The Sennen Cove Diary
May 10th - Sunday
The wind still had its dander up in the morning and was still in the northeast. It had not lost any of its lustre from the previous evening and although Land’s End is not playing with us for the time being, St Ives weather station had it pegged at near forty miles per hour. That seemed reasonable as I was pinned against the back of the counter for most of the day.
The Lifeboat was due to be launched on training early this morning. There were two crew members aiming to attain new qualifications and the assessors had agreed to come along on a Sunday to do it – must be double-time or something. Seeing that we had more than enough numbers on shore, I ducked out and let the others have a play, instead. I made sure main roles were covered and left them to it. I was assured that later on the boat was hauled up the short slip in what they told me was a textbook recovery. I have no reason to doubt them. We are, after all, a very honest, very excellent Shore Crew.
I was very busy through the morning but sadly not with customers. By and by and between the customers we did have, I worked my may through some more invoices. There are probably around 200 and, mid morning, I was through about half. I did not get to finish them all and the Missus announced, when she came back from The Farm, that she would do the rest to keep her hand in.
The other thing that I had half an eye on was that I think we will need a cash and carry order next weekend. There are some key items we need – cans of cider and biscuits, for starters – but overall, I thought we might struggle to make a minimum order. Although the order does not need to be in until Thursday, I like to give the delivery manager the best part of a week’s notice, since we are not a regular delivery, and therefore I would need to know today if we could place the order.
The process took much of the rest of the day between the infrequent visits from customers. All of those cited the blustery wind, so it was no problem guessing what was keeping our numbers down. For all that, the sun was shining and it looked a splendid day and probably was if you could find some shelter. The smart money would be around at Porthcurno basking in the sunshine, no doubt.
There were some brave hearts taking a walk out on the cliffs. They were few and far between. One of our customers pointed out that we had walking books for every level of interest: walks, short walks and really short walks. I told him if he turned the display around a bit more, we had another called walks you can see out the pub window, but it had sold out. It certainly was that sort of day. I had a friend come by earlier who told me that the OS frontage was very busy with drinkers.
We had to wait for a five minutes to closing rush before we saw any busyness at all. In the vanguard of that, our friends arrived for postcards and we fell to chatting. Their curiosity had got the better of them and they had gone to have a talk with the working party down on the big beach. It seems the focus of today’s work was the dismantling of some of the old, twenty year old cables down there. They even had a picture of one of the lengths cut off. It looked remarkably like one of the very old cables, with layers of steel and bitumen cloth but would have had fibre optic at the core. The first of those was laid in 1988 from Widmouth Bay, east of Camborne.
Interestingly, even the Internet cannot tell me when the fibre cables were laid in The Cove. It tells me the last cable laid was 1926, so I imagine it is top secret. While the Internet is keeping hidden when the fibre was laid, “submarinecable.com” will tell you exactly where it is.
Again the diggers on the beach worked into the evening; they have a longer day than me, almost – they start a bit later. We did have a geek at the marine traffic website to see it we could identify the cable boat and where it was coming from. We could not find it but when I took the girls out last thing there was a bleddy geet boat hanging off the Pedn-men-du. It had sneaked around the corner, a French registered boat and had come from Dunkirk. It is a big lump of a boat and the back deck is absolutely crammed with drums and cranes and winches. I think it stays on station with the clever use of GPS and various propellors and bow thrusters rather than anchors. When I looked later, it was lit up like it was Christmas. Let the works begin.
May 9th - Saturday
How very disappointing. When I looked out this morning, we had more cloud than we knew what to do with and the wind that did not know where it was coming from yesterday decided to settle in the northeast this morning and be a little more brutal. It was not that uncomfortable down on the Harbour beach, although I did have to wear a hat again. I cannot say that I was otherwise disturbed by it until a little later when I was standing behind the counter as it blasted through the doorway.
It was a change-over day, so it was never going to be busy, I told myself. It makes me feel much better when it is not. It also gives me the opportunity to feel much better if it is busier than my downgraded expectations, which today it was. I think that we are generally now in an upward flow of visitor numbers and this will continue through until the half term, which we hope will be busier still. The BBC news website suggested or perhaps predicted that the UK would see an increased number of ‘staycations’ due to troubles abroad and the increase in jet fuel prices. I am not very receptive to predictions – I am reminded of ‘barbeque summer’ that was anything but - and will wait and see, thank you very much.
I had hoped that I would see the diggers arriving this morning to discover how they were getting down the dunes. Missing it completely, I caught up with the action just as they drove onto the beach via the ramp to the Lifeguard hut, thus scotching the rumour – started by me - that the ramp was built for other reasons. When I looked a little later, they had built a Guinness World Record size sandcastle roughly where they had been digging before. From the shop, it did look like they had dug a pit in the one place suggesting that the cable they were after was a lot deeper than I imagined. I am beyond the point of guessing anymore. I have not got a clue what they are up to. All I know is that the boys at the digger depot were probably queuing up for this job.
