This was yesterday morning as we left the coàst. Today has started in much the same sunny way.
In between we have been drenched by monster showers in both the home and away locations. The sun is particularly welcome today as we wrestle with wallpaper and paint decisions and generally plan on doing fairly dull stuff. Who needs sun for camping and coastal adventures! We starved ourselves yesterday ready for an afternoon outing with some friends. It is a reflection of our hunger and not the quality of the comestibles that brings the blog to the sorry state of having no pictures. A shocking state of affairs when offered such a pretty range of sweet and savoury treats. Afternoon tea will be represented on this blog only by the left overs that we brought home. How slack is that!
We lived in Cornwall long enough to never quite trust a weather forecast fully.
Even through the curtains it was easy to see that the forecast was a little out of synch with local conditions.
Even our prediction of being without family on this beach was a bit flawed.
Our little granddaughter took a tumble in Hong Kong and needed an overnight stay in hospital so we took a good number of phone calls while enjoying the non rain. So some definite family time was had.
This morning the news from Hong Kong is better and the weather is also doing a fine job of putting a brave face on the situation. A good start to Monday.
Back on the road to familiar places. First stopping at Strong Adolpho for a coffee. Pre-pandemic this was a regular drive to a regular destination. Mawgan Porth has always been a favourite beach, gone are the heady days of family meet-ups, things change but the geography and feel of the place remains. The weather is definitely at the scraggier end of Scrag End of summer. In truth we have had warmer Christmas mornings on this beach.
Once again we have the right clothes to make the weather just a minor irritation. Hugo got his dancing paws out.
Lola has a tiny bit of holiday ennui. She is in season and her freedom is slightly curtailed while there are other dogs on the beach. Like an artful teenager she has one eye on holiday romance while conforming to the family traditions of bracing walks in inclement weather.
Once there is no one else around she is free to be off the lead and scampering at our heels only stopping briefly to leave an alluring flavour of herself on unsuspecting cliff edge plants in the hope that some canine lothario can track her down.
The Scrag End of Summer, North Coast Bobbing tour continues today after a brief return to home. The sand and mud of North Devon has been cleared, out of the van, ready for some North Cornwall sand and mud to be gathered. While I was in North Devon there was a fair bit of rain but my reading journey took me to the unrelenting heat of turn of the century Buenos Aires and the evolution of Tango as a music and dance form in the hands of migrant musicians to Argentina.
So while my real world outlook was grey and a bit damp.
My immersive reading world was somewhat more lively.
My reading for North Cornwall will take me to 18th Century London, I’m not anticipating a huge improvement in the weather of my reading life or my real life on this trip. Awaiting whatever the Scrag End of Summer brings us.
The last morning of the Scrag End of Summer Break. Tea and coffee options on the hob. The next trip in the van will fully embrace Autumn. This has really been a very traditional Scrag End, British break with long walks in the rain and steamy cafes providing respite from the weather either side of one full day of glorious skin warming sunshine. Our last day highlight was the local museum , something we would have missed if we had had two consecutive days of serendipitous sunshine. Local museums are just glorious nuggets of local history, geography and culture. Sometimes they are dusty and fusty and you have to dig around to find pride and joy. Combe Martin Museum is not like that. A great selection of second hand books at the door entices the museum phobes closer luring them into the museum and part with their fifty pences for books and even better the small entrance fee. As is often the case in second hand book shops three well thumbed copies of Fifty Shades of Grey suggest that Combe Martin has a specialist interest in S and M. Just a few steps into the museum gives a mental loosening of the bindings when the true specialty of the area is revealed to be S and S. Strawberries and Silver.
