Cornwall: there is a reason it is so green

I have a few friends who absolutely love New England winters.  Often this is because they are passionate about winter sports and enjoy getting out on the ski slopes as soon as it is possible.  Hiking in winter in New Hampshire is also an attraction.

I have something amiss with my circulation that makes my body decide to sacrifice my fingers and feet for survival in the cold and so,  a few minutes into a hike I have to spend time coaxing the blood back into my numb fingers and toes.  I think it is called Raynaud's phenomenon and it has made my winter hikes with friends less enjoyable than I would have liked.

If you don't have some outdoor activity that you are passionate about, winters might be miserable.  Anne and  I would  get out for walks every day that we could in the winter often on a windswept frigid beach.

If you ask people who don't have specific outdoor activities in winter which seasons they prefer they'd often explain a preference for cool weather because "you can always dress up for the cold".  Its true that beyond a certain temperature the heat only has a few options for cooling down unless you have air-conditioning in the home.

In Cornwall the climate is very moderate.  The average day-time temperatures range from 9C (48F) in winter to 19C (66F) in summer - with some days that are outliers on either side of this.  The rainfall charts show rain every month of the year with around double the amount in the winter months. 

This means that if you like summers where you have a raincoat and a sweater in a backpack on most outings and you don't mind mud you are in the right place.

Even on the most beautiful days here there are clusters of clouds that  momentarily block the sun and make you aware of how cool the breeze is.

Funnily enough we have found ourselves playing devils' advocate with this because of how comfortable we feel here.  It feels like a place we could settle into rather easily.

So I decided to do some research on how people might choose a place to retire and I came across a blog written in 2020 where the author and her husband decided to use comparative data to help with their decision.  I thought it might be illuminating because although the process of setting up the data is fairly subjective (choosing what matters to you in a place to live, deciding how much weight to give each category) at the end you have a list ordered based on how well a place stacks up to each category.

Anne is a little skeptical of the approach but is going along with it on the strength of my argument that we can adjust the criterion and their weights until we are comfortable that we have them right.

The thing is, that this area that we are falling in love with falls near the bottom of the list in the spreadsheet.

We moved to Cornwall to a small town on the outskirts of Penzance, called Newlyn.  The town is a big fishing town with a harbour with a tall reinforced wall and a small gap for boats to go out and return through. 

 This seems somewhat characteristic of Cornwall .  A mile and a half down the road (and a 30min walk on the South West Coastal path) is a famous town called Mousehole (pronounced Mouzel) with a similar harbor and a small opening out to the sea. 

When we visited the tide was very low but I imaging during high tide when there is a storm the harbor would be a safe refuge for boats.  

The village has narrow, quaint streets and a few restaurants.  We heard that it comes to life in summer and that so many of the houses are holiday rentals that the town is incredibly quiet in the winter.  This is possibly the case with quite a few of these small coastal towns.

A small town called Marazion also on the outskirts of Penzance has a castle-like edifice called St Michael's Mount which has been there first as a priory between 800AD and 1100.  The castle dates back to the 12th Century.  

The mount is a small island separated from the coastline of Penzance by a narrow channel which can be walked across at low tide and is a few feet deep at high tide.  The island and castle are owned by a family who bought it in 1640 it from a long line of nobles. 

Today the family still lives on the island along with a few other families who work there.  There is a National Trust that, in partnership with the family, manages the upkeep of the castle as a tourist attraction.

We visited the mount on one of the few beautiful sunny days we had during the first week in this area.

Not far from Newlyn in the opposite direction is Land's End, which is the southwestern edge of England.

We took a drive there one morning and had a short walk along the cliffs on the South Western Coastal trail. 

The seas are very clear here and there are impressive sea cliffs and beautiful wildflowers.  No trees grow here on the edge of the country, apparently because of the winds that sweep across from the Atlantic.

On the way to Land's End is a turnoff to an open air theater that Anne went to for a mid-week afternoon performance of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. 

Anne's photo of the theater

The theater was built by a woman who came to Cornwall after the first World War.  She bought the entire cliff head for 100 GBP, built a cottage near the cliff and offered one summer to allow players in her theater group to stage a play on the edge of the cliffs below her home.  With the help of her gardener she made a stage and some rough seating.  Over the years that followed and with the help of others in her theater group the theater seating and stage were improved.  She continued working on the theater well into her 80s.  She died aged 90 in 1983.

I took a bus-ride with Anne the following day to see the beach and hike up to the top of the cliff and along the Coastal Path some distance.  We walked to a point where we could see the open air theater.