With nothing much else going on for much of the morning, I decided to crack on with the first quarter invoices for the Making Tax Difficult system. The first thing to do was to order the invoices by date which is a task of overwhelming tedium. The Missus will usually do this for me because for some reason she enjoys such tasks. Sadly, she was unavailable at the time, and I had to do it myself while trying desperately not to think of the other more interesting things I could be doing, such as polishing packets of drawing pins.
Once complete, I set out to start the inputting. I had not started particularly early and I did not complete the entire pile. At some point during the process, the hooded sweatshirt order arrived. This is also a task requiring Jobian patience as each item needs to be stuck with a size label so they are easily identifiable in the boxes that they are kept in. I also box them in size order with the smallest at the front so that I can quickly get at them during the course of the shop day.
My preference is to sell the hooded sweatshirts out of the box in their original packet. A customer will bring me one on its hanger from the display and I will endeavour to find the same size in a packet from the store room. It is pure bone idleness on my part. The hooded sweatshirts on the hanger have our own label that I would have to remove – we reuse them – and I would then neatly fold the article before taking the payment. I would then have to open a corresponding packet from the store room, place it on a hanger and rethread the label. Clearly that is far too much effort for anyone.
I managed to get two thirds of the delivery cleared before we started to get a little busier and I had to stop. There were new visitors arriving and some who we have become firm friends with over the years we have known them. One of them had a dog that I was keen to see again but sadly it had been ill and they felt it best to leave it behind, which was unfortunate.
The influx underlined my failure to order newspapers because the entire body of the new intake came by during the day to ask if we sold newspapers. My ankles are now sore from the number of times I had to kick myself. Perhaps the bruises will still be there next year to remind me to order them a week earlier. Actually, I negated the need to rely on my hopeless memory and put a reminder in my electronic diary to get it right next year. That and wearing a hair shirt and half an hour of self-flagellation in the evening should do the trick.
Part of my penance was played out in the shop, however. At one point in the afternoon a small crowd of German ladies appeared in the shop asking for a UK power point adapter for their devices with German plugs on the end. We have stocked such adapters for years and sell a lot of them. It was easier to go and get one rather than direct the ladies to them and I handed over the article to the lady who had followed me.
In fact, they had all followed me and had me pinned down in the aisle. This was clearly deliberate so that the first lady could harangue me about how unsuitable the adapter was for the equipment she needed it for. We quickly established that the equipment she had was not non-standard and I started out by merely suggesting that our adapter would be suitable. No, it was not, she told me, as it did not look right.
In response, I escalated to insisting that it was. She became equally insistent that the pin holes were not in the right place. I escalated further to an assurance that it was a universal adapter and that her two pin plug would indeed fit into it. We both reached for our ultimate play together as I guaranteed that it was the right adapter and she reached in her bag for a device with which to demonstrate her position.
It ended with me tossing caution to the wind, which was by this time quite considerable, and ripping open the packaging on the adapter. I took the German plugged device that I was offered and went to demonstrate the insertion. I admit I did have a moment of panic when it took rather more force than I bargained for to fit it into the socket but fit it did in the end. I had thought to tell the lady I would not sell it to her as punishment for not believing me in the first place, but she offered to buy a second one, so I demurred. I have principles but she clearly did not like them, so it was fortunate that I had others.
We had a quiet enough run into closing time after that. The diggers on the beach were still hard at it; my they have a long day. They are still working above the high water line, so they left the big sandcastle where it was for the evening. They were gone when I looked again after tea.
What actually made me look was a sudden squally gust that charged in from the northwest. It was enough to rattle our bin and flap a few loose things outside. We then settling in for a more consistent, robust blow and to listen to it howling in the eaves for the rest of the evening.
May 8th - Friday
We were met with the view of a stonkingly glorious morning when I threw back the virtual curtains first thing. It has all the hallmarks of a burgeoning rip gribbler about it and when we arrived on the beach, it was further evidence of the loveliness of the day in prospect. It was the sort of day to foster laziness and not even the sea could be fagged to push a few waves onto the beach down in the Harbour.
Idleness was not an option for me as I had the shop to open. There was also the large collection of wetshoes and slides in the truck that the Missus had brought down from The Farm yesterday. They had yet to be unloaded and I would have to wait until later in the morning for the opportunity to get my teeth into those. Instead, I started with a handful of deliveries that I had called in including the pasties (sorry, MS) for the weekend which I had in mind were probably either going to be twice too many or half not enough to see us through the weekend.
In the late morning, a couple of RIBs arrived. I assumed, in fact they could not have been anything else, that they were to do with the cable repair in the bay. They traversed the line of the cable many times during the afternoon doing something. I had rather expected something a little more exciting than a couple of nondescript RIBs charging up and down. Fortunately, someone who knew better than I told me that the RIBs were just doing the inspections; the bigger cable layer would be arriving next week.
