Summer as three - from the lost blog

Autumn lingers on the air like a cormorant ready to dive into the tossing sea from it’s craggy perch. I can feel it on the breeze that comes in through my open window, see it in the morning light as it makes shapes on my wall and lights up the dust particles and listen for it in the sounds of the bird song. It’s a most welcome friend and I love living in this ‘not-quite-season.’ It’s a peaceful and transitional time and I feel like it brings so much breathing space.

Summer in Cornwall is always busy and we share it with so many visitors that travel down to take in the incredible and unique landscape that the county provides. The roads become chaotic and travelling becomes extremely difficult, beaches are so busy that finding parking is tricky so with a baby in tow and so much work to do during my busiest freelance season, we’ve avoided beach trips at peak hours and played closer to home this year. Getting in and out of West Cornwall is a not easy due to the huge bottle neck that is the Hayle – Penzance via St. Erth road and so we tend to make the most of Cornwall’s beaches during the spring & autumn when it’s still pleasantly warm and also perfectly tranquil. Late July to August is always that bit too hot for me anyway so I’m quite happy to take refuge in the shade of my lounge with a cold drink and crack on with editing wedding photographs with the radio 6 playing.

I thought it was time to share another ‘Postcards’ post. I haven’t had the time to blog our individual adventures this summer so instead, I’ve taken excerpts from our various memories over the past few months and compiled them to one chunky post. I hope you’re sitting comfortably…

The summer of sea mist…

I love misty weather. If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you will know that it’s one of my favourite weathers. Although it feels like this summer has been a long and stretched out one of hot, endless sunny days… the kind you dream about as a child, early summer blessed us with a precious smattering of pale, soft mist. Look at the hues that it turns the sea… this kind of weather fuels my dreams and inspires me endlessly. The below picture was taken on my first ever trip to St Michael’s mount. I’ve lived in Cornwall forever and never visited – it’s one of those places you take for granted and think ‘I’ll go someday’ and you keep putting it off until you realise someday never came. Steeped in legends of lost lands and giants, it’s also believed to be a powerful connecting point of many lay lines that run through the lands. Jon used to pier jump from this harbour as a kid and I’m so damn jealous because what is more magical than jumping off into the ocean from an ethereal, tidal castle island? We can see the castle from our bedroom window and look at it every day so it was really fun to stand up in the galleries and look at the opposite view.

The usual swimmers diving off battery rocks to brave the swim across to NewlynRepairs and restorations on Jubilee art deco Lido. The pride of the townEveryday scenes from walks along the seafront of our hometown

“Some days were mistier than others…”

You know it’s the beginning of summer when the Golowan flags go up. Each year we get new ones pop up along the seafront and each year with a different theme. My favourite so far was the ‘Sea Monsters’ theme but this year it was diving angels and they were lovely too. Golowan is the annual festival in our home town that celebrates midsummer or Beltane as it’s better known on the wheel of the year and it’s a beautiful, colourful and very whimsical myriad of arts, music and food events all around the town with great parades, folk dances and papermache models and masked characters.

First proper swim of the year…

These photos were actually taken by my friend Laura as I didn’t bring my camera

One of my favourite beaches ever is the incredible Pedn Vounder which lays hidden in West Cornwall, just over from the popular Porthcurno. It was always a secret gem in past years and is a much coveted nudist destination but instagram has popularised this beach so that despite it’s perilously rocky climb and long trek, it’s become popular with tourists and families (much to the displeasure of the nudists.) You can’t have everything in life, so like the rest of Cornwall, I leave it to the tourists in the peak season and make the most of it in the spring and autumn months. We headed here in July as both mine and Laura’s birthdays fall that month and it’s become a bit of a pilgrimage of ours to come here each year for a swim. I’ve always been comfortable swimming nude as I love how liberating it feels and how connected to the incredible natural world I feel when I’m swimming. Rarely do I feel more human and grounded than when I’m floating in the ocean and it saddens me that people are so embarrassed by their bodies that despite wanting to bathe naturist, they don’t for fear of ‘not looking good.’

