Symbolic Forest

As it’s nearly Hallowe’en, I thought it might be time to post a creepy story. And this is a true creepy story. I posted it originally on my Tumblr, six years ago, as an account of something that happened to K and I when The Children were both still only crawling and we took them away on holiday for the first time, to a holiday cottage on a farm in North Cornwall. It happened a few weeks before I wrote it down, more or less exactly as it is set down here, in the middle of the night just before we were due to leave. I haven’t edited the originally, so “about a month ago” should be read as “September, 2014”.

This is not a ghost story. It has no climatic ending, no plot and no dramatic arc. It is, however, something of a paranormal story. Moreover, the reason it has no plot and no ending is that it is a true story. The reason I’m writing it down is because it was strange enough to merit remembering, and I wanted to write it down before its strangeness was corrupted and faded away.

About a month ago, my partner K and I took our 10-month-old twins away for their first holiday. They had reached the stage of crawling, climbing, and taking an interest in everything they saw, but had not quite mastered their first steps or their first words. Thinking it best not to travel too far away for a first holiday, we hired a cottage on a farm in North Cornwall, in the wedge of land between the River Camel and the sea, the landscape that is famously the home of both King Arthur and the North Cornwall Railway. The cottage was, to be frank, more like a modern bungalow than a stereotypical Cornish cottage; but it was indeed on a small, slightly ramshackle farm, and was surrounded by beautiful countryside. It overlooked rolling hills, small ancient fields divided in haphazard fashion by twisting raised hedges and sunken holloway lanes. It was a beautiful, disorienting landscape: looking out from the picture windows of our cottage’s front room, I was convinced I was looking north or north-east until careful correlation of maps and hedge-lines persuaded me we actually faced southwards. A small ravine led the eye gently towards the distant lights of the nearest town, but otherwise there were no landmarks in sight, not even a church tower or a sign of the nearest village. Not being able to find north is unusual for me: I’m normally fairly good at orienting myself. When I was a child, I read lots of Enid Blyton books in which the characters always wake up on the first day of a holiday and, forgetting they’ve gone on holiday, have no idea where they are. To me, this is an entirely alien concept.

We stayed for a week, Saturday to Saturday as is the custom, and greatly enjoyed ourselves; this isn’t the story of our holiday, but suffice to say we had a wonderful time, and returned to our cottage each night to settle down cosily on the sofa. Not having a TV at home, we enjoyed the illicit treat of snuggling up, sleepy babies alongside us in their sleeping bags, quietly watching inane programmes about home redecoration and suchlike.

I wondered a few times just what the night sky looked like on a clear night there, given how dark our cottage felt with the lights out, but most nights, at least when I remembered, the sky was overcast and no stars could be seen. On our final night, though, I needed to go outside, and saw what seemed a perfect black sky, scattered everywhere with starlight pinpricks.

We were cleaning up the kitchen that night, after the babies had settled down to bed, and I said to K, my partner, that we should go outside to look at the stars. It would be romantic, I thought. Outside, though, a mist had started to drift in. Towards the south, the stars were still on show; towards the north the sky was black, and the mist was already thick enough to be noticeable over the hundred yards or so across the farmyard, between our cottage and the farmhouse. “Can we go inside?” said K, nervously. Not to get ahead of things, but she admitted later that, just before this, just as the mist had started to drift around the farm buildings, was the point at which she had started to feel anxious about our surroundings.

We went to bed as normal, hoping that we might get an uninterrupted night of sleep - an unusual treat for us at the moment, as it’s rare that our daughter doesn’t wake up wanting a cuddle and a small drink. In the strange surroundings of our holiday cottage, much darker and quieter than our city home, both babies had tended to go to extremes, either sleeping soundly all night, or waking and refusing to settle back down to sleep.

In the middle of the night, I woke. There was screaming from the babies; loud, urgent screaming from both of them. Where was it coming from, though? I knew instantly, as if the idea had been pushed into my head: the babies were outside. We had left the windows open, I thought, which was why we could hear them; the babies were outside, in the garden, crawling around on the grass surrounded by fog, and I had to go outside and rescue them. It was the one thought in my otherwise terrified mind: I had to go outside. I couldn’t find where I was, though. I stood, next to the bed, and whirled around, arms out, trying to find a wall or a door.

