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.

We drank coffees by the harbour early this morning, and then I bought a Cornish saffron bun and half a Swiss roll from a little old lady in her little old cake shop on Fore Street. We were adventuring to Land’s End, and we knew we would need snacks.

The double-decker bus rattled and pulled into the bay at the Penzance terminus, and then we were off, in fits and juddery starts up the crowded, sloping main street and its chain of chain stores, and then higher still into the hills, slowly, until suddenly, it seemed, we burst into the sun and the wide country. We curved up and down the narrow, tree-lined paths while tree branches clicked and tapped and scraped against the windows; southwards through St Buryan our city bus made our way through fields and farms while left and right the sheep and dairy cows took a leisurely lunch.

At Land’s End, an hour later, the bus would go no further. The earth before us – past the gift shoppe and the greasy cafeteria, past the Dr Who media extravaganza room – seemed to stop in mid-air. There was land, and then there was sky, and on either side of us the rocky granite cliffs dropped down, down, down to the ocean, where the water was dark blue and light blue and the ten shades in between, till it crashed white on the rocks.

Ten feet down from the girl eating her pasty in her car, we sat at a picnic table and unwrapped the Swiss roll. (The saffron bun had been dealt with easily enough, chunk by delicate, torn-off chunk, in the bus to Penzance. It was intrigue that had led me to the saffron bun. I’d never had such a thing, and wasn’t sure what to expect. I should have expected a raisin bun, it turned out – a yellow raisin bun that tasted of nothing between the raisins.)

It was intrigue, I say, that had led me to the saffon bun, but it was desire plain and simple that had brought us, me and Olive both, to the Swiss roll. The Swiss roll, it appears, is the taste – nay, the essence – of diverse childhoods different in many other ways. This one, now, at Land’s End, was soft, and dusted with sugar. The light pastry paper fluttered in the wind. In the sunlight, it had become clear that the jam was of a colour unknown to the natural world. Also, I had neglected to bring a fork. I dug into the pastry with my fingers. The roll tasted of nothing between the jam, and the jam tasted of plastic and sugar. “She was such a nice old lady,” I said, and I was, I believe, doleful. “You cannot trust the natives,” Olive said. He had taken a bite of the Swiss roll, too. “They will smile at you and then stab you in the back.” He must have meant that they will throw the Swiss roll at your back. He folded up the Ordnance Survey map and we set off northeastwards, in search of lunch.



We picked our way up and down the scrubby coast, with the great ocean on our left. Sleek jackdaws sheltered from the wind on ragged, rocky platforms jutting out from the water, while the gulls swooped white and grey above us. We jumped from rock to rock over small and sparkling creeks, and squeezed past the thorny branches of wild and unforgiving plants. We sat on big, flat rocks and watched the waves. I turned my face from the wind, and all I could hear then was the sea.

“Mowmy!” I texted Mowmy. “We are at Land’s End, walking walking walking, and the sun is shining off the sea.” “Waaah,” she texted back, “hope u have sunblock and hat.”



We came down into Sennen Cove, passing the harbour with its so many fishing boats at rest. We sat down at a table by the beach – it is the end of the season, and beside us most of the chairs were stacked high – and we ate fresh crab sandwiches on buttered white bread.



During the walk back, the lowering sun turned the cliffs a bright and deep orange. The sky was very low, and very vast. The bus back to Penzance passed fields and fields of winter cauliflower, the crops in neat and full rows, their large, deep-green leaves perfect for Peter Rabbits to hide behind. When asked, our bus driver, a lean man with a long nose, said he likes his cauliflower grilled.

The number 17 bus to Penzance took us through Lelant and its stone houses on either side of the narrow, curving street. Further out, the cows were brown or black-and-white in fields green and greener beyond.



From Penzance, a large and built-up town with dusty chicken and kebab shops by the bus station, we walked east along the coast to Marazion, fixing our sights on St Michael’s Mount. Saints and conquerors have made their way to the island since the Middle Ages; in 1846 Queen Victoria popped in to the castle for tea. The five-kilometre path took us by the train tracks, by the whirring of a helicopter preparing for take-off, by a curious rundown shack with three model mermaids on its roof. They were two redheads and a brunette, and their tails were made of green plastic netting.



At Mount’s Bay we walked on the beach, slipping on pebbles and sinking our heels into the sand. The sun was behind us, strong over our shoulders, and I took my coat off. The wind carried the scent of the salty sea.

