The Penzance days are done for January 2025. There has been a lot of actual pondering while my eyes and mind could settle on a distant horizon with St Michaels Mount a geograhical and visual reminder of reality.
The trip was always about pleasure and work. There has been much talk of how to make medical images the very best they can be. Often that is about optimising many shades of grey without creating artifact and false detail.
Cornwall in winter is often a study of 50,000 shades of greige. A colour that swoops and dips between grey and beige.
I have spent a little time applying medical image physics to my photographs . Altering them to suit my needs to create a false image of a real place using real images.
I won’t bore you with the details because it really would be very boring. These three pictures were taken in the space of 5 days. The registration point was that St Michaels Mount could be seen as I took all three pictures.
By double exposing 3 times using the horizon as my common point I have created a magical realism image where murmerating starlings join two kite surfers in the skies near St Michaels Mount. Banishing the greige.
Morning para surfers at St Michael’s Mount. Not a bad way to start a week, I was wrapped up warm with hot chocolate in hand.Penzance is being very good to me today. Sunshine and warm enough to go without a coat once the sun was properly up.
Monday morning with more murmuration. Really couldn’t help myself there. Although of course that was actually Sunday night. Here is a bright morning photo from Sunday too.
Bright dawn sunshine lights up a rust stained wall at our swimming zone.
We chose an area very similar to our home zone, with ladders and handrails to ease our way in and out.
Looks can be deceiving. This was not an easy location to get in, but it is the choice of local dippers.
Yesterday was a day of wrapping up warm and enjoying the smug sensation of a sea swim achieved early and a whole day left to warm up in the sunshine.
A pub roast dinner and a day of basking and walking in winter sunshine completed Sunday.
The Rain it Raineth Every Day. Norman Garstin 1847-1926
Sometimes it feels as if this is true. William Shakespeare wrote the quote which is the title of this painting and the nearly true statement in Twelth Night. One of my favourite W.S plays.
A rainy day in Penzance. What to do?
A lot of enjoyable faffing about and dog walking in damp conditions and an afternoon trip to Penlee Gallery and Museum. Which was a wonderful welcoming place.
And here is the serendipity of live blogging.
The sun is out this morning, the Bobbers are up and the sea is exceptionally chilly.
No more arty faff. Just me and sunrise and my post swim plunge pool.
I am not the only family member that ponders. Hugo finds pondering easiest on a comfy bed. He is pondering the quality of the biscuits he was given in a pub in Penzance. I was at the same pub but not given a biscuit, a tickle or photographed by a stranger, looking cute near a ship’s wheel or staring masterfully at a sextant. For me the pub itself became a massive ponder.
The Admiral Benbow is one of the oldest pubs in Penzance. It has elevated itself from an illegal drinking den in the sixteenth century to a regular pub with an irregular clientele in later centuries. All safely in the past. Famed for being the meeting place of pirates, smugglers, wreckers and all other forms of seafaring miscreants. The pub would also have been a great place for all varieties of prostitution to thrive. My ponder on the subject of the Admiral Benbow is really about the whitewashing of crime and criminals, illegal activity in all its many forms by the passing of time and the ‘ romance of the sea’
I cannot imagine choosing to spend an evening in a pub or club associated with 21st Century criminals. Drug dealers, handlers of stolen goods, people traffickers, or perpetrators of modern slavery.
But centuries passing and a whiff of the sea makes sharing a time-hop space with the imagining of rogues acceptable, fascinating and enjoyable.
Romance and fantasy stick themselves to the sea and seafarers in a way that seems disproportionate and mystifying. The whites of tropical uniforms are a ‘thing’ in both heterosexual and queer culture. Sailors have a word for a temporary madness that hits them in the tropics.
Calenture a sort of giddiness that brings a heightened state of excitement in hot weather. Throwing themselves into the sea for fun and feeling sexually aroused.
Seafarers really do get some of the best words.
As I sat in the Admiral Benbow enjoying a rum,while Hugo enjoyed a good sea dog biscuit it was easy to imagine the bar boasts of olden times. I really hope Calenture cropped up.
Prof.Google helped me out on this one.
Are Sailors romantic because they were the first profession to really see the world and bring us unimaginable things from foreign destinations.
Which brings me, rather circuitously, to today’s random question
What’s your favorite candy?
Chocolate. Just chocolate. Not chocolate cake or puddings. Nothing too fancy.
Ponderings, in the Admiral Benbow on Monday night. Plenty of space for historical visitors from all centuries. Some nibs of chocolate in a leather pouch and tales of Calenture. Just fascinating.
Lola, meanwhile, thinks such pondering is overated. She could be right.
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