It was a blustery day on Wednesday, but I have taken the opportunity to have a short walk when I have to visit the library in Hayle. Sometimes along the Copperhouse Pool and the garden, or along the quayside to the beach. This week I chose the beach as it was low tide. (Please click […]
Cloudscapes
Within the Salon community we count many devotees of the writing of Virginia Woolf and every year we offer a number of studies focusing on her work, some online and others based in some of the places she loved. This autumn we will run the seventh in our series of Virginia Woolf travel studies in […]
Campaign to protect views immortalised in Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’
Since the last update report there has been significant progress in preparing the Market House for use by the Archive. In early 2024 The St Ives Archive and Town Council were fortunate enough to receive central government funding from the Community Ownership Fund and the Town Enterprise Grant to renovate the Market House in the […]
Market House update
Something a little different from me today – another post in an occasional series of pieces about the art books I’ve accumulated over the past few years, mostly from shows I’ve visited in London and the South East. One of my current reading aims is to actually sit down and read some of these books, […]
Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour
Which political party seeking our vote in tomorrow’s local elections is the most ‘Cornish’? Putting policies aside, most of which are merely variants of ‘build more’, which has the greatest proportion of Cornish candidates? One, admittedly very crude, method for assessing this is to compare the surnames of candidates against the 850 or so surnames […]
Cornwall’s local elections 2025
FOR M.F.H.
I can’t remember being in class with you.
Not socially I mean, but at Grammar School.
If it was Latin you would have been at the top,
As I was usually bottom, lost and
deposed by deponents.
Perhaps on the Rugby field –
we could both have been props.
I couldn’t see without specs and
coming from London, soccer
was really your game.
We might hae rolled down the grass
Together on the Island-
years passed before I knew it
to be an ancient coastal fort or castle.
With H.C. we might have climbed
the rock we called “Old Smokey”.
Or did we look and fish together
for mulllies together in rock pools?
We followed the older boys building dens
-of cardboard and canvas and pitched camps
In tents on the grass like Brutus
Before the battle of Phillipi.
Your father was a printer and to
my parents a cockney with fair hai rand
ran the youth club with judo in the schoolhouse
next to the textile factory, close
to the beach and the sea.
We traveled to Penzance daily on the buses
forgetting those cowboy films we watched on your TV,
we spoke little except,
I do recall staying off school your
coming around and telling me I had a detention.
What for I wonder?
Towards summer term in the third year,
I borrowed your exercise book
before the Physics exam, my own a mess,
and swotted up calorimetry. I could never
understand how a copper can could have a temperature.
Was it sick?
To my own surprise, I came top with
an absurd 98 per cent.So went on to
Measuring “g” with a swinging lath, like
a cricket bat with the Wing Commander
You went forward to Caesar’s Wars in
tripartite Gaul then Greek and Homer.
Where are you now I wonder>
With Russell Crowe in the Elysian Fields?
penwithlit