Three sorts of cream is quite decadent. Never has ‘normal’ cream been so unappetising to me though. Who in their right mind would ever order ‘thin’ cream. Regardless of that Combe Martins original USP was mining for Silver and Lead and growing Strawberries. Products that they historically traded with nearby Wales for Coal and other essentials that coukdnt be found closer to home. Tourism has obviously been a big factor in the life of Combe Martin. In a curious time warp the first big boom was during the time of the Napoleonic Wars when the wealthy could no longer travel in Europe. Combe Martin boomed again this year when neither the wealthy or the normal could easily travel anywhere but the British Isles.
One small aspect of the museum I loved was a contemporary book of Remembrance. Featuring obituaries of the residents of Combe Martin. Ordinary peoples lives reveal extraordinary stories, revealing the human face of a location.
Here are our doggy faces posing, vintage style at the end of their Scrag End of Summer Van Trip.
As luck would have it we have a dog whose ears act as a windsock. Thus allowing me to share other pictures that feature wind and you will have an understanding of sense and direction. Lola is staring out to sea looking northward towards Wales.
Yesterdays swim was extraordinary. Exhilarating and epic, the thrill and managed risk of an unknown beach made our morning swim just delicious. The previous day we had met some fellow coast path amblers. The woman expressed an urge to swim in the sea, her male partner was somewhat dismissive of her diligence or ability to do such a thing. We told her we would be at the beach at 11:30 and at 11:30 she strode into the sea to join us with no sign of her doubting man.
The rest of the day was spent ambling and exploring the coastal path.
Somewhat disappointingly the stretch of coastal path did not live up to its designation of scenic. We knew the sea and cliffs were to our left but what we mostly saw were brambles. I observed that the walk was “About as scenic as my arse’ which pretty much describes everyone’s view. A rotating display of four human bums and three dog bums depending on which order we were walking.
Book reading conversations were the high point of our rest stops. Raynor Winn and Simon Armitage have both written books about walking the South West Coast path. Both books were given rigorous reviews in the bramble caves where we found benches to stop. Blackberries were available for refreshment which was a reasonable compensation for not seeing the Bristol Channel.
A View!
Thankfully walking the coastal path had not been the plan so there was no huge disappointment with the lack of views. The reward for doing a challenging and unexpectedly long amble was pints of Doom Bar shandy and smaller measures of Gin and Tonic served with tasty fish and chips at a beachside pub.
Yesterday was a proper English holiday day. It rained all day but we still managed a ‘bob’ on a grey beach. After a hot shower and breakfast we set off on foot to explore the cold wet beauty of the North Devon coast.
I will spare you the monotony of grey seascapes but we did manage to find some local and not so local colour.
Rock formations and tidal pools
Sometimes holidays in England definately need the right clothes because the right weather does not always blow our way. We have the right clothes!
We brought colour and interest to people walking the coastal path by bobbing in the sea when no-one else bothered. I also thoughtfully used my fluorescent bouy so they didnt incorrectly assume I was a seal at play. My natural grace in the water is easily confused with the movements of a marine mammal and it would be cruel to trick people,on the 630 mile hike of the South West Coastal Path, into believing that they had seen Martine the Coombe Martin Seal frolicking with a mackerel.
Although I do sometimes tinker with them.
We located rain forest plants. Although locating a good coffee after 4pm takes an intrepidness we do not possess.
Dicksonia Antarctica
Perhaps most significantly in these Covid times of restricted travel we found a cute Japanese Tea Set in a charity shop. Which helps me to spice up this blog with quite a lot of foreign influence.
Some late September’s bring us Kataifi and other sweet treats. This one brings us plums from a friends allotment.
We are having a few days in the van trying to extract the last preciousness of nectar from the scrag end of summer. New swimming/bobbing destinations are the ultimate goal although the tides were not on our side for an afternoon swim after our arrival. Instead the dogs went mad on a craggy beach and we talked with other swimmers also waiting for higher tides.
