#1303 theoldmortuary ponders

On Aug 27, 2025Aug 27, 2025 By theoldmortuary.designIn pondering, Procrastination, Scrag End of SummerLeave a comment

My feet, and the rest of me woke up at a normalish time 6:00 and needed a light on. Wind and rain outside, but not quite visible. Sunrise was at 6:24 today. Another sure sign that the ‘scrag end of summer’ is fully established in these parts. At this time of day I am accustomed to considering an early dog walk to avoid the heat of the day. Today the consideration is rain avoidance. Hurricane Erin is the cause of our disturbed weather, she is heading to our shores in a less powerful but still disruptive way.

Among my many youthful plans, being a weather forecaster was one potential career path, as was Agony Aunt. Both could easily be revived as interests in semi-retirement.I also wanted to be a window-dresser at Selfridges on Oxford Street, maybe less transferable to the dabbling level of interest that I currently operate on for the other two. One can casually offer advice to others and comment on the weather. Not always at the same time of course.But rearranging a shops window display is not something that can be dabbled at without both causing alarm and probably setting off an actual alarm.

It must have been at this time of year, a year ago that I considered getting a little App operated weather station for our yard. Maybe I should do something about that.

Semi-retirement is like that, so much to do, so little time to do it with all that other dabbling and procrastination going on… Not to mention the weather, because here it comes.

And this my friends is what procrastination looks like on the dog walk.

#1194 the oldmortuary ponders

On Feb 7, 2025 By theoldmortuary.designIn art, PhotographsLeave a comment

I picked up this postcard at The Archaeology Museum (Acropolis) of Athens in early autumn.

I’ve added the heart because it has become a favourite image. A girl standing with her dad.

I am fairly certain I don’t have a similar image of myself with my dad. Not for any estrangement or complex family dynamics, but because in our family my dad was the photographer and therefore never in pictures.

This is an almost unimaginable concept in a world where smartphones allow everyone to be a photographer.

In our spare room there is a big blue Ikea bag of family albums to be gone through before I put them back up in the roof. I can’t say I hold out much hope of finding a father-daughter picture of us together until I was in my teens.

In pondering and googling this thought I found a really interesting article which I have shared below.

https://www.itstartswithadam.com/blog/what-smartphones-have-done-to-photography-and-our-capacity-to-look#:~:text=Smartphones%20have%20made%20photographs%20fluid,does%20the%20remembering%20for%20us

And just like that I have found a long form blog about artiness that I really enjoy. I like New World art writing for the same reason that New World wines are so interesting. No snobbishness, less entitled twattery.

Pondering and googling and a day walking in the sun.

It makes me think and that is always a good thing.

#895 theoldmortuary ponders

On Apr 24, 2024Apr 24, 2024 By theoldmortuary.designIn Colour3 Comments

Early morning daisies doing their very best to shout out for Spring. These daisies may not have got their moment in the sun ( blog) if it were not for a lovely colour and shape coincidence.

I know very little about spiders but I imagine they have had a tough Winter/Spring as rain has constantly run into their spidery hidey holes. Just hours after the daisy picture I caught an orange, or maybe tan spider having a bask in a tiny porthole window.

This picture also looks, at first glance like a tennis ball, bringing an unusual and high flying spectator to a game.

I am not a natural arachnophobe in my normal day to day life,but neither would I feel hugely comfortable if this chap suddenly swung down on a silken thread and brushed my face?

Is there a scale of arachnophobia and we all sit somewhere on it ? With spider lovers actively taking positive steps to overcome a fear that is hard-wired into humans.

I had a nasty bite once, on my ankle. Dulwich Park, not anywhere risky. The spider was not nasty because I am not a fly, but the bite became a bit gooey and sore. The local pharmacist said he had seen a few such bites that week. All well and good in 21st Century London with antibiotic creams but would it have been a much bigger problem centuries ago?

I’m just not certain I fully understand why arachnophobia is such a common/popular fear when actual serious harm to humans is rare in most countries.

Dr Google helps out a bit but also muddies the waters by throwing in religion.

