Friday 14 September 2012

113. I can see the seeeeaaaa...


4th September

G’mrrnin’…
Wow I’m tired. Still. Been tired for days actually, perhaps it’s the oncoming of autumn… the weather has certainly been getting much fresher (not that it was ever particularly hot & stuffy this Summer, except for my explorations into Morocco). But yes, autumn is coming. WINTER IS COMING. But lets just think of it as autumn for now… not prepared for winter yet.
I do quite like this time of year though… it’s still relatively good weather (actually it’s probably better weather than we had all summer, just less warm) and so I can wear more clothes than just shorts & vest. Which is nice. Because I quite like wearing clothes. This time of year is also when everyone has gone back to school and work, which in my eyes is SUPER! Less busy at the hostel. YAY! No more horrible post-GCSE groups, no more stressy families, no more silly drunk young-uns (I sometimes miss being a drunk young-un… but I currently don’t really FEEL like a young-un… I was pretty amazed when a 22-23 year old couple of girls stayed at the hostel the other day, it’s not often that I find folks of my actual own age any more… actual young age rather than the 27 everyone still reckons I am).

But yes. Autumn. Outside is smelling really nice, sort of warm but damp… slightly rotting and so slightly sweet (except for the rotting seaweed at Flushing, which when trodden in leaves a thick brown tarry substance on your boots and STINKS TO HIGH HELL). Mmm, warm leaf rot smell.
Birds are singing again after their summer period of not singing (to protect the whereabouts of their young!) and it’s easier to feel more “in touch” with nature (without meaning to sound like a complete and utter hippy, haha).
Soon I’ll be able to set myself up in the hostel at a table again, and not have to move my stuff out of the way in the evenings. Soon we’ll have that lovely stream of ye olde coast path walkers again. WAHOO! The sort who DON’T bring in excessive amounts of sand on their boots, who DON’T go and get drunk and use next to their bed as a toilet (ok so that’s only happened once, and they WERE a stag group… but still. BLOODY YOUNG FOLK!).
Mmm, old path walkers. My favourite. Especially when I can natter on to them for hours about the YHA & the good old days, haha.

Hopefully the sea will remain nice and warm for a while longer yet… I was still going in mid November last year so it should be fine. I need to do more swimming with William. He’s getting better… perhaps one day I can race him & it’ll be a fair race (what’s the fun in swimming without playing about or having races?) (I miss racing).
Though of course I won’t be in the sea in November, we maybe the first week of November… but most of that time I’ll be in Amsterdam. Or Stavanger. Or Reigate. TRAVELS! YAY!

Am getting pretty excited about all my little travelly bits, not been abroad with Imy before (Amsterdam). We’ll do all the normal tourist stuff (Van Gogh museum, sex museum, coffee shops, and there’s a bar which ONLY does drinks including gin! Imy will be chuffed) and then we may go on a train or something to Rotterdam / other place for a few nights. Jazz it up a bit. I hope it won’t be too cold… at least it isn’t January / February, they’re the coldest!
I suppose Stavanger isn’t really travelling… it’s more “seeing friends”. EEEEEE! NORWEGIANS! I miss my Norwegs (Microsoft Word didn’t recognise the word “Norwegs” – how dare it! Had to add it to the dictionary).
There’s even a slight chance of me going to the Caribbean mit le parental units for x-mas (if Elk sails there with her boat we’ll go, otherwise meine mutter is going “OOHHHHH I WON’T SEE HER FOR A WHOLE YEEEEARRRR!”) (with less capital letters, she’s not much of a capital letter sort).
And then of course back to lovely lovely lovely Cornwall, where the current thought is that I’ll stay with the lovely lovely lovely William Arnold. If he’ll take me. Maybe I’ll do a little WWOOFing at Bosavern in the weekdays, to amuse myself.
And then come March, Perranporth again. Wow… nearly a whole season done at Perran, and haven’t been scared off enough to not do another one!