That then begged the question what the diggers were doing uncovering the cable up the beach. Obviously, I could not see exactly what they were going but there was a line of road work barricades running up the beach just short of The Valley and they were digging a trench. It is possible that where they were was above the neap tide high water mark, so the assumption had to be whatever they were doing was only preparatory for whatever the big cable boat would be doing. Next week, the bit they are working on will definitely be swapped by the tide. It was quite frustrating not knowing, so when one of the workers came in for snacks, I grasped the moment. He told me all they were doing at the moment was identifying where the cables were. There are several together where they are digging, so I assume they could not just use a metal detector if they are looking for one specific cable.
There was one thing that did make me raise an eyebrow. The works they were carrying out today were at least 50 metres away from the path leading up to the Lifeguard hut. I do not know but I strongly suspect that those diggers were indeed making the huts more accessible from the beach. It does rather look like they were slipped a fiver to do that while they were waiting to start on their own work. It is also possible it was part of the agreement that let them use the top car park as a staging point.
We were fearfully quiet again today. There had been a bit of action during the middle of the morning, and we had some walkers passing through. The café looked like it had more business than us during the afternoon with several of their tables outside used up. It was, after all, the sort of day for sitting around outside.
The day had not developed quite as rip gribblerish as I had imagined. Some milky high level cloud moved across us and softened the sun considerably. There was not much in the way of a breeze, and it was hard to determine exactly where it was coming from. The local stations could not agree: St Ives had it northerly; Land’s End was not sure at all and had pointers in three different directions; and Gwenapp Head, windiest place in the universe, had it in the southeast. The BBC were keen to tell us the northeast and the Meteorological Office, the southwest. The Lifeboat marker flags were slightly suggesting the northwest, although we have been known to have local anomalies in the past. The flag on the Lifeboat station pole was limp and therefore no help at all as was the flag on the Lifeguard hut. A mystery, then. We will leave it at that.
It was about half past one o’clock when I started on the wetshoes and the slides. It was as far back as I could put off doing them without not doing them at all and I could find no further excuses for putting it off. It did not take all that long to be honest. The Missus had prepared all the slides so all I had to do was to put them out. The wetshoes, however, all needed to be torn out of their packets and the stuffing extracted from each shoe. I did it between customers that were so few and far between that I did all the shoes in about three batches.
We had a minor five minutes to closing rush. It was just ahead of this that I was compelled to go upstairs to, erm, make a cup of tea. When I return there was a group of small children just outside the doorway looking in. They looked for all the world like they had been transplanted from a Victorian melodrama and were dressed not much differently. All it needed was a couple of inches of snow to complete the picture. They looked at me with glum apprehension and their expressions failed to change when they went back to looking inside the shop.
There were several people in but only one couple fitting the parental bill and they were down the far end of the shop by the soft drinks fridge. Frequently, with a family of that size, the children would be all over the shop, running about and causing various degrees of mayhem. I was very impressed with the discipline, but they did look down hearted, like little street urchins down on their luck and dressed in rags. I parcelled up some of our small packets of sweets and gave it to the parents when they came to the till, a reward for the children for being so good, I told them. I do hope they were allowed them after their regular afternoon beating.
I dismissed any further though of the children – they probably deserved a good thrashing, anyway – and spent teatime watching the digger people refill the trench they had dug. I am not exactly sure how they are getting to and fro the beach but someone observed them coming down off the dunes using their buckets to stop toppling forward. The next time I looked have cleared the table and cleaned up, they had gone for the night. The digger driver told me that the next phase is uncovering the cable below the tide line, which clearly will be a timely effort, especially in neap tides. I shall be looking forward to the next exciting episode.
May 7th - Thursday
I had to drag myself out of bed early this morning. It was necessary to do all the normal chores and then be ready to leave for the metropolis of St Just by ten minutes to eight o’clock. I had booked my annual blood letting appointment via the message that they sent me which did not allow me to enquire whether it was a fasting blood letting or not. I took the precaution that it was and booked it early. The Missus would have to cover in the shop, and her preference would have been a later appointment. She probably would have been more sympathetic had I not checked later to discover that it was not a fasting test, and I could have indeed gone later.
As I drove out up Cove Hill, I noted that there were three large diggers in the car park there by the entrance. I was not aware of any working going on up there and I meant to ask the Missus when I got back. She has her finger on the pulse of such things but, of course, I forgot.
All became clear later on when two of the diggers appeared on the beach over by the Lifeguard huts. My guess, when asked by some of the observers who had seen the diggers down there, was that they would make vehicle access to the Lifeguard hut. Whether this was by moving the rocks or loading sand on the rocks would have to be seen. We had to wait a while but by late morning the diggers were moving some of the rocks out of the way and moving sand over what was left – which answered that question.
I was not sure why the Lifeguards should need vehicular access to their huts, and I surmised that it might be to do with the jet ski and its trailer. It was well into the afternoon when one of the Lifeboat crew and also a Harbour user disabused me of my random guesses and explained the real reason. It was nothing to do with the Lifeguards. The fact that the diggers were working at the foot of their access ramp was merely a red herring.
I am reliably informed that one of the transatlantic fibre cables in the bay needs to be replaced. The diggers were performing ground works ahead of the main laying. The cable will use existing ducking through the dunes to the top of the cliff and thereafter to wherever it goes. The marine end of the operation was due to arrive today but there was no sign of it. It will also explain the presence of various gentlemen with false beards and dark glasses wearing ushankas hanging about the place and looking furtive.
