The Holiday Post

I suppose it is obligatory to write a post about my holiday if I’m going to retain any pretence of having a proper personal blog. I headed down to London for a few days before moving on to Cornwall. In the interests of curiosity, I decided that I’d go by sleeper. In fact I can now say that I’ve used all the sleeper train routes in the UK; there only being two of them, that wasn’t too hard. It’s quite an experience to use them though. It is as if the companies operating the Caledonian Sleeper and the Night Riviera have forgotten that they are running them. Almost all the cost cutting measures that passengers on all the other trains in Britain have grudgingly got used to, just haven’t happened with the sleepers. On the way to London, I supped a glass (yes, a glass, made of glass!) of Deuchars IPA while sitting comfortably in the lounge car, and at Paddington before departing for Cornwall, I relaxed in the First Class Lounge, awaking with breakfast in my cabin the next morning.

London was fun, I did the obligatory touristy stuff: the British Museum; Kew, where I seemed to be the youngest visitor without a parent in tow; Trafalgar Square; Buckingham Palace; &c. The highlight was probably a tie between the tour of the Palace of Westminster and eating dinner in Greenwich Park, overlooking London as the sun set.

The true highlight of the holiday was waiting for me a few hundred miles away. The YHA hostel at Golant was my base for three nights as I pottered around Cornwall using the local bus services (I would not want to have to rely on those services). I was particularly taken by Fowey. It’s a bit like St Ives, but smaller and nicer—which is probably my code for ‘insanely middle-class’, as most of the children there seemed to have names along the lines of Isobella or Tristram, while the parents appeared to be competing in their skill of using received pronunciation. The other place I made sure to visit frequently was the Eden Project. I’ve been going there for several years, so it feels very familiar. It’s nice to see it develop and settle as a garden, but also to see the constant new stuff that appears.

So anyway, I’ve wittered on for quite a bit too long now. I think I have just about managed to write a text-book style holiday post. I’m sure it won’t be too long before I have more to write: I’m emigrating tomorrow!