This really is a beautiful area despite the constant cool breezes and uncertainty about rain.

On our final weekend in Newlyn we drove to Lizard point which is the southmost piece of land in England.  We did a 7mile loop from the town of Lizard along the Coastal Path and then across the land inland to complete the loop.  

Our next stop is a small town on the other side of Penzance for a week before we move on to a couple of house-sits we have lined up elsewhere in Cornwall.

Devon: Jam first, or cream?

Our trip to Cornwall was eventful and we ended up having to make a last minute change which put us in a picturesque village in Devon instead of in the one we'd planned in Cornwall.

We had a train trip booked on the railroad that travels between Paddington Station in London and Penzance (which I realized is a real town and not just a place with pirates in an old musical).

You can reserve seats on the train but the online booking guide doesn't give you a very clear idea of where the seats are in relation to windows and so we arrived at our coach to find out (much to Anne's horror) that we were all the way in the rear of the coach with no window.  After a few moments in the coach we were told that the coach letter C (electronic boards on the outside announce a letter matching your ticket) had been switched and we needed to move to the 3rd last coach on the train.

After we left the station I went looking for a bathroom and discovered some seats with a table that were marked as reserved from London to Penzance and were unoccupied.  We assumed that the people who had booked those seats were no-shows for the trip and that we'd probably not be challenged if we sat there and so we had a desk for me to do some work on and a big wide window with a view of the countryside for Anne.

The trip between London and Plymouth (which is where we were getting off) is just over 3 hours (around 4 hours by car) but our AirBnb was booked in Downderry which is across from Plymouth in a ferry and then about a 20 min drive.

All of the car rental places in Plymouth are closed on Sundays so we planned to get to our AirBnb with public transport and then come back to Plymouth on Monday to get a rental car for the rest of our time in the South West.

 

 

We arrived at Plymouth Station at about noon and made our way to a bus stop where we were told we'd be better off getting a taxi to the ferry.  The taxi fare wasn't too expensive and we were dropped at the entrance to the ramp of the ferry within a few minutes of hailing a cab at the train station.

 

The ferry to Torpoint (the first Cornish town across from Plymouth) is free for pedestrians in both directions and free for cars entering Cornwall - you pay to leave. 

It started to rain as the ferry crossed the bay and when we got off I suggested that we go up to the pub at the top of the hill for some food.

As we went in with our two bags of luggage each, all eyes turned towards us and the bar fell silent.  One of the patrons called out to us: "Are you looking for food?"  - we said we were and he told us that there weren't any places around there that sold food, but we could go to a restaurant about 15min walk away but it would be closed in about an hour.  

I suggested to Anne that we get a pint of beer each and try to figure out what to do next.  It gave us a chance to catch our breath before we headed out to see if we could make it to the restaurant in time for a sandwich or something.

At the bus-stop on the way to the restaurant we discovered that the bus which the AirBnb host had said we should use didn't run on a Sunday.  It was raining but we figured we could make our way over to the restaurant in our raincoats hopefully without getting too wet.  This turn of events was starting to worry me - we were more or less stranded with no good way to get to our AirBnb.

We arrived just after they had closed but the chef told us there was a pub a little down the road from them and she'd be happy to give us a ride.  We were pretty conspicuous with our luggage and I guess she took pity on us looking bedraggled and a little lost.  On the way she tried to call a taxi to get us to Downderry and when she couldn't, she said she'd give us her number and we could call her after lunch and she'd take us to our AirBnb.

At the pub we found a table and ordered the traditional Sunday pub lunch which is a big roast.  They had an option for Anne which was a nut roast.  

Anne discovered that her phone was missing while we were waiting to be fed and after sending a text message to the chef she showed up with her partner who handed over the phone - it had slipped out of Anne's pocket onto the floor of their car!

We were really touched by the kindness they showed to complete strangers and I was determined not to bother them any further with a ride to Downderry so we asked our waiter if he knew of a cab company we could call.

An hour later we were in a cab heading to Downderry.  The roads are like those you see in the BBC crime series set in small villages with a parish priest who solves murders.  The are incredibly narrow with broad, tall hedgerows on each side.  Cars approaching each other on the road have to do this delicate dance where they look for a small amount of space in a hedge so that one of them can partially pull over to make space for the other car before they come head to head.  The cab driver said that you need to be good at reversing to drive on these roads.  I suppose it is often that you have to back up when no gaps are to be found.  We saw quite a few cars passing in this way and there doesn't seem to be a specific etiquette - I suspect both drivers start looking and the first one to spot a place to pull over does so and the other lifts a hand in thanks.

