Our Morning Glory reusable coffee cups from Morning Glory Cafe on Coogee Beach.
Holidays and Christmas firmly behind us, the first Monday in January finds us with a list of chores and jobs all made a lot more tolerable by beautiful sunshine.
The sun even penetrated the car cleaning chore.
Our reusable coffee cups are useful and a great reminder of our first breakfast in Australia.
I will take a cold West Country winter with bright sunlight any day but a warm early summer in Sydney in December certainly has made it much more tolerable. I feel like I have had a power pack inserted, I really hope it lasts until at least the end of March.
Sydney Harbour Bridge. The Opera House is just visible
This monotone image was my first sight of Sydney Harbour Bridge at about 6 am. I love it when nature dials down colour to monotone. Time is suspended and real life is presented, as if in a black and white film.
One month on I realise that this could not have been a more fitting first moment.
When I was 10 my Aunt, Uncle and Cousin migrated to Australia. There were complex reasons for this. It was my first experience of heartbreak not caused by death, but by distance-created absence. We had been an extremely tight familial group. Two sisters, their husbands and two girls, both only children. My cousin was severely handicapped and this was the reason the family sought a new life in Australia.
My uncle, who was a nursery man and landscape gardener,was employed to be a plantsman and landscape gardener for the Sydney Opera House Project and nearby botanic gardens.
Apart from occasional ‘bluey’ air mail letters our only contact was ardent following of news coverage of one of the great building projects of its time. All in black and white.
Which is why this image delights me.
Hello old friend. You look just the same as in 1960’s news broadcasts and papers.
Of course I promised you, theoldmortuary blog readers sunshine throughout January.
Two days later.
Funny to think that my uncle would have watched this building being built whilst leaning on a shovel or at the wheel of earth moving equipment. As was often the case in the sixties he did a really manual job while wearing country gentleman clothing. Brogue shoes, tailored trousers, a shirt and tie and a ‘Sports’ jacket with a fine knit Fair-Isle jumper.
Hard to reconcile the news, that as I wandered the very quiet streets of Windsor in search of another coffee after a boisterous and turbulent 14 hour flight. Something dreadful was occurring in Sydney, a place I have only just returned from. A place that found a place in my heart and mind instantly.
A place that introduced me to Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere. Gorgeous, camp and oversized. Twinkling brightly, defiantly competing with the brilliance of the sun. Now overlooking a landscape of grief and sorrow.
Pondering being on the other side of the world and taking some time out to bob about in an altogether warmer sea pool than normal.
As it turns out other bobbers have bobbed in this same pool before me .
As is so often the case photography cannot quite catch the vivid colours completely accurately.
But my pre prepared colour charts. Random as they may have seemed in a grey and dismal English November, can be used to accurately pick out the colours I will need to recreate the vivid blues and greens of the sea and the gorgeous cappuccino creamy flush as sand and breaking waves mingle in the liminal space of the shore line.
Now the burning question is to sketch or swim?
An unusual choice for 6 am. Maybe both if I am quick!
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