We are at breakfast. Three seagulls – two adults and a juvenile – swoop down on some abandoned food on a table on the terrace. One of them overturns a cup of cold coffee into the saucer – another gets away with a piece of toast. We all love this display of avian cheekiness. An amused waitress dutifully rushes out to shoo them away.
We decide to take the ferry to Polruan, on the far side of the harbour. The little vessel shuttles back and forth every 15 minutes or so. One might regard an open boat on a breezy estuary as a fairly Covid-free situation, but all our fellow passengers start to don their masks – and the captain has one on too. We ransack our bags for our face coverings and wear them for the first time in Cornwall. For some reason, non-compliance doesn’t feel like an option in this intimate group with everybody’s eyes on everybody else.
When we arrive on the Polruan side I have the sense that we’ve landed on an island, and I have to remind myself that Polruan sits on a peninsula. A complicated network of minor roads connects it to the rest of Cornwall. We walk a circuit of the headland, involving a fair amount of climbing. At the highest point we see our hotel in its wider context on the far side of the water. On our return passage a petite and pretty blond girl joins the captain to collect the fares. As we approach the Fowey shore she pivots her body over the side with her feet in the air, deftly reaching down to snatch a rope from the jetty. She then lashes it to a onboard mooring post with great vigour and determined force.
Yachts in Fowey Harbour
We briefly consider taking a second ferry to Mevagissey in the afternoon, but decide instead to walk along the coast to the west of Fowey. If you like circular walks, Cornwall often presents a dilemma because you naturally want to stick to the better scenery of the coastal path and avoid the often overgrown and little used inland ones. However in this instance we do manage to walk a pleasant loop. We follow attractive inland tracks to Polridmouth before returning east along the coastal cliffs.
At dinner I listen to younger people ordering. Whereas I just say I’ll have such-and-such, they typically ask: May I have such-and-such? I guess fewer years have elapsed in their case since their parents taught them to say please and thank you. I’ve become a bit lax perhaps. [Millennials often also use the American Can I get?] A party at an adjacent table includes two late teenage girls, discussing Latin and Estuary English with the relentless energy of youth – pleasant enough to listen to for a short while, but quite tiring when you hear it all day long as a teacher.
Blackthorn 