In England the postal codes are accurate enough to get you to a single house or apartment.  All we had for this AirBnb was a postal code so when the taxi dropped us off I assumed we were directly outside of the house.  We weren't.

I plugged the postal code into Google maps and we walked down the road a bit and up a massive flight of stairs to the AirBnb.  The apartment is a shipping container converted into two rooms and a bathroom.

The view from the top was amazing but our excitement was short-lived because when I set up my computer I was seeing massive data loss to common sites (around 80% packet loss) and live voice/video calls were impossible.

I had some trouble communicating this with the owner.  When the household mostly uses the internet for web browsing, social media and for streaming movies the software is pretty good at buffering to minimize the effects of intermittent loss of data so they might not even be aware of the problems.

In this case we were told it had been fine for other visitors some of whom had worked there before.  They offered to reset the router in their house down the hill and we could reset it at the top afterwards.  They were using an extender to get their internet access up to the shipping container on the hill.

I realized after everything was reset with no sign of improvement that we would have to find somewhere else to stay before my work started the next day at 2pm.

We found another AirBnb in a small town in Devon on the other side of Plymouth and we took the bus ride in the morning after arranging to get reimbursed for all but the one night.  

We almost missed the bus because we were about 2min walk from the bus stop when it drove past us.  The driver noticed our luggage and my alarmed expression when he drove past and he stopped the bus at the next corner for us to catch up and get in.

Considering that two cars coming towards each other have trouble, the bus makes for an even more interesting ride.  I told the driver at the end that he deserves danger pay!

Our stop in Plymouth to pick up the car was illuminating.  A bus driver at the ferry stop was kind enough to offer us a ride up the hill free of charge to get to the correct bus stop for where we needed to go.  This was the third act of kindness from strangers since we'd arrived over here (4th I suppose if you count the man in the bar who told us where to find food)!

It was raining for much of the time we spent in Plymouth.  The area we stopped in for coffee was marked on the map as an area of greenery but the closest it gets are the trees growing in the middle of the concrete paving.

Once we had our car we made our way on a 2 hour drive to the small town of Brixham in Devon in the area called Torbay.

I was interested in how the people of Devon and the Cornish get on and it turns out there are a few details to their rivalry although these are mostly described as light-hearted.  The most well known is whether you put the jam on your scone before the clotted cream or the other way around.  It turns out that Anne and I disagree on this point which surprised me.  I can't imagine how you spread jam on top of cream!  

One morning we stopped at a coffee shop full of memorabilia from a passenger steam ship line (Cunard) that used to ferry mail and passengers internationally in the 1950s-60s.  As of 2022 they are the only shipping company still offering a passenger service between Europe and the USA

We ordered a cream tea for 2 and one of us put the jam and cream on the scone in the correct order.

The town of Brixham is a quaint fishing town enclosing a small harbor.

We were able to go for a few walks around the town which has some obviously tourist-oriented shops.

 

The streets are narrow here as well, with parking fairly hard to find.  We were able to park our car across the street from our AirBnb for the week but it was tight up against the curb and along with the other cars parked there blocking half of the road forcing cars to single file in both directions.

There is a section of a hiking trail reachable from the city.  The trail is called the South West Coastal path and Anne had read about it in a book called "The Salt Path" by Raynor Wynn who hiked this trail with her husband after financial ruin and after his terminal health diagnosis.

We decided to find it and walk for a stretch along it.

The coastline if rugged but very beautiful.

There are stretches that run on the streets and paved paths of the towns where the path takes you through a town.  Our walk was half in the country and half in the town so we got a feel for both.

After a week in Devon we headed back to Torpoint, across the ferry, this time in the rental car and stopped again at the restaurant where we had been treated so kindly.  

The restaurant is called Woogies and we had a meal there that rated up with the best restaurant meals we've had on our travels.

From Torpoint our sights are set a small village within walking distance of Penzance in a bay on the most south-western stretch of England.  

London in June

Visiting our daughters in London doesn't leave much free time with my work schedule but the routine is very pleasant.  We take turns to walk each pair of grandchildren to school in the morning and then afterwards usually walk the dogs along the tow-path between West Molesey and Hampton Court, often stopping at the little Cricket Club for coffee and croissants.

