h/t Helena

Winter fields outside our son’s west country cottage where we all went for Christmas…

Inside looking out…..

The tree….

The gang….our grandchildren…

Harry’s big parcel…..what can it be?

Harry’s older cousin Oliver got as much pleasure from helping to give the present as he did from receiving his own. As for Harry – the monkey never left his side….

Which, I suppose, is part of what Christmas is about…..

h/t to our daughter Helena (Harry’s mum) who took the pics & Vicky our daughter in law (Oliver’s mum) who was our hostess…

Murphy lives here.

He is 13 years old, was a rescue cat whose first home was obviously a living hell so he never has been particularly cuddly. Our grandson Oliver once summed him up perfectly as “the grumpiest cat in town.”

He has been hit by a lorry, fallen out of trees and accidentally clunked by a brick. In his younger days he saw off legions of other cats who dared to trespass into his territory plus one or two dogs. Now, however, apart from catching the odd rabbit just to prove he can still do it when push comes to shove, he prefers to take it easy, especially in front of a new log burner that, in the nature of cats, he assumes has been provided purely for his own comfort.

So, with all those crises ripping across the globe, Murphy just switches them out of his mind….maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here…..

We did a circular 5 mile walk from The Parrot Inn, Forest Green. On the return leg we walked out of a wood and came to the Buttercup Field.

It was one of those moments when you just wanted time to stand still. The peaceful tranquillity of the place drained away each ounce of stress, calmed every nerve.

We wanted to be there forever…

But of course you can never stop the clock so eventually we moved on but not until The Lovely Mrs P had captured the scene on her Blackberry.

Then, back at the pub we raised our glasses and toasted the Buttercup Field with a pint of Hobgoblin

Remember this?

Am I out of sync with this 21st century world when I say the words of that beautiful song still send shivers up and down my spine. In this world of “relationships” rather than marriages, of “partners” instead of husbands/wives, is the sentiment behind it a curious relic of a bygone age?

I wonder.

We live in a society where certain political and commercial cartels appear to have an interest in engulfing our cultural antennae with a constantly recurring tsunami of sexuality until every taboo has been swept aside. So, is there room for that notion of romance – the sheer unbounding sense of exhilaration when a man or a woman wants to be by your side and where sex is merely one manifestation of that sweet surrender of oneself to another?

For many years western popular music proved a reliable and universally acceptable vehicle for expressing the magic of that moment, either via gentle, light hearted joy

…or with the the bittersweet emotion of parting

Sometimes we wanted to broadcast to the whole of mankind that we were together by going anywhere and everywhere arm in arm

On the other hand it could be a more wistful almost ethereal dreamscape where the rest of the world scarcely mattered

Romance could sometimes be a roller coaster of emotion marked by a deep sense of yearning when your other half was elsewhere and all you had was emptiness

A cascade of words could splash the canvas of love with shimmering, vibrant colours of devotion

But a love could also be so deep that being together in itself was sufficient and no words were needed

So do songs like these have no resonance with young (or even old) people today?

I would wager that they do but as a modern music of the underground, the new cultural samizdat, publicly disowned but privately treasured…

…and these words, easily mocked by a corrupt and cynical media, must surely still strike a chord across a million crowded rooms…

Once you have found her,
Never let her go.
Once you have found her,
Never let her go!

That’s right – I married a Cornish girl nearly 44 years ago and we still often go back there.

This is the cottage where we stayed in Fowey a few weeks ago.

Conveniently it’s right next door to a pub – “The Safe Harbour”

The Lovely Mrs P was born and bred in Fowey and when this Londoner went down there do do some courting (strange, old fashioned word….) we used to go down to that pub for a quiet drink and a little privacy

Opposite the pub is the letter box…

…and almost opposite the cottage is the alleyway that leads to the church and the harbour.

The church, St Fimbarrus, is where we got married in 1967…

….and we posed before it 40 years later…

Further down the town you come to the mouth of the River Fowey, Fowey Harbour, which is a busy little port for ships large and small.

“There is nothing- absolutely nothing- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”

Fowey also has a fully furnished bus stop…

While further inland are the (rather modest) Golitha Falls where the infant River Fowey tumbles down from the edge of Bodmin Moor

One day we went further down to the western tip of Cornwall where, every twenty miles or so, there is a delightful sandy cove with a beautiful natural beach set against rugged cliffs. Once there we followed the cliff path to Pedn Vounder Beach and harvested mussels for our supper from the isolated rock standing up from the sand

The cliffs look as if they have been hewn by giants to carve out forbidding ramparts

Beneath the rocks there sits a woman of mysterious beauty – does she seek to capture my heart?

She has no need for it is the Cornish girl who captured my heart many years ago…

Meanwhile the eternal sea washes against the sand, whispering the memories of people like us long departed and yet to come…