Sherlock Holmes stories by Conan Doyle. This one is entirely appropriate.
P.s On one of the sites where my blog appears Meta offer an analysis. A case of Metapondering perhaps?
When I moved to the Plymouth area for the first time from Brighton, in the late eighties, I was not so sure it had been a wise move. The cultural and societal differences between a liberal and multicultural seaside city and a post industrial port were vast and uncomfortable for a long while. I quickly found my tribe by joining an art class.
Plymouth artists liked to drink in out of the way places. One such place was the Victualing Office Tavern, a grubby pub in one of the roughest parts of Plymouth. We went there to enjoy live jazz , rock and folk. Just as the quote says, we were a very broad gathering of people from all works of life. People creating art in council flats and some in homes that were mentioned in the Doomsday Book. There is a theory that artists are the first sign of gentrification….
Now I live in the exact same area as my 1980’s art excursions, after a ten year return to London. The VOT has gone up in the world, as has the area. Queen Victoria should have swapped the word dangerous for interesting.
Visionary rather than vituperative is a better way forward even for a Queen
Just a blog to use one of my favourite words that rarely gets an outing.
Beltane , Mayday, caught me out yesterday. It was a day filled to the brim. Not another thing could have been squeezed into any second of the waking day. So much so that the blog was brief and largely unexplained.
I combined two exercises from Paint Like Turner to create a painting of our local tidal pool.
The first big takeaway was that watercolour painting 250 years ago was not done on paper that was anywhere near white. So the process took about 24 hours as I dyed paper with cold tea.
The process and the result.
Then dried the papers in hot bright sunlight, which bleached out the colour a bit. I think I quite like painting on imperfect slightly beige paper. In real life the image has a warmth about it which I quite like.
Then to read the instructions and dig around in my paint store for the suggested colours or as close as I had.
I was working from one of my favourite, very atmospheric photographs of the pool.
At this point I should point out that this is the pool on an excellent day.
And this once again is the painting. Very curious to create art from firm instructions.
I need to sort this horizon out before actually attaching the mount.
I was quite thrilled that the painting more or less has a Turner colour palate as demonstrated by the biography I am also powering through.
But the painting is nothing like a Turner in reality and much more like my photograph.
Which rather neatly brings me to the end of the day. Which was spent with a huge glass of Pimms , celebrating a friend’s success in the London Marathon. 26 miles of determination and endeavour.
This photograph has the colour palate of the sun going down through a glass of Pimms.
12 Days of Sunshine. Spring has not been this good since the first Covid lockdown of 2020. A lot of water has flowed since those days of uncertainty and impending sadness. If I could pick one good thing, one great thing actually, of the whole Covid debacle. It would be the formation of ‘Bobbers’ our cold water, sea swimming clan of interconnected humans. Not a week passes without a chilly dip in Firestone Bay.
The tide and the currents were not our friends yesterday, but the Royal Navy ship HMS Sutherland, the Navy’s fastest ship, cut through our bay in a way that we could not.
WIP H.M.S Surherland
The thing that keeps us safe from peril in this sea is the one thing that I have yet to add to these two pictures. And yet it is the marker of achievement for a ‘good’ bob.
Getting to the first buoy. One of three that string the boundary of our swimming zone. We do our thing on the coastal side of the buoys and the Navy, and all other nautical traffic, stay on the island side of the buoys.
The buoy needs painting in a way that it will be obvious in these two pictures. A tiny project for today. But for now I just stuck the two buoyless pictures together. It works for me
theoldmortuary.design 