An evolutionary response: Research suggests that arachnophobia or a general aversion to spiders is hard-wired as an ancestral survival technique.
Cultural and/or religious beliefs: Some individuals within certain cultural or religious groups seem to have phobias that stem from these influences. These particular phobias differ from phobias that are common in the general population, making culture and religion potential factors in phobia development.
Genetic or family influences: Researchers believe that there may be a genetic component linked to phobias. Family environmental factors may also influence the development of phobias. For example, if a parent has a specific phobia to something, a child may pick up on that fear and develop a phobic response to it.

Spiders in religion is going to have to be a whole other ponder. The early morning coffee and my spider pondering is done for the day.

#650 theoldmortuary ponders

On Jul 21, 2023 By theoldmortuary.designIn WordsLeave a comment

Spoiler Alert the answer to Friday’s Wordle is included in this blog.

My wordle guesses today made a 4 word poem that inspired two related reminiscences. Perfect ingredients for a ponder.

A long time ago I was at a work Christmas party in a Private Members Club in Poland Street in London.

The club was in a basement and I needed to leave to get a phone signal. On returning I entered the wrong door and ended up in a Bear Bar, the sort of place burly gay men, dressed in plaid go to meet other burly gay men or cubs, who are diminutive or much younger men who are attracted to burly men in plaid. I had a perfectly pleasant half an hour or so talking to an Australian Army Captain who was there to hook up but had no problem entertaining a woman who found herself in the wrong club.

At one of my workplaces I worked with a predatory male colleague. He was a constant pain and often harassed or proposition many of the women he worked with. One Monday at work he was in quite a flap, he had been away in a strange town and had made the exact same mistake as I had done in London. He also favoured the plaid shirt look but when he stepped into a Bear bar in a strange town suddenly the predator became the prey. Karma I feel.

#650 theoldmortuary ponders

On Jul 3, 2023Jul 3, 2023 By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity1 Comment

Yoga under this tree was sublime. In Devonport Park with Park Yoga.

A day that entered with a whimper and went out with a bang. If yoga under a tree in the morning is a whimper and the 1812 Overture counts as a bang.

In between there was a Garden Party with live music and fabulous food. And a lot of toilet rolls. Overnight I had worried that the four toilet rolls I had left in the clubhouse of the local tennis court would not be enough for a celebratory garden party. An early morning dash to the supermarket ensured that the tennis club was fit for an outbreak of dysentery. There was more food and drink than was necessary and as luck and public health would have it. No dysentery.

The Royal Marines concert was a forgotten pleasure. We had expressed an interest in getting tickets during the dark recesses of winter. But the summer took so long in coming we had forgotten the pre booked evening of music that popped into a WhatsApp message yesterday morning.

Tchaikovsky composed the 1812 in 1880 which means that if builders were whistling contemporary music as they built our house the street would have been filled with snippets of one of the World’s most well known overtures.

#649 theoldmortuary ponders

On Jul 2, 2023 By theoldmortuary.designIn flowers1 Comment

It was a very west-windy kind of day yesterday. The sort of day where outdoor eating became a dangerous sport. With cans and napkins being whipped off tables, sending responsible diners chasing after their errant table paraphernalia. Outdoor eating is a favourite thing for us to do, because the dogs take a very dim view of being left at home on summer evenings. Earlier in the day I had taken photos of various blooms that were luxurious, because after many weeks of extraordinary sunshine, we had had a couple of days of light but persistent rain. I wonder if they were all so pristine after the winds had had their way with them.

The wind has also stopped any meaningful swimming for the weekend. So blooms it is to illustrate this blog. Have a fabulous Sunday.

#522 theoldmortuary ponders

On Mar 26, 2023Mar 26, 2023 By theoldmortuary.designIn pondering2 Comments

First Ice Cream of the season. Soft whip with clotted cream and a chocolate flake.

A late in the day pondering, possibly not hugely interesting but worth pondering, I feel.

I recently read a very bitter editorial by a woman journalist who was bemoaning that the craft of good journalism was being diluted by people like myself who blog.

She claimed we were “flooding the world of the written word, with bad grammar and poor punctuation.”

Maybe she was having a bad day but that comment seems counter intuitive to a profession that holds on tight to the right of free speech.

