Covid-19 (and my own laziness) has interrupted my travelogue of last September’s UK adventures.  I’d been a week on Islay in Scotland, then drove with my cousins in Somerset to Morvah, Cornwall.  It seems a very long time ago and it has done me good to revisit my journal and remember. Here is installment thirteen:

Towards the end of the very windy day wherein a pirate mended my glasses, we went on a search for the Merry Maidens, a circle of standing stones the guidebooks all say are in a field indicated by a stone marker and a wide area for cars. We found a Celtic cross near a stile and a sign that said Public Footpath. I salivated at the public footpath sign and was eager to climb the stile and look for stones in a field.

Over a stile

“I think this is it,” I shaded my eyes to make out something at the far end of the field.

Sue came over the stile. “I think that’s a gate.”

Wendy came over the stile. “That’s a gate.”

But, but. My footpath.

I always want to walk the footpaths, which in many cases just means you are allowed to walk the edge of the field, which is not going anywhere notable like a magical well or thousand year old merry maidens.

We got back in the car and drove slowly around two joyless hikers, the man with his nose in a paper map and the woman looking resigned. A quarter of a mile down the road was a stone marker, a wide space along the side of the road and a huge sign that said Merry Maidens. One could even see the standing stones from the road. The guidebooks couldn’t have told us all this?

Merry Maidens standing stones

Merry Maidens

Over the stile we went and approached the circle of nineteen stones. An officious man had his camera and his patient lady-friend in his force-field. A few free-spirited women danced. We all tried to give each other a chance to photograph the maidens without being tacky tourists in the background.

The most elegant maiden

The joyless couple arrived. The man, his nose still in his map, stopped obliviously in the center of the stones. He was skinny and wrinkled, his back straight, his neck curving forward like a shepherd’s staff. A Dickensian undertaker had wandered into the scene. His resigned wife stood outside the circle and we all waited for him to get the hell out of our photos. After a long study of his map, he and his wife moved on without having even looked at the Merry Maidens.

When we had the Merries to ourselves, I watched Sue take photographs and then stood in her place to take my own. Wendy sat on a rock, thinking her own thoughts.

She photographing the Merry Maidens

“Wendy, you are like Patience on a monument,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. It’s something from Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, I think.”

“Pithy on a rock cake,” Sue said.

“What’s that?”

“You know rock cakes? Pithy are the little curls of lemon or orange rind on the top that everyone flicks off because no one eats them.”

“So you’re saying that Wendy is superfluous?”

“Isn’t that what you said?”

“No, I said she was patient.”

Wendy, through this whole exchange, remained the Head Teacher, not taking this nonsense seriously. She knew she was the only one who could drive.

From the Merry Maidens we went to Lamorna Cove. I felt immediately that this was the place I wanted to be left alone for three days to watch the surf, take walks and write. A small beach with a few houses and one café, it’s hidden away at the end of a narrow wooded road flanked with thick hedgerows. The Dickensian undertaker and his wife clomped past us as we headed for the café, apparently still not the least bit interested in their surroundings.

Elena at Lamorna

We arrived back in Morvah late afternoon in time for Sue and Wendy to get a short rest before packing themselves off to a concert in St. Ives. I was never so glad in my life that I elected to not get a ticket. I craved a quiet evening.

I was watching an episode of Silent Witness when Sue, of Alec and Sue, the owners of the cottages came in clutching her guest book for us to sign. Sue is gone during the week so this was only my second time seeing her. She’s in the medical field; we thought a nurse. She certainly has a bit of the head nurse about her: cheerful, bracing, interested, no nonsense and always with the catch phrase, “Well, I’ll love you and leave you.”

She asked me about our stay. We reviewed the various appliances and devices Alec had been called in to fix. She loved me and left several times before the front door closed on her. I went to bed and didn’t hear Sue and Wendy return.

In the morning we made a shopping list for our last port of call, one more stop on our tour before returning to Butleigh. We needed milk. Three different kinds of milk: lactose-free for Sue, skimmed for Wendy and whole milk for me. To go with our two different kinds of tea.

As a goodbye, I bought all the catnip mice in the church across the road. I found the graves of the sisters who had built Trebeigh cottage: Maude and Laura Annie Noye, may they rest in peace.  I was mooing at the cows when Sue joined me.

“That’s not a very English moo,” she said. “You’re not getting the vowel right.”

We delivered the signed guest book to (the other) Sue where we found her, Alec and James cleaning a cabin and watching a soccer (I think, I don’t care) game on the telly. I told them that a pirate had mended my glasses.

“Oh you mean that guy over at Land’s End?”

“I don’t think he takes that costume off when he goes home,” our Sue said.

“Oh he does,” said James. “I saw him on the cliff path with his lady-friend and he looked normal.”

We loved and left everyone, loaded up the car and headed into St Ives for a final stroll and shop before heading to our last destination, worlds away from Trebeigh Cottage. Next up: a night in a caravan park.

At times when I have been seriously depressed and feeling like nothing short of oblivion is going to help, I have engaged in the homely task of listing anything I could scrape from the quotidian to appreciate. In this surreal time, optimism can be in short supply. So as a public service, I offer the following small pieces of life to savor:

A person who has a wonderful college roommate who has introduced her to the utility of the word quotidian, can now throw it around in a blog post.

