It is most unlike us to visit Cornwall in the school Summer holidays. But here we are waking up in an orchard where peace reigns and our evening walk along a picturesque estuary with boat yards and boat skeletons resting up in the mud, gave us complete isolation. We could hear other humans and their dogs having tinkling, brittle holiday conversations in their million pound holiday homes.And the pervasive beat of party music on a Saturday night from houses rented by groups of young friends anxious to be as cool and interesting as they thought they were at 18. Anxious to still be friends despite the tribulations of negotiating the adult world since leaving university.
None of this touches us in the Orchard. Birdsong and squirrel movement are the only sounds that are interrupted when an apple falls from a tree.
Apart from our own invasive sounds of a whistling kettle.
And the spit of bacon in a frying pan
And the quiet tap of fingers writing a morning’s blog.
Hugo enjoys Glastonbury on the radio in the comfort of his own home.
This weekend is traditionally a big Festival weekend. Most years Glastonbury is happening. We don’t ever get tickets but we love to listen in to anything that is broadcast. Festivals attended in real life are a great chance to experience unknown music or to dance for as long as possible on uneven ground in a tented environment.
Glastonbury is on a Fallow Year, this year but there is a festival less than a mile and a half a mile away across the river from our home.
We can lay in our back yard and listen to the music just as if we were at a festival relaxing in our camper van away from the main stages. In fact our yard is closer to the main stage of Morvala than a lot of camper van fields at festivals.
We swam on Friday to the catchy tunes of The Bay City Rollers. Something that would hugely have excited 14 year old me. Distance lent enchantment.
I was never a super massive fan but I did have an excellent pair of tartan Oxford Bags bought from a Grattan Catalogue book. Oh the 70’s
Tonight we will be able to lie in our yard with a hot chocolate and skip 20 years to the nineties and listen to Ash.
Time marches on but music can make everything seem like yesterday.
Looking back at my photos from festivaling at home there was another more recent brush with the past. Hugo enjoying the teepee. He has been in another realm, (Maybe one where dogs can actually attend festivals) for 6 months now. Time enough for these photos to be lovely memories of a dog life very well spent.
Just to add a note for other dog lovers.
Your dogs don’t cross the Rainbow Bridge. They wait for you there.
We did an airport pick-up for some friends last night which meant a different but old location for the late evening dog walk.
The little row boat caught in the reflected lights just caught my imagination. It was just a moment when the tide allowed the little boat to have his moment in the spotlight.
But with St Pirans Day, the Patron Saint of Cornwall, approaching I had planned to save this image for a couple of days. A photo of the Cornish bank of the River Tamar would have been useful and appropriate for St Piran.
Alas with just a little research St Piran seems about as authentic a chap as many other Saints. Maybe invented, maybe living under an assumed name.
Below is a link to a fine and glorious fantasy story.
Of all the supposed Saints I occasionally research St Piran does seem to have had more fun than the average . If I exclude the being thrown into the sea weighed down by a millstone episode.
Just for spinning a good yarn, St Piran can keep his Saints Day on the 5th of March. I believe he is my favourite so far.
Thank goodness for a photo archive. We are off for our annual end of the summer weekend in the campervan. The good weather however has not come with us. Just one good photo from our evening walk.
One good photo.
Photos aside we had a great long coastal walk exploring all the old tiny bungalow and chalet lanes where pre and post war dwellings are being turned into minimalist architects holiday aspirations. In accordance with the end of the season. All cafes closed at 4pm. We set off at 4:30 and by 7:30 when we returned we were wearily in need of a cup of tea and a wee.Triumphant though because we had managed to stay one foot ahead of ominous rain clouds that hovered just across the bay.
2023
Nobody needs to see those rain clouds so the same bay from 2023 will bring much better quality joy. Although the National Trust does use a photo that I could have taken today to advertise the area.
Possibly the most prolonged and windiest nights of our camping career brought the rain, eventually, to our sliding, campervan door. Today may be a book day.
Yesterday was a fabulous February weather day. Fabulous because the sun was up and greige was banished. I was on a mission to take a bad photograph for my ongoing dabbling at image-manipulating. The day itself was full of other stuff. Shopping, child care and book club. So my moments of image manipulation were snatched in the rare quiet moments of the day. Time poor is sometimes a good thing. At the early stages I am. happy with my multilayered image.
Not quite sure that I am where I want to be image wise. But sometimes the enemy of good is better. and multi -layered is the tenuous link for this blog.
I woke myself up this morning to get out of a multi-layered dream. Certain that I did not want to be where my subconscious had dumped me.
Like many people Airbnb is in my travel portfolio.
For reasons unknown my early morning dream had me checking into an Airbnb late at night above a coffee shop. I awoke in the dream ( Probably when the first real life alarm went off) to find my bed in the midst of the coffee shop with people stepping around my bed with coffee and breakfast items. Seemingly oblivious or being discrete about having to step around my bed. It was definitely a contemporary 2025 coffee shop but the disturbing thing for me was not that I was in bed, but that many of the customers were smoking indoors and there was an unmistakable smoke fug filling the room. Just as used to happen before indoor smoking in public places was banned. I quickly woke myself up.
In my waking life I have never given such a thing a moment’s thought. Where and why on earth do our brains write such bonkers scripts.
I wonder if my creative thinking is all about layers so my dream world is being a bit layered and book club was about parallel lives.
The tree, although beautiful, did not take our attention. The dogs filled the mental space where pondering could have happened.
But this tree turns out to be the perfect specimen for my current experiments with an easy image to double and treble expose digitally altered grey seascapes. I can’t say that I am entirely sure where all this fettling about is taking me but January skies are a lot more interesting with some tweaking.
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.
At no point in blog #900 were we more than 2 miles as the seagull flies from home. But as you can see from this map we live in a complex place water-wise. To cover that 2 miles as non-seagulls involves either a long drive involving a toll bridge. A car ferry or a foot ferry.
When I moved from Cornwall to Devon people questioned the decision but being a woman from Essex I always felt rather more like a Tamar Valley resident than a Cornish one. Cornwall can be tricksy with people not born there. Devon has a more open heart. The small move to Devon was, and is no big deal.
Devon on the horizon, Cornwall at my feet. Sometimes the other way round. Just like Jam and Cream or indeed Cream and Jam
The big deal is of course the way I serve scones.
Geography and Cream. Critical!
If in doubt eat a cheese scone no jeopardy with a cheese scone.
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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