Still at Zennor ( see previous post) we had lunch at the Old Chapel Café. I discovered Cornish crab, which I afterwards ordered every chance I got. As we were leaving I got engrossed in seeing how an old iron ship part functioned as a doorstop. I pulled it away and watched the door swing in. Then I settled it back and joined my cousins in time to hear Sue say, “She’s playing with the doorstop. Next she’ll be doing a video and saying ‘Gwen would love this.’”

St Senara’s Parish Church is known for the Mermaid Chair.

The Mermaid Chair at Zennor

Wendy and Sue mentioned it so many times I was expecting to see a statue of a mermaid lounging on a giant throne in the center of the nave. But it was a quiet little wooden bench about 400 years old with a carving of a mermaid on one side. St Senara is a Celtic saint like St Just and St Erth and I believe St Bridget of Sweden.

The legend

This particular church is obviously well loved and well-tended as evidenced by the needlepointed pew cushions, each one unique and as of our visit, gently used.

Pew cushions, St Senara

We had an afternoon cup of tea at our lodgings. Alec and James, a tanned, piratey-looking, hippy handyman, came to fix the light that wasn’t working in the kitchen.  I chatted with him while he fiddled with the light, which he could eventually not fix.

When the men left us with our cups of tea we started pretending to be gossipy old ladies. (Wendy is on record saying we weren’t pretending.)

“What’s Alec do all week when Sue’s at work?”

“Don’t know. He’s just around. He’s got his cow.”

“Does James come every week to fix stuff?”

“I think he comes once a week but he’s been here twice because you complained about the light.”

“There’s Alec, getting in his car.”

“Where’s he going, then?”

“There’s a BT van. I wonder who called them.”

“Must have been Alec because he and Sue own all the cottages but the one that belongs to that couple in Switzerland who never use it and won’t sell it.”

“Well Alec just left. Looks the BT guy is getting out.”

“What’s he doing, then?”

“Now he’s back in his van.”

“Is he just going to sit there?”

By the time we had wound up all the gossipy bits I was laughing so hard I was crying. Sue, especially, says her lines with a kind of indignation that she hadn’t been informed in the first place.

By late afternoon we were at Godrevy Beach waiting for the seals to put in an appearance. It reminded me of deer watching on Whidbey, waiting for hours and only having a brief sighting, then going inside and finding later that six of them were out and about and never bothered to let me know. We saw so few seals on this particular day that I’m not convinced I saw any at all.

The Ice Cream Van

I waded (paddled.) Sue got her Kelly’s ice cream cone from the van that parks at the beach until the end of the day or it runs out of ice cream, whichever comes first.

Much later after I returned to Seattle, I learned (from a Doc Martin episode)that the lighthouse at Godrevy is the lighthouse that Mrs. Ramsey was trying to get to in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse. Had I known that, I would have paid better attention.

Mrs. Ramsey’s lighthouse, Godrevy

Wind whipped up as we drove home and continued on through the night. As people never seem to tire of telling me, these winds begin in America and pick up momentum until the hit their first obstruction, Cornwall. They said the same thing about Islay when I was there.

None of us slept well. I was awakened by a continual bumping sound. At 1:00 I went outside to investigate because I thought it might have been the recycle bin. It wasn’t. But it was deliciously spooky outdoors across the road from an old churchyard in the wind at night.

In the morning Sue said she’d been up at 2:00, thinking the church had caught fire because she saw lights around it.

Wendy said she had lain awake, wanting to make a cup of tea but afraid she would wake somebody up.

We went to Land’s End where the winds were close to 50 mph and I was seriously afraid they would blow my glasses off. When I visited Land’s End in 1980, the only building on site was a small, decrepit snack shack where one could buy a postcard, a stick of rock and an ice cream with a flake. Translation: a stick of rock is a thick hard candy stick with words embedded all the way through, in this case “Land’s End.” Ice cream often comes (or did then) with a piece of Cadbury flake chocolate stuck in the side.

Elena at Land’s End

Land’s End

orginal Land’s End tea cottage

Today Land’s End is practically a theme park. All kinds of video crap, exhibitions and flashing lights, none of which have been particularly successful. Quite right. There are still plenty of trails and scenic views, which is truly all you want when you come to Land’s End. It’s the tip of the boot if you envision Cornwall as a boot. Or a drip on the witch’s nose if you envision Cornwall as a chauvinism inspired idea of a witch.

We lunched at the restaurant as the cafeteria looked a little seedy and the guy behind the buffet looked like he might have drooled in the food. I ordered for us at the bar. Sue and I wanted the leek and potato soup. I asked if it came with a side salad. The young woman behind the till looked as though I had asked her if she would just get someone to urinate into a bowl for me.

“A SALAD? With soup?”

I guessed not. Back at the table Wendy and Sue said they’d never heard of soup and salad. Soup and sandwich, maybe. Or salad and coleslaw.

“COLESLAW? With salad?” I asked. “How do your figure that?”

“Well they go together, don’t they?”

“Coleslaw most certainly does not go with salad. Coleslaw is salad so that’s redundant.”

I loved the leek and potato soup. It was leeky and green. You gotta love green soup. Sue hated hers because it was thin and not potato-y enough. Too much leek.

Down the road from the restaurant I met my pirate. We passed a petting zoo where for 10 GBP you could pet a llama to get to the Greeb craft cottages where I struck gold.

Edward Williams is a silversmith with a workshop and a cat names Felix who used to wander all over Land’s End until he found a home on a blanket in a box with a sign that says “Please do not pet the cat.”

Edward (Eddie the Snake) was decked out like a pirate with plenty of pirate stories to tell in a pirate accent. He was still a master craft metalist and he took on the challenge of my broken glasses.

A Pirate mends my glasses

First he flattened the two broken ends banging them with a lethal looking hammer. He broke several drill bits trying to drill a rivet into each end.

“It’s hard metal, you see. Probaby titanium,” he said making me wonder if it was so hard, how did I happen to snap it in two.

He kept at it while telling pirate stories to Dutch tourists who I silently willed to go away. He twirled my glasses while building up to his punch line while I had visions of me groping my way through Gatwick airport because my glasses had been smashed or the lens had fallen out and were now the property of a cat I wasn’t allowed to touch.

Eddie the snake

He ended up super gluing the two ends and wrapping the whole business with hot silver wire. One arm was a little shorter than the other but the glasses fit much more securely.

“What do I owe you?”

“Oh, nothing at all. But you could leave a donation to the cat.”

Nothing could have pleased me more except to have been able to give Felix a scratch under the chin. I put 10 GBP in the bucket and gave my pirate a kiss. My silver-wrapped glasses were my favorite souvenir of the trip.

Wendy and Sue, by this time, were long gone to find the toilets and to wait with the eternal patience of the English in the car. I was able to run up the hill, texting them at the same time to say I was coming. Five days of Fat Camp was paying off.