I’ve just been talking to my beloved, who was sympathising with me about the weather.  It’s weird.  I’ve always thought of Cornwall as positively mediterranean compared with the rest of the country, and Penwith, in particular, as being at least two overcoats warmer than the rest of Cornwall… and yet, here we are in some peculiar, overcast (but high UV), high-teens-low-temperature paradox.  But, fuckitall! (or butt fuckitall, if that’s your preference; it’s all one to me!) We are British and we are ON HOLIDAY.  So we will go to the motherfuckin’ beach no matter how notsunny it is.

Today, Mima wanted to visit the Minack theatre. She has a dim recollection of a childhood visit there, when I probably scared the living shit out of her by making her sit high up on the steps carved into the cliff or, worse, stand close to The Edge.  To be fair, it’s an absolutely AWESOME place (if you don’t know it, you should totally click on the link).  So. Anyway….

We got in the car, and my phenomenally tolerant son-in-law, who was both the driver and the only person who has never been in this part of the world before, made a totally reasonable request: how do we get there…?

“Oh,” I said “Just head for Sennen and at some point, veer left.” Which seemed to me to be a thorough exposition of the navigational detail. But apparently it fell some way short.  Still.  Satnav to the rescue, and about 15 minutes of teeny, tiny, please-god-don’t-let-there-be-a-tractor farm lanes later, we pulled into the car park at the Porthcurno telegraph museum.

So here’s the thing you should know.  For some reason Porthcurno, which is roughly the size of your thumbnail plus a pub, became the British home of telegraphic communication in 18something.  Yes, back before the internet… even probably before international telephone communication (I’m hazy on this), somebody decided that the best thing to do would be to lay cables under the sea so that people in Cornwall could speak to India.  Yup.  India.  Obviously.  I mean, India is quite a long way to the east, and even though it was a colony at the time, Porthcurno is pretty much the westernmost point of the British isles, but even still.  It’s kind of mind boggling to think that Porthcurno was the most convenient place to land cables if you wanted to send telegrams to India. It’s like that old joke: “How do you get to India?” “Well, I wouldn’t start from here…”  Anyway.  There it is.  So the best car park for Porthcurno is adjacent to the telegraph museum which, last time I was here, was run pretty much out of a shipping container, but now has its own bona fide building.

Mima’s plan was to park up, and walk to the Minack; and after that we would find a cafe, grab some lunch and head down to the beach for some quality sand castle time.

So we set off down the path, the baby snugly in a sling and the toddler holding her parents’ hands and playing one… two… three… wheeeeeeeee! Which is a game much beloved by the spine of no parent ever.  And we made reasonably good progress down the cliff path which is very cliffy and vertical, and eventually we came upon a couple walking in the other direction with their dog who informed us, worriedly, that “it’s everso steep, up there” and “it’s not very safe”.   So we did an on-the-hoof risking assessment including factors like ‘toddler’ and ‘not everyone loves a grazed palm’, and decided to turn back to the beach, and drive up to the theatre later.

We meandered down the most beautiful stony cliff paths, through high, sweeping grasses arched gracefully over the pathway and past giant gunnera plants – like outsized rhubarb, but with vicious looking spikes.  I’ve been playing with my new camera… Tim, who is far the superior photographer in the relationship, gave me some technical lessons before I left home.  He explained things like f-stops and ISOs and how to prioritise apertures and something elses, and I listened assiduously and understood all the words.  So I have taken photos and I’m pleased with this one of an ebony jewel wing dragonfly (which I took on a fully automatic setting):

I failed to get a foaming, blurry picture of the waves crashing on the shore.  I did try.  I tried quite hard.  But I forgot whether a big number F-stop meant a slow aperture, or whether I should prioritise the something else.  And mostly what I ended up with was glary, over-exposed nonsense.

However, it is a lovely camera and we had lots of fun building snow villages in the sand (I promise.  That is what we did) and decorating them with shells which I selflessly rescued from the ohmygoditsbastardfuckingcold sea and presented to my grandbaby for the adornment of her snow castles.

Anyway. Eventually, the wind became too chill and the sun too absent and we decided to walk back to the cafe and find an ice cream and maybe drive up to the theatre.  And so that is what we did, and we all had ice cream and this, very roughly, is how we all felt about it.

And then we noticed that the traffic trying to get up to the theatre was not in happy harmony with the traffic trying to get down from the theatre, and we decided the gods meant us to visit the theatre another day, so we went home for tea and (from some of us, at least) tantrums.  It is very hard to make tea that contains specifically sausages but NOT THOSE sausages.  While providing cuddles with My Mummy.  But NOT THAT My Mummy.

The whole tantrum experience was, I have to say, funnier for some of us than others.  For which I apologise…