We recently came back from almost 10 days in Cornwall. This visit coincided with Aisha's 12th birthday but also with some pretty abysmal weather. Mark & the kids drove down and on the way stopped in at Glastonbury to visit Valerie again. Fortunately her son Toby was there too. We last saw Toby, now married and a teacher at Rugby school, as a 15 year old when he and Valerie came out to visit our friend Rachel in Damascus some 20 years ago.
She also made a group birthday cake for Toby, Rachel, herself, Aisha and William. She persuaded Mark to take the remains of the cake, which lasted to be served as Aisha's birthday cake, eaten after present unwrapping on top of the Hoe, in Plymouth.
Sally organised a couple of days leave and trained it down to Plymouth to join us for Aisha's birthday. It was a logical place to meet up en route to Cornwall, but also the closest city to where Sally's grandparents lived and in fact where her Grandpa ended his days, so somewhere she wanted to see again.
The day started with a family breakfast and then a drive up to The Hoe. Aisha enjoyed both the good weather and her presents. William enjoyed taking his shirt off! 
The Hoe is the spot where Sir Frances Drake spotted the Spanish Armada on its way to attack England in 1588. He reportedly completed his game of bowls before sailing out to face the Spanish. There are various statues and stirring WWII monuments on The Hoe. As a navy port town, Plymouth was heavily bombed and suffered greatly. We found this plaque which had some particularly poignant wording as part of a prayer.
In case you can't open it up clearly enough the wording is, in part,
".... I ask no help to strike my foe,
I seek no petty victories here;
The enemy I hate, I know
to thee oh God, is also dear..."
While Aisha didn't have too many things she wanted, she has been declaring her need and desire for a mobile phone and was hoping to get one for her birthday. With her increasing independence here - she now catches public buses to & from school by herself - Aisha has made stronger arguments for a mobile. Mark has been adamant that a phone, while OCCASIONALLY handy, is in no way a necessity. He has long maintained that for kids they are little more than toys - ones that are increasingly used as a means to bully and be bullied. He suggests that the perennial safety argument is a furphy and that common sense would make one far safer than a mobile. Sally, however, is swayed more towards the benefits, so it proved a point of ...discussion... between Mark & Sally! In the end, Aisha wasn't too disappointed - she didn't receive a phone, but the promise of one by way of the following poem Sally wrote as a temporary phone substitute!
We knew about the Mayflower & Plymouth but we didn't realise the very many connections to the founding of colonial Australia and to Australia during WWII.
There is also an impressively located, recently renovated &, unusually, free art deco 'Lido' overlooking Plymouth Harbour where we swam with many locals in very cold water, bracing wind but lovely sunshine.
The next few days were spent at a very good B & B in St Agnes on the north coast of Cornwall. The weather had collapsed overnight and would stay wet, windy and quite cool for the remainder of our holiday. In fact the sun really didn't shine until the morning we left Cornwall a week later!
St Agnes also has Australian connections. Its surf life saving club is twinned with North Bondi's, we found a calistemon in a pub garden and......
...Mark's paternal Grandfather, Harry Strutt, owned the Cove Cafe and B&B right on the beach in the early 1950s! Mark's parents, Elizabeth & Harry Strutt also had their honeymoon there.
Mark didn't know much more than this. Staying in the town was not planned but just happened to be where he found accommodation. A phone call home to his mother reminded or told him that Grandad had owned a cafe '... as close as you can get to the beach there..'. On seeing the cafe he wasn't sure if it was the one. It certainly was as close to the beach as you could get but he had no recollection of the place from when he visited his Granddad in the early 70s as an 11 year old. We mentioned the vague connection to the B&B owner who brought out some St Agnes history books. Sure enough, flipping through the first one resulted in photos of Harry Strutt senior from the 50s.
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| The Cove Cafe - 1950s |
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| Schooners Cafe - present |
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| Harry Strutt 2nd from the left in each photo. |
This discovery called for our first Cornish Cream tea!
The beach disappears at high tide but opens up during the low tide. In 2008 the sea just about took Schooners Cafe away!
Before leaving for Cornwall Mark had booked tickets for a performance at an outdoor theatre near Penzance. The Minack theatre ( The Minack link ) has been around since the 1930s when a local woman, Rowena Cade, had the idea for it and supervised the building of the theatre, perched on a cliff top looking out over Porthcurno bay.
We knew it was the last night of Hamlet - appropriate given our upcoming visit our friends in Copenhagen who live close to Elsinore castle where Hamlet is set. We didn't realise how popular it was nor how late it would run. We ended up arriving at 6pm just to check it out for the 8 pm performance thinking we would collect tickets and go off to eat nearby, but found the queue had already started because it was unreserved seating. The sky looked ominous and we debated just what we should do. We were unsure if the performance would go ahead, if it would stop part way through and if it did go ahead whether we should attend. How would the kids cope sitting in the drizzling (or worse) rain watching Shakespeare?
People in the queue were very encouraging and we found out later that shows are rarely cancelled. The theatre has apparently been attracting full house audiences from around the world for years. So, we decided to stay in the queue and ended up getting seats (stone benches - Colosseum style) in the third row. Given it was a full house and some seating is way way up 'in the gods' our unintentional early arrival worked out well. We pulled out every layer of clothing we had in the car, including the picnic mat to cover and warm, rain coats & the all important bin liners recommended by our B&B owner! We bought Cornish pasties and brownies on site and warmed ourselves as we waited with hot chocolate! Others were far more prepared with yummy gourmet picnics - something we'll know for next time!
As the performance began we could see the rain forming and drifting in from the sea. While it came through periodically in sheets it was never really very heavy and the wind and cold was appropriate given the play! The actors carried on and, amusingly, wove the weather into their dialogue. Despite the complexity of the play the kids enjoyed it- especially William who chuckled his way through it and was still engaged when it finally ended at 11pm!
This particular post is titled 'Hanging Ten in Cornwall' because, being Australians, Mark decided that the kids should have surfing lessons in England. Not only kids but parents as well (for amusement value on the first of the 3 lessons the kids had)! This was part of the kid surprises mentioned in the previous post. Not too long before we left Australia we all watched a TV programme about surfing in UK, particularly in Cornwall. Indeed Cornwall has some spectacular long wide (when the tide is out) sandy beaches with surf. At low tide they actually could pass for Australian beaches. As mentioned earlier, the weather was bad - the archetypal British summer. The water was surprisingly warm though and with wetsuits on we were fine. The noise heard on the video is the wind that blew fairly constantly for the four days we were in Cornwall.
Here are a few shots of our surfing exploits.
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| RESTING AFTER AN TRULY AMAZING RIDE, THE PHOTOS OF WHICH HAVE MYSTERIOUSLY DISAPPEARED .... |
Fortunately the slides were good and the kids and Mark had a good time, one session lasted almost 2 hours ! It was easy to see though, that there was potential for spending almost half the allocated 80 minutes queuing for the slides. All that after waiting up to 45 minutes just to get into the complex. Food for thought for those advocating an Australian population of 30 - 40 million by 2050.
On the way home we dropped into Romsey to visit Jane, Nigel and Julian (the Big J mentioned in an earlier post). Jane was Mark's landlady way back in another life when he had hair and was a wise and brave traveller living and teaching in London. He was saving as much ££ as possible to head back on the road to ultimately and, unbeknownst to him at the time, meet Sally in Damascus. Jane has been a reliable friend since 1991 and has now become a source of travel advice, meals and a place to stay on the trips to & from Devon & Cornwall.
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