Circumstances interrupted my reverie in the form of the frozen delivery arriving in the late morning. It was poor timing because we had just started to get busy and I had to divide my time between customers and the delivery. It is the only order that cannot be left until later if we are busy. It is also not helpful that the company has the most disorganised delivery process of any of our suppliers. Our order is displaced all over the storage space in the truck and the driver needs to find the item on the delivery note then search for it in the back of the lorry. The box will sometimes be in plain view and sometimes buried under other items which are not part of our order. Why the orders are not segregated per customer into cages or boxes, defeats me.
There were sufficient gaps between customers to get the order away before it melted and we now have a full display of ice creams. It was starting to look a little thin as we had not topped it up since the first ice cream delivery just ahead of Easter. Since the ice cream kiosk next door is not open every day, we tend to be the fallback option and consequently sell quite a few on their off days. I had done the order twice. The first was more than a week ago and I had delayed too long in sending it to the Missus to be placed. When I did it the second time, I remembered the pizzas that I had forgotten the first time but forgot the prawns and the chips that I had remembered on the initial list. I think we will be alright until the next order as we still have some weeks to go before we are in full flight.
The other thing that scuppered any further interest in the works on the beach was a jolly little Lifeboat shout at two o’clock. The boat was called to a small open boat with double engine failure that had tied itself to Longships lighthouse to stop it drifting away. There were comfortably enough Boat Crew for the job but on shore it was looking like I would be on my own for a while. Luckily, the winchman turned up just ahead of the launch and we had the boat away in a timely manner.
We were fortunate that the Lifeboat took the casualty under tow because it would be down to the two of us to affect the textbook recovery. It would have been possible, but I would need to lie down for a bit afterwards. Instead, I estimated that we would be looking at a recovery at around five o’clock or just a bit later when more people would be available to help.
Things in the shop had calmed down dramatically. The little run of busyness we had, evaporated after I returned to the shop. I was still in my yellows for a good while after as the story unfolded and I relayed information to the other members of the very excellent Shore Crew who were just waking up from whatever stopped them attending for the launch. I calculated that the boat would return to The Cove at five o’clock but half an hour out from Penzance harbour where they were taking the casualty another craft called in sick from the Wolf Rock lighthouse area.
With no other takers, our boat volunteered to go to its aid if Penlee could be tasked to take over the tow of the original craft. The Coastguard thought that a spiffing idea and less than twenty minutes later, our boat was on its way to Wolf Rock.
I recalculated my timings but half way there, the Coastguard informed our boat that the casualty wanted to be towed to the Isles of Scilly to which it was closer and to which it was heading when its engine failed. I recalculated again and it looked like our boat would be returning to The Cove at the time it would have been had the day gone smoothly and we had launched on training in the evening as planned. Fortunately, I had not broadcast any of my calculations, preferring to wait until we were sure of the outcomes of each phase of the operations. It saved my embarrassment because when our boat arrived at the second casualty vessel, it had already been taken under toe by a passing motor cruiser and was well on its way. We assess the toe to be satisfactory, and the Coastguard were happy to stand down our boat so that it could return to station.
I recalculated again and discovered that the boat was just half an hour off being back and had to hurriedly arrange a recovery crew. As it happened, various interested parties had already arrived and more followed giving us more than sufficient numbers to execute what was clearly a textbook recovery up the long slipway.
There are two Boat Crew due to be assessed and hopefully signed off on another stage of their training on Sunday. Since they were not part of the rescue crew and anyway needed to practise skills other than towing, it was decided that the arranged training would go ahead anyway. We had recovered the boat and finished up at six o’clock, so we all hung about and waited half an hour for everyone else to turn up.
Both boats launched again toward seven o’clock and because there was a lot to cover, the big boat did not return until quarter to nine o’clock, crossing the setting sun to the northwest. It surprised me that the sun was so far north but then I realised that we are only a month or so off the summer equinox. Gosh, where did that go.
We had set up what we could on the short slip when the boat had come back the first time and did the rest after it relaunched. We were therefore as ready as we could be when it eventually steamed into the Harbour and we carried out what was clearly a textbook recovery up the short slip in very calm conditions. We very quickly washed down and rearranged the boat for its next launch and retired to the crew room for a very brief debrief. We are, after all, a very repetitive, very excellent Shore Crew.
May 6th - Wednesday
I am going to have to get myself a new mental notepad. The old one is bleddy useless. It was while I was chatting with a customer about newspapers for the umpteenth time this season that I remembered. Last year I made a mental note that I would start doing newspapers a week earlier this year because there were probably enough people around to make it worthwhile and, by this stage last year, I had just about enough of telling people why we were not doing newspapers. It is too late now, and I shall endeavour to remember for next year.
