Better late than never (Tues, 20 June)
Posted on June 25, 2006
Filed Under Outside Dublin, Summer, Cornwall, holiday | Comments Off
The funny signs paragraph is at the bottom. You can scroll down of course, but I hope you’ll indulge me by reading the bit in between.
Visited Lands End and the Lizard Point in Cornwall today. They are, respectively, the most Westerly and the most Southerly parts of Britain. Arguably, Lizard Point was the nicer of the two. It was very remote: there’s a 9 mile road leading to it and that’s all that road does. There were no turn-off’s (a little lie!) It was unspoilt and I had to park in a field. The views, of course, were fantastic but the wild flowers were an added bonus. Apparently they’re unique to the region and it’s one of the reasons people (tourists later) were attracted to the area in the first place. Well worth a visit.
Driving around today, I was struck by a few things:
– I had to turn the radio off after awhile. I’d spent too much time channel-hopping between BBC Radio 1, 2, 3, and 4. And each time I changed the station I had to adjust the volume. Radio 4 was set the loudest at volume 13, Radio 3 at 11, R2 at 9 while R1 was adjusted all the way down to volume 8. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to correlate the level of noise they can tolerate with their age. Someone would make a fortune if they could invent a gadget that would adjust the radio output to a constant level.
– It’s funny how nature can overwhelm the senses. As I got back into my car, I noticed how smelly it was and how I hadn’t smelt anything while on the Lizard Point. Maybe you’re not supposed to smell anything while in the ‘fresh air’? there was plenty to look at (dramatic cliffs, crashing waves etc) but the bravado of the gulls was astonishing. Several times, one gull or a gang of them would hover on the breeze metres in front of me before disappearing kamakaze-like over the cliff. I honestly think they were showing off and I was mildly surprises not to see one of them cap-in-hand at the front gate looking for contributions.
– Midway through my holidays and I’m kinda physically tired, but in a good way. All the strolling, walking, climbing etc that I’ve physically done is good for my ‘constitution’. I’m more calm and the blood pressure has dropped. Maybe too much! For ages today, I was stuck behind a big silage truck carrying a 1,000 litre of you know what. And the motto of the company? ‘Shi-f-ters, 40 years in business and still moving’. And I didn’t mind.
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Most people go on holiday but I think I’m on annual leave. Not the annual leave dreamt up by corporate H.R. departments desparate to be P.c By ‘annual leave’, I’m thinking more of a deliberate leaving behind of all my worries and troubles. Maybe what Catholics (& other Christians?) call a ‘retreat’? Whisper it but I didn’t check my Blackberry toay for email. In the ‘real world’, I could probably get into trouble for that.
This retreating from the world is good for the psyche. Usually, people declare themselves ‘exhausted’, or ‘in need of another holiday’ when you ask how their holiday went. For most people, a holiday is two weeks in the sun. But really, all they’re doing is replacing is one set of 3′s with another set. During the working week, you have the daily 7am 3′s – shower, shit ‘n shave. On holidays, you replace those 3′s for another – sun, sea ‘n sex.
Why impose these burdens on ourselves? Most of us have a favourite place where we like to, well, just sit. Maybe it’s a sunny spot in the garden, maybe it’s a public park, or maybe it’s a particular city where you like wandering the streets not understanding the language.
So the next time you’re planning on taking time off work have a think about whether you want a holiday or annual leave?
Two funny signs today!
– ‘This lane is closed to protect the workmen’. I saw this sing on a dual carraigeway as the 2 lanes merged into one at some roadworks. This sign is completely redundant, unless you thought that the roadworks were strategically placed to annoy you.
– The sign had an image of a plane inside a triangular sign with a red border. This was outside Lands End aerodrome. I instinctively slowed down in case I turned the corner and smashed right into the back of a light aircraft. Obviously, I’m not the first to misunderstand because, 50 metres on, there was another sign, ‘Beware of low flying aircraft’. Ahh! And to think I imagined airplanes, wings extending out horizonatally, driving around the highways and byways of Cornwall in the dead of night trimming the hedges. Think about it.
I wrote this on Tuesday, 20 June 2006, but I couldn’t post it until today.
