The Sennen Cove Diary
August 3rd - Monday
It was looking all rather bright and encouraging before six o’clock this morning when I stepped out with the girls. By the time we opened, things had gone downhill and it was not just the weather that had produced some thickening cloud all over us but our deliveries were in disarray.
The bread and the newspapers were roughly on time, although it seems that the Laurel and Hardy Newspaper Company has stopped checking my volumes. There is no longer a nice little scribble on the packing note, checked by Fred (not his real name), and to prove it I was missing a title. As explained yesterday, I narrowly avoided missing the credit as I got tied up with customers and later deliveries.
The greengrocery, of which there was quite a bit, arrived after we were open. Since we had not reached manic customer activity at that stage, I managed to get it all out of the way, bar the produce that needed to be weighed, before the dairy arrived. It was when the milk got here that the customers pounced. I found myself going up and down the aisle to put a few litres of milk away, then returning to the till to serve and going back again.
By the time I went to my gymnasium session, there was no sign of our pasty man (sorry, MS), so I left it to the Missus to sort. We had already taken orders for pasties when they did arrive, and I fended off the usual questions of what time the pasties get here with my usual response of two minutes after the van arrives.
Even the gymnasium session was in doubt. The local gig club had arranged to have a joint exercise with the Inshore boat – or we had arranged with them. They called off at the last minute and there ensued and hour of indecision whether the Inshore would go anyway as planned or later in the afternoon. Since my gymnasium session rested on which was it would go, I had to press for an answer.
I felt a little torn about going anyway because business has started to pick up before I left. By the end of the afternoon, I was glad that I did not turn back – I was grateful for the rest.
To say that it was busy today would be like saying that light travels quite quickly. We were pressed behind the counter for most of the day and when we were not being pressed, we were being very pressed. The pasties had arrived very late in my absence and the people who had ordered had already had them by the time I got back. The soft drinks had arrived and were piled up in the store room – the Missus cleared them after I went upstairs to get ready. The water and the biscuits arrived before I went up, and I stowed those at the back of the store room. I eventually got to put the biscuits out approaching closing time. Breakfast was at half past three o’clock.
The day that I thought was supposed to be cloudy according to the people I spoke with, turned into another proper rip gribbler. I imagine that the beach was packed again, although if I did get to see it, the scene did not lodge long in my brain to be recalled later. I do remember the sea being full. At low water two long sandbars reached out from the beach proper and dissected the sea into approximate thirds. It was a most peculiar arrangement with water users spread across the three segments or pools seemingly equally. Again, there was no surf, and the bay was as flat as a dish all day.
Despite the melee in the shop, I had to make some effort to replenish our bodyboard stock. We are almost out of child boards, and the adult ones will not last much longer. When I called our suppliers when I went upstairs to get ready, they too were short on just the boards we needed. I was able to secure some stock of the children’s boards, but we will just have to run out of the adult ones.
If there were any other deficiencies across the shop, they would just have to wait. Roughly the only time I came out from behind the counter was to put more pasties in the oven or retrieve them. Any other spare moments were reserved for trying to build an order so that we could have a delivery from the beachware company who were supplying some of the bodyboards but not enough for a minimum order. Even this task I had to give up on in favour for doing it in the evening after we had closed.
I am very fortunate that I can have fun with some of the customers. It would be a very long and difficult day without some levity. I do occasionally get it wrong and there are people out there who, unbelievably, are even grumpier than a grumpy shopkeeper. Someone did ask why I still had our ‘covid’ screen in place after all these years and I explained as well as the function of keeping some germs at bay, also provided a modicum of protection should an offended customer wish to punch me on the nose.
The Missus headed off to The Farm before we closed, so I did not get to see her until almost bedtime. If I stopped to think about it, I might consider it a curious life with us both running at full tilt for these few weeks and maybe a bit longer here and there. We have been doing it for twenty odd years. This thing may rattle along but if it was going to break, I am sure it would have broken by now.
August 2nd - Sunday
There is nothing quite like strapping up your second customer of the day’s broken finger to get the morning going with a zing. He had fallen on sone rough ground up St Just was the previous evening while walking his hound. Always blame the hound; it looks better.
I was also seriously ahead of the posse by the time the shop opened. Thankfully, the soft drinks fridge had not been too badly ravaged by the thirsty hordes yesterday. I was able, just about, to reach the spare stock behind the cash and carry order without having to move too many boxes or break an ankle trying to reach the back of the store. The beer fridge had fared worse but at least I could get at the stock and that did not take too long.