A person can safely make a Fu Manchu with facial depilatory and be reasonably certain her neighbor won’t be recycling his New York Times her way in the next ten minutes.

A person can go to Trader Joes at first light, find the line stretches three blocks down the street, get in line and spend five minutes getting her phone and earbuds organized when a staff person comes along and says senior citizens are allowed to go to the front of the line.

Since all the TV talkers are working from home, a person can see Claire McCaskill’s kitchen, Stephen Colbert’s dog and Chris Hayes’s two small children.

A person has permission (finally, after being raised by a Mother Who Went Through the Depression) to throw away tissues after one (or two) uses and doesn’t feel obligated to re-use them until they are the consistency of wallpaper paste.

Even though a person misses her beloved hairdresser, she owns a pair of scissors and will do penance later.

The streets are safer for bicycling than any time since the late 1970s.

If one is the director of the OK Chorale and has a stack of different colored bandannas for use in chorale performance, she can saturate and contrast balance her face mask with her wardrobe.

Everyone in one’s neighborhood is nice. Not that they were un-nice before but now they are saying “good afternoon” to one’s butt as she works in the front garden.

An endless parade of families, children on bicycles and dogs on leashes stroll past a person’s house at all hours. It’s as though everyone is rediscovering life.

These are all good things.

I thought of my mother the other day when I went to the market and realized that planning a meal meant starting with what I could find on the shelves, not with choosing a recipe from a niche cookbook. Women in my mother’s generation cooked whatever was on sale.

I’m not being snarky when I say my mother would have relished the current Covid-19 crisis. One of her most quoted Bible passages was from Matthew 24 (I had to look up the address but there was a time when I knew it by heart): “there will be famines and plagues .  .  . you will hear of wars and rumors of wars.” This was a signal that the end was coming and the end meant Jesus was coming. Plagues and wars and rumors of war. Plagues and wars and rumors of war. It was a mantra.

The wars and rumors of wars have actually never stopped in the 2000 and some odd years since the book of Matthew made the cut as being the word of God, according to some ancient males on the other side of the world, adjudicating in an ancient language. But this Co-vid 19 outbreak would probably qualify in my mother’s mind as an End of Time indicator. As a plague or as a “rumor of plague” if she wanted to go that route.

When she was feeling angry and thwarted by our ebullient mischief, my mother used to say “What you kids need is a good depression.” By this she meant we needed to experience some deprivation until we came down from our high horse. She had been there and done that herself in the 1930s and as a result my mother always had enough toilet paper to supply a public rest area for months. She had a basement packed with food past its sell date, which I would starve rather than eat, but where toilet paper is concerned, I grew up in a house of plenty.

When I heard that people were toilet-paper-panic-buying, I wondered if they all knew something I didn’t. Was there a shortage? Maybe I needed to lay in an extra supply. At Bartells in Edmonds, the toilet paper wasn’t even being unpacked onto the shelves. It was in warehouse boxes by the front door with a sign limiting you to four packages. I bought two even though being my mother’s daughter, I had plenty at home. Thus I came to understand how panic buying (or selling) happens.

I doubt there was any panic going on, however, on St Patrick’s Day when I got an email from Licorice International promoting a one day special: a box of Irish Potatoes with every order over $30. If you don’t know what these are, Irish Potatoes are not Irish or potatoes. Neither are they licorice. They are wads of coconut and cream cheese shaped like tiny potatoes and dusted with cinnamon. I knew of them but didn’t know if I would actually like them. And here was a “free” box of them.

I occasionally order Salmiak Rocks (salty/sweet Dutch licorice) from Licorice International, hence the email. I was currently more into bubble gum cigars and just wasn’t feeling the licorice. But the free box of Irish Potatoes that I didn’t know if I would like! Let’s see $30 worth of licorice. That’s 2.2 kilos of Salmiak Rocks, what would that be, one pound? Three? I wasn’t sure which way the ratio went. And $30. Now? When I have no income because I can’t have students in the house?

Blog Reader, I ordered five pounds of Salmiak Rocks and got my free Irish Potatoes. They are creamy and taste buttery and it makes me smile to see them. It also makes me smile to know I have all that licorice in abeyance.

Oh and by the way, I am teaching on Zoom. Tell all your friends.

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.

Our Celtic Spirituality Morning gave way to lunch at The Cook Book in St Just. Once a bookshop/café, now it’s a café with books for décor. I ordered a plated salad after it was explained to me that a plated salad is salad on a plate. I had an image of latticed and braided vegetables but it was just a salad—a good one—with about a pound of cheese on the side.  I ate one hunk and we put the rest in an omelette in the evening. In conception an omelette but one that turned into scrambled eggs as mine so often do.

On the way back to Morvah I announced I was going to take a nap the minute we got home.

“You have to bring in the washing first, “Sue said.

We all brought in the washing and we all had a rest before the omelette cum scrambled egg and frozen potato waffle, which are like French fries (chips) only waffled. We had a time figuring out the broiler for the waffles. I dropped out early and went for Alec who wasn’t home.