Although I worked in this part of North Devon long ago the fine detail of the coast is unknown to me. Having worked in health screening at the time the same cannot be said for the North Devonians, some of their intimate spaces are seared onto my brain. The one that sticks ( or stinks) in this approximate location is a woman who appeared at my clinic in fairly normal clothes for an evening at a nightclub. She had arrived in a van driven by a younger man soon after we opened at 10 a.m. There was a feint whiff of something rural as she settled into the chair for the interview part of the procedure. She was garrulous and witty. The getting nearly naked part of the examination was a surprise to us both. Every layer of her clothing was dotted with the excrement from the overnight production of multiple chicken bottoms.The poo had gently warmed as she was driven to her appointment. Although it is imprudent to ask why patients arrive unclean she was anxious to explain her situation. She had been enjoying a drink with friends in a pub with a dancefloor, a friendly young man had asked her to dance and had lavished attention on her all evening and then offered her the opportunity to explore his body more effectively. He explained that he lived in shared accomodation but that he had the key to a warm and comfortable barn. She was anxious to explore the European Union Common Agricultural Policy in action and accompanied him to the barn. Unknown to her he was a poultry farm worker. Her precious going-out clothes were discarded in the dark under the watchful gaze of roosting hens who spent the night voiding there cloacas on her best underwear and dress. Getting to grips and being gripped by an advocate of the European Common Agricultural Policy had quite exhausted her and she had only woken up an hour before her appointment and had scrabbled back into her clothes under the continued watchful gaze of the hens and begged a lift into Ilfracombe for her appointment. She had been aware of a certain musty or earthy smell as the van warmed her up but the true horror of the situation only revealed itself to us both as she took her clothes off. Examination completed she returned to her European lover in two NHS gowns and her 3 inch heels.
And that my friends was North Devon 25 years ago. When we had the benefit of a European Common Agricultural Policy.
Despite all the talk of too much talking over the weekend, the back yard is looking more stylish with Hannahs diligence with a paintbrush and a pot of black paint. The outside toilet has also been rehabilitated as a usable space instead of somewhere where stuff was dumped.
Of course my previous two blogs didn’t lie, there was a lot of nattering. Yesterdays nattering was with a woman we had never met before, although during the 18 months we have exchanged baking and crochet with her. Ruth is a friend of a friend. Our friend in common became a vital go between delivering bakes from us to Ruth. Ruth in turn made vital crochet for us. I can already feel you thinking what is ‘ vital’ about crochet. @theoldmortuary crochet became a conduit of love. During lockdown our toddler granddaughter moved to Hong Kong with her parents. I’m not sure such an occurrence is ever easy to bare but with the complextities of a pandemic and other worries it caused hard to manage grief. Ruth crocheted super hero clothes for our grandchild’s plush pig and the pig also flew off to Hong Kong with a crocheted and enchanted cape for safe travel and a happy return. In sad situations it is sometimes the little things that give comfort.
Recently, after our house move, we were in need of crochet again. Hannah’s mum had made beautiful crochet when she was alive and we have a few pieces of her work. An old house really needs some little touches to link the everyday contemporary world to the past. Once again Ruths nimble brain and fingers created two beautiful runners for us in a similar style to the one Hannahs mum had made. Another meaningful link to love and loss in a way that something mass produced could never be.
And out of all of this we have gained another friend.
Yesterday and today have been days of nattering around the table. In the evolution story of @theoldmortuary , chattering around the table was the original source of the daily blogging three months before the pandemic gripped and nattering around a table with friends or family was banned as an unacceptable infection risk.The daily blogging became lone pondering and almost 18 months later we have only just returned to the habit of nattering with friends around the table over a cup of tea or coffee and baked goods.
We seem to have nattered all weekend with very little actual work occuring!
The top picture represents the main topic of conversation this September and actually most Septembers. The sudden realisation that evenings are getting darker. It happens every September and yet every September it is a surprise. Baked goods from a bakery fuelled this weekends natterings, this mornings trip for baking perfection took me past Smeatons Tower, I managed to grab this shot while the streets were still quiet.
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