Finding The Drowned Forest At Wherry Town

Down on the beach at Wherry Town in Penzance the storms have exposed the remains of an ancient forest.... down west of the Jubilee Pool....

 .....We do go to see the ancient trunks of pine and so on... shown for first time in nearly half a century.

 A fine day for such an outing... lunch at Archie Brown's first though.

In The Dark Again or How To Make Toast Without A Toaster Or a Grill

Yesterday the power did go again. About 8.30. Left our neighbour standing in the dark in her powerless shower... all nicely covered in soap...
The Old Man have got wise to that trick and did not trust the power supply for some reason. (Well the wind doth blow mightily again.) And so did not step into the shower until he could see what's what. Which was Poof! Powercut. Of course we do have that traditional stove top kettle what we bought last time the power went. So we do manage our washing and breakfast.
Now I am a toast addict. But we use an electric toaster or the electric grill. What to do? The Old Man suggests a kind of dry frying on a pan. So I do get the pan out... put it on the gas ring and do press down a slice of bread onto its surface... turn the slice over... and it do kind of work.
We have tea and we have toast. What more do you want?... Hey don't open the fridge... you'll let the cold out!

Sourdough - The Ideal Bread For Powercut Baking

That other day when the power went off for nearly 24 hours... I discovered something else good about baking your own sourdough bread. We have an electric oven and I have already started some bread dough to rise when... the power goes "Phut".
Do not panic, say I to meself. You can make sourdough into a really "slow food". I did whack the bowl of dough in the still cold but non-functioning fridge and....
Next day, when the power came back, I did stab the little rascal back down a bit, waited for it to get back to room temperature... shaped it, proved it... and baked it.
No problem.
The virtues of sourdough.

In The Dark...

Ooh-er, there we be this weekend... watching the ultimate phase of the excellently dark, sweary and blood-spattered "In Bruges" on the old DVD player... when the brilliant Brendon Gleeson makes an explosive point and POOF the lights go out!
Darkness  and powerlessness abounds. Followed by an early night, after listening to the transistor radio for an hour or so, then sprinting to catch the fading heat of the electric blanket.
We break out  next morning into the fully-powered nearest town to purchase a kettle! (Heating water in saucepans be a pain we do find.) Thanks be for the gas hob.
In all there be nearly 24 hours of powerlessness. Lots of torches and candles. But power is restored in time for this week's episodes of BBC4's latest subtitled thriller "Salamander". In fact Belgian-themed crime thrillers are sustained after a slight interruption.
How are you getting on with "Salamander"? I like it fine... another outsider/conspiracy fest. What a lot of bird song in the background. You noticed? And The Old Man be coping with it.... except when he thinks it is set in Denmark. He be very pleased it is in 45 minute episodes. But then he has to wriggle a lot.

The Wind Doth Blow...

And I do sit at me desk thumping away on the laptop... and do get nervous as things do whistle and hum out there. But me and The Old Man remain safe. The power still works. We are not wet. Nor blowed away.
He still has a puffy, chapped  and scabby hand. We still wait for some kind of narrowing down of the cause... or some kind of blood test that the GP can't quite get to happen. Yesterday I answered the phone to a bright young thing who informed me that  she was ringing from the NHS Referral service... that this be just a "courtesy call" to inform The Old Man that his "referral" has been put through... As it took me a while to work out that this was the gist of the call, I sat in stunned silence for a beat too long to ask "What referral?"... and anyway I am not The Old Man so guess she could maybe not be telling me "which referral".
On the subject of medical privacy? Has you UK people had the leaflet about your own NHS GP data being fed centrally unless you object? If you read the leaflet you will find that this is not for medical purposes... i.e... it is not designed to co-ordinate your treatment, etc... except in so far as they say it will help planning. And medical researchers, drug companies, insurance companies may be able to consult parts of it...
Naturally The Old Man already has a view on this and is not convinced that individual identities will be stripped from the data as efficiently as promised.
You can opt out of the scheme. The Old Man was provided with a couple of forms by his GP.  So we have.

Pardon Me... But The Weather Here....

... as in most of UK... has been awful. But we be safe. I do sit here in West Cornwall and listen to things rattling in the wind and wonder if anything is going to fly off the house. It hasn't so far. The Old Man already do have the aerial replaced from the last blow... before Christmas.
And we do have just a drip or two come in when it do the horizontal rain thing. The other day the rain be coming in under the side door... so horizontal be it. But... we do not live right at the seaside.... nor by a river.... nor in a valley... nor on top of the hill.... We do have an unmade lane that we live by... no tarmac to repel the water into our home. And there be a field above that.... grass and stuff to soak up the rain.. Like I said. Under current conditions, we be safe.

Porthleven is fairly close. That has had a right battering and makes it on to YouTube and the national news. A friend has his small boat there. It was in the harbour when the inner harbour timbers went. But his boat is safe, thank heavens... hauled out in the rescue mission... and now back home in his garden.

Me? I do feel  rather stir crazy. Every time I look out the window and see a break and blue skies I do walk into another room and find rain and hail being slung at the windows by a mighty gust of wind. I know I should get out there before I lose the use of me legs.....

However.. a short break to London by train do seem out of the question right now.... what with floods, storms and landslips... I believe that be about two or three more places a train can't get through... let alone the destruction of Dawlish.

Still Raining...

And The Old Man is still fuming over the analysis of the Somerset Levels flooding as pundits still talk about rivers overflowing their banks (not the core of the problem) and angry members of the public still seen intent on confusing The Environment Agency with some kind of environmentalist pressure group.
Meanwhile the constant rain is revealing some of West Cornwall's inclinations. A house in Camborne did a partial collapse the other day when mine workings opened up underneath it. (No one hurt... family had moved out when the cracks appeared the day before.)
And a day or so before that... a hole (another mine-working collapse) appeared at the side of the main road in the village of Rosudgeon... between our village and Penzance...
On hearing this last piece of news The Old Man showed alarm.
"My newspaper!" cry he. For this indeed is the village where he gets his daily paper.
Me? I'm too busy frantically trying to recall how close the nearest workings are to us, according to the mining survey. (You really have to have one of these before you buy a property down here, you know.)