Crazy Cornwall!
As I knew it would, my two weeks in Cornwall passed by in a flash (not a black out haha)…
just to warn this is not in chronological order. I had such a good time so many things are flashing through my head so this is just blurgh – me getting it all on a page. Good luck if you understand any of it haha…continuez…
The first five days were pretty crazy. I was alternating working in the kitchen and babysitting Ben with Rosie’s sister Catherine, so it would be one early morning one late night as I was doing the dinner shifts. If you can’t remember, this is what I did in April – five hours volunteering in the kitchen in exchange for accomodation, food and travel expenses paid for.
Dinner shifts usually involve lots of helper’s wine (it has to be under 3 pounds a bottle in tescoes so you can just imagine…) so my first five days were pretty full-on and involved quite a few late nights until way too much red wine and that was that. Just to prove to myself that’s not what Prussia Cove is all about, I went wine free for the next week and a half just to prove a point. And so I did what PC was all about – I went for walks, I enjoyed the sun, I read my book, I hung out with my friends and I went swimming every single day, sometimes twice a day.
Oh we also had our fun in the evenings. We turned the kitchen into a discotech and danced the night away. One night we even had a tin foil party, where you weren’t allowed into the kitchen unless you were wearing a tin-foil hat or dress or wristbands – whatever you could come up with. Arlex definitely won the prize for that one – photos on facebook! One night I was on for breakfast shift so I began clearing the tables at about 3am, went to bed and got up at 7am to begin breakfast. The mess is incredible in the mornings, and you have to get breakfast ready and make fresh porridge at the same time, and there’s only two of you. Good times!
The swimming was my favourite. It wasn’t that cold, but it was really refreshing. There’s nothing that makes me feel better than jumping into the water and going for a swim. And then there’s the rubber dingys. They were Jo’s idea, who John likes to call Jo Bond because she is very adventurous – off to Nepal next week to trek the Himalayas – can you say cool?! So I went shopping with Miles one day and found these dingys, and we spent more time sunbaking on land in them until Jo, Sacha and I took them down to Greendolls – a mound of rocks where at low tide you can swim through to get to the ocean, and we sat in them playing bumper dingys, Sacha and I in one boat pushing off the sides of the rocks and colliding with Jo! I then spent the afternoon sunbaking in one of the dingys on the water, letting the tide push me between the rocks and luckily not out to sea because I was so relaxed I almost fell asleep. On the last day I took the dingy and swam from the main point outside the house, where all the other girls were sunbaking, and paddled my way like a motor-boat over to Kanigey Beach, over a km away. I surfed the beach for a bit in the dingy and then paddled back to the innis rock, it’s out in the ocean about 50 metres from the main house. I climbed the rock to the top and sat on it, silhouetted
by the afternoon sun. Then I walked up to Greendolls and saw how high the tide was, so I jumped from the highest rock and almost lost my bathers after the ten foot plunge – Julia said she could hear my scream from the hammocks at the house. Quite proud I had to do that a second time! All of that took me about two hours.
I also had lots of fun looking after Ben. We played a LOT! And one day we took a lift up the hill with John in the van and he dropped us off at the weekly car boot sale, which turned out to be pretty cool. Only Ben set his sights too high – he wanted a blue plane. Not possible, but he got a green train that he called Cucumber (because it was green like a cucumber duh!) and I ended up keeping him happy with an ice cream (before lunch but we didn’t tell mum). Oh, until Rosie came up to me that night and told me that Ben had been carsick in the afternoon – and us helpers were playing a game where we all sit around in a circle and the person who’s IT has to work out what the rule of the game is. That person asks everyone a question and this particular one we had to continue the next answer with a one word answer beginning with the last letter of the previous person’s answer. Of course, Caddie answered with a work ending with “Y”, so when Jo asked me “Was it your fault that Ben threw up in the car today?” I burst out laughing with the “Oh no”est look on my face and answered boldy “YES”! To which everyone cracked up laughing. Terrible. Absolutely terrible. (Just for the record it wasn’t really my fault – the car they hire is really awful and claustrophobic, but Ben was okay in the end!)
On the last Saturday night Noam was playing in the concert and Rosie had to do finishing speeches, so Catherine put Ben to bed while I went to the concert, and then I went up at 9.30pm to take over and the kitchen was supposed to send me some dinner up (we always have dinner really late on concert nights), of course it was so hectic that they forgot, and I had fallen asleep on the couch so when Harriet brought in this bowl of food, mostly cold, I kinda just ate it and fell back to sleep until Ben woke up crying at about 1am, and so I sat with him rubbing his back until he fell back asleep. It was a big night, Rosie finished at 2am and I just crawled into my bed and fell asleep.
