Tag: life

A visit to Plymouth

I’ve just been to see the Beryl Cook exhibition, Pride and Joy, at The Box in Plymouth.

As it happens, it was just in the nick of time because it ends at the weekend.

It’s a wonderfully thought-out display of Cook’s work. It makes you appreciate her influences and great skill as an artist.

I loved the paintings of her family in particular and everyday scenes like the market and a car boot sale. The details in some of the paintings are tremendous. Little warm and comedic asides playing out alongside the main event.

I have never seen so many people smiling and giggling as they walk around an art exhibition. Sheer joy.

Beryl Cook (1926-2008) was a quiet, private person but one of life’s great observers, going out and about from her Plymouth guest house and finding inspiration in pubs, clubs and on the seafront.

Plymouth was my stomping ground from 1979-1982 when I was doing my training. It was fascinating to think I might have seen some of these real-life tableaux unfolding around me.

But back then I was coming up to twenty and only interested in live bands and having fun with my fellow trainees.

When we left the exhbition yesterday, I followed my memories to drive along the back of the Hoe, turning left into Lockyer Street where I remembering once sitting one of many Teeline shorthand exams until I hit the magic spot of one hundred words a minute which meant I’d passed.

At the junction, we had to wait while a Beryl Cookesque woman – large and colourful – crossed the road. It was perfect timing.

Down at the Barbican, we strolled to our lunch stop overlooking the boats in the harbour.

At one point, I was sure I’d spotted a fellow trainee, wandering around the Barbican in shorts and a sun hat.

I chased after her, shouting ‘Susan, Susan!’ but it wasn’t Susan, which is not surprising because Susan lives in Scotland and would not be in Plymouth unless we were having a reunion.

The thing is, this Susan looked like my Susan only maybe thirty or forty years younger, just as I remembered her.

I even asked the woman if she was sure she wasn’t Susan but she didn’t understand me because she was Spanish.

Then it was a fish and seafood lunch overlooking the boats and a stroll to see the work of another Plymouth artistic genius, Robert Lenkiewicz (1941-2002).

Like Cook, his work at the time was unfashionable in high art circles but popular with the public.

When I was in Plymouth in 1979, the Barbican Mural next to his studio – where a fellow trainee the year above me had a flat – was truly wonderful.

Now, it’s been allowed to fade and rot, which is an absolute travesty and so very sad.

My paternal grandfather was born in a pub run by his parents in Martin Street, Plymouth, just off Union Street. Family legend has it that, as a child, he set the cannon balls that formed part of a monument on the Hoe rolling down the hill. This can’t be true because they are glued together, or maybe it is and the glueing happened after Grandpa’s childhood exhuberance.

So what with my grandfather’s Janner status and my own connection to Britain’s Ocean City, Plymouth holds a very special place in my heart.

In a galaxy far, far away…

We were sitting there, out in a French garden last Friday, listening to the sound of a midwife toad (look them up, they’re incredible).

(The noise they make is more like a scops owl, but it doesn’t show up on the Merlin bird app on my phone for the obvious reason that a toad is not a bird.)

Anyway, Mr Grigg began regaling the barbecue guests with a story about a very low aeroplane we’d watched in the sky one afternoon earlier in the week.

It went into a cloud and we had followed its trajectory, the two of us fully expecting it to come out the other side.

But it didn’t, which led me to suggest a Bermuda Triangle-type theory in which the plane used the cloud as a time and space portal to disappear into a different world.

I relayed this to the others, who were a bit non-plussed by this explanation, with one of them even humming the tune to The X-Files and another doing an impression of a cuckoo.

So I zoned out and gazed up at the night sky, which is my wont, while they discussed UFOs and other dimensions. In my own head, the theme music for Stranger Things was playing loudly, drowning out their scorn.

And that’s when I saw it, a long line of lights moving slowly towards the little full moon, which was about to appear above a tree.

I savoured the moment for a few milliseconds and then said calmly: ‘What’s that up there?’

All eyes turned to the sky. We watched this strange phenomenon for a minute or two as it traversed its night stage, seemingly on some otherwordly mission above our heads. We were transfixed.