Before I had left the room my mind had cleared slightly, and I realised there was no way the babies could have left the cottage, or even have climbed out of their cots. As I still kept trying to work out which direction the crying babies were in, though, I suddenly realised that something, something nearby, was trying to make me leave the cottage.

Staggering a little, I made it out into the hallway, and quickly closed all of the doors off to the other rooms. Going to the desperately crying babies, I tried all the usual methods of settling them back to sleep: a drink of water, a tight hug, soft words. Nothing worked. I was trying not to think about the dark feeling I had that something else was inside the building, trying to help the babies relax, but the babies were still clearly very upset, still crying, definitely not going to go back to sleep on their own.

One at a time, I hurriedly carried them back into our bedroom, so that all four of us could settle back down together in bed. K has also started to wake, and held them close to her. “Have you shut all the doors?” she mumbled.

“Yes,” I replied.

“I’m scared,” she said. “I feel like there’s someone else in the cottage.”

Rationally, I knew I had locked the doors. The only way in was through a door with a bolt on the inside, which I had bolted before bed. So why did we both suddenly feel that someone or something else was inside? Why had I felt it was trying to trick me into going outside?

I quickly went, trembling slightly, into the hallway. Open the living room door. Flash the light on. Nobody there. Despite what I had thought earlier, the windows were firmly closed and locked. Into the kitchen: nobody there, the windows closed and the door still bolted.

Back to bed. “There’s nobody else here,” I said, “and the doors are all shut.” The babies were slowly calming, drifting back to sleep making quiet whimpering sounds. Slowly, me hugging our son and K hugging our daughter, we drifted back to sleep.

The next morning the mist had gone, the cottage was itself, and it almost felt welcoming again. We were glad to leave, though. I don’t think we even dared discuss it, hardly, until we had loaded the car, had our final chat with the farmer and his wife, and were driving the car under the horse chestnut tree that shaded the farm’s gates, and off down the long dead-end lane that took us back towards the Atlantic Highway. We had no idea, no idea at all, what we had felt, or what could have been influencing us. What struck both me and K, though, was that without discussing it - without even being able to - all four of us had apparently woke up with great distress in our minds. Obviously we don’t know what the two babies were actually thinking; but they were most certainly not their usual awake-in-the-night selves, and nor were K and I. K had been, as I said above, nervous that something was approaching before we’d gone to bed, but she didn’t mention a word of it until the next morning.

I’ve searched for information, since we came home, about possible haunted mists and rural panic attacks associated with that area. I have a vague memory, after all, that the word “panic” originally meant a specifically bucolic terror, after Pan himself. Nothing I’ve found, though, has been connected to that part of the country. K suggested that panics can be caused by ultrasonic noises, which could be a plausible and non-supernatural explanation for us all feeling the same terror. At root, though, I don’t think this is ever going to be fully explained, or fully explainable. All I can tell you is that: it did happen, exactly as I’ve told you above.

Keyword noise: Cornwall, holiday, panic, paranormal, ghost stories, fog, mist, cottage, The Children.

Central Station: the transport hub of the city. Trams and metro to all parts of the city; buses to all parts of the suburbs. Ferries to get you across the harbour. And trains, of course, to the airport, to the rest of the country, to the rest of Europe. Underneath the station a crisscross of subways provides the usual transport-hub range of things a traveller in need might be looking for. New luggage, flowers, quick food. There are fast food units in the subway, selling chips, fried chicken in a bun, other forms of quickly-cooked meat, where the shy but hungry traveller need not even speak to the staff; and conversely a shy fast-food-frier never need speak to their customers. The whole front of the unit is a wall of clear plastic coin-operated boxes, each with a door at the front and a door at the back, each hopefully containing some tasty but unhealthy morsel. The hungry traveller puts their coins in the slot and opens the box; at the back, the staff fill up empty boxes with more hot food. Everything is, under heat lamps, on display behind its little perspex door to tempt you.