There was no sign of any rain around this morning despite Radio Pasty’s best efforts of telling us otherwise. It is a shame that their analysis was not included in their website again. We had some brightness, and I took the precaution of wearing sunglasses when I took the girls down to the beach. A member of the very excellent Shore Crew had told me last week that the optician that did eyes told him that his eyes had been adversely affected by UV rays. He is roughly the same age as me and has not, like me, spent an unusual amount of time outside. His job has been predominantly indoors.
It was bright down on the Harbour beach and the early morning sun was reflecting off the water which was close in to the top of the beach when we went. It was rather glorious with just enough nip in the air to warrant the wearing of my woolly jacket and a hat. The waves were happily slapping on the sand, but it was the only noise there to annoy the peace.
Some cloud drifted across us in the early part of the day but after that we enjoyed sunshine for the rest of the day. The temperature was down a bit on yesterday and the windchill brought it down a little further. It certainly did not put off anyone from nestling on the benches across the road that were all in the sunshine all day but on the beach we had the same lacklustre gatherings we had for the last few days. I would concede that it probably is not sitting on a beach weather just yet and with no surf, the surfers are not interested either.
There were some rumblings in my inner ear; some small, barely present signs in the ether that we were about to get a bit busier than of late. We started to see a small influx while a friend and neighbour dropped in for a chat and after he left, the tsunami started. Another sign: a coach load of Germans walking past on the opposite side of the road, an omen very much akin to an eagle flying to the left if you are an ancient Greek – or was that right and Roman? Soon, the shop was alive with visitors from all manner of places buying gifts, beach clothes and, of course, pasties (sorry, MS).
Being a glorious afternoon that just got more glorious as it went on, I suspect helped a good deal. I still could not fathom why the beach was still so empty, but I was not going to ask many questions as all the people who might have been there were up our end buying things.
I was kept busy for the entirety of the afternoon which is, of course, why our delivery of t-shirts arrived today. It had arrived slightly before the main bulk of the busyness and allowed me to get some of it dealt with. Many of the t-shirts I was able to get out into the shop bins, but some would need to be taken up to The Farm. It was a blessing that we can now order far fewer for each run – it used to be 300 and is now 50, thank heavens. Needless to say, I did not finish them all and have the children’s t-shirts to look forward to tomorrow.
It was while I was topping up the t-shirts that I noticed that the wetshoes were in a terrible state of stock erosion; there were gaps all over the display with sizes missing completely. The Missus had asked me a week ago to make a list of the stock we needed but I had forgotten all about it. We now need 50 shoes brought down in one go and it is one of my most disliked tasks – the unwrapping and removal of the card and paper stuffing in each shoe. That will teach me.
Late in the afternoon, I was engaged in conversation with a lady who regaled me with tales of her early visits to The Cove and surrounding area. It was just post-war which would put her in her late 80s or early 90s. She recalled staying in an old Victorian railway carriage and particularly remembers the gas lamp fittings and the lack of electricity. It is not the first time I have heard of railway carriages being used for accommodation in the area and given the location of this particular one, I did wonder if I had met one of her relatives at some point in the past. I still find it quite incredible that there were quite so many railway carriages here; we are ten miles from the nearest track.
Our busyness went soft sometime after half past four which is a good half an hour after it usually does, even on busy days. The Missus had been up at The Farm all afternoon and had a busy day herself. There was much planting going on and she also planted up two decorative shrubs for the decking in front of the cabin. This is the same decking at the front of the cabin where we have lost a big umbrella, several chairs, a glass top table and various other decorative items to 80 mile an hour winds. I do not fancy the chances of these two shrubs being there this time next year.
I was feeling quite ebullient by closing time. I cannot imagine it will last.
May 5th - Tuesday
Well, that gave me a chuckle this morning. For the last couple of days of largely dry weather, the BBC has shown on its weather website, full days of black clouds with raindrops falling from them. This morning, with a bay you could not see across and the rain pelting down outside, the website showed a full day of sunshine and light cloud. I knew there was a good reason for paying a licence fee: it is the entertainment value we get.
At least such an anomaly is easily explained: the website is maintained by people who cannot be fagged to look out of the window once in a while. What was a little harder to explain was my 13 millimetre socket and handle sitting on the counter when I opened the shop this morning. I went to the lengths of checking the CCTV to assure myself that it really was not there when I closed nor had the borrower returned it while I nipped to the end of the shop for something I forgot to take out of the fridge after I had initially closed up.
Fortunately, our system highlights movement and when I checked, the Missus had nipped down at half past nine o’clock, after I had retired for the night, and placed it there. Perhaps she is trying to gaslight me and have me committed. She would probably find that she did not have to try very hard. What actually happened was that she had gone outside to get rid of the lobster shells from our tea and the socket and handle was sitting on our newspaper box. Anyway, I am very pleased to have it back and, moreover, our 100 percent return record has been maintained. Obviously, I also do hope his pal’s roof rack did not fall off and smash into thousands of pieces.
Of course, it is also possible that our man’s roof rack did indeed fall off and smash into a thousand pieces which was what prompted him to return the spanner – in case the wheels fell off as well. We will never know but I prefer to think that our natural human trait is honesty – with a few exceptions.
