myth making

i am catching up slowly with my posts here on the ol' diary. i don't want to get too behind and not remember what has happened. i am 30 now and blimey, did that go quick, i want a record for myself before the altzheimers starts. so these are retrospective posts covering the last month. i want to be done by the time i go to the ATP festival.

this post is about the holiday i had with will in cornwall. after an amazing birthday this was a sweet coda. i was born in tintagel in 1979 and we moved away just before school started in 1986. we still had family down there so till i was about 10 we'd go back for holidays but apart from a couple of drive-throughs i haven't spent time there since then. i was kind of nervous about going, anxious that it wouldn't be the same at all. in the 1980s it was going very commercialised with lots of day-glo signs and fibreglass statues of king arthur and merlin at every corner, there was a lot of tat. but strangely enough, it has gone the other way. we were also going there by public transport, a feat my dad was aghast that i was even attempting. it is hard to get around in cornwall without a car. i discovered from the online timetables that there were about 4 buses per day, which made the village impenetrable after 5pm. but it was a wonderful, surreal holiday.

we arrived in bodmin station and got the bus to tintagel, changing at wadebridge. as soon as we got towards the river camel my head started to spin as it looked so similar, i recognised buildings and the curve of a lane and it made the butterflies in my stomach flutter. we alighted in tintagel and stopped for some lunch. the high street was pretty much the same, a couple of shops had been replaced by other things and the road had been widened but apart from that it was ok. the weather was lovely so i checked with a barmaid whether you could still walk along the coast to treknow (an even smaller village half a mile away which is where our guesthouse was) and she assured me that you could, if you start from the church. this is the church where i was christened, i'm not sure how valid the ceremony was cos the vicar was very drunk apparently. i was quite pleased that we had to pass by here so i could have a little look. as soon as you get out of the high street you realise how remote and bleak the countryside is, you wonder how people chose to live here in the first place. it was a nice day so it looked bright and sunny but the bushes and trees bent over from the dominant wind demonstrated how wild it can get around these parts. we walked around the churchyard looking at the old gravestones that have been taken over by weeds and moss. i jokingly said to steen "i'll have a look at the newer ones and see if i recognise anyone my nan knows" and almost instantly i saw the name "jamie tremaine". jamie was the first (and only, i think) boy i gave a valentine to. i remember hearing that he'd died a few years ago but it was still a shock. i instantly teared up and couldn't speak. i just saw his face, the white blonde hair and big red lips playing with a car or chasing his best mate david around the park with me and climbing into our treehouse. i haven't seen him since i was 8 but the memories of him were very clear. i looked around and saw some dandelions and laid those on the grave and walked on, a little shook up.

we carried on towards the coast road and the rugged cliffs opened up. a feeling came over me that would last for the entire time we were there, i felt at home. we moved around a few times when i was a kid, i never felt very settled and when we did stay in chepstow for the long term i always rejected it as my home. i sulked around waiting for me to find my home. cardiff is a home of sorts, i feel very settled here, but there is a world of difference between feeling happy in a place and feeling at home. i tried to explain it to will like this: here, in tintagel was my first experiences of nature, of the world. here a wall is not just "a wall" but "the wall", my understanding of what a wall looks like. i've always loved the platonic idea of this world being a mere shadow on a cave wall and being in tintagel is like looking away from the wall and looking at the way the world truly is. everything in tintagel is authentic and real and outside feels fake.

we had a wonderful walk along the coast path to treknow. i was hoping instinct would kick in and i would remember the way back to the village and luckily it did. we were soon on the lane in treknow near the hotel my mum used to work. i was surprised that it was the same and it just looked smaller. i saw the town hall where i used to go to coffee mornings and brownies with my mum, the cavenous room was in reality the size of someone's living room. then i came to my nan's old house. for some reason this had a lot more resonance than when i saw the house i actually used to live in with my mum and dad. it too was smaller than i thought, despite the extension that made it two storeys and no longer just a bungalow. i used to think the garden was huge. it was still called tremallow, which made me happy, i used to think it was named after my nan's love of sweets. then we came to our guest house which i'd found on the internet and was one of the cheapest places to stay in tintagel but it certainly didn't feel cheap, it felt luxurious. it was a vegetarian bed and breakfast and we treated ourselves to a meal there in the evening too. amazing food! at the breakfast i kept on grinning like a loon, it was so tasty. the lady there was really nice and introduced us to her three mental dogs, it felt like home.

the first night set us up for a magical time. we went down to trebarwith cove, a little beach that used to be a couple of minutes walk over the fields from the house where i was born and the sun was setting. we had a meal at the port william pub on the cliffs and watched the sun set the sky on fire. it had been beautiful weather but a storm was coming so the waves crashed on the ragged rocks with great violence, it was exhilarating.

the next couple of days were spent wandering and wondering. it was a strange experience for me, having grown up there and to find most of it unchanged. the house where i was born had been changed only slightly, now being called "trebeth" rather than "trestebeth" as my parents called it (after the first part of their names) and the family living there were very posh (a massive contrast!). the main thing about the town i had seen changed i suppose is that there were not so many young people about, only the oldies. my parents generation and even some of my grandparents' were still there but apart from tourists there did not seem to be a lot of young families. but in fact it was so similar at times it made me dizzy, walking down a lane with flashes of then and now mingling in my vision. i spent most of the time floating about the place like a psychic picking up information from the dead, turning this corner and that hoping to find evidence of myself, a state i think steen had a lot of patience dealing with. will was wonderful, as usual. the fact that he made me feel comfortable enough to take him on this journey with me and then to completely understand the place, feel akin to it as i did made me very happy. magic things kept happening, like seeing a seal in the wild diving for food in boscastle, our coast walks and that sunset. it made it a birthday brimful of contentment.