We didn’t, I have to admit, arrive in Amsterdam by train. We arrived on the cheap overnight bus from London, which drops you off first thing in the morning in a car park on an artificial island in the harbour, midway between the city and the equally artificial suburb of IJburg. The tram then takes you onwards into the city, tunnelling under the Amsterdam-Rhine Canal, backpackers and budget tourists packed in alongside commuters on their way to work. It takes you, naturally, to the vortex of looping tram tracks and platforms in the forecourt of Central Station. We changed trams to head off to our hotel, stood waiting for our next tram to arrive, and took in the sounds of the city.

The main entrance of the Central Station has a clock tower at either end, square, topped with a pyramidal spire. On the right-hand tower is a clock face. The left-hand tower has something that at first sight looks similar, but with only one hand On the day we arrived the single golden hand was sweeping back and forth rapidly, with no apparent pattern to its movements. Bells were clanging, and I thought through some natural pattern-seeking train of thought, that each clang of a bell corresponded with the swish of the single hand through each segment of its face. It was an auditory illusion: the bells were the bells of trams pulling away from their stops, a sound you will hear all over the city. After a few minutes I realised that the markings on the face - N, NO, O, ZO, Z and so on - were the Dutch compass points. The hand was a wind indicator, connected mechanically to the weathervane atop its tower, responding to the gusty wind blowing across the flat waters and flatter land surrounding the city, telling everyone with the skill to read it which boats they might expect to be coming into harbour from which directions, and which might find the weather fit to sail. A suitable sign for a merchant city whose golden days were created by sailing ships gone for months at a time, where the traders left back at home would carefully watch the wind, wary of whether it would indicate fantastic profit or total ruination.

It is, of course, fake. Almost brazen in its fakery. I don’t mean that it doesn’t do anything, that there’s no weathervane and the hand’s movements are random: it is genuinely displaying what the wind is doing above Amsterdam right now. What is fake about it, is the thought that any merchants ever watched this particular weathervane for signs that their fortune was about to be lost or made. Central Station wasn’t built until the 1880s, and it was built on Station Island, which as the name suggests didn’t exist until it was needed to put the station on. Station Island was dropped right across the old harbour mouth, roughly on the spot where, back in the city’s golden days, a floating boom was laid out every night to defend against attack from the water. The Central Station sealed off the old quaysides along the River Amstel, the source of the city’s wealth, from the wilder waters of the IJ. It was controversial; it was the final death-blow to the old, decaying Golden Age city’s harbour. The wind indicator on top of the station is, in some ways, the first sign of tourist theme-park Amsterdam. Telling all those waiting for their trams that today the winds are good for boats at anchor in the Zuider Zee to come into port and land their precious cargo, even though the building it is part of would fox any attempt by a temporally-adrift East India boat to reach the city’s merchant quays. For that matter the Zuider Zee itself is no more: the IJ, the bay that Amsterdam teetered on the edge of, is a freshwater inlet of the Markermeer lake, one of several different and separate patches of water and land which the old, treacherous Zuider Zee was carved into during the twentieth century.

Only a few minutes’ walk from the station, the Oude Zijde is the real tourist heart of the city. And by that, I mean, tourists flocking to Amsterdam will generally reach Central Station and pour themselves into the Oude Zijde to get drunk, get stoned, and have sex. By “tourists” I mean a particular type of tourist, of course, largely young alcoholic men, and by “have sex” I mean mindless mechanical fucking. I might not know the city well, but the Oude Zijde seems to be constantly crammed with drunken tourists staggering about, gawping at the fetish shops as they wander from bar to bar, joking about how many whores they’re going to use, should they find the courage. The brothels themselves are unmissable: shop frontages consisting solely of glass doors, pink neon strip-lights above them. Behind each door stands a woman in cheap satin underwear, posing for the passing drunkards to try to entice them in. Should one of them have enough courage - each, I imagine, thinking of the amount of “banter” he will get from it back home in Corby or Hexham or Andover as long as nobody tells his fiancé about it - the woman will take their cash and lead them through the door, upstairs into a tiny bedroom, leaving her doorway empty until she is ready for the next fucking customer. Then she comes back to present herself on show again, like a bag of chips, or some fried chicken in a bun. “I can’t believe you did it, mate,” the customer’s friends will shout, all too willing to believe that women will.

