In which Sid and Doris travel from south west England to south west England.
It is a favourite joke in the Bonkers household that whenever the train announcement says “please take all of your belongings with you”, Sid says “But I left some of mine at home”. However, lulled by our commitment to doing less than 30 miles per day, we may have overpacked a bit.
On bikes with panniers, back box, bar bag and two little rucksacks, your duo set off to Salisbury station with the tyres looking suspiciously squashy. It is 176 miles as the crow (or chough, rhymes with enough) flies from Salisbury to Penzance, but it takes five and a half hours to get there by train.
We will not trouble you with the description of Great Western Railway’s insane system of trying to hang bicycles by their front wheels from hooks (the hooks are too small for modern tyre/wheel profiles but that is slightly irrelevant because the space is too tight, the e-bike is too heavy, the train has already left so everything is rocking to and fro, and it’s hopelessly cluttered with the unloaded pile of Too Much Luggage). The point is that there are only two of these bike spaces on each train and so making the connection to the next train and spotting the carriage with bike spaces (“That was iiiiiiit!” as the front of the train shoots past us on a long platform) becomes a matter for some worry, especially for Doris who is OIC of organising the trains and keeping track of the 16 tickets (no exaggeration) which the ticket machine printed for the journey. Thank you, Doris.
Anyway, plot spoiler alert, here we are at the far left hand end of Cornwall. Devon starts approximately at Exeter and Cornwall starts approximately at Plymouth and so we had one train in each county. Cornwall has a reputation for being hilly and it’s interesting to see what they mean – the hills are very tiny but the down bits between them are very steep, it’s like someone scrumpled up the scenery. There are lots of branch lines, leading to us finding this site explaining the scale of Beeching closures in Cornwall. The persistence of some of the lines was attributed to the amount of china clay being freighted along them from Newquay, and on today’s journey we were indeed pulled over to pass a china clay-carrying freight train.
Extensive and successful lobbying from the Guild of Translators and the Guild of Signwriters has resulted in a resurgence of Authentic Local Ethnic Languages and following successful campaigns in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, strenuous attempts are being made to find the Last Ever Person Who Actually Speaks Cornish. So, secure in the knowledge that nobody will be able to disagree with your pronunciation, you can say as you leave the station: Welcome to Cornwall – Kernow a’gas dynergh!
Which is very funny, says Miftah Bat.
Penzance itself has a certain amount in common with Aberdeen, mainly because it is also built of granite. However, it is substantially warmer as this is the far end of the Gulf Stream last encountered on an unpronounceable boat off the east coast of America. The sea temperature has dropped from the 82’F (28’C) we found off Florida to something a bit cooler here, judging by the few people we see shivering in the sea, but it’s still enough to support sub-tropical garden plants even though at over 50’N we are about level with Calgary in Canada.
A stroll round town shows us a place that is an odd mixture of chi-chi shops and desperate decay, clinging on through tourist income and an influx of displaced artists from expensive St Ives.
Our ongoing -est challenge delivers the 1935 Art Deco Jubilee Pool – the largEST sea water lido in the UK. The main information board tells us that generations have enjoyed its safe seawater bathing, after which a supplementary board celebrates the installation of geothermal heating which now makes it possible to get into the pool without suffering coldwater shock syndrome. Many thanks to the Jubilee Pool for their picture of the pool on a sunnier day.
Sid and Doris are clearly part of the displaced artistic community as they are staying at The Artists’ Residence, which is pretty posh for Penzance and has plenty of the required Shabby Chic.