I feel that it stems from two problems: one is that bodies are needlessly over sexualised. Maybe it comes from years of Life Drawing or maybe I’m just not lusty enough but a body is just another natural vessel, or a temple if you’re more spiritual. Heck, maybe it’s even just a meaty bag of bones. I battled with insecurity after I gained 3 stone when I was pregnant and failed to lose it after giving birth but choosing to cast that to the wind and pursue my enjoyment of being a human girl with sandy toes and fully immersed in the ocean was far more of a payoff than letting any insecurities rule me. It was also empowering. I could probably write an entire blog post on body positivity and the issues of societies weird sexualisation of bodies but I won’t today and I’m not sure if I’m ready to take my blog down a political route yet …

My family read my blog so I’m sure my naked buns are gonna cause an uproar and scandal resulting in panicked phone calls to relatives and whispers behind hands but apparently me drawing naked people at Newlyn art school on Wednesdays is totally acceptable so hey 

Then the Lido was repaired…

Yes, you noticed correctly… Lyra and I have matching outfits 

After much anticipation, the Lido renovations were finally finished and so we took Lyra for her first ever trip at Jubilee pool. And then we went back again the very next day. I did a whole blog post last year on this beautiful pool because I’m obsessed but now it has a shiny new undercover cafe which serves up Yallah coffee and we basically live here now. Now that it’s autumn, I’m hoping they’ll turn on the new geothermal heated section soon… I’m dreaming of cool, misty days sat in the warm water watching the steam rising.

Outfit twinning even though I said I’d never do that… I feel like once you become a parent, you lose all of that decorum you once had and cheese becomes the new hip.Lyra says that nobody is too cool to wear suncream! Layer up y’allShe slept so well that evening…

We broke one of our own golden rules…

And visited the mount during peak holiday season. It was one of those days where I needed nothing more than to dip my toes in the sea and I have such a fond memory of wading through the shallow waters as the tide crept in on the causeway and savouring every footstep in the warm shallows. One of my favourite parts of visiting the island is this beautiful handpainted mural of the mount featuring as a location in Shakespeare’s Illyria. We picked up a few succulents from the little plant shop on the mount and took them home where we made a big pot of mixed succulents so that it felt like we had a miniature garden on our kitchen windowsill. I dream of the day when I’ll eventually have my own garden and greenhouse.

Taken from our paddle back to the mainland

Port Elliot Festival

I’ve always wanted to visit Port Elliot festival, a local but very well known festival of literature, performing arts, comedy and music held at the beautiful Port Elliot estate near St Germans. I did my degree in Creative Writing and a festival that celebrates literature is exactly my cup of tea but each year I’ve always had to work when it’s been on. This year was the first year that I had free and when they announced that it was going to be the very last one, I quickly booked a day ticket for fear of losing my chance to ever go. It’s hard to visit a festival with a small baby and there was so much more I would have loved to have seen and done and I would have loved to camp for the weekend but we still squeezed lots of fun into one day. I hope that one day they’ll bring it back so we can go back and experience it fully with some art workshops and a big ole dive in the river Tiddy.

Beach BBQ’s with the sweet family

Do you even live in Cornwall if you don’t have at least one summer bbq on the beach? This is my sweet fam! (Jess on the left is an honorary member)

One of my favourite memories of the summer is a delightful cold water swim in Hayle estuary and a delicious bbq on the beach with these babes.

Sweet cousins

And the days in between…

It’s been an inexplicably busy summer for us, not necessarily with making fun memories but also my first year of working full time freelance with balancing my family. It’s been so difficult for me to find balance and it hasn’t been one of those stress free, idyllic summers that’s so easy to portray on social media. It’s been trying to find time for adventures between the chaos and travel of work – but in that chaos we visit places we wouldn’t normally. This summer, Lyra has visited Brittany, Bath and London through my work AND we did have an incredible time seeing Florence and the Machine play live in London. Some evenings, it’s finding half an hour for a stroll on the cliffs before or after a photo shoot and making a point of booking myself onto new art classes or time with friends. We’re learning, learning about balance and learning to navigate new pathways together as a family. We are learning about our sweet daughter who just keeps blossoming into this hilarious, feisty, tiny human bean but still transitioning into adult life. University feels a world away now and I’d like nothing more than to go back and do a masters but this year is all about a different type of learning. Learning to function in newer and bigger ways. Learning to find this new identity of mine that combines mother with creative and individual and learning to look after myself not just physically but emotionally.

I’m hoping to spend autumn reconnecting with my friends whom I’ve neglected over the summer, begin to unwind and slow myself as I’m feeling a little frazzled. I want to make time for reading books, maybe have an autumn beach bbq or two and really take in the soothing transition of the seasons. This time of year, I love looking out at the various autumn moons (yesterday I witnessed the gorgeous golden harvest moon) and we have the perfect spot to watch them from my window.

This blogpost has been a bit long and ramblesome and I feel like I’ve had to force myself a little to push it out in what free time I’ve had. I’m going to try to make littler posts more often so please tell me what you’d like me to share. I feel like there’s only so much I can write about my love for shifting seasons and Cornwall, so I’m happy to take suggestions. Do you want more baby stories? More Cornwall adventures? Guides to Cornwall? Photography tips? Please let me know and inspire me!