...Reporting Back on Boots and our Travels...

It is lovely to go away but really lovely to get back. After ten very full and happy days for us in Cornwall and briefly Devon we were greeted by a lawn of lush hay and everything looking rather over-luxuriant (including ourselves i might add, after ten days of excess food). Thanks to Janet’s attentions our guests were unaffected by our absence and the only worry we met was a rather wobbly Boots the cat.

Janet had alerted us that she seemed a bit unsteady on her pins. A fight? An injury? Had she perhaps had a knock with a car? Or perhaps it is just old age (it hits us all). Anyway, she isn’t off her food but spends a lots of time licking her right paw.

We took her to the vet this afternoon who said that might be a case of referred pain; she (the vet) could not find anything wrong anywhere so gave Boots a couple of injections (antibiotic and an anti-inflammatory) and all we can do is hope for the best. We do not know how old Boots is, but doing some careful sums reckon she must be at least 16. Seeing she still runs up the apple tree and chases her own tail she is no doing badly.

Anyway, a week ago I promised that the next day you would hear of more of our Cornish outings, so back to our trip. I can see some of you thinking once again, ‘What is this blog? A travel site, book site, cookery site? Most definitely probably not a holiday cottage site.” However, it is all loosely connected with our two holiday cottages are so much part of our life and one of these days there’ll be pure Tom’s and Douglas’s Barn news. Anyway, the next day it POURED, and the best day.

It was grey, foggy, very windy and extremely wet sp we spent two days very happily reading, chatting, even trying to get back into knitting (squares for AIDs orphans in Africa) in our holiday cottage, only to emerge to buy essential provisions and to have a truly delicious meal at a restaurant in Porthleven called Kota, that our daughter Ruthie had recommended. She had been there, and it is run by the sister of one of her friends, and the friend’s husband. It is superb, and I reckon we had the best food we have had for a very long time: every mouthful was an explosion of wonderful tastes. The wine wasn’t bad, either.

We returned home via the Eden Project after our Cornish week, spending the weekend with my brother John, near Totnes. More fun and nostalgia and general self-indulgence, with a trip to Ringmore where our parents are both buried within sight of the sea and their own house and then back via the Start Bay Fish & Chip shop at Tor Cross on Slapton Sands.

Before I close you must admire Percy, who landed unbidden in my brother’s garden a number of years ago and has ever since strutted around like the lord of the manor, gazing at himself in all the windows and displaying his feathers to anyone in the slightest interested. The thing is, he really is very beautiful, so you just have to admire him, which he expects as his due.