I wasn’t just looking after Ben though, but also one of the musicians, Ida’s little boy Judah, but he says “Doodah”, another little cutie. So sometimes one went one way and the other, well you get the idea. We spent time down at the beach throwing rocks into the water. Well I was skipping stones but Ben decided rocks were a better idea. Ben and I also did some hill-rolling, one of my favourite past-times, only we found out afterwards that it was actually quite wet from the night before’s dew, so we both looked like we’d been swimming in our clothes. Ben liked it so much he made Catherine do it the next day! hehe Judah would come up to me every morning and wait for me to ‘bop’ his belly button and then giggle hilariously. He’d toddle up to me and hand me whatever he had – a ball, a train, even a potato once. I told Ida I’d go visit them in Los Angeles. When they left Judah wiped his nose all over my shirt as a goodbye present, I’m blessed I tell you hehe.
Yes, we had a few games after dinners. As well as the rule game, there was also the Italian game, which is fast paced and pretty funny. Everyone sits around the table with a piece of paper and a pen and writes a sentence in English. It can be about anything. This particular night most people tended to focus on the huge bottle of red wine we had, and the enormous amount of cheese and grapes we had eaten for pudding. The cheese and grapes were on these enormous trays – and anyone who knows me and cheese, well, you dont mess with the cheese man! And one of the helpers kept trying to take the tray away but i kept grabbing onto the other side of the tray shaking my head – nope, not done yet. In the end I was like “Just leave the tray there okay, I’ll go wash it myself when we’re all done.”We ended up eating cheese with strawberry jam and celery sticks with peanut butter at about 3am that morning. Anyway, back to the Italian game. You write a sentence in English and pass it on clockwise. The next person translates it to Italian. The idea is that you actually don’t know Italian so you make it sound like you know what you are writing about. Then you fold the first person’s sentence over and hand it to the next person again, who can only see the Italian version, and has to translate it into English. And so it goes around in a circle until you finish the piece of paper and the final sentence is in English. Each person then reads out every sentence and you get such a laugh because the final sentence in English is usually very different to what it began as.
The funny part is that I couldn’t remember any Italian – I was having a mental blank, and I had never played the game before, so I did like fake German, it was only Miles who had to translate it next to me, but the German girls were actually pretty impressed with my German, and I spoke quite a bit in Prussia Cove. Julia had the indecency to say my German was better than my English, but that’s because I talk so fast in English with a mix of Australian lingo and British lingo that she just stares at me blank faced half the time.
It was so nice to see everyone from last time and meet new people who I’ve heard about. Andrew, dinner chef for the first week and a half, and I made some great creations, and he’d be like, Grab a spoon Mara and let’s try this. And I’d give him my honest opinion, always fab, maybe a more of this or that, apart from the apple crumble he made, which was just wrong! I took one mouthful and just said that wont work. So the next day Arlex, who is the lunch chef, showed me the secret to making the most perfect apple crumble. And I can say that it was so good, that he kept sneaking into the larder with a spoon and eating it – and Arlex usually never snacks! Imogen claims that it tasted orgasmic, a fantastic comment, and it didn’t last through tea time so the musos obviously liked it! Jo and I made a stack of scones – Andrew left us in charge when he and everybody else went to the concert. I swear he thought we were going to burn the place down, but not only did we sweep, mop and make the place sparkle, but also made a whipped cake and a massive amount of scones. The whipped cake is now my other specialty, it’s such an easy recipie although it means constant jokes of being whipped while making the cake – the whipping however refers to the fact that it’s literally left in the cake mixer for about fifteen minutes to whip itself into a nice treat. The scones were awesome, and Arlex showed us the best way to eat scones – with goat’s cheese and honey – OH MY GOD it was good. Arlex was hilarious – he loved being around me when I was eating because he would laugh in his Colombian accent that he liked that I appreciate my food, and he can tell that I enjoy what I eat, the different flavours and me just sitting there going oh god this is good!