Though Perran does have its downsides, sometimes. As much as it’s fun to be “living” in a van – not having to pay rent or bills (apart from the vehicle related ones, but people have those even if they live in a house (if they have a vehicle) plus vehicle is cheaper than house)… where was I… ah, yes, as much as it’s fun to be “living” in a van, it’s… well, it’s not a house. Is it.
I’m currently living at Boscastle YHA for the week, covering for the manager Terry, and so I get to stay in the staff accommodation. I’ve got my own room with an en-suite bathroom (shower & mirror included!), and a bed (though I have to say, my van bed is bigger and comfier), and a DESK (this is the main highlight), and a kitchen area. I know I have all these things vaguely at hand at Perran but I have to get out of the van to get them, and I know they aren’t THAT far away from the van, it still means going outside. Sometimes in the pissing rain. Just to use the toilet.
I’m not complaining as such… I just miss having storage space to hang up my clothes (rather than delving blindly under the bed until I manage to pull out the item I was looking for) and a DESK!! (Very subtly trying to persuade Arnold to let me meet his dad who is a cabinet maker… I’d like a cabinet/shelves/desk in my van. It’d suck if I made it though) (plus I’d quite like to meet some of Arnold’s family anyway) (is that weird?) (you reading this, Arnold?) (not that I JUST want to meet his dad so that I can persuade him to make me in-van furniture) (lets stop talking about this).
But yes.
I’d like my own space, really. With good light for reading & creating in.
Wouldn’t that be nice.
Heh.

But I shouldn’t be thinking about the future too much, I’ve got the present to contend with first!
Today it’s a lovely sunny looking day (although sun doesn’t last long in the Boscastle valley as the sides are so tall and steep). I think I’ll go for a little circle walk along the coast path & then slightly inland, then if there’s time maybe I’ll go to the Witchcraft Museum (again) although I reckon I need a whole afternoon for that so perhaps not (there is sketching to be done! Sketching without other people getting bored with me taking so long!).

I’ll go say a quick hello to Hector first, though. Find a change of clothes (wearing the same thing for days on end… niiice…

Anyway, it’s been roughly a month since my last update.
What’s been gow’n awnnn?

Well I’ve been back from Coverack YHA, done Perranporth YHA for a while, and now I’m at Boscastle YHA for the short week, as I said. I love the area around Boscastle; a short walk from the hostel (which is RIGHT IN the harbour – when the tide comes up the sea is pretty much lapping at the outer wall!), SHORT WALK FROM THE HOSTEL there is an outcrop of land into the sea. Yesterday I walked up there in the mist, there hadn’t been much cleaning to do and so it was still relatively early and so not many tourists were about (admittedly there aren’t too many about anyway). The mist was dramatic, and made the highest point of the outcrop even more exciting. No one about, careful footing as in some places its very slippery slate sort of rock. At the top you can look back down at the village and it feels a little like you’re seeing it from a helicopter of something.
Going towards the high up "helicopter view" place bit. In foggish stuff. Yeah.

From the afore mentioned view... this is very steeply downwards. Lots big fall mucho yes.

