You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Hot sausage and mustard

I'm not sure that I'm entirely enamoured of the Cornish pastie. I mean, it's perfectly edible - but to someone who's been bought up on pies, they seem to lack... juiciness. The lack of gravy (in the ones I've bought, at least) makes them seem a bit dry - this isn't a problem in the chicken, potato and sweetcorn one I bought to sustain me on the trip back to London, but was a bit disappointing in the pork and apple one I tried while tramping around the town.

***

I didn't manage to do much in my sojorn to Penzance - didn't catch the bus to Land's End, didn't go to any ancient mining areas, didn't go to the exciting-sounding Pilchard Museum ("still a working factory!"). But I did get to wander around the town itself a bit, and saw a bunch of stuff that interested me. :)

Penzance is a British seaside resort - so they have things like a salt-water swimming pool right next to the sea, where you can swim above concrete rather than pebbles, and a "mechanical marvels museum", where you can let your children drive you barmy indoors rather than outside. But it's also definitely part of Cornwall - as well as selling "Old Rosie" cider and having more "real, original" pastie shops than you can shake a stick at, if you wander far enough away from the toursit areas you might run across a graveyard, where whole families are buried in a single plot - mother, father, son, wife, grandaughter. For some graves, the headstones are much taller than I'm used to, with space on some of them for more writing as it becomes necessary. For others, the writing is around the outside of the plot, and you have to walk around the grave to see all the people sharing the space. It was very peaceful.

***

Had dinner with the Austrian girls, Andrea and Connie. They both came from the same small village outside Stuttgart, and had known each other since kindergarten. Connie will be visiting New Zealand with another kindergarten friend either later this year or early next year, so who knows, maybe some of you reading this will get to meet her. (I gave her my email address.)

The only reason I met them was that I had been discouraged by the first B&B I tried ringing, and so had plumped for the backpackers when they said "yes"; and for there part, the Penzance backpackers were plan C, after plan A (stay in Helston - foiled by absence of places to stay) and plan B (use their tent in the bush - foiled by the rain, common-sense, and complete absence of bush). And even then, it was pretty much pure chance that I got to chatting with them. I'm glad I did - it was much more fun chatting to them about what Austrians think of the British than reading the book I'd bought along. :)

(Not that "Across the Nightingale Floor" is a bad book - I read the whole thing on the train - but it's something that can be done at any time. :)

Had a relatively unremarkable dinner at a Wetherspoons - the others had a pasta bake and a fish pie respectively, and I had the mixed grill. Well, once I managed to get the bar staff to admit that the kitchen was open - when I first went up I was told (somewhat cryptically) that the kitchen was "sick", and that he didn't have any idea when it would get better. While going back, defeated, to the table, I noticed that people were still getting dinners from this supposedly "sick" kitchen, so I went back and tried a different, slightly more clueful looking barperson - and that seemed to do the trick.

(The mixed grill was okay, but a little dry - and the baked potato had no butter. So, points off for you, Wetherspoons!)

It's sad, in a way - the number of people I've bumped into that I'll never meet again. On the other hand, I may end up offering Connie and her friend a couch to sleep on when they're in Wellington (if I can convince my flatmates), so it's not like life over here is completely disconnected from life back home. ;)

***

I'm back in Paddington at the moment, waiting until Adrian is available. I might try and catch up with some mail, or at least read some blogs, but at £1/20 mins, I'm not inclined to stick around too long.

Oops, went back and added some stuff, and now I only have two minutes. I guess I just have time to put this up and log out. Sorry for any typos or lapses of grammar!

Posted by svend at August 25, 2004 4:32 AM