We watch the tides and think about fishermen and their saints. At the base of Smeaton’s Pier, by the chalkboard with the day’s wind and water warnings, is a small, grey stone building – little more than a room and a low roof, really. This is St Leonard’s Church, where for hundreds of years Cornish fishermen said their prayers before heading off to sea. The chaplain at St Leonard’s was paid, I have heard, in fish.

The fishermen were acquainted, too, with St Ia, an Irish priestess and martyr, who, legend has it, crossed the Irish Sea on a leaf. St Ives sounds like the tides washing in and pulling out, and the gulls crying on the wind, but at night when the moon is round and low in a black sky, St Ives sounds, too, of the possibility of a lady on a cabbage leaf. She carries a light to guide her. Those may not have been fireworks we saw last night by the Godrevy Lighthouse.

Back to London tonight. We have crab sandwiches for the train.