No sign of Rick Steins (we turned on our favourite food-related Saturday morning TV show, Saturday Kitchen, while getting ready to leave the hotel only for chubby ginger imp Worrall-Thompson to tell us he was in Louisiana–who’d have thunk it?), but Sal and I still managed to have a lovely Easter weekend down in Cornwall.
Showing our typical cavalier disregard for the impact on the environment of excessive, unnecessary air travel, we headed down there on Thursday night, starting our journey by heading 34 miles in the wrong direction and hopping on a plane. Now, if there’s anyone out there who is still labouring under the misapprehension that flying in the early 21st century retains any of the glamour that it might have had in the early days, I challenge you to maintain that opinion after flying somewhere with Ryanair. For us, this pleasurable experience begin with travelling to lovely Stansted, a journey that set the pair of us back a cool fifty quid for the privilege of being wedged in to the cesspool of filth that is the laughably titled Stansted “Express”. Once you’ve made it on to the plane, and fought through the unholy scrum to find yourself a seat, you get the pleasure of staring at some garish yellow upholstery for the next hour or so, and reading and rereading the safety card that is plastered onto the back of the seat in front of you. Ryanair being the sort of airline that likes to cut costs wherever it can (they now charge extra if you want to take any luggage with you, justifying this by explaining that they think passengers should “only pay for the services they use”), I assume that this is a cost saving exercise–although passengers might occasionally accidentally leave with a paper safety card, it’s rather harder to mistakenly remove the seat in front of you on your way out. I can only assume that in the event of the pressure in the cabin dropping, a stewardess pops round to sell you an oxygen mask at two Euro a pop, and in the event of a crash landing on water, life jackets at three. Well, you should only pay for the services you use, of course.
Actually, as we came in to land, I wondered if I might find out whether this was true, as just at the point when it felt like we were about to touch down, we were suddenly, disconcertingly, climbing again. Thankfully, after we’d done a big loop around the area, we landed safely at the second time of asking. As I was getting off the plane, the bloke in front of me spotted the pilot emerging from the cockpit:
“Take a wrong turning there did you mate?” he asked.
“No, just air traffic control asked us to go around again”, came the sarcastic reply from a clearly not amused pilot. “Have you seen this weather?”
30 minutes, and one collected hire car later, we arrived in Newquay. The directions from our hotel told us to drive to their car park at the back, so this we duly did, heading down a very narrow and bumpy passageway and into what appeared to be their car park, but as we got out of the car we realised that we couldn’t actually work out how to get around to the hotel.
“Can I help you?” asked an awfully posh voice from a middle-aged lady poking her head out of a nearby building.
“Er, we’re staying at the hotel,” Sal said, “but we can’t work out how to get in…”
“Which one?”
Now unfortunately, our hotel being called the “Quies” hotel, answering this question lead me to commit my first faux-pas of the weekend, but once she had told me that it was supposed to be pronounced Kway-ez (“…we don’t want to insinuate anything”), and had pointed out that we had actually stopped one car park too short of our destination, we managed to find our way into the hotel.
Leaving our room (equipped with an entirely unnecessary four poster bed) to check out Newquay, we found it to be mostly closed. I can’t say I was entirely impressed, as we wandered the deserted town centre, passing sparsely populated and uninviting hotel bars on the way (not to mention a large van bearing the logo of a Blues Brothers tribute band). Needless to say, we didn’t stay out for long.
The following morning, after an artery busting full English, we headed for the beach. Despite it being a typically grey English spring day, a number of people seemed to be getting an early start on the Easter weekend and were already out in what they might laughably refer to as “the surf” (and if that’s what it’s like in the cold spring, I can’t imagine how busy the place must be in the summer). We had a pleasant enough wander on the beach, though, although Sal got rather more than she bargained for when she answered her phone as we were stepping over a rock pool, consequently stopped looking quite where she was going, and quickly acquired two very wet shoes and lower legs.
When we returned to the car, we discovered that Newquay’s gulls had been busy, and the top of our black hire car was now largely covered in big white splodges. Perhaps it was time to move on…
And so we made our way down the coast to St Ives, where we were staying for the rest of the weekend (on the way stopping to join a lengthy queue at the Philp’s Bakery shop in Hayle for some fine pasties, which we wolfed down in the car park, leaving a large pile of dripped meat sauce for the gulls to pick over later).
In contrast to Newquay, St Ives is thoroughly lovely. We had some fantastic seafood, spent many pleasant hours wandering the quiet winding streets, and got horrendously drunk in an impossibly busy bar on the waterfront. We also spent a very sunny Easter Sunday sitting in the Porthminster Beach Café, eating gorgeous fish, drinking some excellent wine, and acquiring a mild sunstroke of the kind I’d previously thought it impossible to get in the UK.
Although I’d thoroughly recommend a trip to St Ives, I’m afraid I can’t say the same for the world of tat that you’ll find at Land’s End, where we ventured on Saturday morning. The landscape that surrounds it is pretty impressive, but it is unfortunately scarred by a shabby hotel and a bunch of tacky and entirely unnecessary “attractions” of the kind that make you ashamed to be British, and wonder what the tourists must think.
To my eternal amusement, the sign post at Land’s End has been “operated” since 1957, and anyone not wishing to be relieved of ten quid for the privilege of having a small photograph of themselves taken with said signpost is kindly asked to stay out of the official photograph area. I was pleased to see that no one was taking them up on that very good value offer on the day we were there. As we were leaving the area we were temporarily waylaid by a time-share salesman who tried to offer us free tickets to the Eden Project if we agreed to attend a lengthy sales pitch at their resort, and after we’d politely declined he asked us what we thought of Land’s End. Given that we’d been wandering around for the last 20 minutes slagging the place off, I felt it was only right that, in the politest way possible, we, um, told him…
In the event, we didn’t even go to the Eden Project, preferring to spend our remaining spare time on Monday at the excellent Lost Gardens of Heligan. It occurred to me, as we sat in the cafeteria eating our bowls of soup, that spending some of our annual leave visiting a garden centre might perhaps be considered a slightly uncomfortable step into middle age too far, but, in an effort to pretend that we’re still young, we managed to make sure our lunchtime conversation touched on topics such as the price of (non medicinal) drugs… The gardens are great, though.