Neither did the newspapers. The Laurel and Hardy Newspaper Company decided in its wisdom to short me on two of the most popular Sunday titles. Just for added amusement they did charge for them, so I had to login to their system to arrange the credit. At this time of the year that is a precarious arrangement because there is a cut off time involved. If I am busy first thing, I can easily forget to do the credit and letting the Laurel and Hardy Newspaper Company get away with it is more galling that you can imagine.
We were blessed with another dry and sunny day, this time without any attendance cloud to spoil it. I think, not that I had much time to look, that the beach was about as busy as it was yesterday. I am not sure what it was about Friday but it is unheard of to have a Friday as the busier day of the weekend, if we wish to be loose with the term. Each day of the actual weekend was, by our turnover, a third less busy than Friday.
The other odd thing about the three days was the enormous demand for cheese pasties (sorry, MS). Up until now, including the busy half term, I had maintained roughly the same ratio of cheese to steak pasties. Friday and Saturday upset that particular wheelbarrow of ratatouille with a frighteningly large demand for the vegetarian option. There was no doubt that we would run out early on Sunday.
One customer, a regular, warned me that her extended family would be buying cheese pasties for the entire week. One day I might have thought was a blip but two looked more like a trend and I increased my order of cheese pasties for Monday by a good margin. I probably do not need to say that sales of cheese pasties, subsequent to the order cutoff, dropped through the floor and the few we had left for today lasted until the middle of the afternoon.
As a small aside, we have also been selling an unusual proportion of Diet Coke, both cans and bottles. It struck me that there might be a correlation between this and the vegetarian pasties. It is the sort of thing that I should commission a university to study, but I understand they might charge a bit for the privilege. I imagine there are probably a few blokes down the local who would give it a bash for a pasty and half a pint of lager. I am not paying out for a pint at those prices.
At quarter past two o’clock we ran out of pasties completely. We would struggle to fit a greater volume in the fridge than we had for this weekend, so we must either hope this weekend was exceptional or imagine a way of holding some more.
The Missus came down to the shop after the initial rush of the morning. She set to in the store room and cleared the rest of the cash and carry in about two hours. Obviously, I had broken the back of it with my many forays into it over the last day and a bit, but I was grateful for her efforts. We will only have one more big cash and carry delivery and then it will be all over. It is amazing to how quickly it finishes after the long period of expectation.
From the middle of the afternoon, we were more cruising through the day with occasional frenzied activity when small crowds blew through. It gave me the opportunity to look down on the vast expanse of low water beach in awe and wonder. There were probably as many in the water than there were at the head of the beach with a bit of a sparse middle in the no man’s land. At low water, there was not a wave to be had anywhere not even around the many exposed sandbars. Anyone in the water was either standing about paddling or sitting on a board and drifting here and there. Through it all, the sun shone down, and sales of parasols were back on the menu.
It really was a proper rip gribbler of a day even with a bit of southeasterly keeping the temperature down. It was a departure from the normal sort of day that St Buryan Male Voice Choir play on the wharf; it usually tips down. Actually, it usually does not. I think that we had some memorable days when it absolutely heaved down in biblical style stair rods and those are the days that stick in the mind. The choir collect on the Harbour wharf and sing a few songs to the usually substantial crowd that gathers around. The RNLI buckets are then taken around by some burley types looking menacing before anyone can escape. It usually turns up a few bob for the Institution.
Another thing that happens on choir night is that we have a five minutes to choir singing rush. Those who have come down to view the choir realise that we will be closed when the singing stops and it is time to head to the OS for some more – fuelled by beer. We were particularly busy for a good half an hour before the show started with all manner of customers including children eager to spend their holiday money.
One young lad acquired a bag of fossilised sharks’ teeth which are, and have been for years, immensely popular with boys his age. He was obviously a canny lad or perhaps slightly suspicious because he asked if they were genuine sharks’ teeth. I said that they were, honest guv. Still a little unsure, he asked what sort of shark they came from. Momentarily flummoxed, I remembered that they were fossilised, so I told him, a very old shark. Behind the family in the queue was a young man who suggested that the young boy photographed the teeth with his smart telephone and asked the AI facility on it to identify the shark. I said that he better not as it would probably come up with ‘rabbit’ which caused some merriment. (I made a note of who he was so that I could bar him later.)
We did indeed close up before the slightly rotund gentleman has started singing. I slunk away upstairs out of the way as the crowds shuffled by. With the OS calling, they would have had no interest in shopping, I concluded.
The Missus took herself off to the OS after the event so that she could finance some of the beer for the boys and the choir. She took the girls with her leaving me to do the admin I would usually do in the morning on the computer and retire which sounded like a very good plan at the time.
