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.
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