I was particulary like that on Angus’ first night of cooking dinner. I had heard so much about Angus, and he totally exceeded my expectations in every way. He’s like an aging traveling hipster, and I say that in the nicest way because he is amazing. He looks like a younger version of Bill Nighy (British actor from Love Actually for those who don’t know) with thick black rimmed glasses and tanned skin. His food is inspired by the places that he’s travelled, especially India and Morroco. On his first night we madea bed of mash potato with asian greens and mackerel baked for three hours in juices and ginger, so soft you could swallow the bones. For pudding we made sorbet with pitted big fat purple grapes, a sprinkle of brazil nuts and glacied ginger. Yuuum! Hilary asked Angus how you eat the fish, and Angus said you run your thumb along the belly to open it up and get the skeleton out, and Hilary said, wit your fork? and Angus was just like – no, use your thumb!
The next night I had worked with Ben in the morning so I got to sit and enjoy dinner with the other helpers. They served on small plates made of leaves, and we began with small light batter shells filled with a seafood mix with corridander and yoghurt on top, and then last nights leftover mackerel squished with the potato and greens to make fish balls, and then the main was rice with a tuna mix and a really nice red chutney. Jo, Sasha and I sat there eating with our fingers, it was amazing. We had grapes with halva and brazil nuts afterwards for pudding. Angus got two encores that night.
Steven came for the second week, yes the same Steven whose cello I babysat on the way home last month. He has become engrossed in the Australian TV series Summer Heights High by Chris Lilley after I told him about it on the plane because they had one episode, and so we were all sitting on the bus on the way to the concert and Steven’s sitting there going “Oh My God, That is So Random!” as one of the characters Ja’ime says. While I was sitting there being Jonah going “”Puck you miss! Take a joke – don’tchoo even know what punked is?! All ‘rangas are homos!” The other musicians were on the bus asking what it was all about and I was sitting down the back and Steven points back at me and goes “She’s responsible for this! Mara told me all about it!”
I’ve got another game for you, slightly less thrilling because it takes time to plot but can lead to some pretty funny situations. It’s called the murder game, and it’s kind of like a backwards Cluedo in real life. Everyone puts into three separate hats/bowls/etc their own name, a place and an object. Each person then removes one each of the same which will tell them who they have to kill, with what and where. Miles couldn’t understand this concept so he gave away pretty quickly that he had to kill me in the larder with a spoon. Being ‘dead’ means you have to hold that object in that place, the killer then takes on the victim of the deceased so in the end there should be only one person left. I had to kill Caedie under the bar table with a potato peeler. Can you say impossible? I almost did it too, but I wasn’t confident enough that I thought he worked it out – I got him over to the table but I didn’t push him to take the peeler. Caedie left before the rest of us so he gave me his victim – which turned out to be Miles on top of the kitchen work table with a light bulb. I never got a chance to kill Miles but it would have been funny – all week he was trying to find a reason to get me in the larder, Cmon Mara, I’ve got something for you in the larder, Cmon Mara, I need to talk to you about something really important in the larder. He even tried to get Doro and Fran on board to help them get me in there, but I clicked on pretty early and ran for my life! Literally haha!
One day I needed to get out of Prussia Cove for a bit, if you remember, last time I left almost everyday to see bits of Cornwall, but this time it was all about enjoying the sun and the people, but after a week I just needed to take a break. So I went shopping with Miles which he was grateful because shopping for food for 80 people is not easy and it made it quicker and easier for him. We went to the cash and carry, which is the coolest place – it has all kinds of food in bulk and miniature, like huge boxes of cornflakes, bulk packets of jars of peanut butter, massive bags of toilet paper – we had to get it all! So I was running back and forth between the trailer trolley chucking things in the pile. We had to go to tescos too, but there wasn’t much to get there. I got the yoghurt and hand cream and Miles took care of the booze!
I did have to work while I was in Cornwall, made a little bit easier because they have limited wi-fi down there, but it enabled me to write a few articles and sort out some other bits and pieces for the website while I’m effectively out of the office. I missed one of the concerts just to get some quiet time for about five hours and thrash out some words, but it worked well. I had a few easy early nights as well where I just sat and watched a film – they were giving out the Hitchcock classics in the paper so I watched The Lady Vanishes and The 39 Steps. Amazing stuff.
I don’t know that there’s any more to tell you. I had such a blast in Prussia Cove with everyone that I met and met up with, all the cooking and creative time in the kitchen, amusing Ben and Judah which often ended with one or the other being chucked over my shoulder, the concerts, the music in the house, the swimming and sunbaking and walking along the coast. What a time…Prussia Cove ’09 here we come!
Tags: Travel
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