Lessons in Living
Musings from Cornwall in a heatwave. And yoga classes throughout June.
“The secret of a good old age is simply an honourable pact with solitude.” *
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
*and things to tend, and maybe also a view of the sea
I spent the last week on the coast of Cornwall, back to a place that decades of returning has afforded the status of a home from home, even without the bricks and mortar. Every year we move between different rentals, each with its own charm. One is romantically sat above an art gallery and a literal stone’s throw from the slipway, which makes a daily morning swim a few steps from door to sea. There is no danger of resistance when you can smell the salt water as soon as you open your front door, can lean out to check both the tide and the queue for coffee at the waterside hut.
Another of the houses has an especially beautiful garden, awash now with foxgloves and irises and white trumpeted lillies, and in the summer with the acid green and pink hydrangeas that Cornwall is famed for. It is a bigger place, with a table that can squeeze the sixteen of us when we gather for meals, and enough bathrooms that I dont need to share with teenage boys.
And then there’s another, the one we had last week and for the third or fourth time, which sits in the middle of a row of houses with seafaring names like Coastguards cottage and Admiralty terrace. It is above a road that runs away from the village, one that eventually becomes a coastal path, and is further to lug the paddle-board and more steps to go for milk and the still warm potato rolls in the village shop every morning. But beyond that, the stairs up the terraced garden is the only other price to pay for views are transfixing, blue and sweeping and so expansive that you can feel the boundaries of yourself start to blur the minute you look out towards the horizon.
My sleep runs in cycles across the course of every month and last week coincided with my waking even earlier than usual - up on the cusp of what is now a very early dawn- and so I watched the sun rise across the water every day, in the still quiet of a sleeping house. I have spoken more than once of my love of the silence of the earliest part of the day, of how particular the quiet is in a village where mostly other people are in bed, no doubt with sheets flung off to counter the heatwave that kept the air thick at night and into the morning.
On only the second day I am aware that our neighbour for the week, Valerie, is also an early bird. From just after sunrise I can hear the muffled sound of her radio, set to a station of classical music which i can only vaguely hear. Then like me, she is at the on the terrace with a cup of tea, watching the sun as it raises its head, spraying itself in glinting fragments across a millpond still sea. We are both bleary eyed to begin with and so we make a point of leaving each other to ourselves. It is only much later, when she has watered the concrete troughs of multicoloured petunias and I have written in my notebook, that we acknowledge each others presence, with smiles and gentle talk of the mornings uncharacteristic heat. Of what it speaks of for the rest of the day. Only later still will she tell me stories of the village, of its past and present. Of how she arrived here more than fifty years ago now, ‘on her way to Australia’. Of how she and two friends were planning on taking the next £10 passage to Sydney, which was still six months away. About how she said to her girlfriend that she really hoped ‘that that Terry bloke won’t be there’ when they made their way to Portscatho from Truro, the very Terry that she married within three months of arriving. The Terry that she bought a house with for only £4000. The house they brought up their three daughters in, daughters who thankfully hadn’t moved far away so that she saw her grandchildren regularly enough to be a comfort. The house she was still sat in now. That she could sell of course, for 300 times what she bought it for - but then ‘who could put a price on this view’.
I don’t know when Terry died - it is a question that is hard to ask- but I do know despite twenty years of renting in the village we have never met him but that they were together until his end. I know too that despite the time her love is undiminished. She speaks of him in the past tense with still shining eyes, telling stories of his love affair with sailing, his work for the coastguards and his irritations too. ‘You get it all when you are together a lifetime’ she offers up, with a still girl-ish smile.
It was from Val that I learned that more than 50 percent of the village is now second homes. And that the jellyfish swarms come earlier and earlier every year. And that octopi now over-populate the coast line, stripping the sea of scallops with their impressive tentacled dexterity. And that a ‘blow’in’ from London had broken up the Am-Dram society that had otherwise been running for decades, with all her bossy and serious ways. And that the bus no longer comes to the village, because there are no more teenagers to take to school in Truro.
But it was from Val I also learned, as the week went on, the art of still beautiful living. In the ritual of a quiet early morning accompanied by steaming cups of tea and then coffee, in that order. In the maintaining of things to tend; stone troughs of petunias that needed watered each morning, and a wildflower patch for the bees ‘that mainly looks after itself’, in the feeding and cuddling of reticent guinea pigs, rescued from an animal centre. I see it too in the daily feeding of a seagull - whose name I cant remember- but who knocked daily with his oversized beak on the back door, so that he could limp with his gammy leg inside and be fed. Or in the watching with a smile the children jumping from the pontoon on the far side of the village at high tide, their delighted squeals carrying across the water. ‘All my children did the same’ she said, as we watched together. Generations have done the same thing.
I noticed how she would wait for the sun to leave the terrace before returning to the same view every evening, a library book in hand, and be absorbed in reading for longer than most can now muster. And how she would pause on the dot of 6pm, put her book down splayed at the right page for just long enough to get a glass of cold white wine, to which she added a single ice cube. On some nights she would be joined by a woman I presumed to be her daughter. On another it looked like an old friend. On those occasions the book would stay where it was and there would be animated conversation instead. But other nights she just returned to her book, interrupting herself to sip her wine or to look towards the horizon turned pink by the heat haze, her mouth upticked and always threatening to smile.
YOGA CLASSES IN JUNE
Tuesday yoga sessions will run for the next four weeks which see us through to the peak of the year. The warmer days lend themselves to practice out in nature ( which the Zoom classes are perfect for, and the recordings can all be downloaded and so taken anywhere too) and it is at this time of year, with bodies that are naturally more open, that you can make real progress in your practice.
The evening In Person classes are at Chloe’s Studio in Gaginwell. For the last few weeks we have been bathed in a slow setting sun every evening - which lends another layer of magic to the class and makes it a perfect way to end a day.
Sign up for tomorrow or for a whole series of classes using the link below.
TUESDAY 2nd June 9-10am ZOOM Class
TUESDAY 2nd June 6-7pm at Chloe’s Studio Gagingwell