Home Again!

Sat in the bay window of my grandparents' house in Newlyn, Cornwall, it seems for a moment as though the last 8 months never happened. Looking down over the rooftops of the village and the tangle of yellow-masted trawlers that huddle in the shelter of the stone-walled harbour, the sea sparkles blue in the May sunshine. The promenade curls round to the town-houses and church spires of Penzance, where the battered, but still gracious, old bathing pool points out into the bay. Overseeing all of this, the enigmatic, castle-topped St Michael's Mount faces proudly seawards, just as it always has.

This has been our bolt hole for the last 2 weeks after our return from Hong Kong and it has proved perfect for the purpose. Cornwall in May can be a match for anywhere in the world and this May has been blessed with some glorious weather. The hedgerows are awash with wild flowers and it has been mostly warm enough to walk the cliff tops in shirt-sleeves.

The first things that we noticed, though, was how calm and ordered and peaceful everything seems and how polite (with the odd exception) everyone is. For the first time in 8 months, we don't feel the need to sharpen our elbows when we join a queue!

For anyone needing a release from the stresses of life, a hike along the remote parts of the Cornish coast takes a lot of beating. The air is clean and fresh, with only the sound of the gulls and the rush of the surf to distract from the stunning views of rugged cliffs and sandy coves. Watching the infinite patterns of the ocean crashing onto the rocks, it is easy to lose all sense of time and question how we manage to make our lives so complicated.

It's great being here before the main tourist season is in full swing, which has allowed us to get to places that would be swamped in July and August. We've walked in splendid isolation along the cliffs to Lamorna, Porthcurno, Cape Cornwall and around the Lizard and even found a parking space in St Ives! From the house, we have also had our daily walks along the promenade to Penzance and around the headland to Mousehole.

The promenade between Newlyn and Penzance was nearly washed away by the winter storms here and everywhere there is still evidence of the damage wrought, with broken paving slabs and twisted railings. In places the concrete path has disappeared altogether, reclaimed by the beach, and the art-deco bathing pool remains closed and filled with rubble blown in by the storms. But it's still an enjoyable walk and lots of work is ongoing to restore and improve it, with new paths, lawns and flower-beds.

Newlyn is a thriving working village, famous for 2 unlikely bed-fellows: fishermen and artists! The fishermen value it's sheltered harbour and it's location at the far south-west of England, jutting out into the Atlantic; the artists it's wonderful light, natural setting and unpretentiousness. It's a quirky mix, quite different from the usual tourist impression of Cornwall, which is refreshing. I have been coming here since I was a young boy and I never tire of it.

The path to Mousehole has been our favourite over the past couple of weeks. We follow the road out of Newlyn, which rises up above the harbour (always colourful and full of interesting activity) and then cuts down to the shore, where a cycle path follows the rocks. Atlantic grey seals and dolphins are regular visitors and we nearly always seem to spot at least one seal as we walk. Our ultimate target though has invariably been a small shop in the village that serves wonderful pasties and ice cream!

On the subject of Mousehole, I need to get something off my chest: what is it with everyone pronouncing it Mowzel?! It seems as though everyone has to put on a broad Cornish accent suddenly, which is akin to visiting Glasgow and pronouncing it Glazzgee - I think you'd probably get a 'Glazzgee Kiss' if you tried that one!

Mousehole (pronounced as it reads unless you have a Cornish accent!) is the quintessential romantic idyll of a Cornish fishing village, with old stone terraced houses crammed around narrow lanes, alleys and a small harbour. It is buzzing with life from spring to summer, but sadly little more than a ghost town in the winter, when most of the shops and restaurants close, as three quarters of the houses are second homes or B&Bs. The one pub in the village (The Ship Inn) does a roaring trade, but the owners are incredibly rude people (or they were to us), so we gave that a wide steer.

All of this makes it sound like we have been having a holiday down here. And indeed we have to some extent (Sue, in particular, has found this a haven), but this only tells half of it. We have had the small matter of 8 months of post to deal with and all sorts of personal administration to catch up on, not to mention the logistics of planning for the coming weeks and months.

We have decided that we will spend the summer months in the UK and we have managed to arrange a series of house-sits in Suffolk and Sussex to take us through to nearly the end of August. We're hoping that this will give us the time and space that we need to start thinking about our longer term plans and we both have some projects that we want to start working on. We also hope to continue catching up with friends and family, hopefully not boring them too much with our photos and travellers' tales!

If you liked the sound of our bolt hole down in the west of Cornwall, then I should tell you that you can stay there yourself and I have even negotiated a 10% discount for anyone who mentions this blog! You can find details at www.cornwall-online.co.uk/pengullyn-newlyn

So, this brings me to the end of the Tamworth Two blog. We hope that you have enjoyed reading our 'Grown Up Gap Year Tales'. Our travels have probably been tougher even than we had anticipated at the start, but we have seen many wonderful sights, met many interesting people and come away with experiences that will live with us forever.

We have made it hard on ourselves at times, but we wanted to see some of the world from ground level. As we travelled (from Europe to Russia, across the vast Siberian plains and Mongolian Steppe and on through China into South-East Asia and Australasia), patterns seemed to emerge. Europeans are a bit like Russians, who are a bit like Mongolians, who are a bit like Chinese...with more in common than divides. The laughter of children is the same, whether they are leaping into a muddy river in Laos or riding a boogie board in the surf at Manly; teenagers strut with the same swagger as they search for their own identities; adults lose themselves in the same anxieties for maintaining and improving their lives and elders look on with the same world-weary wisdom.

We have also been awe-struck by the landscapes that we have travelled through and enchanted by the wildlife. This was tempered by dismay at the amount of destruction and degradation by human hand that we witnessed. As populations continue to grow rapidly and developing countries, in Asia in particular, rapidly improve their standards of living, the pressure on the natural environment is only going to increase. We have seen evidence everywhere we have been that the earth is creaking under the pressure and without radical solutions to significantly reduce humanity's impact, we fear that nature will wreak her revenge - and we will have only ourselves to blame.

I will finish, though, with a more personal parting thought. One of the the foundations of this year for us, was that hopes and dreams deserve to be given a chance to become real. It is easy to keep them in one's mind, always finding reasons for putting them off. Of course there are risks involved and the reality may not be quite what one expected, but the biggest risk in life is surely of looking in the mirror one day and seeing looking back only unfulfilled potential and regret.