6th September

Ah! What a quite nice couple of days I’ve just had, yes indeed…
Yesturday was sunny, so after finishing the mornings work I decided “lets do that walk which you wanted to do, but yesterday it was too foggy!”. I set off, and instead of only getting to the top of the outcrop, I got right to the top of the hill! Aren’t I good! Up there it’s an even better view than from the outcrop; to mark the top of it is a white pole with a weather vane stuck on top (a fish) (they seem to like their weather vanes round here… I’ve noticed that the Witchcraft museum has a with on a broomstick on top of it, and there’s a few others about too… maybe it’s because everything down here has no phone signal, and so instead of checking the internet for the wind direction people actually bother to look upwards at the roof?).
But yes. Top of the hill (no mean feat really, but it’s certainly further than the day before). The day was warming up nicely, and so I decided to sit on a flat rock which over looked the fields and valley of the Boscastle area – nice and relatively sheltered, plenty of sunshine (barely a cloud in the sky! Certainly, none crossed the sun when I was there). I had my lunch (dark Ryvita with Arnold’s home grown & home made cucumber pickle, then some Leerdammer on the side as I decided it really didn’t go so great with the pickle) and then some of my peach & coconut oaty biscuit cake slice flapjack soft things (an accurate description if I ever saw one!). And slightly apple juicey water.
Well… turns out I didn’t get much further.
I sat there for a couple of hours in the end, got my shoulders back to their slightly darker egg-shell mode, and snoozed off. It was good. Eventually I decided to walk back down and so came back and then painted and drew and created – if I always had a desk, imagine how much stuff I’d get done! Wow!
I met the third and final Boscastle worker in the evening, there’s Terry the manager, then Anita and Linda the “other two” (like I’m the “other one” at Perranporth). I may have looked a little worried when Linda stuck her head into the office, not because I wasn’t expecting any more check ins and she might have been one, but because I had let out an almighty fart. WHOOPS. What a skanker.
Exciting news: Imy might come down to visit me this month! THIS IS VERY EXCITING!
From high up place in Boscastle, IN THE SUN!

And now today! Oh what a nice day. It was lovely to know that I could have a lie in and have no one to concern myself with, lovely to know that if I needed to get up and use the toilet I could just shuffle across a small patch of carpet to the bathroom, though a shame that I couldn’t stretch out due to the small size of the bed. At about 9:40 I got a call from Linda asking if that afternoon I’d like to help her out with a bit of WWOOFing… why not. Makes sure that I actually get outside, it’s another nice day!
Having noticed that it was a nice day, I promptly sat down and did yet more arty fartying until 2:45pm when Linda came and collected me.
Linda lives and works on a farm, you see; the hostel is just helping her gain extra income (I congratulate her on her ability to run from one job to the other and back to the first, all in one day, every day, and not be totally knackered out) (I suppose I could ALSO argue that making pretty pictures is my “other job” but it’s not quite the same, is it?).
Off to the farm we drove, and I meet all the dogs (thankfully they all seemed to like me, and didn’t jump about, and didn’t try to kill me like I sometimes expect dogs to do) (cat person, that’s for sure) (hamster person). The job was pretty simple, it was lifting bales of hay off of the back of a big tractor tow truck and onto the already existing stack of them in the barn. Big tall stack. Took me a few minutes to gain my sea legs (hay/straw legs?) on top of it all! Slightly wobbly, with a few treacherous gaps and holes. It was only three loads, and all VERY satisfying. The bales were that weight which make you notice that you’re lifting something, but it’s a good weight and you definitely feel that you’re doing something and work up a slight sweat. Delicious. I managed to get hay/straw EVERYWHERE (lots in the hair, who needs hair product to create a “textured volumnised look” when you can just stuff it full of hay/straw? Haha.
Met the alpacas, and the chickens, and drank home made elderflower cordial, and was given a jar of home produced honey (there’s bees! I want to keep bees). Linda took me for a brief little walk, too, to show me the cliffs which are part of their land. Corr! It’s good there. I quite like summer farm work stuff, harvesting and whatnot… shame harvesting doesn’t happen like this in the months when I’m not working YHA. It was all very interesting, and the weather stayed niiice, and then I was driven back to the hostel and bought a lavender & honey ice-cream, and we sat and ate them on a warm wall in the sun, staring at Hector. Ha.
Not much happened this evening after that, but all in all it was a good day. Yes yes. And now back to Boscastley work again tomorrow.


Sunday 9th September.
Ahhh… home sweet Perranporthy home…
Sometimes, despite the fact that it has no en-suite, no kitchen, no desk… there is nothing quite like sitting in the back of the van / Hector, over looking the sea.

Friday 14th September.
Look! Look! A blog entry! Why has the sun come out? It's making me feel guilty for not being outside!

Have some imagery:

Found via Pikaland blog... NICE FACE.

Riikka Sormunen.

Riikka Sormunen

Ping Zhu


Anton Vanhertbruggen

Amelie Fontaine

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