“He won’t know. He’ll just come in and tell us it isn’t working.” Sue again.

Someone (not me) found the right buttons in the right order to get the thing to heat.

Finally we set off for the Minack Theatre where I would be collecting on part of this year’s birthday present, the other part being the most gorgeous box of artisanal chocolates I had ever seen. The Minack is an open air theater built into the Cornish cliffs and looking onto the Atlantic Ocean. It was built by Rowena Cade in the early thirties. For two years, she and her gardener moved granite boulders and earth from the cliffs below her garden to create terraces. Since then it has become a celebrated setting for plays, recitals and entertainment of all kinds.

The Minack Theatre

The play we saw, Stones in His Pocket by Marie Jones uses two actors to play all the characters. They moved quickly from one character to another by use of a gesture, a turn or in the most obvious of cases –to everyone but me—switching between blue and a red cap. Wendy was later incredulous that I had missed the significance of the red and blue caps as (apparently) the entire plot hinged on them.

In my defense I must say that the setting of The Minack was distracting. Sitting on the headlands on the edge of the sea, I watched the waves and gulls and the sinking of the sun into west, muting the edge of sea and sky until everything was dark except for the stars and of course the stage lights, which didn’t seem all that out of place. With all the external drama, my wandered in and out of the play.

We were bundled up though it was a mild night for mid-September. A group of young German women, in their late teens, sat in front of us. Before the play started we saw that one of them was crying and her companions were rubbing her arms and talking earnestly to her.

Suddenly Wendy up and offered them one of our blankets. “Is your friend cold? Would you like a blanket? We can share.”

I thought, “Wait a mo’. I don’t want to be cold.” In truth I was positively sweating with four layers on top and two pairs of socks, a scarf, a hood and a blanket , which I felt compelled to share with Wendy as the price of sitting next to someone so thoughtful. She also got half of Sue’s blanket so for her kindness she got double warmth. Quite right.

When the subject of the young women came up on the way home, Sue said “She probably cries all the time and whines about everything and they’ve figured out how to humor her,” which made me burst out laughing.

An enormous harvest moon guided us home and a tailgater lit us up from behind.

The next morning Sue popped her head round my door to say, “Oh Elena, you’ll want long pants. There are stinging nettles” and I had that sense of being a seven year old with my parents. We were to walk the cliff path that begins with the public footpath next to the church and hooks up with the Cornish Coastal path. The rugged coastal path extends from Minehead up in Somerset all the way around Cornwall to Poole in Dorset. Parts of it are easy but parts have huge boulders to negotiate and an unforgiving rocky path. Wendy has walked a good deal of the coastal path. Her assessment of our little bit was that it was of middling difficulty.

St Bridget’s Church, Morvah

I told Wendy and Sue about my nurse friend Susan who looked me straight in the eye and said “DON’T FALL.” We laughed about it but there was method. I didn’t lark about on the cliffs and I walked carefully on the paths and over the boulders, her words in my mind.

Coastal Path, Morvah

We were working our way along when into the beauty of the stark blue sky and the rugged black headlands strode a man wearing nothing but hiking boots and briefs. Brief briefs. Practically a cod piece. He paraded past us at the intersection of the foot path and the coastal path. Before we’d recovered our surprise another man came into view from the north.

“Here’s another one,” Sue said.  “This one has clothes on.”

The second man passed us chuckling.

We walked a different piece of the trail when we visited Zennor and this became my favorite walk. My poetry for this trip was Rilke’s Duino Elegies. I never got past the first elegy and I puzzled over the words. Standing near Zennor Head watching the dark of the sea burst into white spray against the black rocks, astonished by the colors in the carpet of wildflowers and gorse, hearing the fierce wind, feeling the warm sun, I thought I understood Rilke’s words:

Beauty is nothing but

The beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear

And revere it so, because it calmly disdains to destroy us.

Zennor Head

Wildflowers, Zennor

Path at Zennor

Wendy drove as fast as she would allow herself to get to the Botallack mine by sunset. The evening was cold and the wind never stops blowing in from the Atlantic. Yet quite a large group had gathered. A young woman sat cross-legged on a rock that jutted into the sea and waited. Others waited in their cars, still others clutched their coats and watched. Wendy was one of the former, this not being the first time Sue had photographed the sunset. I was one of the latter mostly because I like to watch Sue photograph. The atmosphere and the drama of the setting sun was magical.

At the Botallack Mine

Sue at Botallack

Moving to more mundane matters, I bought bicarbonate of soda in the Pendeen shop to sprinkle in my shoes, which still stank. I coated both shoes and left them out in the Cornish sea air. I used my new foot salve, Socks, and went to sleep. In the morning I put on sandals, my only other pair of shoes. I fought my way through the cousins to hang the wash on the line. We had done colors on this morning and whites yesterday.

Today was Celtic Spirituality morning beginning with Men-An-Tol, megalithic remains that looked quite sexual to me. A holed stone and two phalli plus a kind of wilted one that leaned over. Close to Morvah, it was still a bit of a walk off the main road.

