To those reading this in sunnier climes than Dear Old Blighty, you ought to know there was a time – it seems a long time ago now – when Britain had summers. This hasn’t happened for a while and this year has been no exception.
The Gordon-Smith troop gave Cornwall the once-over this year. It actually did stop raining long enough to register but there is a reason why the countryside is so beautifully lush and green. Plenty of people have written about Cornwall; here’s one of the reasons why.
Gorgeous, isn’t it? It’s Mullion Cove, near the Lizard. We stayed in Carbis Bay, near St Ives of cat fame. (“As I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives. Every wife had seven sacks and in each sack were seven cats…” etc) The reason why there were so many cats in St Ives is that the upstairs rooms in this predominantly fishing village were used to store nets and sails and mice loved nibbling away through the ropes. It was biological warfare up there. So much so, there was – ages ago – an official cat nurturer who rejoiced in the sobriquet of “Pissy Willy”. This was your basic, Victorian-style neutering where a couple of bricks and a tom-cat with a pained expression featured. Apparently Willy also manufactured ice-cream; and was never known to wash his hands. I mean, it makes you think twice about the nut sundae, doesn’t it!
My holiday reading was Louise Penny. I had the pleasure of meeting Louise and her husband, Michael, a couple of years ago, and we got on like a house on fire. Gosh, she’s a good writer. She brings such a sense of place to her stories that I’m sure I could find my way round the fictional village of Three Pines. Gamache, her detective, is such a nice bloke to spend time with as well, that you feel, by the end of the book, that you’ve made a friend.
St Ives is, of course, known for Art. There’s lots of hobby painters - it’s so picturesque that it makes you long for a paint-brush - but real artists live/lived there too. The most famous is the sculptor, Barbara Hepworth. She had a studio in St Ives with a garden attached. The garden is fascinating. It’s fairly small but full of these amazing sculptures that are positioned against the plants and the settings she chose. I can’t honestly say I’m a huge fan of abstract art, but I fell in love with that garden. It’s interesting, too, that her sculptures are so easy to copy – many a town centre is disfigured by its pointless obligatory lump of Hepworth-style Art – but the real thing has got life and magic all of its own.
Across from Barbara Hepworth’s house is the old Palais de Dance. It’s been unused as a dance-hall for years and now, empty and silent, it’s used as a store-room for Hepworth’s sculptures. Some of the figures in the garden look like Easter Island figures and it’s odd to think of those stone giants waiting on the dancefloor. There’s a story in there somewhere; stone music to breath them into life. Maybe – in the story – they are dancing but their life runs on such a different scale than ours that we can’t see them move. Rather like the kids in the morning!
Here’s a picture of all the graduates throwing their hats in the air after the celebration. It was a wonderful day, set in the architecturally wacky late-Victorian dream of Thomas Holloway’s Royal Holloway. Royal Holloway is now part of London University but when Thos. built it – it opened in 1886 – it was a women’s only college inspired by his wife, Jane, who reckoned it was a good use of quarter of a million or so. There’s a statue of Thomas presenting the college to Jane in the middle of the quad and he looks fairly smug about it – and with good reason, too. There’s few buildings which bear the imprint of their designer quite so blatantly. It looks like a French château run mad. It’s impressive but always makes me want to laugh, too – so result! The graduation started with sparkling wine and Haribos (you know, those squashy sweets) outside the History Department, and then, after this laid-back introduction, we moved into the very formal surroundings of the Chapel. The Chapel, as you might expect from such a sturdy individualist as Thos, is decorated without a trace of English restraint, but in an exuberant Italian-with-attitude style, glowing with colour and with lots of women saints on the walls. Here’s a bit of the roof. 
Trumpeters sounded, the graduates walked in, received their degrees and the whole thing went like clockwork. Then it was off outside, into the gigantic Quads, for more sparkling wine and nibbles (if you could get to them; graduating gives the Young a fairly hearty appetite.) It was a wonderful day; it all ran to plan and even the sun shone. 
. I'm off to Sunny Cornwall (fingers crossed) next week so I'll talk more when I get back.
Here's everyone hard at work, doing it. I can’t put the crossword grid on the blog for some reason, which is frustrating, but these are the clues – they’re not too hard! The “grid” is a standard scrabble board.