The rain went on rather longer than I had hoped. There was a geet long chain of it piling down the north coast in a straight line. At some point it changed its mind and hung about where it was leaving us damp and overcast for the rest of the morning. It was not the most alluring scene to draw visitors to The Cove, and we consequently remained quiet for the rest of the day. There was not even a clandestine pasty (sorry, MS) underground movement clearing out our stock. Very poor show, I felt.
There is a clear expectation amongst our fisherfolk that the sea conditions are set to improve over the longer term. The spring tides were much smaller than I expected this time around and we were able to get down on the beach in the Harbour this morning. As we turned down the slipway, I was surprised by the increased number of punts down on the lower parts of the slipway. They were either dragged down yesterday or the days before and I just did not notice. For the past month there were only two or three punts down there so the change was very noticeable. The girls went running off between them and disappeared. They did emerge eventually on the sand, but the smell of bilge water was clearly too much of a draw for a while.
In what seems to be the usual progression of such things, business did pick up in the afternoon. It was, however, very clear that the bank holiday weekend was over and done with and ‘picking up’ was a very minor affair. The weather decided to clear and improve during the afternoon but, as ever, we cannot get a pat on the back without a boot up the backside to go with it; the wind picked up. It started in the northwest and ended in the north, so that even Land’s End was correct. It felt chilly during the morning to the degree that I had to go and get a jacket. Even when the clouds cleared and the sun came out during the second half of the afternoon, it did not seem to improve much. I think that it might have been different if you were out under the sun.
As usual, business took a dive after four o’clock and the street emptied. It gave me the chance to look out across the bay as the tide became full and chased any remaining characters off the beach. The water is still essentially flat but today was rippled in the northerly breeze. There had been a few waves in a bit of a shore break earlier. One young lady staying here told me it was ideal for her, and she could get away with not having to join her boyfriend in some more macho surf.
With the skies clear, it was still light when I took the girls around last thing. I think it was the first time this year that I have not needed my headtorch with me. We are charging through the year it seems.
May 3rd - Sunday
It was a drab and colourless scene to gaze out upon first thing in the morning. We were excluded from the beach thanks to the tide but at least it was not raining. There was plenty of cool damp in the air but largely it was temperate. The fresh wetness of the earth and the flora kept the girls sniffing the whole way around the block as my freshly made tea went cold at home.
Naturally, it started raining when I went down to put the display out ahead of opening the shop. It was short lived, but the sky looked threatening at times for most of the day. I was dubious that it would rain at all, but a customer dropped by the in the middle of the morning to tell me that it would rain at two o’clock, stop raining and get brighter for the rest of the day.
It was doubtless this highly specific bit of intelligence put all the rest of our customers off visiting us, at least until ten minutes past two o’clock. Even some unexpected sunshine in the middle of the day failed to have the restorative effect that we might have hoped for. It threw into disarray my careful crafted plan for provision of pasties (sorry, MS) and forced me into a ill thought out order for Monday morning.
During the quietness of the morning, I attended to the few gaps that we had on our Jewellery stand. I may have omitted to mention that we had a visit from the very helpful young lady who last year looked after our surf jewellery ordering and putting out. I know that I did admit to making a hash of the display on the new stand and against the advice that came with it as to which type of bangle or anklet went where on the stand. I almost turned down her offer of a visit thinking that she would not have much to do when she got here but thought to let her see the new stand anyway.
She duly arrived after a false start and had to change the day. When she did get here the shop was empty and she had plenty of time to review my cobbled up job of display. I was distracted by some customers and when I looked again, she was in full flight rearranging the display. By the time she finished it resembled the example photograph that they company had sent with the stand. All the correct types were on the correct sides of the display. Despite only working for the company part time, she clearly knew the stock intimately and did the rearranging without referring to any notes.
I cannot work out exactly how she exists, perhaps it is the modern way and I am out of date. She works for the jewellery company on and off during the summer on a contract basis then, during the winter, she went off to some ski resort and did something completely different there. She appears to be very level headed and utterly competent and perfect in a client facing role. I am sure she will do well and I do not think that she will ever find herself in a rut or bored with her job.
I am equally sure it suits many progressive employers and certainly suits the employment market in Cornwall. I know many young people who do three or four jobs during the summer and survive on fewer during the winter. It is a form of adaptation that many young people who are prepared to put in the effort seem to find no only effective but essential.
Her visit also prompted me to pull my finger out to correct the signage boards on the bottom of the stand. As supplied, they were too large and bound either on the rotating stand above or the wheels below. I knew she would be disappointed by my effort with the display, and I did not want to disappoint her with the stand as well.
This has been a very long way of saying that her efforts made it very easy to top up the displays because they were in a logical order. On the downside of that, it did not take very long at all, and I was left with nothing to do sooner.
This was probably a good thing because as the afternoon went on, we got quite a bit busier. It is difficult to determine whether there has been a general increase in visitors, or this was just trippers deciding it was a good time to visit The Cove. Traditionally, this bank holiday weekend is not a busy one for us, although it too may have been influential in the upturn. One thing is for certain, it was not the weather forecast that brought them; that was more than a tad wrong. The BBC had promised us showers all day and our random customer of good cheer assured us of rain at two o’clock.