By the time I took out my camera from my jeans pocket, the sight was dimming and so were my photography skills because I was so excited.

After the thing left our field of vision, silence ensued, followed by a feverish conversation about what we’d just witnessed.

It took me another five minutes to retrieve something from the back of my mind and to declare the thing we’d just seen was the Starlink satellite train. I’d heard about it once on the radio and had always wanted to see it, and now I had.

It’s operated by SpaceX, whose driving force is a strange man I do not like. I refuse to name him so my blog doesn’t get launched in to the outer atmosphere but just think of Batman gone bad and you’ll know who I mean.

That aside, we all rely on the internet these days, so the Starlink satellites have a job to do and, when you read up on it, you realise that there is so much in this world we do not understand.

And why am I telling you this? Because you need to know.

Also, the thing in the sky looked very like a Star Wars lightsaber moving gracefully across the universe. And as today is May the Fourth and I always put down my religion as Jedi on the census, I felt I needed to share that with you.

Have a great week.

Love, Maddie x

January reflections

January has already been a mixed month here in West Dorset, with cold, cold weather and blue skies at the start of it (hooray!) and then miserable rain and wind (boo!), which kind of reflects the way many of us feel in the weeks after Christmas.

The festive season passed me by without major incident and now the forward-face of the dual-headed Janus dominates our lives as The Good Ship 2025 slips its mooring and floats off into the past.

In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings (Wikipedia).

Whilst some of us are celebrating the arrival of new little people, it’s been a rough old twelve months for some, with Christmas and New Year anything but merry.

Life is hard, and even more so when you lose something or someone dear to you.

It doesn’t help when the outside world is going through tumultuous times which appear to be never-ending.

I’ve stopped listening to news bulletins. They’re full of multi-daily doses of negativity which make us all feel so angry and/or helpless. The chatter and backbiting on social media is even worse, with entrenched views constantly in a bitter battle with the voices of sanity and rational reason.

I heard on the news this morning that people tend to book their holidays in January because it gives them something to look forward to during these dark and dreary months.

I can well believe it.

The best thing so far this month has been the remains of the Wolf Moon shining over the village green in a three-way chorus with the lights of the community Christmas tree and the phone box library.

And on another positive note, we came third in the pub quiz, the morning cuppa tastes even better in the mugs my brother bought us for Christmas and I’ve lost four pounds since Christmas.

Roll on blue skies and warmth.

That’s about it.

Love, Maddie x

How did you use that extra hour?

It’s the day after the clocks went back and it’s one of those Sundays that seems to have gone on and on.

I was up early and did all the ironing, fed the dogs, order a dog harness, water bowl, poo bags and three motion sensor lights for the landing, made a pot of tea, scored eight on my daily popquiz – Popquizza.com – and finished an episode of The Rest Is Politics US before the clock showed seven-fifteen.

By eight o’clock, I’d walked the dogs and was ready for breakfast.

I’ve managed to tick loads of things off my to-do list, although by three o’clock this afternoon I was flagging and the dogs were doing circles because they were so hungry.

Mr Grigg has dug up four lots of leggy lavender for me to replace, and there is more planting to come.

I’ve also gone mad with the bulbs again, ordering with gay abandon from Farmer Gracy and then bricking it when a massive box the size of Matabeleland arrived on the doorstep with a smug look on its face.

It’s half term in Dorset this coming week but no doubt the weather will be dreadful, so the chance of me finding room for 90 narcissi bulbs is pretty remote.

Two years ago, I ordered so many tulips I had to enlist the support of Number One Son and the tiny grandson who waddled around in dear little wellies and was armed with a lethal dibber.

We managed to plant them all but, of course, I was away when they flowered, so I missed the lot.

With just five days of October left, it’s been a busy month.

And now the nights are darker, it’s time for slowly simmered stews, log fires and a ridiculous binge on all four series of Stranger Things to remind myself of the plot and premise before the new one drops at the end of November.

I’m going to try to pull my socks up and blog at least twice a week, but as my late mother used to say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

That’s about it.

Maddie x