Bluebells and cream teas

Sunday night. As last Sunday, I’m sitting in my room, the room that is now where I seem to spend most of my time, doing what I seem to do now more than anything else, tapping away at a keyboard. It’s either that or scribbling away in a notebook. It’s beginning to trouble me that I have too close a relationship with my laptop, and my notebook, some kind of bizarre love triangle. And I spend too much time on the internet.

At least today I left the house for a few hours in a row, and went for one of the most beautiful walks I’ve ever been on through glossy green fields and bluebell woods, down to the Helford River. It began at an ancient farm house in Constantine, through farmland with the most rich, red soil I’ve seen outside of Shropshire. Something appeals deeply to me about old farm yards and barns with streamers of dusty cobwebs from rafters, and chipped whitewashed walls. The view though from this farm yard was awesomely beautiful - I know exactly now what rolling fields and downs are, slopes of grass and wooded paths.

The bluebells too were something else, swaying carpets of blue, changing in the sunlight. I think it was one of the strangest experiences of my life this walk, with a group of older people (I was probably the youngest by easily twenty years) wandering along non-existent paths in the woods, trying not to trample on the bluebells and wood anemones. It reminded me too, or would have done had I had a young man for company, of Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Woodlanders’ as they walk amongst the roots and branches of the forest.

The walk ended much more prosaically, and happily though with a cream tea in the garden of the farm house. Real clotted cream on thick scones and a slab of chocolate cake. Washed down with tea in blue and white striped cups, Wonderful. Except I had to do another walk in the evening to walk off the sinful amount of cake and cream I had consumed. Lentils and bread tomorrow, and another walk through the bluebells around Pendennis.