Getting Out Of The Smoke and Into The Country

There comes a time in every Londoner's life when that person thinks "Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, this is a giant, energetic, polluted metropolis full of miserable assholes and if I don't get out of here I might just snap the next time the clerk asks me if I have an Advantage card." That time was nigh so the Beautiful Competition and I packed our bags, booked a train and got as far away from the Big Smoke as we could go, by heading straight west. Cornwall. St. Ives.

Cornwall is an unusual place. Historically speaking, it remained Celtic longer than the rest of Britain, and after the Romans left it remained "Romanized" long after the Saxons set up shop in the eastern part of the island. In fact, after the Roman pull-out, the last remaining operable seaports were out in Cornwall. It's farm and fish country, then it became mining country, and now it's artistic and tourist country. Yellow sand beaches, overpriced restaurants and even the occasional sunny day. So we, along with thousands of other tourists, descended and made the most of nine days out of the City.

We did so with no agenda in mind; this was a holiday designed to relax. It was our replacement for a 'let's go to the beach and drink those little drinks with umbrellas in them served to us by dark-skinned natives' holiday that would have been way too expensive. We got sunburns and I even swam in the ocean a bit (although, I admit, I was gasping at how cold it was) and took a very 'whatever' approach to things.

The first couple of days were 'sit on the beach, putter around town and relax' days. St. Ives is a fairly famous art colony, with its own Tate gallery (!) and a long tradition of landscape and modernist art. The landscape is rocky and rugged, with high granite cliffs dropping into jagged tidal pools where seals bask. It has inspired literary types of all kinds: the Godrevy ligthhouse in St. Ives Bay inspired one Ms. Virgina Woolf to write To The Lighthouse, and the nearby town of Zennor was where D. H. Lawrence composed much of Women In Love. It's not hard to see why: it's a wild land, and its rural nature and tourist draw has allowed it to avoid some of the economic pitfalls that other places in England have experienced. Which isn't to say that stuff didn't exist, just that the vibe was a little less intense.

A massive hiking trail circles the entirety of the area - the South West Coastal Trail - and we did a piece of it, walking into Zennor from St. Ives through fields of heather and over rocks the size of tractor-trailers. Logged a good 9.44 miles on the GPS, and got some amazing pictures.

We planned a trip to the Isles of Scilly, the westernmost point in England some 28 miles off the coast, but ended up scrubbing it the morning of because the helicopters weren't flying due to the mist and fog. Welcome to England! So we saw most of Penzance (the town of the pirates fame) and ended up bussing out to St. Michael's Mount, an island-fortress that is only accessible at low tide, by foot anyway. As we discovered, when the tide comes in and you need to take the ferry back, it costs money! Piracy is alive and well in Cornwall!

The trip was well worth it; we both ended up sunburned, relaxed, happy and destressed. Coming back to London was hard; on our way back from breakfast this morning, Liz remarked that London still smelled badly when it was wet. I agreed; it's like a dog in that it's alright most of the time, but it's really kind of stinky and when it gets wet it only gets worse. So it's good to get out and relax.

On a more personal level, I got a ton of writing done and did some pretty strong thinking about a lot of things - my future, priorities, and so forth. But I'll save that for the Puppet Show.

Pictures here.

To Canterbury We Wende

Whan that July, with his shoures crappy
The droghte of dust hath perced to the roote
And bathed every Jason in wanderlust,
Of which vertu engendred is the truste;
Whan Elizabeth eek with her sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge Ja-son
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne, (WTF?)
And smale foweles maken melodye, (birds)
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen Jason and Liz to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende!

So this last weekend to get the hell out of London we took a pilgrimage (slow train ride) to Canterbury, home of Canterbury Cathedral, the shrine of Thomas a Beckett, England's best-known Martyr, and destination for pilgrims since medieval times, when Chaucer wrote his famous tales. We didn't tell stories on the way - we had our usual Sunday chat instead - and didn't see much of Canterbury apart from the high street and Cathedral, but I'm told there isn't a hell of a lot to Canterbury apart from those two things so I think we did alright. The Cathedral is probably my favorite in the UK aside from Durham, as it's an amazing Gothic construction, impossibly huge and beautiful in a way no other Cathedral is. Even with all the Cathedrals we've seen here and across Europe, there's something about Canterbury that's different. It's one of the few that feels warm on the inside, whether it's from the lighting or the choice of stone. It feel like what I've always believed God's house would be like. It's a strange, homely feeling at once historical and immediately present.

I admit that I'm biased to Canterbury based on my first experience there almost ten years ago, but returning this time with just a little time before it closed and the rain alternating between annoying sprinkle and outright downpour it still held its magic. There's very few things I can say that about, especially after so much time has passed. It was a strangely refreshing trip, even if it was just for a few hours. And just what we needed to get out of the city.

Flickr set here.