It was fair to say we’d slightly overdone it on the lunch order at Trevaskis Farm earlier in the day. Bolstered with a gift card from my daughter that needed to be used on a sunny afternoon outside the school holidays and definitely not at the weekends, we’d headed for the coast in the van, via a lunchtime stopping off point. We don’t do crowds and we don’t do the indoor restaurant area here – it’s a bit like an airport departure lounge inside, but the sunny patio area is a different matter entirely. And if we do have to suffer the company of others, we prefer to be surrounded by a relatively benign gathering of people who make us feel as if we’re still callow striplings of youth.
“Ooh what a lovely car! If you kick the bucket I’ll have your car please!” This from one lady of certain years to another, whom I hope was a very good friend with a well developed sense of humour. These are the sort of people we’re happy to be within earshot of. Gently entertaining and not remotely boisterous. Meanwhile, we considered our deli wraps with salad and gazed at each other over the "sharer," a mountainous bowl of loaded fries covered in all sorts of decorative foodstuffs. What a brilliant invention they are. The loaded fries – in fact I’m going to refer to them as chips because that’s what they’re called here, despite the catering industry trying to change the language – were particularly delightful, although even I had to eventually concede defeat, for fear that I might do a Mr Creosote and explode extravagantly across the patio. It would have been a shame to spoil everyone else’s lunch, and whether that septuagenarian wit would have been frisking my remains in search of the keys to a large red van, I can’t really say. At the point that I could eat no more, we asked for a box, which I filled with pulled pork and chips before waddling across the car park and placing it triumphantly in Brenda’s fridge.
From here, it was a short run down towards Godrevy, where a second field had been opened since last week’s visit, creating space for us to pull out the chairs and sprawl ourselves lazily next to the van. Ali promptly lost herself in a campervan based cookbook, although it seemed that some of the recipes were prepared at home and plonked into Tupperware containers for the journey. No I don’t get it either. I just continued to sprawl, nursing my overfed stomach, and gazing at the ocean. After a couple of hours of general inertness, we finally struggled down to the beach to watch a grey seal from the rocks, before labouring up the cliff path to see the rest of its kin on the stony shore of the secluded Mutton Cove. As we did so, we passed a couple of photographers entrenched among the thrift. One of them looked familiar, I thought.
By the time we returned to the van, it was only an hour before sunset, so I headed down to the cliff edge to claim my pitch. And then I recognised the face I’d seen a while earlier. Lucie used to frequent these pages, but sadly she’s gone onto other platforms and abandoned us here. I hadn’t seen her for a number of years – in fact the last time I did, she was about two hundred yards away on the big beach to the west of us one December afternoon, making a subject for my own image as she pointed her camera out to sea. From that distance, neither of us recognised the other.
They’re not really my thing because I like my own space, but I did once go to a meeting of the camera club that Lee used to be involved in, because Lucie had been invited to make a presentation and I thought a friendly face in the audience might help. Ironic now then that I’d temporarily found myself joining the ranks of her own club for the evening. Little did I know that another of our friends, Su Bayfield, was down below us on the rocks, pointing her camera in the same direction. I was told that twenty odd members of the Penwith Photography Group were lurking in various hidey holes all over the headland and the rocks.
So despite being a miserable old so and so who goes out of his way to keep out of the way, it was rather lovely to spend an hour catching up and sharing stories with Lucie, a very talented photographer whose absence from Flickr nowadays is a bit of a tragedy really. Her distinctive style is always recognisable, and she’s done rather well out of it too. If you’re on some of the other platforms we don’t talk about here, do have a look for Lucie Averill if you don’t already know her.
Meanwhile, the thrift was looking rather lovely on this glowing evening as the sun dropped closer to the horizon, and while we continued to chat, we kept our eyes on our viewfinders. I’d deliberately chosen the wide angle lens, positioning myself as close to the seasonal blooms (and the edge) as I dared to, and attempted to focus stack and bracket at the same time. It’s always a messy job when intricate foregrounds overlap distant backgrounds, and I knew that blending five raw files was going to be a fiddly affair – not least because my computer groans at me almost audibly whenever I instruct Lightroom to load files into a stack in Photoshop. In fact, as I’m writing this story before I post the image, I can already see it’s going to need another bit of fiddling with the focus stacking first. Just try to enjoy the mood I’m attempting to convey and don’t inspect the join too closely if you don’t mind awfully thanks.
By late the following morning, hunger finally returned. And I found a lone tortilla in the fridge to wrap the leftovers in. There was enough in the doggie box for another very pleasurable lunch. They always seem to taste even better when you’ve salvaged them from the prospect of the waste bin don’t they?