WEEKEND BREAK (18)

STILL SANS SAND!

 

Well, almost.  We’re into June now and this is still the rocky scene* at Falmouth’s Castle Beach, as of this morning.

 

 The sand is trying to make a comeback, but for the moment at least it still looks like a losing battle.  

 

There are just a few little pockets of it back where it should be, here and there, so far as the main area, directly below the coffee shop and beach huts, is concerned.

 

The "good news” is that there is still an excellent sandy stretch just to the west.

 

 It’s only 50 yards or so away from the coffee shop and is easily accessible via a flight of steps and just a teeny weeny bit of rock to negotiate. Or of course you can approach it from the west (e.g. Tunnel Beach).

 

In the meantime, with the clock ticking and summer really, truly (??) just around the corner, a good old sou’westerly gale – or two or three – would not come amiss, to get that sand finally shifting back big-time to where it belongs!

 

But then again, life is never dull at Castle, as a video on their Facebook page reminds us: https://www.facebook.com/castlebeachcafe. Scroll down to the May 30 reel starting “It’s been a stressful few years . . .”

 

* See also Weekend Breaks May 23 and April 25.

 

 

MUDDY ‘ELL, WHAT A BRIEF FROM MY FIRST BOSS!

 

By the end of tomorrow, more than 100,000 people will have visited the Royal Cornwall Show.

 

Happily, I will not have been one of them – as I never have been. (I’m not a crowd person, see.)

 

Just short of 60 years ago, though, I had no choice but to attend the RCS’s little brother, the one-day Stithians Show, Cornwall’s biggest of its kind.

 

That was in Falmouth Packet territory and I – as the raw trainee on that newspaper – was more than once given the Muggins role of covering the event.

 

And in those days that meant doing it properly – you know, actually visiting it and spending hours there.

 

More specifically, come rain or shine or mud, I had to traipse round collecting Gawd knows how many hundreds of names – that is, every single winner, runner-up and third place or whatever.

 

Names sold newspapers, ‘twas the rule, and there was simply no easy way round it back then, of course – I had to hand-write down into my trusty reporter’s notebook every single one of them.

 

And then, at the end of the day, return to the office – or to my home with my trusty portable typewriter – and tap ‘em all out, one by one. 

 

Oh, and together with a meaningful and colourful report to kick off what would have been a page lead feature (in a broadsheet newspaper, remember!).

 

It was nothing unusual for that sort of job to involve Yours Truly burning the midnight oil.

 

Same applied to evening council meetings, or any other out-of-hours news coverage.

 

Editor Ken Thompson would repeatedly drum into me the paramount need for my stories to be written up SAME DAY, no matter what it took.

 

He justified this with the line: “JUST IN CASE YOU HAVE A HEART ATTACK OVERNIGHT, MIKE.”

 

And the really scary thing was . . . . he WASN’T joking!!

 

  

‘TEMPORARY’ JOB!  WAS DENTIST LYING THROUGH HIS TEETH?

 

More than a year on from my big move, I’m still struggling to come to terms with the stratospheric cost of private dentistry compared with what’s left of the NHS version.

 

And now I’m about to embark on a major course of treatment that could, I guess, render me bankrupt.  (Only kidding.)

 

To clear the decks for that, I had another lesser treatment this week that involved a temporary filling in a tooth on the other side of my mouth.

 

As Josh at Falmouth’s Observatory practice chatted away with me lying helpless on his reclining chair, and literally rendered speechless, I got to wondering how long I could delay completion of the “temporary” job, for cash flow purposes, you understand.

 

As if reading my mind, he assured me that the temp fill should hold firm for a good time to come.

 

Then he revealed his “record” such period among his patients.  One of them, he said, had gone FORTY YEARS between the initial procedure (by another dentist, natch) and completion of the job – and with that temp fill still in good nick.

 

Somehow I don’t think I shall be challenging that record!     

 

 

 

EE AYE ADDIO, WE WON THE (BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH) CUP

 

Once upon a time, sponsorship in sport – any sport, at any level – was an almost alien concept.

 

Nowadays, of course, it’s everywhere, all part of the game, as it were.

 

As such, we see some strikingly long and/or quaintly renamed competitions.

 

One such I noticed last week was in a Packet report of a success for Falmouth Town Reserves.  

 

(Provided the Packet got it correct, of course), it was the Kernow Stone St Piran Football League’s Tracy Banfield Cup. 

Exactly.  Try putting that mouthful into a soccer song or chant!

 

 

THE CALM EXPERIENCE THAT LEFT ME ANYTHING BUT

 

I forked out just short of £40 a year ago to sign up with the Calm app, to listen to soporific story-telling in the middle of the night in the hope that it would crack my insomnia.

 

It didn’t.

