Tuesday, May 3, 2016

2016-05-02 Monday: Close to Home

Headlines

A Slow Morning at Home
Lunch in Polperro
A Slow Afternoon at Home

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Stream of Consciousness

A Slow Morning at Home

The weather is grey and gloomy, with intermittent rain. Light, drizzly rain. We stay home. We spend the morning just taking it easy. Reading, watching tv. Relaxing.

Lunch in Polperro

Finally, a bit before noon, we hit the streets of Polperro. Down the hill. Round the harbour. To the Three Pilchards inn, for lunch. Deb has fish pie, I have curry of the day. Deb's is delicious. Mine is good, not too spicy, enough to have me sweating.

The Three Pilchards is, according to notes in the menu, the oldest inn in Polperro. It's small and snug. There's a wood fire burning, in a square pot-bellied stove (is that still pot-bellied?!). We sit by the window, watching... a stone wall, a metre or two in front of the inn. It's a narrow foot-passage. The main interest is the occasional pedestrian passing by.

Out another window we have a view across the harbour. Mostly, we can see a raised concrete area with iron rails to stop people falling off. It doesn't stop a man who occasionally climbs over the railing, into a door on the closer side. He has a bread crate as a stepper, so it's a regular crossing... It looks like a coolroom that he's visiting.

The iron rail is wet from the rain. The man is not very tall, wearing jeans, it's a struggle to get across. He'll be getting his pants wet, each time he climbs across. Not the most comfortable place for a coolroom :-)

Above us, there's constant squeaking of floorboards. I suspect it's the kitchen, directly above us. All the food is, according to the menu, freshly cooked on site. The curry is from a large pot, the waiter had to check that a fresh pot had been made since it ran out yesterday. We guess that the fish pie was also mass produced in advance. Still, it may have been mass produced here, rather than in a remote factory.

After lunch we walk to the bakery, where we continue lunch: cheesecake and coffee. Delicious cheesecake, I suspect it contains large quantities of local clotted cream :-) Good coffee, too ! We also buy a loaf of bread and two pasties for dinner at home. (This is the bakery where we had delicious pasties yesterday.)

A bit of shopping on the way home, and that's it.

A Slow Afternoon at Home

We play "Dog-opoly"... I hope the manufacturers paid royalties, it's an exact copy of Monopoly -- but with dogs! Quite a clever idea, really...

The locations we buy, are dog breeds. The railways are dog categories (mutt, companion, so on). Instead of Electric Works there's the Butcher. One "Bad Dog" card says that we had an accident and have to pay twenty for carpet cleaning :-) Some jokes, lots of simple fun, Monopoly with a different theme.

We enjoy it except that Deb wins...

As we're sitting here, at the kitchen table playing Dog-opoly, there's loud noise from outside the door. That's the door at the top end of the kitchen. Solidly bolted closed -- four dead bolts plus a keyed lock -- bolted from our side, though it looks as though it may possibly be openable.

I go outside to check. Aha! It's a metre wide gap between us and the next cottage up the hill. A place where the neighbours store rubbish bins. That was the noise we heard.

We also spend some time planning for tomorrow. At the shop, I asked if our road (Talland Hill) is really two-way... It's definitely one way below us -- and very narrow. I'd rather not go down the very narrow road, specially since we would then need to drive through the quite narrow streets of the village. We were told, it's two-way. So tomorrow, we drive up...

We're heading off for a walk. But it's more than an hour's drive to get to the start of the walk. Or... ten hours' hiking...? No thanks ! :-)

The late afternoon has been fine and sunny. The forecast looks good for a walk tomorrow. Let's hope. Not that it really matters, we'll walk anyway... This is England :-)

Later: Deb is watching Master Chef, the English version. The first recipe is raw prawn... The meaty body is raw, the head is roasted quickly on charcoal then laid next to the raw body. The diner then squeezes the head -- and the melted brains flow out onto the prawn flesh! Yuk! At least, it seems like yuk.

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Dr Nick Lethbridge / Agamedes Consulting
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"The greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing." — William Arthur Ward.
   

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