London, Cornwall, Dorset
A few holiday snaps
I have been travelling in the UK in the last week or so.
Initially, I was staying with friends in London’s East End, which has been utterly transformed in the last few decades by development radiating from Canary Wharf, which was initially a project led by Canada’s Reichmann Brothers.
The flat I was staying at overlooked Limehouse Basin, part of the original canal system that serviced the docks along the Thames. Nowadays the canal boats parked there are recreational or residential rather than working boats as they once would have been.
My friend Jim and I travelled from London to Penzance, Cornwall, in the extreme southwest of the country. One day we hiked along the sometimes challenging Coast Path to within sight of the isolated clifftop home of the late John le Carré, the master of spy fiction. (We’re both fans.)
Ever the optimist, Jim thought we’d be able to cut through the Le Carré property to get to a road. However, its privacy is closely guarded and we had to slog back along the trail. It is off-season, and there were no pubs open to grab lunch or a drink, so this photo was hard won. My step-counter claimed I had walked 35,000 steps by day’s end.
Along the same trail is the lovely and oddly named village of Mousehole, pronounced something like Mau-zle.
Another day, we hiked near Land’s End—the most westerly point in England.
From Penzance, you can see St. Michael’s Mount, a much smaller version of Normandy’s Mont-Saint-Michel, but similarly accessible by causeway at low tide. The little island was once the home of an 18-foot cattle-eating giant named Cormoran, who, thank god, was eventually killed by a farmer’s son named Jack—or so they say.
I’ve now left Cornwall and am settling in for a while at my sister’s home in Lyme Regis, in west Dorset, and I will post something from there in the days to come.
