Cornwall

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Cornwall, but not as the locals know it: Stein’s at Home reviewed

The Stein’s at Home steak menu box (£65) says ‘Love from Cornwall’: it is not for people who live in Cornwall. It is, rather, a cardboard mirror of Padstow, Rick Stein’s slate-covered, teal-painted, monstrous Cornish Center Parcs for upper-middle-class holiday-makers, and it has its own whimsical map of Rick Stein outlets in case you stray too far from the Rick Stein path, like Dorothy heading to her death. I went to Padstow during the first lockdown and heard guilty testimony: some natives enjoyed pandemic because Padstow was almost real again. But that is over now, and here comes the counter-revolution to reassert itself in cardboard. People will follow later. Cornish

Thursday

Martin Gayford

One of the greatest of all outsider artists: Alfred Wallis at Kettle’s Yard reviewed

Alfred Wallis (1855-1942) should be an inspiration to all late starters. It was not until he had passed the age of 70 that, after his wife of many years had died and having previously worked as a sailor, fisherman and rag and bone merchant, he decided to take up art. ‘Aw! I dono how to pass away time,’ he explained to a shopkeeper in his native town of St Ives. ‘I think I’ll do a bit a paintin’ — think I’ll draw a bit.’ Three years later, his work was spotted by the leading British modernists Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood. By and by, Wallis’s pictures were being exhibited in

Thursday

Deborah Ross

An extraordinary debut: Make Up reviewed

Make Up is the first full-length film from writer–director Claire Oakley, set in an out-of-season holiday park on the Cornish coast where the wind blows, waves crash, rain lashes and gulls screech so you know it’s not a rom-com (foxes shriek in the night too). But while it’s easy to say what it isn’t, it’s harder to say what it is. It’s a thriller but not quite a thriller, and a horror flick but not quite a horror flick, and a psychosexual fantasy but not wholly a psychosexual fantasy… It may be we can settle only on one thing, and the one thing is this: it is very, very good.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Hope in a takeaway bag: Mackerel Sky reviewed

You don’t dine in the age of pandemic: you scuttle about in the wreckage. If you can afford food, and you aren’t afraid of your neighbours, who don’t understand the government strategy and believe that if they stay indoors for eight years they will survive, and so should you, you can eat out; or rather you can collect takeaway in the comforting dusk. It is not because I want the food. My husband, with whom I re-enact Sunset Boulevard in lockdown, each taking it in turns to be crazy Norma or Max the butler, is a superb cook. It is that I want local restaurants to survive. It is my

Tuesday

Marianna Hunt

Six places in Britain that make you feel like you’re abroad

Even when lockdown ends in Britain it may be a while longer before international borders begin to reopen. But not being able to hop on a flight doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy an exotic escape. There are plenty of beautiful spots across the British Isles that make you feel as though you’re hundreds of miles from home. Here is our pick of the best. Somerset Lavender Farm, Somerset Sipping a coffee al fresco and gazing over the lilacy haze of fields at this family-run farm, you’d think you were in deepest Provence. In fact you’re just 10 miles from the UNESCO world heritage city of Bath and right on the

Saturday

Tanya Gold

Dining in the time of pandemic: takeaways reviewed

I love eating while watching bad films like Battleship, so I love takeaway food from local restaurants. I am not rich enough to like the idea of takeaway from Simpson’s in the Strand and a plastic lid does not have the drama of a silver-plated dome. But eating takeaway food while watching Battleship is not my job, or at least it wasn’t until now, in the era of pandemic. The fine restaurants shuttered swiftly but the local restaurants offered takeaway, and I supported them. It is not indolence to order takeaway in the time of pandemic and, if you don’t, when this is over there will only be either Simpson’s

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

The Cornish revolt against second-home owners

It was sunny on Monday so I took the children swimming in Mousehole harbour. It was almost empty but a woman sanding a boat on the quayside scowled at me. She couldn’t hear the children’s Cornish accents, which might tell her that I live here. There have been tensions for years between native Cornish and the incomers who buy houses and drape them with nautical-themed junk. With pandemic, they have developed into hostility. A sign appeared on the bus stop in Mousehole: ‘If you have travelled from a hotspot area outside Cornwall (like London) you are putting vulnerable people in this village at risk of death. Please come back when