 

So I made a diary note to de-register this week, when my subscription was up for renewal.

 

First, it took an age to go through the procedure and then – wow, wait for it! – the last required step was to send off £9.95 as cancellation fee.

 

Scandalous or what? I certainly hadn’t expected that, and there was no mention of it when I originally registered.  

 

A straw poll among family and friends quickly confirmed that this was indeed highly unusual, not to say unfair, practice.

 

And what it definitely wasn’t was a calming experience!

 

 

From The Archive: first published June, 2016  

 

DISCOVERING A “NEW” BIT OF CORNWALL

 

One of the great joys of living in Cornwall is that there is always more of the county’s gorgeous coastline waiting to be discovered.  Well, that’s the case with me, anyway – I’ve still got a fair few miles to go before I’ve seen it all.  One person who is determined to help me make inroads into that shortfall is my elder daughter Annabelle, who regularly pulls me away from home territory when she comes down from London. This was one such trip . . .   

 

There’s nothing – absolutely nothing – to match the discovery of a “new” stretch of Cornish coastline.  Factor in quality time with your daughter and you’ve got a day in a million. 

 

That was my blessing one day last week.  Wife Janet is still largely out of action after a nasty fall, so she urged me – positively kicked me out – to head off on my own with Annabelle.  (Probably just glad of a day free of fuss, fuss, fuss from me.)

 

Annabelle, London-based these days, is your ultimate planner, organiser, and lover of Cornwall - and never misses a chance to come back home. 

 

The walk she chose was Porthgwarra Beach to Nanjizal Beach.  This is south of Land’s End, “just round the corner” from it, but never previously reached by me despite ten years of doing the PR for L.E.

 

And what a discovery.  After a hairy-scary narrow, winding approach road (what else?), we paid for the car park at the cute little café and were then straightaway hit smack between the eyeballs by a cove that gave new meaning to “picture postcard.”

 

Cue first half-dozen or so shots by snapper Annabelle.  Then onto that coastal footpath and in no time at all we were up on high – just us, the vastness of the sea and the utter magnificence of the Cornish coastline, with its awesome, rugged cliffs, all around us.

 

Well, not quite just us.  For company, we had the Scillonian slowly coming into view, well out to sea, from Penzance.  She looked so tiny, chugging away out there – a symbol, almost, of man’s place on the greater planetary scale of things.

 

A lot of birds, too, with a special eye out, to no avail, for the Cornish choughs that the display notices told us we just might see.

 

Talk about refreshing the spirits.  Such a sense of freedom and escape from everyday pressures and concerns, out in the “wilds.”  Such peace . . . nature’s sounds alone, and not another soul in sight (at least for starters) . . . scarcely another building in view, just Gwennap Head Lookout Station in the distance.

 

We chose the more “challenging” of the two footpath routes, the one almost literally hugging the clifftop.  And mighty close to the edge we came, too, at times.  (I just had to look the other way while Annabelle crouched at that edge for some of her more ambitious photographs.)

 

On past that lookout station and we began to wonder if we would ever find Nanjizal Beach, but in the meantime we marvelled at the unfolding scenery each time we rounded a “corner” or crested a ridge. 

 

Whole rows of “zawns” – deep and narrow inlets carved into the cliffs - fair took the breath away.

 

And then we were finally descending towards that beach, and it was so worth the effort – capturing, as it does, the very special essence of this stretch of granite coastline.  

 

Indeed, it’s not a beach in the normal sense.  It’s a carpet of boulders, some pretty large, and special care is needed if you want to avoid turning over your ankle.  

 

Two streams cross the beach, with one arriving as a waterfall.  Then – photographer’s paradise – there is the remarkable “Song of the Sea,” a high, narrow cave feature with rock pool at low water. 

 

What comes down must go up - in this case, we have a fair old climb back up to the top of those cliffs for our return walk. 

 

In fact, once we’ve managed that climb and got our breath back, we agree it’s time to find some little rocks for shelter from the wind and indulge in some lunch – Cornish pasty, OF COURSE!   (Delicious, even when cold.)

 

By now, we have a few more walkers on the trail.  And then some bonus extra company.  

 

As we return to Porthgwarra, and look down once more on that picture-postcard cove, there are sudden whoops of joy as Annabelle spots a seal idly swimming around close to shore.  Snap, snap, snap!    

 

Finally, it’s time for a return visit to the little café, where we treat ourselves to a (well-earned!) Cornish cream tea, consumed at a table out on the grass. 

 

Attention turns to a friendly black Labrador dog, his tail flapping against the ground as he feeds on tit-bits handed down from above.

 

All still so peaceful, so relaxing, so friendly, so civilized.  We live in a troubled world, don’t we just, but here we reflect that it is still possible to achieve the ultimate get-away-from-it-all.