Adventures & Starfish

Cornwall & Devon :

The weekend before last saw mini ‘S’ and me on a short dash, heading for my Cornish homeland.  We arrived on Friday afternoon to a Cornwall bathed in bright sunshine ! ‘I thought your last blog was the sunny blog !’ I hear you say... Which is true, I didn’t expect the sun to still be shining this late in October...
No sooner had we pulled up to the house, then we decided to have an expedition up the wooded valley behind the house. It was lovely, with a stream for wading, fallen leaves for kicking on the path and strewn with rather out of season (climate change again) wood violets. As my farmer uncle ‘P’ is not too well at the moment, we decided to bring the outside in and pick just a couple for him, which he was very happy with.

In the middle of the day on Saturday, we took my grandmother ‘E’ out for lunch, which was by no means an easy task. She has dementia, and although has a few moments of clarity each day, suffers from short term memory loss. It is wonderful to spend time with her though. She is nearly 90 and has such an interesting life. She was able to talk about all sorts of things like her wartime experiences in London, memories of my grandfather and some of her previous cars (including a convertible Jaguar XK something glamorous sounding in the 60’s).  She really seemed to enjoy our trip out and here are some of the best things she said :

•  ‘You see, we have such a lot of ships these days...’ While we were parked up, looking out at the sea. 
• ‘Aaah...  Freedom !’ As we drove over the brow of a hill and looked down into the sunny valley below. 
• ‘Look at their dear faces !’ When we stopped for mini ‘S’ to gaze over the fence at a herd of Holstein Frisians.

Starfish :

After we had dropped my grandmother home, we wanted to do a little bit of rock pooling at Kennack Sands. It actually turned into one of the best rock pooling sessions of my life ! Here are some photographic highlights:

 

We also found a rock pool with 36 (yes, 36 !) hermit crabs living in it, which was strange as would have thought that they would have been in competition with one another. Although unfortunately the photo I took didn’t do it justice, as every time I held my hand over the pool trying to focus, they hid in their shells !

This song is an ‘oldie but goodie’ as they say ! Released in 1970 by Atlantic records. This song has  great childhood memories for me, and involves yet another fabulous junk shop find by my farmer (and soul aficionado) uncle ‘P.’ One day we found a vinyl album at Trader Gray’s ‘Shiver me timbers’ shop in Longrock, entitled ‘Black Magic’ containing this song and many other classics. I heard it on the radio last Saturday and in an instant I knew that it HAD to be my record of the week ! Jerushah X