Eden

I’m in the loungeroom of the cottage listening to Stephen Fry on Radio 4 doing an obit for Clement Freud. I have coffee and a Very Large Cat. The Builder is still in bed. It’s drizzling and misty outside and there will, when I can be bothered doing them, be sausage and tomatoes and eggs on toast for breakfast. We are pondering the idea of lunch in the seafood restaurant in Mevagissey but otherwise thinking of a quiet day doing not very much. There will be a seafood thermidor for dinner tonight, accompanied with scallops and prawns, all of which I bought in Rick Stein’s deli yesterday. An ideal sort of day, really (well, apart from the need for an obit for Clement Freud). A pity it’s our last day. We head home tomorrow.

Cookie has gone upstairs to inspect The Builder! He’s a huge, enormous cat and has only three legs. I know I have had a cat with three leg who seemed not to be impeded at all by the lack of one. But Giles wasn’t anything like as huge as Cookie. And Cookie’s leg was amputated at the thigh where Giles had a (very painful when he landed on your leg with it) stump. It takes Cookie some effort to get up the stairs. Always excepting yesterday when someone’s car alarm went off and he was up the stairs from a sleeping on the sofa start in microseconds! He also has no trouble getting into the cottage when the bottom part of the stable-style door is shut. He just jumps in. Sounds like a hippo trying to get in!! And he’s in now because he could hear me moving about downstairs and he banged on the door until I let him in!!!

If you happen to have a large, disused clay pit and are wondering what you should do with it, filling it with gigantic greenhouses made with huge hexagons, a visitor centre, lots of plants, walkways ad sculptures would be a very innovative and probably lucrative venture. We had a lovely few hours at just such a venture yesterday. The Eden Project. Mostly indoors, inside the biomes, but also lots of walkways and gardens outside. I particularly enjoyed the rainforest biome - although it was a bit hot for someone who was wearing a jumper and a raincoat! They have mango trees and banana plants and waterfalls and all sorts. And very pretty little green birds there to eat the insects. There are also supposed to be lizards and frogs but we didn’t see those. There is a mediterranean dome which covers not just actual mediterranean plants but also plants from similar climates such as California and South Africa. There were huge numbers of tulips! But it was quite crowded - which was not really surprising given that we were there on a wet day during the Easter holidays! The queues in the eateries were rather long. We went for a stroll in the outside gardens in an interlude between the showers, and then took ourselves off to Padstow for scampi and chips in one of the harbourside pubs, a potter around the harbour and a visit to the Stein delicatessen. We drooled over the menu at the Rick Stein restaurant. Not as expensive as you might expect, but expensive enough - and particularly so when you have a lobsterphile in your company. We shall save up and come back. We had better bring Lindsey and Ian with us. Serious saving is clearly needed!

I enjoyed Eden lots. But if I could only go to one Cornish garden ever again, it would be Heligan. However, we have an annual ticket to Eden so will certainly go again if we find ourselves back in Cornwall in the next twelve months.

We came back to the cottage along the coast road. Not that we could see much - the mist came in and covered everything up. And we had local sausages for dinner. I bought a taster pack at Eden, which had seven sausages, each of a different flavour. They were seriously nice - not much salt and no gristle and very tasty. There are two left for breakfast. I suppose I should get dressed, create breakfast and start the day.

We’ve just had a message from Jeanette to say that Mike (her father in law), who was in hospital last week with a suspected aneurism which transpired to be a heart problem which they fixed with a couple of stents, was out shopping yesterday and had to be removed from a shop in an ambulance and taken back to hospital with a suspected heart attack. Seems like a rather melodramatic way of getting out of paying your shopping bill! Jeanette says he spent a peaceful night with no further chest pains and they are doing more tests.

Oh - and Lindsey reports that my divorce papers have arrived at her place, thus beating Simon by a month. In a fine piece of cosmic irony they arrived almost exactly to the date of the wedding!