Welltown

Today we turned our back on the West Country in order to drive home. What a glorious week of Indian Summer it’s been! We have spent these last three nights in the great comfort of Caroline’s cousin’s old house overlooking the Atlantic Ocean: their informal garden - tables and chairs covered with lichen - spills out onto fields full of sheep and Red Devon cattle, grazing right to the cliff top near Willapark. John, a naturalist to his fingertips, set a light trap on Saturday night which caught moths galore in the freak conditions. Old Fr. Storey is still the priest at St Paul’s Tintagel – as he was when I first came to Welltown with Caroline in 1976.

Addendum: We canvassed with John the possibility of having decided - as part of our carbon awareness - not to travel all the way down to Cornwall for Jeremy Faull's funeral. He responded later, by email:

Brooding about the challenges of remote understanding, I came across this stanza from Philip Larkin and his Going, Going poem of 1972:

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes.
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.

A different sort of distance, but it left me wondering, could we really have experienced St. Breock and its carved benches without being there?

Boscastle

Seven years ago, this village was devastated by flooding: you wouldn’t know it from seeing it now, particularly on an October afternoon with the thermometer showing record temperatures. The National Trust shop and coffee house – I ordered latte and was served cappuccino – also has an exhibition area, with a harrowing video sequence showing. The events that 16th August unfold grimly, cars and caravans swept over the main road bridge and out to sea, as if our grandchildren were playing with my old Dinky toys. It seems a miracle that no lives were lost.

Today Boscastle was en fête, exhibitions in all its public (and some private) buildings, and a vast food tent with cookery demonstrations by would-be celebrity chefs. We walked down into the village from the direction of Willapark coastguard station, the harbour entrance unfolding before us like a sequence from Pirates of the Caribbean. After lunch, sitting by the river (today, hardly more than a babbling brook), we struggled up the steep High Street to see Carole Vincent’s garden, with its curiously antiseptic concrete sculptures.