I don’t like to think that the Oude Zijde, popular though it is with all the tourists, represents the real Amsterdam. It horrified us. Some streets in Britain have a bad reputation on a Saturday night: St Marys Street in Cardiff, for example, or the Centre in Bristol. The Zeedijk of the Oude Zijde, though, was hardly any more pleasant than a British city Saturday night, on a summer weekday afternoon. When I think back about Amsterdam, I try to block the Oude Zijde, its endless vomit-bars and its women-as-fast-food out of my mind. We never even tried to see any of its great sights, such as the church which gives the district its name.

Walk, instead, in the other direction. Start, again, looking at cheap food beneath Central Station; but walk the other way, through the tunnels under the station platforms, under the bus station, and on to the banks of the IJ. At one time you would have been looking out on open water; swimming in it, in fact, before Station Island was built. Nowadays it seems more like a river, a Thames or a Hudson, but back in time this was a wide bay. The water, whatever you call it, is busy here, with little boats darting back and forth; free ferries linking North Amsterdam with the main part of the city, and longer-distance boats slowly ambling past them. “Upstream” and “Downstream” are meaningless concepts on this stretch of carefully-managed water. Originally the way to the sea lay east, via what is now the Markermeer and the IJsselmeer; then, after a canal was dug, north; nowadays west via the newer, larger North Sea Canal.

I’ve never really been to sea, other than the occasional ferry. The longest I’ve spent on a boat, as far as I can remember, is on the cross-channel ferry from Dover to Dunkirk, an entire two hours spent steaming across the mad dash that is the Strait of Dover, dodging heavily-loaded container ships heading from China to Rotterdam. According to my mother though, a hundred and fifty years back our family consisted of a tight-knit bunch of Cornish fishermen and wreckers living in a village so nautical it didn’t even have road access. Before that, according to family myth, the Cornish fishermen had in turn descended from a group of Spaniards who decided to switch sides in 1588 and never made it home again. However implausible this story might be, however unlikely it is that I could inherit tastes specifically from a branch of my ancestry that can only make up, at the most, a sixteenth part of my genetic heritage, I have to admit that I do rather enjoy the abstract concept of being in a boat. In, I promise, an entirely armchair way. I love to walk alongside a harbour watching canoeists capsize and trainee sailors send their sailboats in the wrong direction, and think it might be nice to try it out, some time in the future. The one time I did actually try canoeing, back in primary school, I was the only child in the entire class to fall in, so it’s probably a good idea if this theoretical aptitude remains completely hypothetical. Nevertheless, getting on board one of the ferries that run back and forth across the IJ, hand resting on the side of the boat, looking out across the choppy water studded with red buoys, I certainly felt in my element. The boats are simple straightforward things, symmetrical, both bow and stern consisting of a large fold-down gangway via which pedestrians, cyclists, scooters and tuk-tuks all pour aboard; the passenger deck runs straight through from end to end, with the bridge up above in the centre, the boats shuttling back and forth from one bank of the IJ to the other without ever needing to turn around. When they get going, they get going with a purpose, forcefully pushing their way blunt-ended across the water or up and down the harbour, past warehouses turned into flats and shipyards turned into offices. The working docks are now east along the canal towards the sea, so large on the map they dwarf the city itself.

Over on the far side of the IJ, we found a café which seemed put together from random timbers and pieces of plastic panelling, sitting on a point overlooking the water. Tucked away behind it was a sty, to raise its own pork and bacon. We sat indoors and relaxed as rain battered the windows, surrounded by dereliction repurposed for offices and street art. The stumps of shipbuilding cranes still stood, sawn off abruptly at their hips: it had a disconcerting effect, as if their upper parts had been Photoshopped out of the scene. This redeveloped dockland was nothing at all like the hard, shiny, corporate enclaves of Canary Wharf; instead, it was if the residents of Stokes Croft or Shoreditch had suddenly been teleported to some derelict post-industrial wasteland and left to get on with things. We don’t seem to do redevelopment like that in Britain. If you visit somewhere with partly-redeveloped docksides - Cardiff Bay, say - you see a complete and severe dichotomy between entirely rebuilt landscapes filled with expensive and privately-guarded flats, and over the fence, a scene of empty desolation where the remaining port tries to hang on to docks that might, maybe, be required for trade again one day. In North Amsterdam the two blur together. Just like how, throughout Dutch history, the marshy land has blurred into the reedy inland seas.

