Well, this is interesting.  Cornwall, for its low levels of plague, has been awarded Plague Tier 1 (Medium Alert) from 2nd Dec: pubs, cafes, cinemas and shops will re-open, people can meet indoors ( Read more... )

Suddenly the skies are clear and very blue, and the ground thick with frost in the mornings.  The areas in the shade don't melt at all, so a lot of our Northern side of the hill is now covered in long sparkling crystals of ice over all the grass that get longer every freezing night ( Read more... )

... Yes, we stayed in the same county that we live in, and went canoeing.  But on a new river!  A river we'd never explored before!
We went to stay by the River Fal, which flows south from Truro to the port of Falmouth.
This is where we stayed.  It looked out over the creek, and the coast path was just to the left.


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I've been avoiding shopping at Amazon, since they seem to be so peculiarly unpleasant to their staff and after all, one can buy the same things easily enough from much smaller businesses online -- but yesterday I was checking a wishlist, and the site showed me a  kayak for 59 quid including delivery from a local manufacturer.   I'm pretty sure that ( Read more... )

A peacock!
I am rather pleased with this because I think it's the first thing I've ever made with coloured pencils that actually has a decent depth of colour and doesn't look too stiff.  Background is brusho again, and then the detail is all Inktense pencils, overpainted with a waterbrush to bring out the colours. 

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Usually we try to go out on the river at high tide, because the upper Tamar is VERY muddy, and low tide involves way more mud than is pleasant. But you don't get a day like this every day in December.  So we drove down to Weir Quay, hoping that would be close enough to the sea to not be completely muddy.  This hope was... sort of fulfilled.  The ( Read more... )

Two photos from a quick paddle up the river yesterday:
1) the Spirit of Mystery.
I thought this was just a random Cornish lugger (and very pretty) but googling turns up a wikipedia page for her that says she is a replica built in 2008,  which was sailed all the way to Melbourne, Australia (to commemorate a previous journey from Cornwall in 1854 ( Read more... )

It has been far too hot recently, and mostly we have done very little.  But on Sat evening and Sunday evening we bestirred ourselves to catch the tide ( Read more... )

The bluebells are fading now, but this weekend I caught these just still scented in the sunlight at Grenofen on the edge of Dartmoor, on a short walk with my mother.  It was rather warm, and we retired to the cafe at the top of the lane for smoothies and ice cream.  The cafe used to be a pub, but there's more market now for selling tea and cakes to ( Read more... )

Pp's birthday today and an early high tide, so we got our act together and went out on the river again.  I'm a bit sunburned now, I should have put cream on.  I tend to be lax about sunburn since I almost never burn badly, but it's foolish really.  We were on the river at nine and the water was full of that wonderful smell of leaves warming and ( Read more... )