other adjectives are available
WITH the January weather proving variable, my forty-second birthday saw me ambling gently along five miles or so of the Thames from London Bridge to Greenwich in the company of two good friends. This was entirely lovely. It also reawakened my desire to walk around the coast again.
Thus, a week later, I found myself dozing fitfully through the eight hour overnight bus journey from London to Penzance.
Continue reading “XLVI – Sennen Cove to St Ives”
DAY six of my week in Cornwall saw me rise bright and early and open my curtains to the sight of a wall of dense, white fog. It was, I decided, a faerie fog.
ON THE Sunday, after rising early and obtaining a hearty breakfast from Cap’n Jaspers on Plymouth Barbican, I caught a train back to Par and began my next walk. In the rain.
‘It’s the West Country,’ I told myself, ‘it always rains.’
Continue reading “XL – Par to Boswinger”
The weekend before last saw me back in Cornwall, taking a week out to walk the coast from Looe to Land’s End. Because I thought it would be fun.
The first day’s walk was from Looe to Par where, having failed to find any accommodation near Par that wouldn’t require a second mortgage or major gold robbery to pay for, I would be jumping on a train back to Plymouth to stay in one of that city’s fine hotels.
Continue reading “XXXIX – Looe to Par”
OCTOBER having brought unseasonal warm weather to southern England, I made doubly sure to have packed sunscreen before catching a train back down to Plymouth. My original plan for the day involved the Cawsand ferry but, so far as I could tell, it had finished for the season and so I settled for a leisurely jaunt within the confines of Plymouth’s city limits.
HAVING gone to bed without an alarm, I awoke at about four in the morning and vaguely snoozed until about six. I freely admit that I didn’t really want to get up and look out of the window because the dull grey half-light strongly suggested rain. By the time I had performed my ablutions and got dressed, it was a grimly unavoidable truth that Plymouth was firmly enveloped in low cloud and drizzle.
I AWOKE bright and early in my dodgy-yet-pretentious hotel room feeling very hungry indeed. I had gravely miscalculated in not stopping to eat before getting to the hotel on Saturday night, despite passing a plethora of restaurants in Torquay, and had then felt too tired to go out and look for food upon arriving there. In consequence, I had gone to bed early on a sumptuous dinner of one packet of crisps and my body was demanding calories before it conquered any more hills.
SUNDAY’S walk began and ended at Ferry Bridge, being a circular walk around the Isle of Portland.
I awoke not so much with the lark as with a surfeit of alarms, my phone being joined by the alarm clock in my room, which the B&B owners had thoughtfully set for me. I was too early for a cooked breakfast but they laid on cereal, which I declined, and toast, which I munched upon merrily. They then scored highly on the Helpful Mammal Scale of B&B Excellence by asking if, since I wasn’t eating the cereal, I wanted some extra toast instead.
Continue reading “XXVII – The Isle of Portland”
SATURDAY’S walk marked the first occasion on these coastal perambulations on which I have not completed a section purely as a day trip. A friend, whom we shall here call ‘Alice’, has asked me several times when I’ll have to stop day-tripping and start staying over, and the answer is apparently now.
ALTHOUGH I very much wanted to do another walk yesterday, my finances are dwindling and so I was in some doubt as to whether I should. Imagine my surprise then, when I found that by buying advance tickets (which restrict you to travelling on a specific train) I could travel First Class more cheaply than Standard Class.