We decided to try walking along the waterside to a different ferry terminal, the one directly opposite the Central Station, but the banks of the IJ are so indented with canals and dockland that it turned into a very long way around, compared to the direct route along the water. All of this land is unreal: instead of docks being cut into the land, land was dredged up and squeezed between the piles to form docks in the negative space. Perversely, it reminded me of growing up in Lincolnshire, in another town where the ships are higher than the buildings and modern housing estates give way to industrial sheds. We crossed a canal packed with houseboats, passed a vast, humming electrical substation, and decided to wait for the bus instead. I can imagine myself living in North Amsterdam, in a little suburban idyll only a quick bike ride from the ferry into town. Normally I think of myself as a city person, and as I said, I can’t stand the centre of Amsterdam, but I can imagine myself being entirely happy just outside. Does that make me a hypocrite?

Out in the suburbs, even in the fashionable inner suburbs where tradesmen’s tenements have been converted into designer boutiques and vegetarian restaurants, it’s easy to forget about the nasty Amsterdam that the stag parties head straight for and stay with. We tried to stick to the quiet parts of the city; we’re quiet people. Even heading out away from the centre, though, we couldn’t help noticing more of the glass-door brothels: on the edge of the Pijp district, for example, overlooking the Boerenwetering canal. You can spot them from a distance, by the distinctive pink strip-light over each door. It seemed to be the largest we’d noticed in the city to date, and we had to turn ourselves away.

You could easily accuse me of being dismissive over this, I guess, or of brushing over these Empowered Women’s right to sell their bodies and their sexuality to anyone they choose to. And I admit: I have never met any Amsterdam prostitutes, still less, to the best of my knowledge, talked to any. I have no idea what their stories are, where they came from and why they are behind their little glass door. Why shouldn’t men be able to buy sex in exactly the same way they buy a chicken burger? What harm is being done? And it’s true that the lot of an Amsterdam prosititute is, in most cases, nowhere as near as it is in those parts of Britain where prostitutes are regularly murdered by serial killers the police are usually uninterested in catching. But why should I not find it distasteful and horrific, that these women are being advertised and commoditised like this? How many end up chewed up like food? It’s a continuum, you could say: at one end there’s don’t touch performance, strippers and burlesquers showing their bodies off; in the middle you have the dominatrixes; next to them, the prostitutes. If burlesque dancers and dominatrixes are intelligent, modern, empowered and independent women using their own confidence to turn the system upside down and take advantage of the patriarchy, why doesn’t that apply to prostitutes too? To which I reply: show me a burlesque audience there to admire a woman’s empowerment and not her tits. Show me a dominatrix who dresses for herself and not for her customers. Tell me that putting a person on display behind a glass door isn’t degrading and inhumane.

I’ve read accusations charging the Dutch, or the Amsterdammers at any rate, with hypocrisy for features like the wind indicator atop Central Station. Features like tne Nieuwmarkt metro station, whose architecture commemorates the riotous protests against its own construction. But would these accusers prefer it if history and controversy was completely forgotten? It strikes me more to be a manifestation of, what we could call if we were to descend into national stereotyping, the traditional Dutch compromise. The habit which supposedly arises from the need of the medieval Dutch to agree quickly on how to fund and build each dyke, before the waters submerged them. We must build the railway across the harbour-mouth, but the railway we build will hark back to our great seafaring days. We must knock down the neighbourhood to build this metro, but we will memorialise it when we design the station. There could, you could argue, be a similar degree of pragmatism at work in the open brothels of Amsterdam. No nation on Earth, after all, has been able to ban prostitution; so put it out in the open where it can be seen. Maybe the problem I have, the revulsion I felt, is not with the brothels themselves as much as the men who flock from around the world to use them.

