Thursday, 1 May 2008

west

A moment's peace

I towed a caravan down to Cornwall. The caravan belonged to a friend, and the car belonged to another friend. The caravan was going to live in a field north of Wadebridge, and this was my first and, hopefully, last experience of towing a caravan. I presented a blithe facade, to avoid worrying my friend, and inwardly quaked. We drove overnight, to avoid creating a twenty-mile tailback on that road that snakes north around Exmoor and over Bodmin Moor. We put it in a field. Then I fell asleep almost instantly.

Wandered around a little bit of North Cornwall the next day, gazed across the estuary towards Padstow, drank v posh and expensive coffee, pressed a sprig of fennel in my notebook, ate a Thai fish salad in a gallery cafe and cast a critical eye over the art...

Funny business.

Crunched on a beach looking for nice shells. Realised that it's been a long time since I've been in Cornwall.

And I didn't feel entirely there then, either.

And so home again, and I've spent the subsequent two days getting over the caravan lag. Like jet lag but slower.

Happy Beltane!

4 comments:

  1. Snap - I was in Cornwall earlier this week too... got home yesterday.

    Though the main shells we saw were those of the 400 tortoises at a tortoise sanctuary!

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  2. A tortoise sanctuary? -there must be a story there. Or possibly 400 stories?

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  3. The first tortoise was bought instead of a kitten... the rest just followed... though actually quite a few of them are breed there and as they refuse to microchip the parents they cannot sell the young ones.

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  4. Cor... I just saw the pics of them.

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