Coasts, crests, and a hurried title

In which I share a poem inspired by stunning coastal walks, instead of making tiny chicken nuggets.

Taking a piglet to the seaside, feat. one of my forever favourite views — August ‘23.

I’m meant to be making chicken nuggets.

As I’ve mentioned before, that’s the sort of thing I subject myself to in my limited free time, these days. And another thing I like to do is make my own life really, really difficult, for no reason whatsoever. So when Arthur went down for his (usually mammoth) afternoon nap, I grabbed my hen-patterned apron, smoothed open the recipe book (What Mummy Makes, one of the bibles) and felt incredibly smug and domesticated until I opened the fridge and remembered I’d vowed to walk up to the greengrocers to buy all my veggies and eggs and stuff.

Anyway, as far as I know you can’t make chicken nuggets with 600g of chicken thigh and half a teaspoon of Nutella, so instead: here I am. I’ve had an indulgent 30-minute sofa strop-and-text, sprayed a bit of Method around the kitchen and come upstairs to finish a poem I half wrote while I was in Cornwall.

As usual, Cornwall was a tonic — we go there often to see my wonderful in-laws, so the weather hardly matters. As long as Arthur gets to crawl around the kitchen with his grandpa, and play peekaboo with grandma, and we get to catch up over an evening glass of wine, it’s a week very well spent. But! The sun actually did sneak out for a bit, so we pulled on our hiking boots to visit one of my favourite little beaches nearby: Lansallos.

It was Arthur’s first proper trip to the seaside. Sand was eaten, toes were tentatively dipped, and suncream was slathered. And my father-in-law Jerry and I got talking about poetry, and I said I’d write a poem about the beach — so I did. It’s about seeing beautiful things, and feeling incapable of seeing them properly.

Drunk on Cornish air, I scribbled a couple of other scraps of writing too, which I’ll share next week maybe. But at this point Arthur’s starting to stir and sneeze, and my client work’s calling, so I’ll wrap it up.

Enjoy. And if you’re heading for the hills this weekend, take off your shades, open your eyes, and gulp it all in. Bye!

In search of sandy toes on the walk down to Lansallos — August ‘23.

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Crest

Take off your sunglasses for this one
Or you won’t see it, 
not really, not properly. See
undulating green speckled yellow with buttercups.
Hedges swollen with blackberries, shiny sweet. 
Sky so clear and fresh it catches your breath.
Grit-bitten cliffs crowned with bristling trees —
shoulders hunched, permanently windswept. 
And below it all, 
down
down
down
below it all,
there it roars.
Blue? Maybe, from here.
But up close it’s a thunderstorm
tumbling with foam, 
crashing, spitting, exploding,
(you should see it when it’s angry)
fracturing sunlight into rainbows.
God, just look at it all.
Sometimes, 
I can’t open my eyes wide enough.