On a different day, as we again found ourselves walking through Stationsplein towards the city, some passing tourists with Geordie accents asked us if we knew the time. They were I assume fresh off the train from Schipol, and were astounded to discover that we, the first people they’d spoken to in the city, spoke English. I couldn’t help thinking, they should have been more surprised if we hadn’t understood them. Shortly after we came home, I received an email, one of the standard “would you like to apply for this job?” fishing emails that recruitment consultants send out in their thousands every day. This one, though, was for a job back in Amsterdam, and it promised hard that I wouldn’t need to speak a single word of Dutch. It was sorely tempting. Find ourselves a flat in a quiet part of North Amsterdam and catch the ferry to work every day. Follow all the old Dutch customs, like eating waffles and paying in cash at the supermarket. But would I really not need a single word of the language? Tempting as it was, I didn’t follow it up. Maybe nowadays, after a little reflection, I would do. Maybe I could turn a blind eye to all the tourists drawn like magnets to the Oude Zijde, and teach my children that the women displaying their bodies have nothing, but the men drawn towards them, have everything, to be ashamed of.

In case you were wondering, I did, whilst we were in Amsterdam, try out some fried chicken in a bun from a little perspex box in the subway beneath Central Station. It wasn’t the best street food I’ve ever eaten - that has to be an angelic and heavensent hot dog in Copenhagen - but it wasn’t bad either. It had all the magic ingredients that the best Western street food should always have: hot, slightly salty, slightly greasy, a deep-seated feeling of pleasurable guilt, and instant satisfaction followed ten minutes later by the knowledge that you need another. I did not, in case you were wondering where this was leading, try out any of the other clear doors. I’m not sure I will ever be comfortable that they exist, and I can’t entirely put my finger on why. I could quite happily spend all day riding a ferryboat back and forth on the IJ, watching the boats and warehouses zip past as we headed towards the glittering recumbent shell of Central Station, so long as I could block the drunken hordes from my mind. Instead, hold a wet finger in the air, feel the wind blowing across the flat, flat lands of Holland and realise what it means for fishermen in the middle of the IJsselmeer or tall ships out in the wild open sea beyond the dune-belt. I could live here, if I ever learned to compromise.

Keyword noise: holiday, travel, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Nederland, Holland, Noord Holland.

All that snowy weather we’ve been having – almost all gone now, apart from the enormous pile of snow cleared from the office car park – reminded me of the holiday we took a couple of years back, to Rīga, Latvia. “Make sure you wrap up warmly,” said The Mother. “Get proper thermals. Lots and lots of layers.” “You’ll need to take sunglasses, too,” said Dad, “or you’ll get snow-blindness.”

All of which we ignored, fortunately, because we’d have looked bloody silly. Rīga in February was not too dissimilar from Britain in February, being grey, damp, and largely snow-free; it shouldn’t really have been surprising, because it’s on about the same latitude as Dundee. We took plenty of photos; but for some reason they never appeared on here.^*

* Unlike the above anecdote about the snow-blindness, etc, which definitely has.

Keyword noise: Baltic, cold, Europe, February, grey, holiday, Latvia, photography, Riga, weather, winter.

Underground; wandering; the Ministry of Truth; Trafalgar Square; bridges and cabmen’s shelters; a model home; inspirational food and drink; black and white photos; tourist crowds; Soviet badges; gay icons; the wrong pizza; a missed film; gin and vodka; a walk in the park; strange inflatables; shopping streets; more photography; a nice cup of tea; long queues; very big pancakes; even bigger plaster casts; and another cup of tea.

And then, home again. I should write some of it all down, before I forget it.

Keyword noise: holiday, London.

On this day last year, we spent most of the day travelling, in the car, on planes and in airports. We drove from Yorkshire to Manchester; hopped from Manchester to Denmark and from Denmark on to Latvia. I spent quite a few blogposts beforehand writing about how excited I was; but only a couple, afterwards, talking about how great the trip had been.

Today isn’t going to be nearly so exciting. The Parents are coming to visit for the day; and we are spending the day shepherding them around, letting them take us out to lunch, trying not to get too annoyed with them, before taking them back for their train home.

