101 Things

Today I spent a bit of time on the internet looking things up for the things I want to do for 101 Things.

Yesterday's drive through Bodmin to get to Padstow made me think we should visit there as one of my visits to an unfamiliar town. I picked up some leaflets while in Padstow, including one for Bodmin Jail. This was the last county prison to remain open in Cornwall. Browsing their website I discovered that they do ghost nights... for a price... A little out of my league, but...

Then I found the company who do ghost walks in Penzance and St Ives. It seems they also run ghost nights at haunted locales for a much more affordable price. They do shorter nights from 8.00 pm to 1.00 am as well as full nights. One of the shorter nights is the day after my birthday at Pengersick Castle.

Pengersick sits in Praa Sands, which is a beautiful place with a stunning beach. I have seen the castle and it looks like a fascinating building that would be great to explore. It is also, apparently, the most haunted place in the country... It has suffered from TV programmes sensationalising it as a dark and demonic place but the owners and the people who run the ghost evenings claim this is simply untrue. Apparently a lot of odd things happen there and it has a unique charm and a sense of mystery. Sounds perfect to me...

I also looked up wildlife boat trips and discovered that they aren't that cheap. Then I remembered that The Helford Voluntary Marine Conservation Area have in the past run a cruise on the Helford to spot wildlife. I once went on a walk with the group and the esperts were very knowledgeable and informative. I can't imagine the boat trip being any different. I expect it would be better than a more commercial trip and it is definitely cheaper... Might have to get on and book that.

I am also determined to get to the Minack this year. I have never seen a performance there and neither has F. It is a delightful amphitheatre hewn out of the cliffs above Porthcurno, the sight where the first telegraph cables to America came on shore. Although it is outdoors they rarely cancel performances. Last year we finally booked to go see War of the Worlds. We managed to book one of the few days where the rain was coming in so heavy and horizontal that even the Minack felt the performance should be canceled...

I know ten trips to expensive restaurants might seem extravagant but I have some secret weapons up my sleeve. There is a website allied to the local newspaper where companies put up offers for auction. You might get dinner for two at a good restaurant for £25 if you are lucky. Many places have special offers to attract locals in out of season or for lunches or early evening. So I intend to be sneaky and find bargains....

I am liking having something to aim for, something to plan for. It helps stop me just drifting through life.... Must go buy some fruit though before I mess up some of my targets before I have even really begun...

Padstein

Today we celebrated F's birthday. It wasn't actually his birthday - that's in a couple of weeks time. Tomorrow is the last day of a special offer for a lunch time set menu at Rick Stein's Seafood Restaurant in Padstow. And today it was our turn.

The restaurant was lovely with a calm but sophisticated air. The service was flawless as our waitress seemed to read minds and was always there without being intrusive. But the food... the food was beautiful.

The main course that F chose was normally the same price as the entire price of this menu for one person. It still wasn't cheap but how often do you get to eat at a celebrity chefs restaurant? Cornwall, being a tourist place has more restaurants than local population can support in the winter months and there are all sorts of lovely offers. Even the best of our restaurants need us poorer locals over the winter to fill their tables.

So the menu focused around Rick Stein's newest book and consisted of seafood. I had lobster and fennel rissotto to start while F had a gratin of turbot cheeks. For main I had sushi and F had Sea Bass. For desert I had pana cotta with rhubarb and he had a thing... (oops, slipped my memory). We finished with a latte and a peppermint tea )made with actual fresh peppermint leaves.

My sushi was perhaps a little more adventurous than I expected. There was a fair bit of raw fish. I don't think F would have liked it! It was beautiful and something I wouldn't normally have gotten to eat.

Part way through the meal, a young couple was placed at the table next to us. They were very attractive and were dressed expensively. They sat there and talked about money, about people they knew losing thousands, about shopping in New York, about not using the nursery slopes on skiing holidays and on and on. F and I don't have to talk. Their presence reduced us to silence but we were still communciating. And trying not to laugh. For them it was just a meal, while for us it was a special, special thing.
Afterwards we walked around the harbour and admired the views. Padstow sites near the coast, in a flooded river valley (caused by the change in sea levels after the last ice age). As such the harbour is very sheltered. Opposite the river from Padstow is Rock and the two are linked by a ferry. Rock is known for being the playground of the children of the rich.

Rick Stein knew what he was doing opening a top restaurant where he has access to both the rich and holidaying. The harbour continues to be home to a working fishing fleet, which is becoming less and less common in Cornwall. These fishermen, I hope, receive more for their catch because they are linked to the gastronomie that Rick has created. He has a restaurant, a bistro, a chippie and a cafe. Then there is the bakery, deli, gift shop and wine shop...

After our walk we returned to our car park and decided to visit the Lobster Hatchery. Most aquariums in our area tend to be small and overpriced. This one was small, reasonably priced and utterly charming.

Lobsters are under threat from fishing and pollution but it has been discovered that if females who are carrying eggs when they are caught are placed in a hatchery and the larvae raised until they are large enough, a much, much higher percentage survive to be adults. Lobsters are generally a mix of blue, cream and orange but occasionally genetics creates a rarecolouring or two. These variations occur in one lobster in several million (can't remember the number I think it was ten million for one and four for the other). They had lobsters of both these colourings, one was bright orange and the other was a vivid royal blue.