Thursday

Tanya Gold

I wouldn’t suggest you eat here, but I doubt there’s a better place to drop acid: Camelot Castle reviewed

The Camelot Castle Hotel is a pebble-dashed late-Victorian excrescence on a cliff. It overlooks the ruins of Tintagel Castle. A baby-blue Rolls-Royce Wraith and a floral Aston Martin are parked outside. They are the owners’ cars. Everyone else is in a banger. This hotel played the lunatic asylum in the 1979 Dracula starring Frank Langella, and this is more apt than you can know. Inside there is faded Victorian grandeur mashed with Arthurian legend mashed with Kazakh oil baron chic mashed with three-star hotel in fading south coast resort. There is sinister tiling, dark wood, fraying carpets, staff dressed for serving tea at some ghostly parallel Claridge’s and, from every

Thursday

William Cook

A bridge to the past: Tintagel’s complex history

Halfway across the brand new bridge that links the two halves of Tintagel Castle, there’s a gap where you can look down at the waves crashing on the rocks below. Don’t worry; it’s only a few inches wide so there’s no danger of falling through it. But it’s a thrilling reminder that you’re suspended between an island and the mainland; between the present and the past. Like a lot of places in Cornwall, Tintagel has a complicated history. It was a big settlement during the Dark Ages, bigger than London at the time, and very well connected with the lands around the Med. More Mediterranean pottery has been found here

Thursday

Will Stone

Morwenstowe

The first time I encountered Morwenstowe on Cornwall’s north coast I was alone. It was early spring and the church wore a fresh skirt of primroses. As I crossed the stone stile next to the lych-gate, the churchyard inclining before me, I glimpsed beyond the sturdy grey church tower a triangle of greenish blue, a patch of sea tantalisingly held between the sides of the combe. The faint but undying roar of the Atlantic rolled in across the pastureland. Here was a scene of raw beauty preserved by isolation, a fortuitous harmony of landscape, architecture and perspective where something of the spiritual, the poetic undeniably lingered. Now in early autumn

Thursday

Laura Freeman

Out of order

Patrick Heron’s paintings of the 1950s melt like ice creams. You want to run your tongue along the canvas and catch the drips. They capture a sense of summer holiday sea-and-scampi freedom. When Heron (1920–99) was five, his father, a blouse and silk-scarf manufacturer, moved from Leeds to St Ives in Cornwall. Heron played with the children of the potter Bernard Leach, and with Peter Lanyon, a friend from Sunnycroft primary school and a future painter, founded the Golden Harp Club, a society for the preservation of culture in England. After the Slade School of Fine Art in London, Heron returned to St Ives in 1944 on an ‘approved placement’

Thursday

Helen R Brown

A cold coming to Cornwall

In 1939, Barbara Hepworth gathered her children and her chisels and fled Hampstead for Cornwall. She expected war to challenge her passion for abstract form. But her commitment deepened. The solid ovoids she sculpted carried the weight of grief and the hope of eggs. To Hepworth, they became ‘forms to lie down in, or forms to climb through’. They were a means of retaining freedom whilst carrying out what was demanded of me as a human being… a completely logical way of expressing the intrinsic ‘will to live’ as opposed to the extrinsic disaster of the world war. References to Hepworth roll all the way through Ali Smith’s new novel,

Thursday

James Walton

Never knowingly understated

At one uncharacteristically low-key point in Sunday’s Poldark — back for a third series on BBC1 — Ross (Aidan Turner) left off the brooding and cliff-top galloping for a while to review his finances. They were, his genial banker Harris Pascoe told him, in good shape. Hearing that Ross’s marriage was going through one of its happier phases too, Harris then turned even more reassuring. ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ he concluded with a cheerful smile. Which just goes to show that Harris Pascoe must never have seen Poldark — because the answer to his question was, of course, ‘Almost everything’. Ross’s wife Demelza could, for example, be summoned, along

