Jubilee weekend at Trefalen

 The Jubilee long weekend is over. I was too busy to think much about it on the Saturday. The salad crops, which I have sown to feed seventy two people for the wedding in three weeks time, are still only two inches high. So I spent the day thinning, transplanting, watering, even talking to them. It is a crop I have grown many time before, Thomson and Morgan’s ‘spicy salad mix’, which usually produces a mass of leaves about six weeks after sowing. But not this year.

     Even as I transplanted and watered (and planted my cucumbers and courgettes, and weeded the beetroot, and did the million others things that need doing at this time of year) I could hear  holiday makers heading down to the beach. I enjoy bank holidays here. I enjoy the visitors. So I promised myself that, once the last lettuce was in place, I would go and join them. And then the rain came. And  stayed with us for most of Sunday.

     This meant it was not until late on Sunday afternoon that I eventually headed for what I expected to be an empty desolate beach. But of course I had forgotten the surfers. I met the first as I headed down the steps, stepping aside to let him run past to his car. They always run, down the steps to the sea, up the steps back to their cars. Only once have I seen a surfer walking slowly up the steps.  It was dark and he was looking for the car keys  which he had hidden in the bushes at the side of the path. We had helped him for perhaps half an hour, shining our torch hopefully into the mass of greenery. Then had driven him, bare footed and still in his wet suit, to the pub, where he would be able to choose between a bed for the night or calling out his wife, over a hundred miles away.

     Leaving the surfers, I returned to the cottage via the campsite. The rain had really stopped now and campers were emerging from their tents and caravans, and looking up at the sky. The fields came alive; small figures chasing after balls, kites heading into the sky, barbecues lighting up. Like all bank holidays here. However this was a bank holiday with a difference. Down at the bottom end of the bottom field sat the Queen, in a tent covered with Union jacks, surrounded by crowned princesses. The diamond jubilee was alive and well had reached Trefalen. I greeted the Queen  and she gave me a paper hat with streamers..

      Then finally, on Monday, the sun shone again. Holidaymakers poured into the carpark, down the steps. There were swimmers and kayakers in the sea, games of cricket and rounders on the sand, and sunbathers lying in the shelter of windbreaks, beside older people on chairs, rugs covering their knees. There were dogs and wet suits and picnics and sand castles. A glorious British beach. 

 

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