Falling Sky

Perranuthnoe: The Blue Room

The honeymoon continues!  Bidding goodbye to the palm trees of Boskerris Hotel and suitably full from a delicious lunch at Porthminster Cafe, we took the train southwards from St Ives to an equally sun-drenched Penzance.  It looked like a nice enough town, but we were heading for quieter things, taking a taxi out away from the town and into the south Cornish countryside, finally rattling up a country track to reach our destination, Ednovean Farm.

Photo by the Missus

We'd had a wonderful time staying at both Anchorage House and Boskerris Hotel, and would certainly recommend them to all, but Ednovean Farm has to be my favourite of the three.  An old farm where they still have hens and horses (I believe the room we stayed in used to be a cowshed...) with three rooms for couples, no children, beautiful gardens and a simply divine south-southwesterly view across rolling fields, over Perranuthnoe and to the sea.  We stayed in the Blue Room, undoubtedly the best choice, with a nice big bed, French doors opening wide to reveal the stunning view and a nice wee private terrace too.  As with everywhere else we stayed, there was a TV and DVD player, but with real world visuals like that we had no need for them, happy to sit outside and take it all in, the light, the countryside, the blissful peace of it all.  The 'look' of the room and accompanying bathroom was spot-on, put together with details that felt charming, never cheesy, and the roll-top bath was the perfect size for two. Breakfast both mornings was lovely, with the option (which we took the first day) of having a breakfast delivered to the door of our room, allowing us to cheerfully devour croissants at our leisure.  The second morning we went up to the gorgeous open-plan dining room/kitchen that damn near made us giddy with the sheer Country Livingness of it all, locally-sourced food cooked up on a Rayburn, the sizzling bacon drowned out by birdsong outside.  The hosts, Charles and Christine, are very friendly and helpful - anyone with a complete set of the Aubrey/Maturin books can't be bad - and Olley the cat was a far less yappy feline than our local mog.  And being welcomed with tea and eccles cakes certainly didn't hurt.

So what's to do there?  Well, we'd rather got all the touristy stuff out of the way over the last few days and had no particular plans, just the way we like things.  Walking, eating, reading, or just lazing around was pretty much the order of our two days there, with the coastal village of Perranuthnoe an easy country path walk from Ednovean Farm.  Perranuthnoe's a lovely wee place, reminded me of my home village Islip if it were plonked down by the seaside, surrounded by fields and tiny roads, old houses with welly boots outside.  Coastal paths head out to the east and west of the village as part of the South West Coast Path, both of which we gave a go - pretty easy-going, mostly keeping close to the coast, the westerly path bringing you towards Marazion and St Michael's Mount.  The beach at Perranuthnoe was a little gem, popular enough but never crowded to the extent of Carbis Bay or St Ives, a pleasure to stroll along or just sit on the rocks and watch the waves gently roll in, and a food cabin - appropriately called The Cabin - serving up way-above-average food and drink (though it's recently raised a veritable stushie in the village news with proposals for quadrupling its size).  There's a group of craft shops and art galleries brought together in an old L-shaped set of buildings, where we bought a cracking mono print by an artist whose name is sadly illegible on the artwork so I can't sing his praises, and I had another (delicious) cream tea in the sunshine.  And then there's Victoria.

The Victoria Inn dates back in one form or another to the 12th century, apparently.  It's a nice pink building, quite prepossessing and unshowy, the interior retaining that sense of an old village pub complete with nautical touches (a 3000W bulb from a lighthouse, model boats in boxes, that sort of thing), snug corners, free of pretence.  As with every other pub I went to in Cornwall, local breweries Sharp's and Skinner's ales were on tap (Doom Bar was particularly ubiquitous).  But the real draw is the food - it's a gastropub, but a gastropub par excellence, on a different planet to those pubs with twenty different mains, every one of them from a freezer.  Described as a 'destination pub', it was taken over by Stewart and Anna Eddy, the latter taking care of the food having previously trained with Raymond Blanc and Michael Caines.  The commitment to locally sourced ingredients is immediately apparent looking at the menu and specials, featuring Cornish crab, duck, beef, turbot, asparagus, mackerel, pork, strawberries, cod. We managed to book places for both Saturday evening and Sunday lunch and subsequently found out we were jammy sods to even have got one of them, another couple at Ednovean Farm having failed to get a table for Saturday.

Saturday night I went for a mains special, honey roast Cornish duck breast with sweet potato puree with apple and smoked bacon, followed with lemon posset with local strawberries and lemon shortbread.  The duck was a knockout, richer and juicier than any I'd tasted before, complemented by a puree I'd never even considered making with sweet potatoes but worked like a charm.  The lemon posset, aside from teaching me a new word, had a sharp sweet tang savoured in small spoonfuls along with the strawberries.  It was superb food, presented with care yet still in enough quantities to fill us up and at none of the prices or pretension that one might expect from a chef of such pedigree (the duck a bargain at £17.50, the dessert £5.25) and we slowly ambled our way back up the country paths as the evening sun slowly sank into the west, the landscape awash with a warm dusky light, rabbits scampering on the fields.  Sunday lunch was equally impressive, going for Cornish cod with local asparagus and lemon butter sauce, a great combination of flavours that made me grateful for going on honeymoon during proper asparagus season, followed up simply but tastily with some Cornish Moomaid ice-cream (with a name like that, how could I resist?), again quite excellent.  Honestly, you have no idea how much my mouth's been watering writing this last paragraph...

