About fifty metres from the cliff edge the wind hits me. It is so cold it makes my face ache. It is coming from the north. Where has it travelled from? Greenland? It sure feels like it. Its force is such that it makes me suddenly stop and then slowly carry on with my walk like a film being stopped and then slowly starting up again. There is something comic about it. Daffodils are in flower but their yellow cheeriness seem incongruous in the face of this juggernaut coming off the Atlantic: their heads are blown flat onto the grass, their stems held down by the wind – they and I all bent double in the face of such brute force.
It reminds me of Seamus Heaney’s poem about the storm that hits the island ‘We just sit tight while the wind dives and strafes invisibly’.
This also feels like an aerial assault and maybe, like the narrator and most people today, I should also be sitting tight out of this weather but my aim now is to embrace the path in all its guises, in every mood, however capricious it might be.
Sitting tight is what a lot of people are doing in The Blue Bar facing the beach in Porthtowan. It has bay windows with window seats. All four of them are full with people – many with dogs – who are all looking out at the beach, the sea, the sky, the weather. There is a great comfort from being close to the weather but not in it. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a website that creates new vocabulary or as it puts it “Creates beautiful new words that we need but do not yet have.” A recent addition has been the word chrysalism and TDoOS gives its definition as ‘the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm, listening to waves of rain pattering against the roof like an argument upstairs, whose muffled words are unintelligible but whose crackling release of built-up tension you understand perfectly’. For sure I have felt this pleasure too – as we all must have to some extent – but I have a far more powerful response when I’m actually IN it.
I pick up where I left off on January 13th on the cliffs less than half a mile south west of Porthtowan. How much can change in six weeks. Since then I have driven to Ukraine and met many wonderful, brave people facing up to their third year of war; I received the news of the death of a beloved aunt who liked to read these pages and I also made a discovery of something which has required visits to the local hospital. When there I was greeted by a whole team of new people – kind and efficient – who in turn introduced me to a whole range of new vocabulary about what is going on inside me. This is a new kind of adventure, one where I’m still familiarising myself with the contours and features of my own inner world. It has also galvanised me to come back here where now the air seems fresher, the colours fuller and the light that little bit more brighter.
On the way into Porthtowan mine shafts are rather daintily covered with peaked caps like large Chinese hats. Beyond the ocean is separated into moving patches of grey, green grey and then luminous swathes of jade where the sun has let its touch rest on the surface of the water. It’s mindbending in the variety of forms it presents.
And the weather is also incredible today in its variety. I have only got to the cliffs approaching Wheal Charlotte Moor the other side of Porthtowan but what a sight. It is an almost unparalleled performance, like a display by the Gods who seem to say ‘Look you little people. This is what I/we are capable of!’
Fronts of dark cloud and falling rain cross the ocean like serried ranks of soldiers approaching the cliffs. It’s both terrifying and thrilling at the same time. Moments later the whole sky is that much lighter. Far away now to the west there are silver lines of light on the water under the rocks of St Ives bay. Above them the odd roof of a house in St Ives catches the light, a patch of shining silver momentarily lit up like the pane of a satellite in space catching the light of the sun.
Above me the sun is a wobbly white oval in the sky that appears briefly and then is enveloped by the grey smoke of moving cloud. Great layers of surf keep gliding in like enormous white sheets folder over each other while the roar of the sea is unending.
When I bring my gaze back to the cliff top I notice the grass is intensely bright, a hallucinogen green. In places it has been sculpted by the wind into small dips and ridges like the land has had its hair ruffled.
When I turn to look up a prefect multi coloured arc has formed to the north east – vibrant, vivid in its colour – and its presence is amplified by the dark backdrop of the sky.
The walk today is brief. I set off late and for a long time I am just on one patch of cliff engrossed in the stagecraft of everything that is happening around me while the odd couple walk past with a dog and glance a sideways look at me as if to say ‘What IS that guy doing?’
On the way back small hailstones tok tok on the hood of my jacket and bounce off the ground around me. They look like pearls nestled amongst the blades of grass. Away to the west the great white dome at Nancekuke Common airbase glints in the watery sun. It wasn’t long ago I was there but it seems like another era.
Sonetimes the path is like a memory guide tracking my life. I can literally look back and see the places I trod before: passing Portreath on that grey January day thinking of the Mousehole lights and lost crew of the Penlee lifeboat, sleeping on the perfect sand of Carbis Bay while the toylike train rattled round the cliffs, passing the old stamping ground of Alfred Wallis in St Ives and seeing the scenes he painted. These places I can still SEE and they prompt these memories in me. How far back can I go? Passing Lands End tired and sore. Watching the soft shades of sunset over Mousehole, Portscatho, St Anthony’s Head an more. Watching lights glimmer on The Lizard at night. Seeing ships and stars and the sun rising and sinking and always the sea, the sea, the sea. And on and on. It’s a kind of therapy this visual delving into the past.
And today? Well maybe it’ll stay with me, maybe not. We’ll see at some point when I’m many thousand steps and hours ahead of this here and now.
The Slow Walker 