A lurking danger

 

Last week, near Falmouth, I sat sketching at Maenporth Beach Cafe while Nigel, Pascoe, Perran and Carenza went for a swim.

I was touched when Pascoe came back to keep me company.

Except, that wasn’t it.

‘I’ve trodden on something and my foot’s really hurting.’

Pascoe is notorious for his high pain threshold, so this was somewhat perturbing.

However, there was no glass, only a slight dark patch beneath the skin of one of his toes.

It was a puzzle.  Pascoe, however, is a biologist:

‘Jelly fish? Sea urchin? …weever fish?’

I went up to the café counter. ‘Do you by any chance have weever fish at this beach?’

‘Yes we do.  I’ll fetch you some hot water at once.’

Weever fish lurk just under the sand with their spines sticking out.  The pain is extreme.  The treatment is to dip the foot in water as hot as one can bear to denature the toxin.

By this time, Pascoe had shivers running up his spine.

The lady in charge was kindness itself and after about twenty minutes of very hot water, the pain was subsiding.

After the urgency passed, Pascoe was a little quiet.

'Okay, Pascoe?'

'Yes.  Just wondering how the weever fish is doing.'

Hag Stones

 

We just had a family weekend in Norfolk.

 

On the beach were a huge number of flints, rolled and tumbled by the tide, some smoothed into spheres, others fractured to reveal their ochre hearts. It was flints like this which influenced sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

 

My friend Carol collects flints with holes running through them - she threads them on twine and hangs them from her fence. These perforated stones were once considered magical. Said to ward off witches, they were called hag stones.

That day in Norfolk, I asked my family to comb the beach for very tiny hag stones – hag pebbles.

A long time ago when Pascoe was little and the twins mere toddlers we were all together, wrapped up against the cold wind, paddling on the beach below Kilimantringen

 

Lighthouse in Galloway, when Nigel handed me just such a pebble. Ever since, it has been my key fob.

 

Twenty-six years, however, have worn the hole broad and the stone thin, and someday soon it will wear through. Before that happens, I would like to have its successor lined up, and if possible, I would like it also to have been gleaned on a day when we were all together once more. 

Lucky then that we found one – another precious memory I can turn over in my pocket through the years ahead.

 

(Thank you so much, Andrew and Liz, for lending us your barn).

 

The kindness of a stranger

Carol had a great itinerary planned for the day.  It was a walk around picturesque Three Peaks Bay.

We anticipated the sight of sea holly, rock samphire and the mass of painted lady butterflies arriving from their migration across the sea.

Caroline drove us, and due to narrow lanes packed full of traffic there was much squeezing into passing places, lots of waiting and a certain amount of reversing.

But we knew it would be worth it.

However, when we got to the carpark at the Three Peaks Campsite, every single space was full.  More cars were arriving behind us.  We were never going to get a place.

Then out of nowhere appeared the campsite owner/manager.  She asked a group of young men who had arrived in two cars to double park with each other and create a space for us.  She then approached the others who were queuing behind us and directed them to another carpark several miles away.

From being the unluckiest walkers in the world, we were now the luckiest.

It didn’t even surprise us when the sun came out and shone on the Three Peaks cliff and the ruins of a Mediaeval Castle in the dunes.

At the end of the day, we returned to the campsite, had a cup of tea at their café and bought gifts to take home to our spouses from their shop.  

And when I spotted the manager again, I thanked her for a very special day.

Chapel & Chips - Family Holiday, Guernsey

Cycled to the charming Little Chapel, hand mosaicked in multi-coloured china and tile by a monk about 100 years ago.  Nigel remembered visiting here on a childhood holiday.  We came again when our own children were tiny and I remembered accidentally leaving my copy of Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth here.  I had a quick look round but it seemed to have vanished during the intervening eighteen years. 

The ceramic decoration was mesmerising - themes and patterns would emerge over certain sections, but would then meld into the general melee of varied fragments.  There was a pattern of ormer shells on the vaulting above the Virgin Mary.  And what I didn’t expect, the Chapel took the visitor on a journey through to a further two tiny chapels at lower levels.  

Nearby were Guernsey clockmakers, inventive and imaginative yet tacky at the same time – segments of each clockface split, unfurled and twirled in time to Swan Lake or The Waltz of the Flowers, accompanied by motifs of tutu-ed ballet dancers or tulips, and regrettably studded with Swarovski.

Then north west on our bikes again, along lanes lined with a braid of red campion and wild sorrel.

We visited the tiny ancient chapel of St Apolline, the patron saint of toothache (following a  gruesome martyrdom which I'll leave to your imagination), and appreciated the exquisite mediaeval wall-painting of the Last Supper.

Then back in time for the Fleetwood Mac Tribute balcony concert at Cobo Bay Hotel.  Thousands of people thronged the coast road and beach to chill out  to the music, but I had something else on my mind: there was a chippie very close to the concert.

So last time we went on holiday en famille, I had brought with us salt, white pepper, malt vinegar and ketchup, all in anticipation of fish and chips.  However, Nigel had discovered that the chips that time were fried in beef dripping, thus putting them off-limits to four family members.  I had sadly taken home my condiments unused. 

This time however, Nigel solved the problem by not asking what their chips were fried in and I colluded by not questioning him.  Instead, I opened the fragrant paper parcel he had purchased, pulled the Sarsons malt vinegar from my ruck sack and drenched the delicious fish and chips.  They were so good that I barely remembered to feel guilty.  And as if fish and chips were not enough to make the Halleluiah Chorus play spontaneously in my head, we were eating them perched on a sea wall, my favourite spot for making any food taste twice as good.  Plus, the Fleetwood Mac Tribute was playing in the background.

After the chips, we lolled on the beach like seals, happy in our own blubber and decided we would wait on the beach for the sunset, even in spite of the fact that some local twenty-somethings came and began to hurl a rugby ball around far too close to us. 

One dropped the ball:  “You’re so gay!”  “I may be gay, but at least my dick’s bigger than yours.”  An object lesson in witty banter to be treasured by each one of us.