There are some professions whose job of work is quite rightly protected by law. So that amateurs, people without formal training and qualifications cannot do the thing in question.

Writing is not one of those occupations. But her pithy article made me think, ponder if you will. I am all too aware that my punctuation and grammar can be hit and miss at times. I am comfortable with this, I realise. For the most part nobody has paid me to write so I have only rarely stolen work from ‘real’ journalists. My cranky punctuation and grammar are my written voice. Just as my actual voice is not perfect, neither is my written one.

I am comfortable with my writing peculiarities, not necessarily proud of them, could do better, of course.Thank you, anonymous journalist for pricking my conscience on a Sunday. It was a brief and productive ponder.

#228 theoldmortuary ponders

On Jun 3, 2022Jun 3, 2022 By theoldmortuary.designIn PlymouthLeave a comment

Not an average evening on Plymouth Hoe. Faithless blasting out from a music festival and a beacon lit for the Queens Jubilee.

A lovely evening walk, ripe for a good old ponder. How effective was the beacon system as an early warning system. There is a good bit of theorising on the internet hampered by not a huge amount of recorded data. It is said that when the Armada was spotted of the coast of Lands End the beacon system alerted London about 6 hours later. Beacons were located about 5-15 miles apart depending on the geographical features of the land. Each beacon would have had a watcher and a beacon lighting team, their efficiency would have had an impact on the transmission time. Beacons were dotted along the south coast of England as far as Portsmouth and then turned inland and spread the news to London and the rest of the country. It is said that the news reached York in the north of the country in under ten hours. This is all vague because at the time no-one kept the time. The specificity of the news would have been carried by a messenger on a horse, the horse and probably the rider would have changed regularly between the start point of Lands End to the end point London. The news would then have then been spread far wider by horses and messengers being sent in all directions from London.

Tonight however the Queen touched a symbolic globe and without any horses or messengers, the beacon lit up in Plymouth and many other locations , just like magic. Although not exactly magic, we were close enough to the beacon to hear the gas being turned on several moments before the Queen placed her gloved hand anywhere near the globe. A moment made all the more memorable by ceremonial bagpipes adding unexpected notes to very well known Faithless anthems. Its been a day of anthems.

P.s. here is a proper photograph from a proper photographer.

#215 theoldmortuary ponders

On May 21, 2022May 21, 2022 By theoldmortuary.designIn blogging1 Comment

Yesterday my early morning dog walk sent me down a Google rabbit hole. The picture above is from one of the emergency on -call rooms at St Bartholomews Hospital in London. St Pauls Cathedral and St Bartholomews Hospital have always been a big part of my life. I realised, yesterday, that there is another St Pauls in my life now.

This St Pauls is the early morning sniffing zone of Hugo and Lola. At the very least they must sniff across the forecourt once or twice a day. Yesterday the trail around the church was very enticing for them, and having nothing better to do I allowed them to make the most of the good sniffs. It occured to me that I have no idea how Churches or any other religious institutions get their names. St Pauls is remarkably common.

So while the dogs sniffed round rusty pipes, I googled. It seems that as this is a subject of faith rather than science the whole naming thing can be quite arbitrary. Arbitrary suits me very well in fact.

Gladioli and Sunburst Lichen in St Pauls Church Yard

Am I drawn to know more about St Paul, no not particularly, I’m sure he was a worthy and wonderful chap since so many places, both great and small are named after him, but my nature is always to search out the less populist things in life . The saints in the shadows perhaps, the ones at the bottom of the class or on the reserve list. To return briefly to the City of London there are two churches, St Bartholomew The Great and St Bartholomew the less. Surely the lesser Bart, as he would have been known to his chums, would have been the more interesting.

Pondering such things can bite you on the bum though. While I was pondering the lives of the saints and the places named after them, the dogs found their own interesting topic. Urban fox poo. Jerked out of my unusual ponderings I was alert enough to save myself from a morning of dog bathing. I wondered, briefly, which Saint I should thank for that.

Reflecting on St Paul and other Saints. Link below for an interesting lift ride.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid02CYqszb3JFEBawnvtaxqBxuawG8MhqLPM6jBVnUQbHfYK8Ko29qnyUbEGWoWfMDiZl&id=526761673

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