Men-an-Tol

Sue at Men-an-Tol

These strange ancient sites make me feel like a three year I once babysat. He heard some opera and asked quizzically, “What is that?” Coming from the the west coast of the U.S. where Caucasians have been around less than 200 years, I hardly know what to make of this antiquity. I do know that when I am in their presence, I feel a kind of Presence but then I don’t know what to make of that. So I stood in the Presence and then I took photos. I watched Sue taking photos, then I took photos of Sue taking photos.

Up the road from Men-an-tol is Miscellaneous Standing Stone in a Field, which –after I had communed with it—I learned was called Men-scryfa or “stone of writing.” It stands there like a still life with the presence of that terrifying statue of Dante in Florence. Or “Christmas Yet to Come” in Mr Magoo’s Christmas Carol.  See? I don’t know what to make of these stones. There is an inscription on the stone that seems to call itself (in Gaelic) “grave of Rigalobranos, son of Cunoualos.”

Men Scryfa in Field

Men Scryfa and shadow

I set off through the hay drying in some poor farmer’s field because people are going to trample it no matter what. Wendy and Sue waited at the gate telling me to not come back until I felt The Aura. Sue presently came in. We stayed until interrupted by a couple with cameras.

Pursued by a tractor, we carried on down a different road to Lanyon Quoit, a dolmen. As far as I can make out, a dolmen is a table made of three stones and a quoit is the top of the table. So they are basically the same thing except they aren’t tables at all. They are the remains of a tomb: two tall stones supporting a flat one, in the case of Lanyon Quoit, three tall stones. Lanyon Quoit can be seen from the road but to actually get to it, we traversed a brick stile and walked up a wide green path.

Again the sense of Presence, nothing particularly mystical, but old, tired and a little sad.  “The still, sad music of humanity” as Wordsworth said about Tintern Abbey, a much younger ruin. I felt it in spades when I stood inside the quoit and looked out at 21^st century people taking photos on a windy, sky-blue day.

Turnstile to Lanyon Quoit

Lanyon Quoit with dramatic lighting

Lanyon Quoit with tourists

We passed a father and his little girl, aged around three, on one of these pilgrimages. He held her two dolls while she picked blackberries from the hedgerow with patient attention to every detail of what she was doing. Children can be masters of mindfulness. It’s irritating.

But it gave rise to a conversation about spoken English. Wendy and Sue say “black-brie” and I say “black bare ee.”

“See? You draw your words out,” Sue said.

For the rest of the day I  muttered, “Black-brie, blue-brie, strah-brie, rahs-brie.

We discussed the way the English add questions to the ends of statements almost like a tic:

“I didn’t notice that lot in the chapel were smoking, did I?” I recited. “You tag little questions like that.”

“Do we?”

“Hmmm.”

That’s another English thing, the “Hmmm” that goes up in pitch and then down. I think it means “I heard you and I’m not particularly interested.”

“Quite” is a quirky word. Something that is “quite satisfactory” is just barely satisfactory. “Quite a pretty little bird” means the bird is lovely. “Quite right” is a vote of solidarity with the addressee:

“Finally I turned around and said to them, I bought a ticket to hear the music, not you!”

“Quite right.”

On to the glorious expanse of Cape Cornwall, a National Trust reserve where walking trails take one to the highest point of a headland and the Coast Watch. We finally got our morning cup of tea in bone china cups at the tea hut and sat on logs in the warm sunshine.

Bone China mugs

Apparently a caravan i.e. trailer called the “Little Wonder Café” used to park at Cape Cornwall during the warm months. One could get cups of tea and “normal food and hunks of cake and lovely local pasties.” Now all that’s left of the Little Wonder caravan is a permanent shelter that sells posh food with truffles and cilantro and the bone china cups. I thought I would never hear the end of it from Sue and Wendy: “And there was a caravan and a lovely block of toilets.”

We had our cups of tea and I took a photo of them sitting alongside the tea hut, probably grumbling about the old days when there was a lovely block of toilets. Later I googled the Little Wonder Café at Cape Cornwall and found that Wendy and Sue weren’t the only grumblers. It was a beloved institution.

Wendy and Sue grumbling about the cafe at Cape Cornwall

At the water’s edge, Wendy and I sat in the sun watching Sue photograph kelp and boats. We talked about family—we are still trying to untangle our tenuous connection.

“You feel so familiar, Wendy. Comfortable and welcoming.”

“Well, you’re family, aren’t you? We quite like having an American cousin.”

I believe the “quite” in that sentence means lovely, not just barely tolerable.

I was reminded (as we watched Sue meticulously focusing and clicking) of the patience of the English. Or maybe it’s partly being out of the city. Or Cornwall herself. A calm rhythm dances even in the mining and farming districts that are fading out. Islay was like that, too, but Cornwall feels in my bones.

Sue photographing at Cape Cornwall

Cape Cornwall

Welcome to Port Wenn! If you are a fan of the series Doc Martin, you’ll appreciate the reference. If you aren’t, read on. We went other places, too.

The day began at the cottage in Morvah with the usual tea and breakfast and me asking Sue and Wendy what they remembered from the day before while I took notes. The forecast was for a day of clouds and rain but the day was clear and warm. We did a washing and while I was doing my stretches, Sue pegged it on the line.

