An unstoppable force meets an unmovable object

I am a gypsy!

I love my life. Especially in April. The grey month of March is gone away, the financial troughs of January have left my bank account alone, and this year, trips are multiplying!

We began the first trip on a train to Penzance (what a romantic sounding place!), in the south of England, in Cornwall. The seat had been overbooked, so the journey happened amongst screams with people standing in the alleys not able to either get on or get off. Imagine: a Russian man orders his woman to stay where she is even though a nasal voice on the tannoy is warning that the train will not go anywhere until everyone is seated or off the train, a group of rugby men dribble ‘look at that one over there, she’s hot’, an old lady argues with a young hoodie who doesn’t take his earphones out to discuss whose seat is whose…a real jungle. And then, with perfect comic timing, a phone rings and the ring tone is a monkey’s screech. ‘We are going to be exterminated,’ says its owner…a jungle I tell you.

So, after a quasi-divorce with Krusty, things suddenly calmed down (or when I say suddenly, I mean after a five-hour train journey). Walking on the cliffs to find our campsite, we went back in time by about 300 years. Tiny houses, a lost port where locals feed the seagulls in bowls as you would feed a cat… in the evening, we ate in the port surrounded by lobster cages, very picturesque view of the sea. The next day it was in an English pub, very English indeed. In fact it was called The Brit. Carpet, football, screaming, wine on tap…the landscape looks very French but we were definitely on the other side of the Channel…

In the morning, a frog bids us good morning in our tent and on the way to the Eden Project (a giant conservatory for the future of plants – www.edenproject.com), Cyril the squirrel is with us along the entire forest path. At the park entrance, I somehow manage to do my ‘I am a member of the press, don’t you know’ speech without smiling too much and they let us in without paying the usual £28. The biomes are amazing, especially the tropical one. It felt like walking into Malaysia, humidity and all.

The trip really did appeal to all five senses – sight, with the beautiful greens that we never see in the city; touch, with the fresh moss, the bark of the tress, the roaming cats; sound, or rather the lack of, the silence; taste, with the famous ice cream and pasties; and especially smell, with cow dung, pollen and the tent. Those who have shared a tent for two with a man, even a perfect man like Krusty, will know what I am taking about.

Camping poses other sorts of problems, too: it’s very hard to be glamorous in a tent. But, as I do like to coordinate the colours of my clothes, I decided to get really bad sunburn to go with my red shoes. OK, I didn’t actually do it on purpose but that’s how I made the most of a bad situation…



My sunburn had disappeared in time for Andy and Sara’s wedding in Yorkshire, though, thankfully. And since my hat was red, it’s a good thing, too…

Yorkshire was beautiful, although I think the weather had something to with that. Mounts and valleys, very pastoral. But I have had enough of taking about my life now. I’ll stop there…and go and get ready for my trip to Paris this weekend! I’m going to drive a Toyota there for work and race it against an expert of ‘parkour’, or the art of throwing oneself from buildings, benches and barriers.

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posted by The rat and the monkey @ 9:45:00 AM