The Potwell Inn, remember, is a moveable experience. When we go away in the campervan we normally prepare and pack it the day before we go, so we can drive to where it’s stored and then set off straight away. Leaving the flat to drive down to a rented cottage on the Lizard means we have to take everything down in the lift and load the car, and given that it’s a 20 mile round trip to the nearest supermarket in Cornwall we take as much as we can with us. Because we’re a pub at heart we took with us a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and a bottle of Mount Difficulty pinot noir which were meant to be a treat for our combined 55th wedding anniversary and my 76th birthday. However it was not to be because the hotel in Hay was so awful we couldn’t bring ourselves to open them in a cramped room that smelt so strongly of sewage we had to leave the window open and allow the -3C air to clear the air. I’m ashamed to say that we could have had three weeks in the campervan for the cost of three nights in a cramped room and eating terrible food cooked – at best – by a kitchen porter with a hangover whose partner had just left him.
So today, back on the Lizard, we dined on boeuf bourguignon which I cooked last week and froze, and drank the champagne while we toasted our out of date anniversaries. Yesterday we drank the Mount Difficulty after an hilariously easy drive down with me, well fortified with CBD oil. It’s a new attempt at taming my chronic anxiety and it seems to have some effect. My routine GP tests on Friday appeared to show I have become diabetic, but the nurse failed to explain that severe stress can cause blood glucose to rise and I had just spent three days attempting to upgrade my phone, connect the wonderful portable router through which I am now able to write this at all (no signal normally) and upgrade Madame’s phone at the same time – (pending the remembrance of a critical password) . The nurse didn’t tell me about the life threatening properties of customer helplines, but anyway I had the blood glucose test kit (I’ve been here before) and over three days my glucose has been perfectly normal -so in celebration we bought a packet of biscuits. As a bank manager once said to me – people like you make my life impossible – well hooray! – because I have no intention of going gentle into that good night.
I will write tomorrow about our first stroll around the village and the flowers we saw – a bit unexpectedly, because nature doesn’t read textbooks; but I leave you with the evidence that the fishing industry still lingers on here on the Lizard – three or four cod, obviously filleted on the boat with the carcasses left on the beach for the gulls to pick clean. And a final thought. The last time I wrote I was thinking about the power of nature to regenerate when left to her own devices. Given that it’s all but impossible to imagine how we could return to the imaginary good old days; the pilchard are gone and a global climate catastrophe is stalking us. So what shape could the future hold for the places I love most other than a hopeless longing for the past? Answers on a postcard??
fillets everything in its path!