Neither were correct. The weather that had improved in measures during the day ended up as exceedingly pleasant. There was plenty of thicker cloud to the north of us, but the sun had found some gaps to the south and it was bright and often sunny later on. Someone had removed the chewing gum from Land’s End weather vane and it was showing a northwesterly of light airs. The bay was mainly flat as a dish but there must have been a bit of swell and a few waves because there was a small group of surfers at one point over by North Rocks. It flattened out completely as it neared high water, but it did not seem to deter a desperate few.
It was still mild when I took the girls out for a run later on. There was some coolness drifting around in the air that was pleasant since I had elected to wear my woolly jacket again. There was still the cloud cover to the north but elsewhere it was broken and there was enough light and just gone nine o’clock for me not to need my headtorch. We had ended with quite a successful day. A few more of them would be quite welcome, thank you very much.
May 2nd - Saturday
We were a little bit more upbeat this morning with the numbers of customers coming through in the middle to late morning. I think that largely we were fighting the advancing weather that was set to be poor for the later afternoon. It was not that great to start with. The cloud had thickened overnight and brought some damp in the air with it. There was not much in the way of breeze first thing, but it made up for it later, banging in from the southeast again. Strangely, ever since Thursday, Land’s End weather station has shown the wind in the north. It is either a very peculiar weather anomaly or some rogue has stuck a lump of chewing gum on Land’s End wind vane.
The rain started around the middle of the day, but it was not very heavy. Looking at what was hanging around to the south of us, we were very lucky. The BBC tried to tell us that we would have some sunny spells with our rain, but I must confess that there was not much evidence of it.
We had a delivery late yesterday that I took to be our t-shirts order arriving. I did think it a bit odd that the boxes were so heavy so I should not have been surprised to discover it was the small sweets bags that the Missus had ordered during the week. As ever, the children who were here during the Easter break made a serious dent I the first order and replenishment was desperately needed. Restocking can be a bit of a fag, but with nothing else to do, I was grateful for the distraction. It took all morning.
I had asked the Missus to avoid a couple of types, ‘yummy bears’ being one of them. Since last summer, we have been left with an abundance and they always seem to be the last to go. She duly left these and a couple of others off the order. When I came to top up the stand this morning, I noted that the ‘yummy bears’ peg that had been full a few days ago was now near enough empty. Of course it was.
It was probably as well that I had rather less time to myself than I did on the previous few days. I might have been inclined to reply to an organisation that had ‘reached out’ to me suggesting that I might be interested in becoming a partner in the My Five Iron Golf platform whose name I have changed in case they get upset.
Apparently, our humble store had been recommended to this company despite us being at least five miles from the Cape Golf Club, which was mentioned in the spiel, and there being at least three closer convenience stores that they could have targeted. Gosh, I felt special.
To lure me into this prestigious partnership I was offered a plethora of inducements including “exclusivity for your sector”, “your branding on the flyovers on one of the holes on our West Cornwall Golf Club web flyovers which is trackable and targeted to your demographic within the local area. I am sure these would be really useful if I knew what any of them actually meant. I would also have free golf for me to entertain my clients, colleagues and guests – I presume the clients, colleagues and guests would either have to pay or enjoy watching me while I had my free go.
I will have to act quickly because our man has ‘reached out’ to a number of companies locally, so whoever was doing the recommending was clearly none to fussy about their recommendations.
I spent the afternoon itching to send a reply. I was anxious to know what ‘exclusivity in my sector’ was. Did they really mean that they would not sign up other newsagents, off-licences, wetsuit purveyors, beachware suppliers, grocery stores, pasty (sorry MS) providers, novelty and gift shops, book shops and clothing stores anywhere else in the country. I was tempted to consider selling golfing equipment so that I could include that, too. I loved the idea of branding on flyovers if only I knew what one was – other that the highway constructions that allowed one road to cross another unimpeded.
The more I see, the happier I am that I do not have a real job anymore. I cannot help but think that I would by now have had to do a lot of ‘reaching out’ and finding impenetrable slogans for everyday expressions.
I would have had plenty of time to play silly games with the letter writer as the rain returned in the middle of the afternoon and got heavier. It was a proper shame because we had just started to get much busier, busier than we had been all week. Half an hour into the rain starting, the street emptied, and our merry band of customers disappeared off to the nearest ale house, I would imagine. Nevertheless, when I did the till after closing, we had enjoyed quite a good day by comparison to the rest of the week.
The rain also stopped just before I went out to bring the display in. It looked like it was brightening up in the last gasp of the day. However, when I merrily threw open the door for our last walk of the evening, I had to scurry back to get a coat as it was raining again. Thanks.
May 1st - Friday
There was still a bit of cloud around first thing this morning when we headed for the beach, but it was trying hard to make amends. We were lucky to have a bit of beach; the tide having not long left it. I think tomorrow we will be walking around the block again. One of our lesser used fishing vessels was just launching, containing the Lifeboat mechanic and his pal. They own it between them and go out when they can. I think that this is the first time this year. More octopus, then.