Nevertheless, for me, this is a bit of a special day. It’s the first birthday that I’ve had since me and K have been living together properly.^*

* My 0x1f^th birthday, if you must know. I have asked K if next year I can have a cake with “20” on it, and she looked at me suspiciously.

Keyword noise: anniversary, birthday, holiday, Latvia, Riga.

This week, still from my summer holiday uploads: castles and derelict mineshafts.

The engine house in the bottom row is the well-known Towanroath engine house near St Agnes. The name probably isn’t that well-known, but as it’s perched halfway up a cliffside over the Atlantic, it’s a stock location for Cornish landscape shoots; so much so that it was on the cover of one of the guide books we took with us.^* I remember it appearing in the 1980s children’s horror film Haunters Of The Deep, which starts with two of the characters looking down the grated-over mineshaft next to the engine house and listening to the sound of the sea coming up it.

* the Rough Guide to Devon and Cornwall, 2007 edition.

Keyword noise: castles, Chapel Porth, Cornwall, Haunters Of The Deep, holiday, mineshaft, photography, Restormel Castle, St Agnes, summer, Towanroath.

As it’s Friday again, some more summer photos.

Keyword noise: boats, Cornwall, dogs, fog horn, Goonhilly, holiday, lifeboat, lighthouse, Lizard, photography, Polpeor Cove, satellite dish, sleepy, St Ives, summer, tourists.

I grew up not far from the sea. I didn’t go down to the beach or the seafront very often, but I was close enough that you could see out to sea from the top deck of my school bus. I’ve always felt good by the sea.^*

On the other hand, I grew up in an area where the sea is the colour of weak milky tea. So it’s always nice to go somewhere and find that the sea can, actually, sometimes be storybook blue.^**

In other sea-related (or, at least, tidal) news: the mystery words on the shore of the Avon, which we spotted last weekend and posted about, have been identified: an artwork to highlight litter in the sea, by an artist called Pete Dolby. Thanks to Liz for writing and letting me know.

* You could argue some sort of genetic memory, because my mum’s family’s descended from a bunch of 19th-century Cornish fishermen (and smugglers, no doubt), from Looe and Polperro. On the other hand, my dad’s family’s from Derby, which is as unmaritime as you can get.

** Pure water is, as a matter of fact, very very slightly a pale blue colour. You can see it, just about, if you run a bathful of water in a white bath. That’s not the main reason the sea can look blue, though. And different cultures have seen it different ways; the Homeric adjective for it is “wine-dark”, and you know how dark Greek wine can be. I’ve heard that the ancient Greeks didn’t quite distinguish between blue and green in the same way as we do; but I don’t know enough Greek to tell you how true that is.

Keyword noise: art, boats, Carrick Roads, Cornwall, Falmouth, feedback, fishermen, genealogy, Gyllyngvase, harbour, holiday, Pete Dolby, photography, Porthminster, sea, smugglers, St Ives, summer, water.

Not only have I been behind on updating this site, I’ve been getting behind on posting photos online. I generally stick to posting 6 to 8 photos per day, partly because uploading them is such a slow and tedious job that I can’t be bothered doing any more. This, however, means that I’m still only at the start of posting photos of our summer camping trip, down to Cornwall. That was: August. It’s now: November. That’s some delay. Here, though, are some examples, of hot, sunny, summer Cornish weather.

Keyword noise: Carrick Roads, cathedral, Cornwall, Falmouth, harbour, holiday, photography, summer, Truro.

Last weekend, feeling like we needed a holiday, we went away and pitched the tent. And it rained. The tent, fortunately, didn’t leak, but we ended up with great puddles round the door, a wading trip whenever we wanted to go in or out. Our last morning, we looked out to see ducks sitting and paddling in the water.

Still, it could have been worse. For no particular reason, we’d decided to visit Somerset. If we’d gone a week or even half a week, we’d still be there now, camping by a river. And we’d be rather deeper in the water.

Keyword noise: camping, Cheddar, ducks, flooding, holiday, rain, Somerset, weather.