It had rained overnight, and the greyness held, still, in the morning. We woke late and moved, slowly, into hot showers. Later, we warmed our hands on flat whites at a harbourfront café.

We bought two bars of chocolate, a bag of Haribo and the newspaper, and then headed straight home. We were very pleased with ourselves.



The sun came out mid-afternoon, and we sat on the pier with warm pasties in brown paper bags. I’d gotten the miner’s pasty, with meat and potatoes in one end and a sweet-tart cherry-raspberry jam in the other; lucky the miner who found his wife had packed him a two-course lunch! The gulls edged towards us step by creeping step, but backed away, averting their eyes, when we turned to them. When I finally dusted the bits of flaky crust off my coat, the pigeons flew to my feet, unabashed.



It must have been teatime by then, but we were still waking up, slowly, with the day. We followed the narrow, climbing lanes through the medieval town towards Porthgwidden Beach, with its row of blue-and-white changing rooms, then took the soft, grassy slope up to the Island and the Chapel of St Nicholas at its very top. Down on Porthmeor Beach, the surfers paddled and sat. They bobbed on their surfboards, waiting for the waves, and later we would see them, sun-blond and barefoot, walking down the small, old streets lined with small, old houses.



We took the streets higgledy-piggledy to the waterfront, and on the wharf we queued behind fidgety children for ice creams. The sun was out, and there were dogs large and small, and the water lap-lap-lapped against the harbour walls.