Travelling west through Charmouth and Lyme Regis but also back in time as the landscape is full of memories for me. Slow progress on the bus followed by slow progess on an Exeter-bound train quickening for a while after I join the express to Cornwall, only to slow down again after we cross Brunel’s great bridge across the Tamar and approach the country’s periphery. The end of the journey is still a bit too quick for me as I miss my stop through an ill judged pit stop and travel on to the end of the line in Penzance. But using time and money to correct past mistakes is just part of the game these days and I roll back by taxi to St Ives with unbatted eyelids.
The next day my old schoolfriend whom I haven’t met for almost a half century takes me to see the old undersea tin mines along the coast. The environment is beautiful, the history of the mines less so with stories of broken cables that send over 30 people hurtling to their deaths at the bottom of the shaft, the almost certainly ineffective attempts at self protection by those processing arsenic and forms of ”employment” where miners bid for an area to work on and settle up at the counting house according to the amount extracted.