St Ives, Penzance, Mousehole

One last view and walk-around in St Ives - sorry to leave the town, but less sorry to leave the World's Smallest Room that also contains a double bed.  This is undoubtedly not true - I've stayed in a smaller one, on the Dieng Plateau in Java - but this was certainly ... cramped.  But here are a pair of lighthouses: the one at the end of the town pier, and the other (albeit transported to Scotland) the inspiration for Virginia Woolf's hard-to-get to destination (and yes, there's considerable consternation about the proposal to build a block of flats that would block the view from Talland House, where VW stayed as a child).

Walking up to the Coastguard Station and old chapel, here's certainly a street that we'd be unlikely to inhabit, at least on the evidence of this trip.

Then back to Penzance - by taxi this time, since we had heavy bags - with a proThatcher, pro Winston Churchill, and seemingly pro Trump taxi driver: "at least he gets things done."  A certain amount of disabusing took place.

More literary reference: the Admiral Benbow, made famous by Treasure Island, is just up the road from where we're staying (in a wonderful, wonderful bed&breakfast, Chapel House).  I had an idea of it from when I was 6: it didn't look quite like this...

A bus along the coast to Mousehole - very pretty -

and yes, I know it's pronounced Mowzel, but the locals clearly relish the potential of how it looks.

But more bus problems!  Not just getting there, and back - missing buses, despite what looked like a promising timetable - but for the residents of Mousehole itself, where the bus (since mid February) no longer goes down to the harbor, which makes it hard for the elderly, the infirm (all the people who don't drive) and so on.

And back to our room - complete with a seagull outside.  One can actually see the sea very easily - just not from this angle ...

 

a day in Penzance

It was weirdly difficult to find the bus stop to get to Penzance (in itself perhaps an odd move, since we're about to stay there for our last two Cornish nights) - apparently they've all recently been moved.  Opposite the funeral directors, we were told: this was accurate, but no idea whether the embracing couple on the wall opposite relate to that company's business, or the length of time it takes for a bus to arrive.

Penzance is very different, despite being only 8 miles away (the world's longest eight miles, if your bus is going down tiny country lanes).  Part inexplicably funky, part very run down, part elegant - we were headed to the Penlee Museum to look at Newlyn School art (wonderful, but not enough of their collection was on display, to my find, alas ...).  But - that being said, so good to see paintings I've known well for decades in reproduction in real life.  And also a sense of the town as a fishing, maritime, tin-mining center - and some art nouveau copper bowls with seaweed on them.  This counts as research ...

Very English door.

Then a wander around town - most notable was the Egyptian House, commissioned by a mineralologist in 1835, and inspired by the Egyptian Hall in London.

The town (where the shop fronts aren't boarded up) has vast numbers of junk - I mean, antique - stores and charity shops.  The trouble about such shops these days, for me, is that they look full of things that are horribly similar to those that I donated when clearing out 20 Hillside ...

And then the disaffected mood of the town was summed up horribly well by the youth waving a Union Jack on the steps outside the shuttered Lloyds Bank.  I'm more aware than ever, on this trip, of the discrepancy between the comfortably off in this country and, well, the rest.

 

St Ives

The view from our room, this morning ... not bad!

Followed by a seagull who doubtless poses for tourist pictures like this one, and wants to be paid in mackerel;

followed by another - doubtless - local pictorial cliché.

Then to Tate St Ives, which had a wonderful huge video exhibit of Lithuanian environmental filmmaker Emilija Škarnulytė, where I could have sat for a very long time indeed as underwater creatures and past civilizations and mythological references and biological forms passed slowly, slowly in front of me.

As ever, the view, from Tate St Ives is stunning - all those long waves -

and then to Barbara Hepworth's studio,

and sculpture garden - very much showing signs of spring -

and then for a less spring like (but there are daffodils, and bluebells, and primroses, and wild garlic behind me) late afternoon walk.  Very, very relaxing.

 

we headed south

The view from the kitchen/living roo of our VRBO in Wimbledon - which already seems a long way away - followed by a long train ride down to Cornwall through beautiful green countryside (it would have been even better in sunlight, but at least it wasn't raining), to St Ives.

Here's the beautiful view over Porthminster Beach from our comfortable (but tiny) hotel room: so wonderful to have waves breaking outside;

and here's our post-prandial walk through the quiet town. 

 

spring at Kew (and a final farewell to the Old Homestead)

Blossoms, everywhere, in Kew Gardens; and daffodils;

and more blossoms, with The Hive in the spidery background.

Waving at two of my cousins from up aloft in The Hive;

which happily this time that Alice visited, was playing bee-driven music;

which as ever I found magical.

Gunnera unfurling into leaf;

more blossom;

and then round to Hillside to have tea with friends/old neighbors who live opposite 20.  I never thought I'd see it standing again - but there have been delays with builders and quantity surveyors and all the rest of it, so here it is, still hanging on for a few more sad grey weeks.  I find the photo of it more melancholy than seeing it in person, for some reason that I haven't processed yet.  The trees out front have gone, of course - and maybe if I'm looking for that Barthean piercing punctum it would be the old curtains still hanging in the upstairs hall windows.  Anyway, today's really was the final, and unexpected wave goodbye.

 

spring in Wimbledon

We didn't stray out of Wimbledon today - a lot of walking, on the Common and, especially, in Cannizaro, where they've cleared out the pond (returning it to something like I remember it in 1957, or whenever - when I used to go and feed the ancestors of the current ducks), and full, absolutely full, of daffodils.  I went there very briefly this morning, and then back with Alice and old friends and neighbors plus their new dog this afternoon.

Here's blossom, on Southside - just along from where we are staying -

and a goose on Rushmere.  As you can see, it was an absolutely perfect spring day.

 

exhibitions

Into central London - first to see Cathy Opie's show at the NPG, which was excellent in and of itself - and of course good to find the face of a good and dear friend there (hi, Connie!) even if she is wearing a moustache (which reminded me forcibly of being in a cab going through the streets on Bandung many years ago, and suddenly being surrounded by men blowing whistles and wearing and selling fake moustaches).

Good though the show was, in some ways I appreciated even more how the gallery had hung a whole range of Cathy's works so that they are in dialogue with other older portraits - I especially loved Guillermo & Joaquin, which was hanging on one wall of a room devoted to Victorian photographic family portraits.

Then had a good look at some hands: Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Henry Fawcett, collaborating on a letter to a newspaper (he was blind); 

and in another Ford Madox Brown, these are the hands of John Osborne Riches, commercial manager of the Ocean Steam Coal Collieries in South Wales (there's a great deal to be said about FMB's portraits);

and I'd never previously notice how Queen Victoria's bracelet - showing Albert - in Barker's The Secret of England's Greatness is looking out to the world and not back up at her.

Lunch in the restaurant - amazing view -

and then to Turner and Constable at the Tate: Turner's rain-spattered sketchbook;

Hannibal crossing the Alps - the leader diminished to a tiny, tiny form atop an elephant in the far distance;

and the griminess of Dudley.  It was terrific, and telling, seeing the two hung side by side, and in dialogue with one another (admittedly my sense was made stronger by having just read Nicola Moorby's Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape).  But - be warned - this was the most packed Tate exhibition I've been to in years.

Then for me, the ritualistic celebration of a sunset on Putney Bridge on the way home.