“You are determined to not let me do the washing, aren’t you?”  I fixed her wagon though, I did the breakfast dishes.

My glasses were a worry, also irritating. I could see the blob of cello tape hanging off the left arm and I checked it constantly to make sure it was hooked behind my ear. Sue’s temporary filling replacement sat on the kitchen table pending real need for it. Wendy was still fine.

We drove up the coast to Padstow, home of the Obby Oss festival. Sue said it was mostly a chance for people to get drunk although she thought there were some who appreciated the ancient tradition. The ancient tradition probably involved people getting drunk, too, as that is not a new phenomenon.

Padstow is sometimes referred to as Padstein because apparently the celebrity chef Rick Stein practically owns the village. We had tea at his café and fish and chips at his chippy.

Elena and Sue at Rick Stein’s chippy

Wendy across the table from Elena and Sue, probably wondering why she had to be on holiday with such adolescents.

We sat family style at the table; our dining companions were two women dripping with pierces and with shaved heads except for pony-tails sprouting at the top. Their presence prompted a text message between Sue and me, something I swore I would never do, that is, sit next to someone and text them instead of talk. I had become one of Those People.

S: Is it acceptable to say to the person opposite ffs chew with your mouth closed?

E: What is ffs?

S: For fuck’s sake

E: I wouldn’t mess with someone with that hair-do

S: It’s a ‘do?’ I thought it was a tragic accident.

Snorts.

Later Wendy said she thought they seemed like nice people talking about normal things who just looked different. This made me feel contrite. I don’t think it did Sue.

On to Port Issac. Another village, another car park but this time, no bus. The streets of Port Issac are too narrow and too steep. The car park was about half a mile from the village and straight down, which also meant straight up on the way back. I understand that a month before Doc Martin films, two of its stars, Dame Eileen Atkins and Ian MacNeice move in and start walking the streets to get into shape. Wouldn’t that be something, to come out of your cottage in a little Cornish fishing village, say hello to the Dame and continue with your day?

As we came down to the harbor, I could see that the tide was out and the boats were beached. At the first shop, I bought a DVD of Fisherman’s Friends, a movie Sue and Wendy introduced me to my first night with them back in Butleigh. It’s the true story of a bunch of fishermen from Port Issac who became famous singing their sea shanties. The movie was made with actors (one of whom I despise but I won’t say which one; it’ll be Sue’s and my secret. And Wendy because she hears everything. But I don’t think Wendy cares about Sue’s and my little foibles.)

In any case, the singing is wonderful and the real fisherman are the ones at the start of this clip. You can believe that the OK Chorale will be singing this song next quarter:

For those not familiar with Doc Martin, the show is filmed in Port Issac but is called Port Wenn. The locale is used so lavishly and it was so familiar, I felt I had lived there all my life. There was the coast guard station, the school, the harbor and the fish processing building which smelled as bad as my shoes that were currently airing outside the cottage in Morvah. There,too, was Mrs. Tishell’s pharmacy, which off script is a confectioner’s shop. The fellow inside was happy to chat about being the setting for a famous TV show. He gives up his shop when there is filming and it is made into the pharmacy. He told me about Eileen Atkins and Ian MacNeice walking the hilly streets and he said Martin Clunes is (unlike his character of the Doc) gregarious and always surrounded by people and dogs. Everyone in the village has had their picture taken with him.

SweetShop/Chemist

Finally we went up the steep street to the Doc’s. I sound be-sotted but I don’t think I’m alone, although with Wendy and Sue, I was. I’m not sure they’ve even seen Doc Martin.

After these moments of complete indulgence of me, we walked on the beach. I photographed Sue photographing the boats and we all three found sea glass. It was a long walk back to the car park and a long drive home but we made it just in time to see the sunset at the Pendeen lighthouse, which deserves to figure more prominently than at the end of a day of me slobbering all over Port Issac. So, til next post.

Elena at the Doc’s

Headlands, Port Issac

Port Issac Harbor

Port Issac Harbor

Monday morning–my first sugarless day– I was awakened by the sound of birds singing and cows moo-ing:

Since I was still the only one up, I went round the cottage filming the window fixtures and talking to myself:

When I finished this catalog of domestic quotidian, I took off my glasses to polish a lens and unaccountably snapped one of the arms in two. I looked at the two pieces in my hands and thought, how could this have happened? The arms are made of titanium! I taped them together with sticking plaster (that’s English for Band-Aid) and the broken side flopped on my ear like the wounded wing of a bird.

Meanwhile Sue was up and had broken a tooth and a filling had come out.

Wendy was okay.

Then I noticed that my hiking shoes reeked of something foul. At first I blamed the peat of Scotland but later decided that it had to do with them being cooped up in an airless bag for two long. I put them outside the front door to take in the sea air. By the time I discovered my shoes smelt and had made the general announcement that I was parking them outside (no one cared), Wendy and/or  Sue had done a washing and Sue was taking the clothes to the clothesline in back.

