Notebook
Field notes
Things noticed between essays. Short, dated, and written down where I was standing, more or less.
Newlyn
Spring tide this morning, and the water over the second step below the hut. The gulls had moved to the ice works roof in protest. I stood at the zero for a minute with my hood up and felt, as I always do, very slightly above it.
Paul
Found a benchmark I didn’t know about on the churchyard wall at Paul, half under ivy. The arrow points up at the line, as they all do, like a finger held under the word you’re reading. Here. Exactly here.
By post
A letter from a reader in Northumberland with a list of field names from her grandfather’s farm: Hungry Hill, Far Bog, the Ladies’ Mile, Bloody Close. She wants to know what to do with them. Keep them, I said. Say them out loud now and again.
Woon Gumpus
Went back to the square with nothing in it. The wren was there. I’m almost sure it was the same one. It said the same thing.
Kitchen table
Tried to scribe a contour again, for the first time in twenty-odd years, with a pin on a sheet of smoked glass. My hand still pulls left on a long curve. Some things the body keeps for you whether you want it to or not.
Mousehole
A visitor asked me the way to Mouse Hole, two words, carefully. I told him. I did not correct him. I am getting softer, or older, which round here are the same thing.
Penzance library
Spent an afternoon with the 1878 six-inch sheet for this parish. My house is not on it. My hill is, with exactly the same shape, and a quarry that has since become a car park, and a field called Parc an Grouse, which I’m told means the field of the cross. Nobody I’ve asked has heard of it.