| Home again, jiggety-jig |
[Apr. 4th, 2004|12:44 am] |
Am now back home. Will catch up on what's happened these last few days when I've had some sleep. |
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| Recap |
[Apr. 4th, 2004|06:51 pm] |
Thursday:
After the exertions of the day before we decided to do very little at all today. Only we could take a day like that and end up getting completely rain soaked.
The plan was to stay in apart from a brief foray into Newlyn to visit the art gallery there. There's an awful lot of art going down in Cornwall and Newlyn Art Gallery inhabits the space between the Tate St Ives - world famous stuff - and the St Ives Society of Artists - very talented amateurs. The Newlyn Society of Artists, whose members regularly exhibit at the gallery, seem to be professionals - but only moderately famous ones. Big fishes in a medium-sized pool. As a rough rule of thumb, count the zeroes on the price tag - you can expect to pay £300 for something by one of the St Ives artists, £3,000 for the Newlyn bunch and through the roof for anyone who get exhibited at the Tate.
The current Newlyn exhibition was definitely worth seeing, but it was also patchy in quality. Some very adventurous and talented work rubbed shoulders with smug and sterile knock-offs of artistic giants such as Patrick Heron and Ben Nicholson. The visitors' book was just as mixed - enthusiasm in some posts, but also blank incomprehension from holidaymakers and smug ennui from what appeared to be sneering members of the local artistic community.
The nearest car park is a quarter of a mile away along the seafront. Dramatic crashing waves and a four-masted tall ship rolling at its anchor in the bay indicated we were not in for a lazy summer stroll. The rain, when it came, was icy cold and blew horizontally from the sea. Swiftly, one side of each of us became drenched and freezing while the other side became hot and sweaty from hurrying. We dripped our way into the gallery, where the attendant looked appalled at our sorry state and let us stash our jackets in the disabled toilets. Afterwards, I left ![[info]](http://piktures.deadjournal.com/userinfo.gif) astrofiammante in the gallery while I squelched off through even worse rain to fetch the car. It was a good dress-rehearsal for Saturday, did we but know it.
Friday:
Off to Truro to BookCross - there's a lot of it going on there and astrofiammante hoped a book in the cathedral would have more success than our usual efforts where we never hear from them again. No such luck, of course.
After that we dashed off to Botallack, near Land's End, to explore some old tin mining ruins we passed through a bit quicker than we would have liked on the coast path in 2002. We spent a while wandering happily among them, taking photos and poking around, walking as far as the restored engine house at Levant. Among all the walls of all the ruins, just one has graffiti on it. Mostly it's people's names but there's one other bit in the largest letters of all:
"ENGLISH OUT"
Saturday
The going-home day. For the second time in barely a week we emptied our stuff from the Corner House and drove off - and this time we meant it.
First stop was at Jamaica Inn, on Bodmin Moor, to pay homage to Daphne du Maurier. Rampant commercialisation has done its level best to ruin the place, aided and abetted by the new A30 that strips away the solitude which ramps up the horror in du Maurier's novel. But neither can quite manage to spoil it and we spent an entertaining hour there, wandering around and visiting the museum.
From there it was Dartmoor, to combine two interests - one lapsed and one very current. The last time we went letterboxing on Dartmoor was something like five years ago, but I wanted to combine it with BookCrossing and in order to do so I'd bought a copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles from a second-hand bookshop in Truro. My aim was to find a letterbox, sign its visitors' book and get its stamp, and depart leaving the novel for the next person to find and take home.
No sooner did we get up onto the high moor than low cloud closed in on us. For a while we sat glumly in a car park where an ice cream van and its baffled owner were doing a roaring trade to pissed-off, rain soaked holidaymakers, but eventually we pressed on until we found a valley and a tor low enough to be below cloud level. Of course, not being in the cloud meant that we were under it, and it took the opportunity to piss all over us with great enthusiasm. Fortunately we'd barely started searching when astrofiammante, who is the letterboxing equivalent of a truffle hound, found the box. Or more likely one of the boxes - there's probably a few up there. This one was an old ammunition tin secreted in a crack in the tor, plenty big enough to leave a book in. We did the formalities, left the novel (double-wrapped in plastic), and shot off back to the car like rats up a drainpipe.
And from there we drove home. |
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