Low tide had uncovered the stone path we crossed, like so many medieval pilgrims, to St Michael’s Mount. The clouds had begun to gather, by then, and I felt a raindrop, and then another, on my cheek. We took shelter in the small restaurant with the view of the sea on one side and the umbrella trees and pines on the other. The waitress brought us sandwiches of Newlyn crab from just down the coast, and a pot of tea to warm our hands on.

The water had come in by the time we left, and the path laid into the seabed was only a shadow of a suggestion beneath the waves. A wrinkly man in a small boat waited in the port to take us back to land.

We left Marazion as the sun set, as the swans appeared in the bay like children under an ancient curse. They dunked and bobbed their heads so I couldn’t be sure, but I counted thirteen of them, because of course thirteen is the number in such tales.

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.

At Tiverton Parkway we changed from train to bus in the drizzle, and at Plymouth, where we changed from bus to train, it was damp and windy. A woman with big hair and small, mincing steps crossed from left to right in front of the terminal. She didn’t slip once. At St Erth we ran across the connecting bridge and just made the train to St Ives. At St Ives we arrived, in the drizzle.

Some weeks ago I invited some people ’round to a picnic. Wouldn’t you know, that summer Saturday came around and London was grey and nippy – like a seagull, come to think of it, or an old heiress’s gnarled fingers. “Change of plans,” I texted. “We will picnic in the living room.” “You are so not English enough,” Dan wrote back. “This,” he said, “is perfect picnic weather.” Still, he sat uncomplainingly on the carpet with everyone else, and traded stories with John of great British days out at the beach. The English will sit in their cars, they said, it will be raining, and the English will sit in their cars unfazed, eating sandwiches and looking at the sea. The windows will be fogging up, they said, and they will be eating sandwiches and looking at the sea in the rain and drinking tea, perhaps, out of a thermos.

I tell you what, late this afternoon we arrived in St Ives in the drizzle. The cars were pulled up along Smeaton’s Pier, and inside them the English were eating their sandwiches and cupping hot drinks in their hands.



We looked over the edge of the stone pier, me and Olive, to where a fisherman was dressed like a fisherman (white beard, check; yellow overalls, check) in his boat and the seals popped their heads up above the water with hope in their eyes. One of them, it was clear from his face, is called Harold; the other, I don’t know, maybe Seal?



Like seals ourselves we had fish for dinner tonight, grilled and with flakes of sea salt glinting on crispy skin. There is a DVD player in the rental flat, and we have seen a four-disc Indiana Jones special for £20 at the Woolworths up the street.

I washed the sheets and the towels in time for Kat pulling up on the corner in a pink taxicab. Days we were out – there were walls of jam and candy counters calling and Turkish delights, it seemed, ’round every corner – and when we were not admiring Louise Bourgeois’s dreamy, fantastical cells at the Modern (so many chairs hanging, so much red, a pair of knitted mittens, so much anger and longing), we were choosing between wild strawberry and pistachio gelati at Spitalfields, or tracking down fish-and-chipses for Sunday lunch.

The girl’d brought a photocopied list of shops to hit, and had highlighted the key destinations in a faint yellow. In one store, I flicked through argyle knits and countless peach T-shirts on the discount rack before I gave up trying. “All these clothes are ugly,” I said in despair. “Don’t say that!” Kat said, and she carefully slid the hangers from right to left on the aluminium rail. “They’re all beautiful,” she said, “because they’re on sale.”



Saturday night we arrived early for dinner. We sat on the barstools at Moro with a kir royal and a cava royal, and when Olive came in the door, he said, “What’s that?” “It’s a royale,” I said, “wit’ cheese.” I talk like I know but all I can remember from that movie is Uma Thurman waking up from her overdose and the royale with cheese. Ask me what I can remember from Donnie Darko. I remember Jake Gyllenhaal lying in the street, I remember the rabbit in the mirror. I remember following the wormhole through the house. Mostly I remember – and this wasn’t in the movie, really – Emily finding herself standing behind Jake Gyllenhaal in a queue somewhere in L.A. Em is hot stuff so chances are they could’ve driven off into the sunset had she tapped him on the shoulder and said something to him; but instead he’s with Reese, or at least that’s what Olive says – and Olive is the kind of guy who has no qualms picking up the grody issue of Grazia magazine from a public place and taking it home to read it in bed, without a care that sixteen people could’ve picked their nose and flipped the pages before he got to it, so I’d say his devotion to the celebrity cause is pretty well set.

