Two BIG signs that spring is on its way . . .
. . . And I’m not just talking about the lovely weather we’ve had lately.
But it was great, wasn’t it? Even though I was well behind with this, that and the other, I couldn’t resist dropping everything the other morning and heading off to Porthtowan for a glorious two hours of clifftop walking.
It was fully 20 years or more since I had last walked thataway, but I needed a mini-break of some sort, and boy, did it do the trick.
It was a true “Condor moment” (remember that ad?) when I paused atop one of those great north coast cliffs, all on my ownsome and marvelling at the vast ocean spread all around me.
There’s something uniquely uplifting and invigorating about such a moment, with a cloudless sky, the air still and the sun blazing down.
As bonus, it was good to know I could still do those mega-steep climbs with ease at the age of 75!
As for those two signs of spring, one came with my weekly Tesco shop – when, as per usual, I was outside their doors waiting for them to open up at 0700. Only this time, for the first time since last autumn, it was in broad daylight. Wow, eh?!
Then – something that always gives me a lift – I bought a packet of tomato seeds for sowing in my greenhouse.
I’ve been doing that most years for pretty much half a century now, but I still marvel at the wonder of those tiny specs eventually growing into tall, sturdy plants supplying a delicious summertime harvest.
To me, even after all this time, it is still INCREDIBLE!
And for once, IMO, that word is justified.
Unlike its routine trotting out to describe just about everything these days, it seems, that is in any way out of the ordinary.
Just as a Match Of The Day commentator did, for instance, at least three times in one match last weekend. What is genuinely incredible is that so many professional communicators can’t call on a wider vocabulary.
But I digress. Enough meandering, so let’s really hear it now – roll on SPRING!!
BRIEFLY BRILLIANT
“Less is more,” it’s often said in writing and broadcasting circles. Rarely can this have been better demonstrated, in amongst the zillions of words expressing anti-Trump outrage this past week, than with this little gem of a reader’s letter in the Telegraph on Sunday:
“If anyone was disrespected on Friday, it was the Ukrainian president. A fighter sat and listened to the nonsensical rhetoric of a commander-in-chief who has never served. George Adams, Isle of Wight”
RUN RE-BRAND?
It’s “Run Falmouth” next Sunday, the 16th. Was there ever a more drab title for an event? No doubt there’s a good reason for it (to do with the “hits,” perhaps?), but “The Falmouth Run,” at very least, would have been a whole lot snappier and altogether more appealing, wouldn’t it?
MEETING OF (LUDDITE?) MINDS
Seems I’m not quite so alone in my dinosaur status as I feared (see Weekend Break No 2).
I got chatting the other day to a fellow dawn coastal walker and topics included our weather (surprise surprise!).
We got on to snow and, although he’s been living in Falmouth for a goodly number of years , he struggled to believe my memories of seriously cold winters past.
I cited the night of the Ben Asdale tragedy, when, with a massive rescue operation under way, the rain gradually turned to snow, leaving a thick white carpet in place that didn’t start thawing for nearly a week.
From the weather, we went on to the annual “Klondyker” mackerel fishery invasion off Falmouth from 1977-83.
That was news to Matey, too.
So I told him he would quickly find plenty of info about both, and especially the Ben Asdale, on the internet.
“Just search ‘Ben Asdale, Maenporth,’” I advised.
“’Search?’” he queried.
So I explained, but he still looked puzzled.
“Tell you what,” I said, “I’ll send you the links myself. You’ve got email, right . . . ?”
“Well . . . yes, but I don’t look at it very often.”
Believe it or not, as I resumed my walking, I actually felt a little envious of him, bearing in mind how much of a worry and a hassle all things modern have been for me, notwithstanding all the big benefits thereof.
And then I also remembered a dear 97-year-old aunt of mine, who died a few months ago.
She was a school music teacher for something like half a century or more, finally calling it a day well after official retirement age.
As they bid her farewell, her colleagues gave her a laptop computer.