August 1st - Saturday
The sun had not quite broken over the cliff when I took the girls out first thing. There was just enough beach to cavort upon, so we headed down the slip which is far easier that dragging them down the road. If the tide is fully in, there are alright about avoiding the beach but if they can see a sliver of sand, they are most insistent that they go down.
We did not tarry long, I had places to go and drinks to see and was keen to get started. What I should have done is started much earlier as I was caught out just at the end of doing the soft drinks by the arrival of the cash and carry delivery. I had checked the tracker for the first time that had told me the van would arrive at ten minutes to eight o’clock. I thought it a useful addition to the service until the van turned up half an hour earlier.
We carried out the usual, efficient unload of a delivery that was a fair bit larger than the delivery we had last time. I had ramped that up on the expectation of a marked increase in business and for this order ramped up some more. Judging from the business we had yesterday, it was still going to be too small.
I must say that it certainly did not feel that small after we finished bringing it in. It was piled high and precariously, the full length of the store room with only just enough room to squeeze down one side. There was no time to be concerned about the stability of the piles because hot the heels of the cash and carry delivery came the newspapers and the greengrocery. Most of the latter could go straight out but there were a few items that needed weighing and pricing. Since the top of the freezer where I do the weighing and pricing was loaded with cash and carry goods, they would need to be processed and put out before I could do the greengrocery.
At twenty five minutes past eight o’clock, five minutes before opening, with the newspapers done, the freezer cleared of enough space to finish the greengrocery, and the bread that had arrived first, I suddenly realised that I had not yet topped up the beer fridge. Panic? Certainly not.
I would have been gravely mistaken to think that the helter skelter of the morning was over with the opening of the first electric sliding door in The Cove, although I might be forgiven for thinking so in the first hour as we were reasonably quiet. Then at half past nine o’clock, just as the first serious wave of shoppers appeared, so too did the extra large dairy order I had placed last night. Working between customer visits to the till, it took me the best part of an hour to price and secure all the items in the fridge. It was not helped that after getting my trolley to the end of the shop, I could not get back again because of people in the aisles.
Having boxed off the daily deliveries, I could concentrate on shopkeeping while trying to clear as much of the cash and carry as possible. It was a corker of a morning out there with so much bright sunshine it was hard to imagine a person not wanting to be part of it. I was, as a result, quite hard pressed and there was rather more shopkeeping than there was clearing boxes. It was gone eleven o’clock before there was enough of a break in the traffic to go and get a quick cup of tea.
We stayed busy until well into the afternoon although it was a little more sporadic than the morning’s major rush. I do not think that the beach was as busy as yesterday; the camps thinned out a bit as they went towards and past the Lifeguard huts. Maybe it was the cloud that put them off. Our bright and sunny morning paled a bit from the middle of the day as cloud either filtered the sun or blocked it out altogether. It was combined today with a bit of a breeze from the northwest which might have taken the edge off the temperature a bit. I suspect those camped out on the beach were not minded to care very much.
As the afternoon pressed on, we started to see some more arrivals, many with familiar faces, which is always pleasant – like seeing old friends. It reawakens my conversational mode, which can be eroded as I tire towards the middle of the afternoon. Sometimes others get caught in the crossfire such as the young lady who came to the counter purchasing postcard. I asked her if she had warm hands and I must commend her wit and presence of mind because she responded immediately, ‘not at the moment’. I very quickly pointed to her sweatshirt, before she thought me any more of a complete eejit than she did already, and its legend that said, Cold Heart. She mentioned that her uncle had said something similar which told me that she thought that age might be a factor at play. The very cheek of it, but touché.
In the last couple of hours of opening I had enough leeway to do a few more boxes of this and that from the cash and carry delivery. I had not made much of an impact on it but the Missus, who now looks like she constitutes the night shift, said that she would power through it in the evening. I had no doubt that she would.
Except she did not. By the time we had some tea, it was too late to consider probably two hour’s work in the shop. She said she would get up early, which I doubted, to do it then. Our ideas of early tend to differ in somewhat extreme ways.
When it came to take the girls out last thing, The Cove was a completely different place to the evening before. Gone were the crowds and our end was practically deserted. There was no aftermath of a spectacular sunset as the cloud had thickened a bit. At the end of the shop day it was still fairly bright, but the cloud was gathering then. The Harbour wall was lined with jumpers and there was still plenty of activity in the Harbour. They had all clearly thought better of hanging about later on. Not without cause, so did I and promptly went to bed.