By now we should be having our morning tea and cake but we hadn’t gotten out of Morvah so we walked around the corner to the old Morvah Schoolhouse, which has become a Café and Gallery.  Wendy and Sue scored over me with their lemon drizzle cake (which is a thing, lemon drizzle cake, a Mary Berry thing) saying that it had neither sugar nor gluten in it. I ate my oatcake and bought a bar of lemon soap because I couldn’t have the lemon drizzle.

After we left I was surprised to hear Wendy and Sue’s assessment (complaints) of the experience. The server had certainly taken her time and she had barely looked at us or asked if we needed anything else. She was too busy talking to her colleague who had come in with a pile of vegetables. Said colleague was the same person who had (supposedly) cleaned our cottage and Sue said she had done a slapdash job or words to that effect. But apparently the lemon drizzle had been good.

While we were in the neighborhood, we visited St Bridget’s across the road from our cottage.  It’s was a tiny little sanctuary, freezing cold and smelling damp and old. Catnip-stuffed church mice were going for a couple of pounds a head. I bought four for some of my cat friends. Then I played “Roll Out the Barrel” on the pump organ.

I visited Alec’s enormous cow, Doubtful, and the chunky little Neptune. Doubtful was feeding ferociously near the fence. She took one repressive look at me and continued crunching. Neptune froze a little way off, then advanced, stopped and watched me for whatever most worries a cow about a middle-aged woman cooing from the side of the road.

I asked Sue and Wendy what was the most noticeable thing about my American accent. Sue said it was the way I drew out all my vowels. British vowels are more clipped and with fewer diphthongs. I tried speaking more clippy and Wendy said I sounded like Miss Piggy. We were to have many conversations about the differences in American and British speech and I spent a lot of time muttering to myself trying to zero in on the pronunciation of words.

This first conversation about speech took place while we were trying to find the Madron well. (Madron is accented like Madris, something else I muttered to myself whenever we talked about Madron or passed road signs.) This Madron well was something I had read about; Sue and Wendy had gone looking for it but so far hadn’t found it. The guidebooks are coy about exactly where it is and Google maps is hopeless. The gist of all our sources was that the ancient Madron well is in a field off a path. There’s a sign on the road that gestures toward the path so we parked and set off down a lane, which turned into a path arched over with still green trees and bushes and which pulled us into a wood.

path to the well

A mile in we came upon the ruins of a Celtic chapel with a nave and a well but not the particular well we were looking for. A half dozen young people were hanging about in the ruins, reeking of weed and acting stupid so we continued down the path. We could see fields beyond the woods but nothing to indicate which field contained the sacred Madron well. Finally we came upon a hole with a stone covering it.

“This looks like a well,” Wendy said. “Could this be it?”

Sue looked at her scornfully. “Is this a field?” she demanded.

Celtic Chapel and Wishing Well sign

We gave up on the field and the well but as consolation we saw the Cloutie Well. (pronounced “clootie,” which means cloth.) Colorful strips of cloth hung from branches and twigs that grew around a pond. As the clouties disintegrate in the wind and rain, the ailment they represent leaves your body. I tied up a tissue  because I didn’t have any clothes I wanted to rip for even such a worthy cause as arthritis. It was a used tissue and Sue said that wasn’t very respectful.

Cloutie Well, Madron. Photo by Sue Cooke

From Madron we carried on to Mousehole, one of the many charming fishing villages on the Cornish coast. At Hole Foods (get it?) I had a gluten-free pasty that had to be the finest meal I had ever eaten but then I was hungry and hadn’t had any cake.

The Mousehole is a shop that I remember from 1980. The woman running the shop seemed to have been there since 1980 without sleep, a meal or even a wee break. (Wee is English for pee.) She followed me around sighing loudly every time I left a card so much as a quarter inch askew. She followed me into a section of lotions where I picked up a little pot of foot salve called “Socks.”

“That’s for feet,” she snapped contemptuously (or so it sounded.)

I wanted to asked, “Does that mean I can’t buy it?”

Evidently it wasn’t just me who who buzzed her antennae. Later Sue said she felt like saying to her, “I’m going around the corner now. Do you want to follow me to make sure I don’t steal anything?”

We finished the day in Penzance where there was no joy for my broken glasses (no pirates either for any of you who would appreciate knowing that.) I was still held together with sticking plaster, which a helpful optician made worse by adding a blob of cello tape (that English for Scotch tape.) Sue got a temporary filling kit at Boots. 

We came home tired and pulled our day’s bootie out of the car. I raced Sue to get the washing off the line and we draped the damp clothes on all the radiators in the cottage. Then cups of tea.

A Mousehole Street

Mousehole Harbour

The Mousehole

Sunday was my day of reckoning for all the cake in my system. In the morning we drove into St Ives, Wendy parked in the car park and we rode the shuttle bus into the heart of town. The car park/shuttle is really the only solution for these villages with narrow streets never meant for cars, much less cars going two ways. The bus itself nearly scraped the buildings on both sides of the road. Parking was free but it cost a pound to ride the bus. “Ta. Cheers. Thanks very much. Cheers.” The bus driver scrutinized the pound coins and dropped them in his till.

