As restrictions are slowly being relaxed, there are more opportunities to go out and play. On Saturday went kayaking on the Helford river (photo) with my good friends Lee and Pete. A beautiful part of deepest Cornwall that has no childhood memories – I’m only beginning to discover it now half a century later.
This week I’ve been learning to distinguish between meadowsweet, water dropwort, water hemlock, marsh valerian (photo) and cow parsley, which can look quite similar at first sight and are profuse on Daubuz Moors at the moment.
Editing Wikipedia is a nice distraction during lockdown. I’m particularly interested in helping to reduce the long list of missing topics about Africa. Yesterday this took me, a virtual tourist, to the Benghazi lighthouse on the coast of Libya, the Belessa River that marks part of the boundary between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the Matakil Falls in the Central African Republic, and Paris which is home to the Karthala publishing house. If you’d like to edit any of these pages to make them more accurate and substantial, please go ahead, though you will Google in vain for further details about central African waterfalls…
Over the past few days, I’ve been making the most of the slackening of restrictions. Cornwall has over 300 beaches, and I’m currently staying in the area which uses the slogan “Seven bays for seven days”, inviting tourists to come for a week’s holiday and visit a different beach each day.
Porthcothan, Treyarnon and Constantine I already know well, but this week I’ve visited the four that I’m less familiar with: Booby’s Bay, Mother Ivey’s Bay, Harlyn Bay and Trevone (photo); all of them looking spectacular in the June sunshine.
We never came this far north when I was growing up, because there are any number of beaches much closer to Truro.
This was the week when lockdown fatigue finally set in, so I decided that remedial action was needed. Extra carers were recruited to deal with Mum and Dad’s needs, Hebrew lessons were cancelled, writing and editing was reduced to a minimum. That left just a few easily manageable tasks a day and lots of space in between for places like Porthcothan where the sea was a spectacular turquoise sparkling in the long-awaited Cornish sunshine.
On Sunday morning, making the most of the slackening of restrictions, we walked the whole length of Perranporth beach, 4 miles there and back. We are so fortunate to have this beach, and any number of others like it, on our doorstep.
I’m using lockdown to tie up a loose end in my life. I learned basic modern Hebrew many years ago when I was a kibbutz volunteer (1984-6) but never really mastered it, so I have enrolled in an on-line ulpan, an Israeli language school. Since last September, I’ve been having two lessons a week plus an hour a day of homework.
I’m delighted with the progress I’m making, and my teacher strikes just the right balance between encouraging me and pushing me out of my comfort zone. We have been steadily working through verb conjugations, and are wading through the future tense at the moment.
The first 15 seconds of Ulpan Aviv’s promotional video exactly captures my experience of the exquisite torture of language learning.
Faustin informs me that our old adversaries the termites are merrily chomping their way through the roof beams of my house in Togo. We need to act fast on this: Imagine woodworm on fast-forward, and you’ll get some idea of how destructive they can be.
We’re quite used to having to replace windows and doors, but this is the first time they have climbed this high.
The trouble is, Mandahewa, the roofing carpenter I really trust to do this job, is based in Lomé, 415 kms away, and he can’t travel north because there’s no public transport during lockdown. So Faustin will have to find someone local instead.
Rather to people speaking out of practice I am. Don’t please alarmed be if my words jumbled all up out come.
My evening routine during lockdown is to watch an episode or two of Doctor Who, making up for years of not being able to access BBC iPlayer in Togo. I’ve just finished plodding steadily through all forty episodes of the Peter Capaldi years, giving a second chance to this dark, troubled, emotionally cold Doctor. Like many others, I had a strong reaction against the 12th Doctor when he first appeared in 2013 because he seemed like such a jarring contrast to his predecessor. And I never did like electric guitars. But with hindsight, I think I wrote Capaldi off too early. He is an outstanding actor, and has created one of the most memorable and persuasive incarnations, if not the most immediately likeable. Nonetheless, I still think that history may judge Michelle Gomez as Missy to be the brightest star of series 8, 9 and 10.
As I watched these episodes, I found myself asking again whether new Doctors really do improve over time as they get rooted into their character, or whether we viewers just need time to gradually adjust to radically different incarnations. It’s a lot for the BBC to expect of us, after all, and I have been doing it since I was four.
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