After a prolonged train journey – rails were overheated, there were speed restrictions in place after two recent train crashes – I arrived in Penzance just in time to see the eclipse. My kind B&B hosts supplied celebratory champagne, and the special specs I’d saved from the 1999 eclipse were in demand from other guests. I wasn’t really that interested either in the eclipse or the champagne; I was just relieved to not be in a city ill-suited to temperatures of 34º , and so happy to be back in Cornwall.
I wanted to forget, if only briefly, news of division and drought. The sudden coolness of the earth as the moon gradually blocked the sun was welcome, although local seagulls shouted their displeasure.
An unpoliticised sea flag fluttered as later I returned to my tiny room looking out to the ocean and the headland of Mousehole.
There was a very high (Spring) tide the following evening. There’s a stone slipway against the sea wall about a few minutes from my B&B. I sat hesitating on its edge before slipping into the sea. Bliss. And strangely for an English sea, not really cold. After my swim I struggled a bit getting back onto the slipway – the sea was very boisterous – but a kind Penzance lad gave me a hand. The photo below is of a calmer evening …
Penlee House, as well as having a fascinating and eclectic museum, was showing an exhibition of women artists, with a machine to draw on afterwards.
The next few days I walked by the sea and gazed at it, my favourite holiday pastime, or visited galleries such at Newlyn and Penlee House, and nipped into (subscription only) Morrab Library set in glorious sub tropical gardens, only minimally affected by the drought. I heard later that an area near Land’s End was on fire, one of more than a thousand wildfires reported in the UK.
I’d already booked into the geothermal saltwater Jubilee Pool, which somehow didn’t seem appropriate in such warm weather, but delightful nevertheless.
One afternoon I watched the Odyssey at Newlyn Filmhouse, walking there and back appropriately by the sea, and amused the following morning by this review in the Independent. By the way, re scary stuff , I think nothing can beat Ray Harryhausen’s skeleton warriors in the 1960s film Jason and the Argonauts. which Odyssey film director Christopher Nolan referenced when zombie-like warriors burst up out of the ground at one point.
Wonderful, I have two nephews who live in and around Penzance so it might well have been one of them who helped you onto the slipway.
How lovely!