We walked down the hill and had a wander on the main street, which I presume was the High but there weren’t the usual signs. It was more a matter of, “it’s near the church on the corner.”

Wendy homed in on the Yummy Scrummy Cafe. Wendy is the undisputed champion of finding the best cafes. This one had a gluten-free courgette and carrot cake with thick buttercream frosting, which was damn good. Did I mention it was still morning?

We poked in the shops: Poppy Treffry, White Stuff, Whistlefish, Fat Face.

Sue and Wendy

Wendy and I paddled (that’s English for waded) on one of the five beaches St. Ives is built around. We had lunch at one of Wendy and Sue’s favorites: Pizza Express. It’s reliably good; I just wish it didn’t have such an American-sounding name. Pierces my illusions of Miss Marple.

We were in St Ives during a two week arts festival. Evidence was around every corner, like the Kernow Samba drummers (who were mostly middle-aged women and very good with the intricate rhythms) on a stage where the High St emptied onto the beach. At the Rock Balancing Park a pirate-y looking bloke balanced a huge lump of a rock onto a pointy one, then sat back and kicked his heels against the wall and looked insolent. He waxed eloquent about his carefree life: “This is it. The air, the sea. Life is free.” Blah Blah.

Rock balancing Park

As we trudged up the hill Sue muttered, “He obviously doesn’t have a mortgage.”

At the top of the hill, we went back into town, then started up an even steeper hill to the Coast Guard watch station and St Nicholas Seamen’s Chapel, a dear little place that was unfortunately locked.

Seamen’s Chapel of St Nicholas, St Ives

But we met Frankie, a spaniel/retriever who had found an outlet for his talents. He charged up the grassy hill with a red ball in his mouth, dropped it and watched with great anticipation as it began to slowly roll down the hill again. When it picked up speed, Frankie charged after it and brought it back. His owners said he had already been at it 20 minutes when we walked by. Sisyphus should be so happy.

At the Co-op across the street from the bus stop we brought provisions against the day we would not see another shop, which we did daily. By the time we had gotten off the bus at the car park, the mist was rolling in from the sea. On the drive home we couldn’t see three yards in front of us when out of the mist were suddenly cows on the road. Wendy is a careful driver and no cows were harmed in the course of our journey. Sue and I photographed some hind ends and I moo-ed at them.

Trebeigh cottage was cold and damp when we arrived home. I went across to tell Alec we were getting nothing but cold air out of the radiators. He came back with me smelling like he had been enjoying his Speyside single malt.

“Well, the heat’s not on,” he told us. “The radiators aren’t on.”

Not knowing how to respond to this, we looked at him.

“I drained one radiator but the heat hasn’t come on,” Wendy said.

“Why’d you do that?”

Wendy and I looked at each other.

Finally it was discovered that the thermostat batteries had died. Alec went out to his magical holiday cottage shop to get new ones.

We got the heat going. I took a hot bath and had a mini bottle of Bowmore I had brought with me from Scotland. Every inch of me either ached or downright hurt and I could still feel the cake from this morning in my stomach like a dead weight. Or maybe it was in my conscience. Or already on my hips. I asked Sue and Wendy if they thought we had done a lot of walking today.

“Not especially.”

Oh god, I thought. If I don’t do something differently I won’t survive a week with these two.

I embarked on a new pattern the next morning, one that got me through the holiday: stretches every morning and no sugar. When we went to a cafés for morning tea and cake, I had tea and oatcakes or dried fruit and nuts. Within 24 hours, I felt better and by the end of the week I felt marvelous. I also felt like I had been at Fat Camp. Rigorous hikes every day and no sugar.

Also by the end of the week I felt like a seven year old with her parents. I truly did not have to know anything or think about anything. I just had to do what I was told. “Elena, you’ll need your long pants today because of the stinging nettles.” “Elena, do you have enough yoghurt for the morning?”

Sue and Wendy have traveling down to a fine art and they are so used to each other, they talk in shorthand. I had to move fast if I was going to contribute anything like the washing up (that’s English for washing the dishes) or pegging out the washing (that’s English for hanging up the laundry.) In the end, I felt loved and welcome and relaxed in body and mind like I hadn’t been in a long time.

But the end is still a week away.

St Ives

Green Grocer, St Ives

Wendy, Sue and I set out for Cornwall early afternoon and I got a feel for the pattern of the days. Everything is a reason to stop for a cup of tea and probably a slice of cake. (The English have a real gift of the cake.) I think our first stop was to celebrate having gotten away at all and it turned out to be for lunch at The Monks Yard just off the A303 at Horton Cross. I know this because I was obsessed with toggling from the paper map to Google maps.

I ordered for all of us at the counter where I noticed a gluten-free Victorian cream cake, which I did not have room for but ate a slice anyway. Another pattern begun. The counter person said “And would the ladies like like sugar in their tea?” I looked across the room to where Sue and Wendy sat at a corner table. I wanted to say, “Oh, do you mean them?” But I didn’t.

At the gift shop across the way I found Pip & Ettie waxed wraps, something on my list for Christmas gifts. It turns out that Sue and Wendy know Pip and Ettie (they are a friend’s two daughters) so I bought a lot.

