Ideally a holiday should end before or when you want it to but I’ve another day booked and wake up stiff and tired due to yesterdays exertions plus the poor quality of sleep you get when your air matress goes flat in the night. Combine this with the ongoing drizzle and the 10 mile circular walk to St Agnes is not selling itself to me today. I need a Plan B. I need a challenge!
Plan B goes like this… Find a cliff top viewpoint where I can sit in the car, listen to the cricket, read a paper and stuff my face with a home assembled cream tea. Now we’re talking! Yesterday I noticed a take-out cream tea shop in Perranport (what a great idea for a franchise) and they should sell all the gubbins I need. It’s disappointing therefore to discover that today they are out of scones, jam and clotted cream. I didn’t think to ask about tea. Next I visit the Co-op where I get a paper and the clotted cream. The scones have raisins in them (wrong for a CT) and the jam shelf sits behind a large stationary roll cage that I can’t budge. With no scones and the preserve harshly imprisoned a solution comes to mind. When I was walking through Crantock yesterday I popped into a farm shop that sold everything I need. The 5 mile drive yields results and the final piece of the jigsaw fits into place as a pub carpark at Pentire point allows me some fantastic, albeit soggy, cliff top views. Cricket, paper, cream tea. Perfect!
The beauty of a good quality cream tea is the sheer calorific value you get from it. Yes – the chlorestoral probably takes a day off your life but what a way to lose it. Much better and more memorable than a limp and tasteless burger in some squalid fast food place, regretted and then forgotten in an instant. Last year I gorged myself on a truly epic cream tea on the Isle Of Wight and the memory of it still bring me pleasure now. Hmmm…
That’s that then. What now?
Newquay is around the corner so lets find a Wetherspoons (not so much “a” as “the” since there is only one in the town and only one further south of here and that’s in Penzance) where I can upload a blog or two and grab a drink. Note: My campsite has Wi-Fi but at an eye watering £3 per hour it would make more sense to buy a dongle. I find the pub surprisingly easily. It’s rammed due to the rain but I buy a coffee and manage to cadge a table. I love what Wetherspoons do. It is what it is with quality cheap beer, coffee, edible food and where conversation rules. They tend to come in two formats – tasteful conversions of interesting old buildings (eg: old cinemas, banks, etc) that draw in a varied but inevitably vibrant crowd, or formulaic refurbishments of dark featureless boxes that act as a magnet to pallow faced all day drinkers who say little and only move to slope outside for a fag. This branch errs towards the former but the building has no great architectural merit so perhaps my theory is looking a bit tatty.
I spend three hours arsing around with blogs, photos and email – not because I have that much to do but the network speed is so slow it feels like somebody is rattling out the ones and zeros with a morse tapper. Sundays and Mondays blogs go live but the rest will have to wait until I have more stamina. Anyway, it’s brightened up a bit now so I’ll take in the sea air and find out if Newquay has any hidden charms beneath its predominantly low rent surface.
It hasn’t.
I will take away two distinct memories though. Firstly the measures some people will take to avoid their neighbours…
…and also that of a busy high street like one you might find anywhere with a car packed tarmac road lined with the normal high street stores, but crawling with bare footed dudes in sand encrusted wet suits heading down to Fistral beach with their surf boards. You don’t see that in Derby.
On my return to the campsite I can’t help noticing a very large dead badger at the side of the road. I know that if I stopped to take a closer look I would find the clear indentation of a size 10 walking boot.
Tim Whitemore 