By the time I opened the shop, the day was in full flight with brightness peeking through the sky dotted with fluffy white cloud, high level cirrus and some mid level cloud that acted as a filter for the sunshine. It was warm, too and even in the shop on the shady side of the street, I did without any sort of jacket all day – the first time this season.
There were a fair few more people floating around than over the last few days. It did not translate into too much of an increase in footfall in the shop, but we did see some buying of going home presents. Most of the people were frequenting the café next door and stopping on the benches opposite for breakfasts and dinners through to the early afternoon. None of this had got going at the time I went off to the gymnasium for the first time this week – they gathered during the time I was there.
I took the girls around the block afterwards. We would have gone to the beach again, but it was occupied. There was a small child down there and BB still cannot be trusted not to jump up, although she is getting better. With her long legs she would have been as tall as the child, so it was best not to chance it. We have not been around the block for a while, or so it felt, and in the pleasantness of the day, it was a proper joy. We also stopped to speak with friends as we went by who have a house at the end of the car park. What jollity there was in The Cove today and probably just because of a bit of sunshine.
Then it was back to shopkeeping for the rest of the day. In my absence, the soft drinks had arrived, and I took time to put those away before I settled for a spot of breakfast. There were a few interruptions to that, so the day was not a complete loss, although for such a lovely day I had expected a better.
I managed to pull the beachwear clothes out of the hat yesterday for something to do but that was grasping at straws. Actually, I am glad I mentioned straws because I forgot to check the status of our stock of hats. Oddly, I mentioned ‘hat’ too, but that somehow did not trigger my memory, but ‘straws’ did. Perhaps I should withdraw from the brain function survey I have signed up for before they discover that my brain is clearly just plain weird.
Anyway, I digress. Now, where was I. Ah yes, I must go and have a geek and see if we need any hats because they will be ordered with the other clothes I compliled an order for yesterday. However, since I thought of that later in the day, the only other thing I could think of doing was to complete some more of the brain survey questions I agreed to do as part of the University of Exeter study – and that was before I thought maybe I should not.
I do try and write The Diary in chronological order but sometimes I get lost and bewildered in the review – yes, unbelievably I do reread what I wrote – and still publish it. Apologies.
While I cannot do the actual tests while I am behind the counter in the shop, there are other sections that are not timed or do not need the complete concentration that the tests demand. The system threw up some more sections for me to fill out which request details about my background, my lifestyle and physical condition. It did not cross my mind that I might wish to withhold any details from the study. They appear to have a secure system and have made assurances that the data is held anonymously. Since The Diary probably contains more information about my physical and mental condition that the survey could possibly ask in a lifetime of questions, I saw no reason to be shy.
I was not far into the questions when it became apparent that they were going to be exceeding difficult to answer. My life occurs in two unequal halves, seven months in the shop and five months largely working at The Farm. Questions such as how many hours a month do you spend indoors, for example require a different answer in the summer and winter. There were quite a few questions like that, and I had to make a best guess how to provide an answer.
There was another section on emotional wellbeing. This was one of the parts of the survey that they will also ask of my nominated ‘buddy’ to compare results. I will not see what my ‘buddy’ has written. I can only guess – and worry.
Have I become more grumpy than usual of late? Have I become irritable and snappy? Am I more critical of others? I answered all these as ‘no’ obviously, because I am exceeding well-balanced and emotionally stable – it says here. One of the questions made me laugh, ‘do I find myself talking with strangers in an overly familiar manner?’ Well, yes. It rather comes with the job of being a grumpy shopkeeper. I will no doubt find out later that it is a red flag marker for some deep psychosis or other. Good job I did not fall for the trick question about hearing voices and seeing unicorns and choughs. We all know everyone has that, right?
When I started answering the modules, there were four on display. Some of them were quickly dealt with and I thought I would probably clear them all since we were quiet. I do not know if they thought that I would not notice but every time I cleared one, another one or two modules would pop up. When I thought I had finished, there were more modules to complete than when I started. I am very grateful to my special friend for pointing that out. He notices everything I do not. I am very lucky. Not everyone has a six foot white rabbit to give them advice. I am surprised no one has mentioned him.
Hold the bus just a cotton picking minute. We just had what was suspiciously like a five minute to closing rush. I was not really paying attention. We had one or two customers in the last - alright, probably an hour before closing which makes it a bit of a stretch for a five minutes to closing rush but, no matter – and then a few more after that. It was probably quite fortunate that it happened when it did because it awoke me to the fact that I had quite forgotten to place the bread order for tomorrow and thus the weekend and had missed the deadline. I then had to try and rescue the order by throwing myself on the mercy of our supplier while at the same time serving more customers that we had all day.
Everyone promptly disappeared again and when I came to close the shop the street was completely clear that made me wonder if I had imagined my five minutes to closing rush. When I took the girls out last thing, I noticed that quite a few more holiday lets had lights on that in the week before. Hopefully it is new visitors and not the cleaners forgetting to turn the lights off when they finished.