It was cold Tuesday morning, and raining. The cars going by in the wet street outside sounded like waves crashing on the shore before receding in a foamy white. It rained and then didn’t and then drizzled and then settled into that fine, damp mist that London does particularly well. We sunk into the low seats at Sketch, me and Maud; while the world bustled about us we curled up in mismatched and wildly upholstered armchairs spread out around the tearoom like so many multicoloured petits fours.



We’d come in up Savile Row, where for more than 200 years the tailors have sat with their pincushions and loops of measuring tape. Tuesday morning while the mannequins stood smartly in the windows, we peered down into the lower-ground studios where buttonholes were being finished, surely, and waistcoats adjusted. Surely the tailors in their workshops reached for the chalk in their pockets with precise fingers, and surely their needles trailed fine threads behind them.

We topped up our Oyster cards and the city was ours for the taking. Monday we went west and then east and then west again; on Portobello Road we stepped into Gail’s to sneak into the toilets, but we were waylaid by a pistachio meringue and a banana ganache biscuit. “Banana ganache,” I said, considering. I was trying to taste it. “Banache,” I said, feeling it on my tongue. We got one in a paper bag. It turned out the toilets were broken, so as we left we walked cross-legged and made sure not to laugh too hard.

We lured Laureen out of work and walked cross-legged to lunch at the Tate Modern. We went upstairs, first, to the members’ dining room, a curious punishment, really, as we fought mothers and their prams to the front of the queue to find that the menu posted on the wall had little to do with the sparse selection of boxed salads and cold sandwiches on display. (The toilets were very nice, however.) We went downstairs to the café, then, to a mezze platter, a portobello mushroom and taleggio burger, and a small heap of garganelli pasta. “Do you want dessert?” Maud asked, afterwards, and if we had had thought bubbles above our heads one would have contained a pistachio meringue lightly shaded in with a green pencil, and the other would have hosted a banana ganache biscuit, golden-brown and divine and with two bites taken out of it already. The thought bubble above Laureen’s head, though, was evidently of her modest and long-gone portion of pasta. “I want,” she said, “lunch.”

Maud came in on the 18:56 train from Paris; we took the Tube and a smelly bus and at eight o’clock we ran down Defoe Road to the France-England rugby semifinals at the Prince. We heard a cheer rising from one of the flats on the street, and we ran faster. She had a kilo of comté in her bag, and we ran, laughing; she also had a tin of home-made quince paste, a yoghurt pot of apple compote, a bottle of fancy moisturising oil, some rose tea and a brown paper bag of fresh walnuts from Prades. We skidded round the corner on Kynaston, aiming left, and tumbled through the doorway under the flat-screen TV like slapstick sports stars entering the stadium. The cheer did not go up; we did not put our hands to our hearts to sing lustily. Olive and Bastien and Laureen were holding our places by the window; we sat down and the burgers were not long coming.

A fellow at the bar turned and sneered at us each time the English team scored; he had piggy eyes and a piggy nose. “He’s gloating,” Emily said, noting that the Frenchies in our group only had eyes for the game, “to the three people in here who don’t give a shit.”



Sunday the sun was out, and when we left the rich velvets and the glowing autumn leaves, the long-haired girls and the thick, rustling chiffons of the Millais exhibit – “The thing is,” Maud said, in the portraits room, “if we knew an artist, that could be us on the wall up there.” – when we left we blinked into the sunlight and made quick plans for an impromptu picnic. Laureen led us to the giant Sainsbury’s by her; when we left the pork and pickle pies and the vintage cheddars, the British apples and the chocolate milk of the super supermarket, well, they were in our shopping bags, leaving with us.



We were five on blankets unfurled in a sunny spot in St George’s Square, over to the end by the late roses. Maud sliced the raisin loaf. Olive uncorked the wine bottle. Laureen had washed the grapes, and they were crisp like the day. I crossed my legs and piled my skirt in the space between, like the best of convent girls.

Bastien was prone on the lawn later – a pasty and two pies later, several cheese and honey-baked-ham tartines later – and reaching for a paper plate upon which to rest his head. We found that the sun had crept on, and that we were sitting in damp shadow. We packed up and collapsed on Laureen’s sofas while she brought us frothy cappuccinos in cream-coloured teacups. We watched reality TV and old episodes of Friends till the sky was soft and deep and dark.