Is the Victoria Inn really worth travelling to Perranuthnoe for?  Absolutely, but there's plenty of good reasons to go to this little village on the coast regardless.  It's a refreshing break away from the busier, noisier parts of Cornwall, a path less travelled by tourists, and Ednovean Farm was such an absolute pleasure to stay at - we would gladly return. Slow lazy meanders along a near-empty beach, strolling along miles of coastland with nothing to hear but the sea, wind and birdsong, sat outside in the evening light reading or cosied up in the Victoria Inn, our stay in Perranuthnoe was as close to perfection as we could have ever hoped for.

Next stop: a little bit of Penzance, a whole lot of Fowey...

The Joy of Meades

Much celebration here in Castle Von Naggle this week with the appearance of a new three-part Jonathan Meades series on BBC4.  If you've seen his work before, hell, you'll already know whether you love him or hate him - he appears to be gloriously polarising - but if you've never had the pleasure, read on, read on.

Who is this Meades?  The introduction given to him on Clive James' website, a veritable treasure trove of intellectual goodies where a number of his writings are included, describes him thus:

"[A]n educated upstart who not only doesn’t know his place, but knows far more than his allotted share about all the other places. [...] The tradition that started with Betjeman and Piper’s Shell guides can now be said to have reached a culmination in the personality of Meades. [...] The latest and most subversive exemplar of a useful broadcasting tradition, he still startles me most in his journalism, which is best approached through his collection Peter Knows What Dick Likes (Paladin, 1989). The pieces selected here prove his gift for reaching sideways out of aesthetics and bringing in the sociology and the politics as well, with no care for who gets offended."

(The aforementioned collection being out of print, with tatty paperbacks of it being sold for over fifty bleedin' quid)

According to Wikipedia, Meades was born in 1947, trained at RADA and wrote restaurant reviews for the Times between 1986 and 2001, putting on a pound a year in weight in the process, then losing a third of his body weight in the year that followed.  He's also been writing for decades on architecture and culture and written a number of novels, most of which are annoyingly hard to find.  But he's best known (in this house anyway) for his work on BBC television since 1990.  It's not easy to put his programmes into any particular genre pigeon hole, and so much the better for it - ostensibly the starting point for much of them would be architecture, but they're as much performances as documentaries, lecture and cabaret in one, shot through with black, sometimes vicious humour.  They're also thoroughly opinionated, refreshingly so in days when damn near every programme broadcast seems determined to please everyone and offend no-one, and unashamedly intelligent, as linguistically extensive as Will Self yet without the sense of showing off.

Meades could never be accused of talking down to his televisual audience; his shows demand your attention from start to end.  This could be a recipe for boredom in an age of short attention spans and pandering to the stupid, yet his shows use the medium of television with an invention that escapes the rest of the industry.  The character of Meades who presents these programmes is a fictional construct of his own, perpetually seeing the world through red-tinted sunglasses, forever clad in a suit no matter the location, an incongruous glitch in the system, often played on for ridiculous effect (see the suit-free Terminator intro to Remember The Future).  This is not a man who takes himself as seriously as initial appearances would suggest, a man who understands the importance of entertainment (on his first interview for Little Atoms he speaks of his admiration for Marty Feldman) ensuring that an hour long broadcast never becomes dull, never turns into another generic opinion-free documentary.  His atheism is strident, unapologetic, undiluted no matter the religion, as befits an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.

So what does he talk about?  He's covered subjects from the unsung architectural highs and lows of Britain (the extensive Abroad Again series), Stalinist and Nazi architecture, surrealism, food (the excellent Meades Eats series), Belgium, vegetarians (I dare not show that one to the Missus) and Northern Europe (the brilliant two-parter Magnetic North that first won us over last year).  But these are just the starting points, spinning off into parts historical, cultural, sociological, autobiographical, satirical.  He never takes the oft-trodden route of other documentaries, and his latest - Off Kilter - is no exception.

A three-part documentary (of sorts) on architecture in Scotland, prior experience of television would lead you to expect a focus on Edinburgh, C R Mackintosh in Glasgow and maybe a croft house or two.  Instead, the first part of Off Kilter focuses exclusively on Aberdeen, a city that's barely touched television screens except for oil documentaries.  I've only been there once, a stop-through on the way home from Orkney, and my first impressions were pretty weak.  Turns out I've seriously underestimated it, architecturally at least.  After a rather bizarre opening revolving around corned beef and typhoid, it hits solid Aberdonian ground - well, stone.  He points out how the use of Aberdeen granite gives 300 year old buildings a surprisingly new appearance, even CG-like, and highlights the local obsession with dormer windows and the fascinating churches.  As he puts it: "devil gets the best tunes, god gets the best buildings."  I'd wondered if he'd touch on Donald Trump's Big Adventure and he doesn't disappoint in the slightest, tearing into the whole unsightly business with passionate contempt.  Wonderful.

So, where to start?  Firstly - watch the just-shown first episode of Off-Kilter on the iPlayer, available until the end of the month, then catch the next episode on the Isles of Lewis and Harris, (says here: "Meades discovers serenity, Calvinism and peat bog bodies") which should be a real treat.

Secondly - buy yourself The Jonathan Meades Collection on DVD, a steal at under £14, which contains a selection of his telly work (Abroad In Britain, Further Abroad, Abroad Again) and both parts of the brilliant Magnetic North.

Thirdly - for the many programmes not included on said DVD, settle down at the YouTube Meades Shrine ("if you are going to get caught up in any kind of cult of personality, then you better make sure it's a good 'un.") which has pretty much every thing I think he's done in front of a camera, broken down into 10 minutes chunks and held together in handy playlists, up to & including Off-Kilter for those who can't access the iPlayer.  There's so much going on in his programmes that second- and third-viewings are even more rewarding than the first.  Intelligent, wry, genuinely enlightening television seems to be harder and harder to find, so thank the BBC for keeping these brilliant shows going.  Though the man himself may well shudder at the thought of such acceptance, Jonathan Meades is a national treasure.