Our daughters both have dogs with a lot of character.  Jessica's dog, Smokey likes to steal the ball from other dogs and run away.  Sometimes right out of their mouths.  The game doesn't last long but can be annoying to the owner and dog who were robbed!  Emma's dog, Sonny is fixated on balls.  He will chase them down and leap to get them if they bounce. 

He also wrecks every ball end ends up spending time with.

Arriving in late spring means you get to see new life.  Some trees still have blossoms and flowers plants everywhere and of course on the river the goslings

and cygnets are at different stages of growth with their extra fluffy feathering and mad scrambles to keep up with their parents.

Weekends are also fairly full of activities with the grandchildren and so my writing has had to take a back seat.

On our first full weekend in London Anne and I spend a night in a hotel Chiswick which turned out to be a quaint and rather beautiful town. 

The occasion was a visit to a small family-run circus (Gifford's Circus) that has been operating since 2000 and has an annual stop in a park in Chiswick.   Anne came across the circus after following a British author whose sister founded the circus with her husband.

We were all pretty enchanted by the show which featured a house band that performed ELO's "Mr Blue Sky" so well that at first I thought it was a recorded backing track.  Everyone in our family turned to look at me because of how much I had loved to play the soundtrack to the 2004 movie "The Eternal Sunhine of the Spotless Mind" every Sunday morning (which starts with this song) leading up to and for years after the movie's release in 2004.  Anne occasionally calls me Mr Blue Sky for this reason (or perhaps because of my sunny disposition?)

As usual and on cue more or less - I found myself thinking through the practical realities of living in England (again) when we wandered around Chiswick and looked at the outlandish prices of properties there.

A huge draw is how closely our upbringing matches the sensibilities and character of the British.  I suppose it is fair to say that there is a whole world to being British that we overlook because we haven't (and still don't) have a sense of how conscious of class people in England are.  You hear the occasional mention of "posh" as a reference to someone who is or sees themselves as above the common person but I suspect there is a ton of nuance there that we have no idea about.

I wondered whether we sound "posh" to people with strong accents in England?   I went looking and found articles claiming that English South Africans from the former British strongholds in South Africa (Cape Town, Eastern Cape and probably the Durban area) have what is known as a "received pronunciation" or BBC English.  I remember, growing up, that we would jokingly refer to someone speaking English without a regional South African accent as using "The Queen's English" and laughing at the English TV programs with their fake affected English accents.   

Of course the answer is that the South African accent is to most Brits both instantly recognizable and nothing like the British accent.  People failing to make the distinction are most likely from North America where the British, New Zealand, Australian and South African accents all sound "British".  In America we had times where people were less friendly (clerks at the local town hall or library) because, we later realized, we sounded like snobs with our close-to-but-not-quite-british accents.

Accents aside, it does seem that we would slot rather neatly into a community with social clubs and activities that interest us.  Given that house prices decrease as you travel away from London we could probably afford to buy a house somewhere close enough to our children for regular visits and far enough to avoid becoming "baby-sit magnets".

The price of goods and restaurants did shock us this time around, though.  We were paying close to 16GBP ($20 or R391) for 2 coffees and two toasted cheese and ham sandwiches at the cricket club and our few trips to restaurants were all a little alarming once we took a look at the menu.

Our second weekend involved a long drive to a sculpture garden which had some amazing sculptures made from interesting objects like a dragon made of horseshoes 

and a rather evocative statue of a rust-colored woman caught in a pause peering at something in the woods, which reminded me of my wife.

Anne and I took a few trips into London on this visit.  Anne had a some art galleries that she wanted to see (the National Portrait gallery reopened after two years of renovation)

and the July 4th weekend gave me 2 weekdays off that we used to do a standard tourist whirlwind tour of the center of London.  We started at Piccadilly Circus

and made our way down the South Bank and onto a short river cruise from the Tower of London to Westminster Hall.

 

We discovered that unless you book tickets in advance, the standard attractions (Big Ben, Westminster Abbey) are impossible to visit but we enjoyed wandering around and looking at the sites.

One of our trips included a stop for dinner with friends at an Ethiopian Restaurant and another to Regents Park where we met up with friends from Toronto who also happened to be in London.

We have been told by a number of people that we should visit Cornwall and so that will be our next step.  I've recently been reading the detective novels that JK Rowling wrote under a pseudonym and remember her descriptions of Cornwall where the main character has his roots.  It will be interesting to see the countryside and get to know a little about life in Cornwall.

I've already started looking at real estate listings which has Anne rolling her eyes.