But it was totally alien to my aunt and she could never bring herself to use it. She continued to manage perfectly well in life, with that computer gathering an awful lot of dust . . .
And this week’s feature from the archive . . .
We are all – that’s right, all – going to be poorer now, it’s reported, after the British economy’s dramatic lurch backwards over the past six months.
Who knows, maybe “austerity” will become the in word again.
But even if it does, I’ll safely bet it will still be no match for the 19th Century version, i.e. the real thing, as recalled in this blog post from nearly ten years ago.
POLDARK COUNTRY’S REAL AUSTERITY!
I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t resist a sigh and a smile when our politicians, BBC journalists etc etc constantly refer to today’s “austerity” and “poverty.”
All things are relative, as they say, and I can only conclude that they would literally be at a loss for words to describe life for the less well-off even just three or four generations ago. And then, if they wanted REAL “austerity” and “poverty,” they might usefully take a glimpse at things as they were for a Cornish mining community way back in the 19th Century – as I just have.
Some 20 years ago now, in my penultimate professional life, my PR clients included Poldark Mine near Helston. Its owner at that time, John McLeod, turned historian, author and publisher with the completion of a fascinating insight into Cornwall’s rich mining heritage.
His book – POLDARK PEOPLE – A Mining and Social History of the Wendron District – recalled that back in the 19th Century the now peaceful valley was a busy industrial landscape, the workplace for nearly a thousand people. Miners had to live close to their work and their accommodation consisted of low stone buildings with roofs of reed or straw thatch and containing only two rooms.
In the early 1800s, a commission on miners’ housing said of one such building: “There were three beds in the one small upstairs room, which was reached by a rickety ladder; there was one small window which was unopenable. In this room was a father who was lying ill in one bed which he shared with his wife and a small child.
“A married daughter with a small baby and her sister used the second bed. The rest of the family of the son-in-law and two sons of 14 and 12 years shared the third bed. The room was open to the roof. In none of these cottages was there any drainage or privies.”
For long periods, Mr McLeod wrote, Cornish miners endured “starvation wages.” Their average lifespan was a little over 30 years. They started work young, with “child’s size” wheelbarrows used by boys of eight to ten to bring ore to the surface. “Crooked shafts, inadequate safety, worn-out machinery and poor ventilation were common – development work for the future and the search for new reserves of ore being given a very low priority.”
When foreign competition hit hard in the 1870s, the inadequacies of the system were clear for all to see. The “years of penny-pinching and profit-grasping” at once precipitated the demise of many a good mine which, if organised by modern methods, might have survived for many more years.
Candles, dynamite and tools were supplied by the mine owners, but their value was deducted from the men’s wages at the end of a contract – meaning that “men climbed ladders for hundreds of feet in pitch dark rather than waste their precious candles. Many a tragic mine accident could thus be directly ascribed to such parsimonious arrangements.”
Among produce and labour prices in the mid-1800s, butter was a “luxury the ordinary man could rarely afford” at 6p per pound. A calf’s head could be bought for seven-and-a-half pence (a day’s wage for a man), which could be boiled in a pot to help make stew that would last for weeks.
Education for miners and laboring classes was almost non-existent, but mine captains and wealthier farmers could send their children to private schools. This usually meant attendance at a private house, where they could obtain the rudiments of education at 10p per quarter year.
Mr McLeod’s great great grandfather, Daniel Trevethan, earned around 45 pence a MONTH, with miners being paid only on results, based on the amount of ore extracted.
He would typically spend a week blasting some 500 feet underground, armed with gunpowder and fuses, and then another week collecting the ore in sacks – with just a candle on his helmet to guide him. He died at the age of 43 from a diseased spine – almost certainly caused by mining – after starting work at the age of ten.
Something tells me that Mr Trevethan and his like would have jumped at the chance if they had somehow been invited to fast-forward into today’s age of “austerity” and “poverty!”
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