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.