As well as full grown lobsters there were vats of larval lobster. There was a strong current in these jars and you could see little tiny lobster shaped individuals being thrown around. As soon as they leave the larval stage, they are separated into individual cells, as they have a tendency to fight and eat each other. The little lobsters in theit cells were so tiny! Once big enough to survive they are released into the seas of Cornwall.

We then drove through the sunshine along the coast back to home....

Grey Day

It is an icky day. It should have been sunny but the increase in temperature brought moisture in off the sea. As the sun rose, mist began to blanket everything. Haze has been the anme of the game today. As it got later, the mist grew heavier and it began to rain.

Unfortunately this rain began just as I reached my destination for my evening walk with Little Dog. We got wet. We didn't get very far either. The path reaches a gate and you have to climb a stile to pass through the field. Unfortunately the field contained a whole herd of cows. Even more unfortunately they were all gathered at the gate, waiting. While I would have h ad no problem pushing through a herd of cows, Little Dog had other thoughts. i could see she was nervous and I didn't want to push her. The cows were also nervous of her and the thought of having her bark and scare them just didn't seem worth it....

I am tired. Most of my team will be doing overtime tomorrow but I have gotten out of it by having a reservation to a nice posh restaurant and as it is the second to last day of their special offer, no one would ask me to cancel. Unfortunately F has had a cold recently and I can feel my throat....

I am not sure I should be allowed to blog on days like today *laugh*

Love!

I'm in love! With a new man in my life.

His name is Edward and he is gorgeous!

I remember the day oh so well, when I told F I was no longer in love with him. I realised very quickly I had to continue to say what i had to say before the look in his eyes could grow. I explained that I was no longer in that heady emotional state of being in love, which you can so easily fall out of too. My feelings for him had altered into that other love, the one that just is and will always be. He relaxed as he realised that I hadn't meant to say something so offputting to begin with and it was only my normal clumsiness with words.... He understood what I meant.

The new love in my life lives in a book. Well four books really. So far. Oh and a film to. The Twilight books have impinged on me over the last few days in various ways so when I saw them lined up on a shelf with discout stickers attached, I knew I was meant to buy them.

Reading them it is clear that the idea of love being put forward in this book is taht of soul mates. What makes Edward so special is that he is the soul mate many women might consider designing if they could do so while in their teenage years and have him be super-human. He could never be real and even if he could be real, he could never be my soul mate, for I have already found him. i shall however dally with him a little as i read the books and then he shall be gone, as I move on...

One of the pieces of synchronicity that brought these books to me was hearing some poor young chap on the radio have his message read out. The gist of what it said was that his girlfriend had just dumped him saying why can't you be more like Edward. She must have been very young, to believe for an instant that anyone could be as perfect as Edward or that she was perfect enough to have someone like Edward be her soul mate.

Brida by Paulo Coelho, which I have just finished reading, also has much to say on soulmates. According to the book, sometimes when soulmates meet for the first time, there is a flash of light in the eyes that allows them to recognise each other. Apparently you do not need magical training to recognise this, when you meet. It is curious how many people who have one of those sorts of relationships comment on the eyes and that first shared look when they met. Others of course may take longer to recognise what they mean to each other.

F has no pretentions really. He is a bloke and he just is. He doesn't think like I do at all. He doesn't really believe in magic but he has no problem with my description of how I think magic works and accepts this easily but has no interest in it himself. For all my desire to learn i am often reminded how much wiser he is sometimes, just because he is.

I was meeting a female friend, out with her man and his work colleagues. I had never met the colleagues before. As I walked in i saw a man at the bar and our eyes met and there was something. It spooked me and I spent the rest of the evening running away from him, mostly, even though we turned out to be in the same group. Later on in time, I asked him why he had been so persistent. Mostly he replies that he was drunk and had no idea what he was doing. Sometimes he gives a different answer. Sometimes he tells me there was a light in my eyes, a light of life. How he could see this in a dark club when I was running away from him, I have no idea, except of course I do. I know exactly.

I also know I am one lucky lady. The grass will never be greener for me. He knows this too. This means he can happily let me be a little in love with Edward, because I am forever his.

Word Wednesday: Cake

i like cake.

in fact I like it a lot.

I like all sorts of cakes: coffee and walnut, chocolate, caramel, jam sponges, fairy cakes, muffins, carrot cake, lemon cake...... All of them except fruit cake and even then I like some fruit cakes....

But I can't make them. I have tried many times in the past to make cakes. They generally seem to come out of the oven with the thickness and consistency of a biscuit. F's mother is a prize winning baker and I am more than a little jealous of this skill.

I am not sure if it is the cake I love the best or the icing. I love all things sweet and sugary.

I added my desire to make a passable cake to my 101 things list. Specifically i would like to make F a birthday cake. Not just any birthday cake but a decent birthday cake with the consistency of a cake and not of a biscuit.

I have two weeks...

This time round anyway....

Wish me luck...