Maud came in on the train from Paris, and we woke to pots of tea in cool autumn mornings. Early one day – I put on what I’d worn the night before, I slipped into green sneakers and I walked down the street rubbing the sleep out of my eyes – we sliced into a loaf of wholemeal bread from the Spence Bakery, warm still from the oven. I have a jar of orange jam open in the fridge, and one with whole, squishy strawberries.



We went to a spice shop where a skinny boy in glasses was taking a painstaking inventory of packets and tins. The little bags of spices and spice mixes on the narrow shelves were all the shades of the desert and the shimmering heat – ochre, sepia and burnt sienna, and the colours of the sand in dry riverbeds – and the small shop – it was a room big enough for a man with a moustache and a typewriter and the sound of his typing – smelled of curries and the swirling secrets of old womens’ kitchens. Bags of lavender sat in a box on the staircase, and over to one side cinnamon sticks were tied into bundles like firewood for elves and sprites. Outside the garlic hung from the awning and there were bags of nuts and dried fruit for a pound a bag.

“What,” I asked the storeboy, and he held his pen and his paper still, “would you do with this?” I had a tin of rose petal spread in my hand. It had a surprising heft. “You could eat it on bread,” he said, “or use it in stews.” I don’t know what he could have said that would have stopped me from putting it on the low wooden counter next to the cash machine. The corrugated tin had had printed upon it lush twin blooms in a deep and inviting pink; I am a sucker for roses and I stop to smell every one.

We ate the brownie straight out of the tin. It was still warm, and the chocolate bits were melty. We cut a slim path around the brownie perimeter and ate inwards. There was enough left for piling upon a squat cake stand and dusting with icing sugar for when the boys came over Friday night, Dan and Nai outside on the pavement while I stuck my head out the window, and, later, Marc, whom I greeted with an olive-breadstick cigar in my mouth. “The butler,” I said, calling into the street, “will be down shortly.”

From over here, and let me tell you, this is the voice of experience speaking, 31 seems a whole lot like 30 so far.

Saturday morning – this was after the birthday song from the kid, after unwrapping the New Yorker print from CC, after receiving word of the New Yorker subscription from Olive – (“Am I so predictable?” I asked Marc later, explaining the bounty of New Yorker–related gifts. “But did they give you the same thing from the New Yorker?” he said. “Like the same cartoon?” I said. “No.” “Then,” he said, “I think you’re OK.”) –

Saturday morning we tried to find a bar to gather friends in. Saturday morning! In Soho! For Saturday night! We sure like a challenge, here in ye olde householde. One after the other, a host of helpful barpeople smiled their “no”s down the phone.

We finally remembered a bar we’d walked by several times in Seven Dials. “Meh,” I said, looking up its number online, “this review says ‘cool, chic and sophisticated’.” “Ya,” Olive said, “you are not cool, chic and sophisticated.” This is the man I married, folks. Right here. Roll up, roll up. We called them anyway, just to see if they’d have room for us. They did. “Can I call you back?” Olive said. He hung up and said, “What kind of bar is free to take a group of 12 on a Saturday night?”



We figured we’d take our chances at Freud instead, a small basement bar with a long cocktails list and a no-reservation policy. Six-thirty Saturday evening, downstairs, behind the creeping-ivy banisters, all the seats were taken. The long bench against the wall – taken. The low, battered stools, their paint scratched and peeling – taken. “I wonder,” I mused, “if we have made the wrong decision,” and in my mind I saw the bar we didn’t pick, all bright white and silver, all cool, chic and sophisticated, with room for a group of 12 on a Saturday night. Aged 31, I had no time for regrets. We lunged for two stools. We perched. We bided our time.

The lights were low, and the music hot. The girls were in diamond-print stockings and laced-up heels, they were in T-shirts and tulip-shaped skirts, they were in striped sweaters and pink heels, they were dressed up and dressed down and sometimes they jiggled their shoulders to the beat. One of these girls was me. The boys leaned back and chatted. They made the girls laugh. The lights were low. The music was hot. One of the bartenders was a small man with a large head of hair.

Just as the first of our posse showed up, Dan and Nai and Elaine searching us over the heads and shoulders, two tables opened up. This is the magic of a birthday night – room for all, mojitos cold and sweet, and a large jar of truffles tied with a purple ribbon.