We skirted Exeter and went across the top of Dartmoor on the A30, slipping into Cornwall around Launceston without the grand entrance over the Calstock Viaduct down by Plymouth. I looked up from the map just in time to see the sign saying we were entering Kernow. It was one of those longed–for moments like when I would watch for the first sign for Walla Walla when I went back to school. I was back in Cornwall. Everything began to look Cornish: the narrow roads, the high hedgerows, the occasional glimpse of the green quilt of the pasture enclosures, the dots of white sheep.

Wendy did all the driving. Sue doesn’t drive and I won’t drive in the U.K. It was her call as to what road to take and when to stop. She went straight through to the coast. We stopped at Pendeen for what we thought we might need until we did a proper shop the next day in St Ives.

Pendeen is tiny but it had the closest shop to where we were staying. It’s a “Cost Cutter” shop. The shop in Butleigh is a “Londis” and the one up in Port Ellen was a “Spar.” These are franchises run and supplied a bit differently than the Co-ops. That about ends my interest in them; it’s just that they are so much of the landscape now. The privately run Green Grocers are dying out although there was one in St Just and another in St Ives. I remember when there were Green Grocers in London neighborhoods. Dark, funny little places with fruit and veg that looked like real food out of the garden, not airbrushed and waxed for the supermarkets.

We needed three kinds of milk for our tea. Sue drinks lactose-free, Wendy drinks skim and I wanted whole milk. Last time I was here I told them I wasn’t drinking that thin white water in my tea.

I would have really liked double cream, which is like our whipping cream but Wendy had shamed me out of that on my first night: we had had raspberries and cream at dinner. The cream pitcher was all glommy with leftover cream. I scooped a spoonful into my tea.

“Cream in tea?” Wendy said. “That’s not very British.”

Nothing could stop me in my tracks quite like telling me that. It’s too bad she couldn’t have said that eating sugary food and sitting around all day wasn’t very British.

A mile down the road from Pendeen was our destination, Morvah, and a holiday cottage called “Trebeigh,” one of a series of old stone cottages and a farm, all owned by our hosts, Sue and Alec. We met Sue (hereafter known as Morvah Sue) before we were scarcely out of our car. She bustled over from her home across the yard.

“There you are. So glad to see you. Long journey? Sue, Wendy, Elena, oh you’re Cornish are you? With an American accent. Now the key is in the lock. You try it. Here’s a second set. Just a few rules of the house. Here’s the lounge. It’s a bit musty from the chimney. Just open the door and a window to clear it out. The wifi information is there. DON’T TOUCH the modem or we’ll all lose our internet service. Here’s the kitchen. Funny story, we bought this tablecloth in guess where?”

We looked in silence at the tablecloth, which had drawings of cats on it.

“’Mouzul,’of course. She looked at me, “‘Mouse-hole’ to you. Well, I’ll love you and leave you. Oh. Mysterious story. The two ladies who first lived here were Maude and Laurie Annie Noye. My sons were born on the same days that they died.” She nodded solemnly. “Well, I’ll love you and leave you.”

When she loved and left us for the last time, we looked at each other and blinked. Finally Sue said, “I didn’t think her stories were either funny or mysterious.”

I said, “I’m offended that she didn’t think I know Mousehole is pronounced ‘Mouzul.’”

But Morvah Sue was a good sort and so was her husband Alec who we were to see often in the ensuing week.

Across the road from Trebeigh is the Morvah Parish Church and churchyard. I chose the room where I could see the church and the old headstones and monitor Alec’s enormous cow, Doubtful and her chunky little calf, Neptune in the pasture beyond. The official name of the church is St Bridget of Sweden after a 14^th century mystic whose followers were the first to inhabit St Michael’s Mount.

St Bridget’s Church, Morvah

We got ourselves reasonably settled, ate something or other, had our cups of tea with three milks and settled in to watch a DVD. Sue couldn’t get the DVD player to work. While she and Wendy fussed over it, I went out in the black night using the flashlight on my phone to find Alec or Morvah Sue. Alec was chopping something in the kitchen and said he’d be over “dreckly.”

Alec is a cheerful Scottish man from Ayrshire who has lived in Cornwall since 1967. He and Sue were married in the parish church at Zennor because the Morvah church was too small. Over the years they acquired most of the cottages until now they pretty much own the village. He came in and looked at the remotes. “Which one is it?” he asked. He picked up one and then other and pushed buttons. “Well it’s not working.” Push, squint, push. “That’s not right.”

Finally he worked out that we needed a new DVD player and he went off to get one. We speculated that he had a whole room full of things like DVD players and teapots for all the cottages. When we finally got the DVD player sorted, I had a piece of my own private Christmas cake.

Last Christmas Wendy’s sister Joy had made me a gluten-free Christmas cake that was so heavy the postage to send it was prohibitive. A British Christmas cake is a fruitcake frosted first with marzipan and then with royal icing. The royal icing had hardened and kept the cake preserved. Neither Sue nor Wendy were interested in sharing it with me so I got the whole thing to myself and had my first tasty piece that evening. And so ended the first day of the Cornish holiday.

My Christmas Cake