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Static electricity

My Cousin Rachel is an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s mystery-romance and, even though it stars the forever wonderful Rachel Weisz, it’s more sedate than suspenseful, more tasteful than dangerous. This should be a creepy, gripping tale of paranoia, deception, lust, and suspicions that are founded, unfounded, founded, then unfounded again. (There is a great deal of founding and unfounding on the suspicion front.) But the high-end, glossy period trappings — the frocks; the stately mansions; the teal drawing rooms; the horses galloping along scenic cliff paths; that wisteria — don’t play into a dark, gothic atmosphere. It is highly watchable, I have to say, but it won’t have you

Thursday

Andrew Watts

Duchy original

The Cornish nationalist party Mebyon Kernow (‘sons of Cornwall’) is not contesting any seats in the general election. Its leader of 20 years, Dick Cole, said its members were ‘exhausted’ after their local election campaign — it retained four councillors at ‘County Hall’ (Cornish nationalists always put County Hall in inverted commas, to avoid the inference that the Duchy is a mere county), and were only six votes shy of getting as many seats as Labour. It did not have the resources to fight an election so soon after 2015, when all its candidates lost their deposits. You might find it less surprising to learn that Mebyon Kernow is not

Thursday

Nicholas Shakespeare

Two small boys in the sea

An estimated 400,000 people drown annually worldwide, 50 per cent of them children. Roughly 150 drownings occur in the UK. In the 1970s, the RNLI station at Port Isaac on the north Cornish coast responded to ‘about 30 shouts a year’, reckons the novelist Richard Beard. On 18 August 1978 at 2.30 p.m. a maroon rocket went up with a great whoosh 800 feet into the summer sky to summon the coastguard. In the language of the rescue services, there was a ‘swimmer in the water’. Ninety minutes earlier, Beard, then aged 11, was on a nearby beach with his brother Nicky, aged nine. On holiday from Swindon, the Beard

Thursday

Toby Young

Hurrah for Cornish holidays!

After the misery of going abroad for the summer holidays for the past few years, I’m now happily back in Cornwall. Caroline took some persuading. We used to come every year, but the combination of bad weather and cramped accommodation became too much for her. After a bad experience in a mobile home three years ago, she vowed ‘never again’ and we spent a week in Portugal in 2014 and then ten days in France last year. That was purgatory. The last straw was being un-able to order fresh fish at a seaside restaurant in the Languedoc. To get Caroline to reconsider, I had to splash out on a luxurious

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Magic at St Michael’s Mount

The Sail Loft is under a castle on a mountain on an island in the sea; for that, I could forgive it anything. It is on St Michael’s Mount in Marazion near Penzance, an island so charming and devoid of internet connection it almost strips me of words. If I lived here I would not write again; I would not need to. I would be happy, and who judges fish when they are happy and finds it not enough? It is accessible along a granite causeway for four hours each day — then the path goes back to the sea and one must take a boat; it is more ruthless

Sunday

Henry Williams

Europhiles shouldn’t be surprised that Cornwall supports Brexit

As a proud Cornishman I was delighted earlier this month to be chatting to a young American fashion designer who excitedly told me about his growing label. ‘We’ve just taken on two students from Foolmoof, that’s how you say it right?’ I think he meant Falmouth whose university – specialising in creative industries – has been one of the recent success stories in Cornwall. I’ve also come across graphics designers for Pixar in the badlands west of Penzance. They have been using the superfast broadband network to pass their animations back and forth with LA. For all its Doc Martin appeal, Cornwall is not a parochial backwater, and thanks to

Thursday

Toby Young

Our holiday in a French Butlins

I’m currently at a French campsite in the Languedoc, having been persuaded by my wife that it would be a good place to spend our summer holiday. She described the campsite as ‘a French Butlins’, which she knew would appeal to me. If I can’t afford to stay at the Hotel du Cap, which I can’t, I’d prefer to be at the bottom of the social pyramid rather than somewhere in the middle. But her main argument was that it would be incredibly cheap —cheaper, even, than renting a house in Cornwall. We’re paying about £100 a day for a ‘chalet’ that sleeps six. There was simply no way we