Monthly Archives: July 2018

A Cock-a-two?

Posted on by

 

Full tide at Cockwood Harbour

Beautiful Cockington Village

When I asked my old school friend Sally (now living in Cyprus but on holiday in England at present) if she’d like to go to Cockington for an outing on Tuesday she thought I meant Cockwood; well they sound similar, and both spots are beautiful, but they are quite different and about fifteen miles apart. Cockwood, as you may be aware, is the little harbour on our side of the Exe Estuary and just two and a half miles from our house; it is perhaps the favourite cycling destination for Chris and me. Cockington, on the other hand, is the charming little “chocolate box” village situated only a mile or so from the seafront at Torquay, and it’s so well hidden that you wouldn’t know that it’s there.

My very first visit to quaint Cockington Village was with my cousins who lived in Torquay; that was when I was fourteen and had just arrived from Australia. On the way to Cockington – we all walked in those days – my cousin John saved me from a speeding car by pushing me into a hedge… and for the first time in my life I was stung by stinging nettles, then treated with dock leaves growing in the hedge also – another first.

In my case fourteen was an age for many firsts. My new friend Sally, who, like me, was new to the school, came from a family with rather modern and sophisticated taste – they used to eat real spaghetti not Heinz spaghetti and tomato sauce from a tin! My first attempt to eat real spaghetti – at Sally’s house – proved challenging. The pasta would not stay on my fork. Maybe an hour into the meal, when everyone else had finished, and my dinner was cold, Sally’s father could bear watching me no more.

“You don’t have to eat it Sally,” he said kindly, no doubt thinking that I preferred the Heinz variety.

I expect I blushed. It was all so embarrassing for a shy fourteen-year-old from the bush. 

 

So Chris took we two old school friends to Cockington bright and early on Tuesday. At nine-thirty in the morning, though it’s the height of summer, there were few people about and the village felt like it belonged to us… and the lady who sat contemplating on a bench by the lower lake. The air had the coolness of morning and the sun had the heat of promise for a hot afternoon. The paths were shaded by trees with leaves every colour of green, the outer ones edged with sunshine. The lady on the bench left with her white poodle, greeted us on the dappled path (as if to show no hard feelings for us interrupting her reverie) and Sally took the lady’s solitary position while Chris and I sat close together on another bench.

At our leisure we strolled back to the main path and down to the church and the big house called Cockington Court. From our table outside the cafe we watched some people trickling down the path and larger groups of young folk running off the path, down the grassy banks to the field of parched grass where cricket matches are still played on Sunday afternoons. The tourists were coming, filling the hidden world that we had felt was especially for us. It was time to leave. We were not so dissimilar to the lady on the bench. But we didn’t leave without a walk through the rose garden and a mosey around the craft centre – we, too, were kind of tourists.

I’m so glad we went to Cockington Village and not Cockwood Harbour (albeit a wonderful local destination) not least because we now have a new addition on our terrace – a strange-looking bird we acquired on our visit. Is it a cockatoo by any chance? No, that would be too coincidental. Our friend Roland from Australia (and something of a bird-man himself) has called her Tammy Toucan, and if you think she’s a bit ugly… good! We hope she’ll scare away the seagulls and pigeons that like to perch on our balustrade! All the same, we think Tammy is beautiful.

Tammy Toucan from Cockington Craft Centre

The name Cockington is thought to derive from Saxon terms meaning either ‘the settlement near the springs’ or ‘the place of the red meadow’. … From 1130-1350 the lands were owned by the Fitzmartin family who took the surname De Cockington.

Something Between Us

Posted on by

I was talking to my mother (alias Supergran) beside the racks of freshly baked bread at Lidl in Newton Abbot when it happened. My hand was reaching for a bread bag on the shelf underneath the French baguettes while Mum was two feet away checking out the pizza rolls and bruschetta novelties (and asking what they were) when suddenly an arm appeared between us.

The arm was long and brown, and tattooed on the shoulder and biceps. The arm shot out so quickly, and was so close, that I couldn’t make out the design of the ink illustration. The one thing I knew for sure was that it was young, smooth skinned and… muscular! The fine hairs on the sun-tanned arm glinted gold under the neon lights in the bread aisle as it stretched towards the baguettes.

“Excuse me ladies,” said a male voice.

My eyes followed the arm up to his face. He was perhaps twenty-four, had blond curly hair cut neat and short, and he wore a small beard on his chin. He grabbed a baguette, already in cellophane, and withdrew his arm. There was an empty space where the arm had been and Mum and I were left staring at one another.

I wondered what Mum was thinking… Would she comment on the tattoos and the rude intrusion? I hoped she wouldn’t tell him off in a Supergran manner. Well, he did excuse himself.

My ninety-five year old mother, dumbfounded and wide-eyed, paused for a long moment as she made sense of the arm and how to respond. At last she found her voice. 

“WOW!” she exclaimed sufficiently loud to draw attention from all the shoppers in Lidl, including the young man who was by now past the bread ovens.

The blond turned and smiled a lovely white smile before dashing off in embarrassment. I don’t expect he finished all his shopping in Lidl last Saturday.

 

Four Men in a Boat

Posted on by

“Roland, would you mind telling me again about your boat trip, in detail, so that I can tell my blog readers?” I asked with pen and paper in my hands.

“No, of course not, but where shall I start?” our friend from Brisbane chuckled at the memory and sat down on the dry seat I had proferred (it had stopped raining and he was having a smoke on my studio patio whilst I sat the other side of the threshold with the door open between us).

“Start at the beginning,” I suggested, “and I’ll prompt you when necessary.”

“Well,” began Roland, “we arrived at Polly Steps at Teignmouth, on the harbour side of Shaldon Bridge. Geoff (my brother-in-law) drove the trailer onto the boat ramp while Chris (that’s my husband), James (my sixteen year old nephew) and I were already knee-deep in the water in order to manoeuvre the boat off the trailer. Three attempts and we were launched successfully. Captain Geoff sat next to the motor on the back seat, James was on the triangular bow seat and Chris and I were in the middle seats. On the floor of the boat was a conglomeration of ropes, plastic bags, oars twice the size of the boat and a cool bag with three cans of beer.”

“So not much floor space?” I queried.

“Not with all those ropes,” he shook his head and gave a wry smile as if he was remembering something funny.

“And what was the weather like?” I thought you readers might like to paint a mental picture of the scene.

“Oh yes, the weather,” Roly understood. “It was around five o’clock in the afternoon and sunny – balmy even – not a cloud in the sky. The tide was coming in but the water was shallow as high tide was eight o’clock. We were headed for The Passage House Inn at Newton Abbot. As we negotiated the narrow channel for a mile or so up the river Chris and Geoff pointed out various houses and the village of Bishopsteignton set below the sunlit fields on the right hand side. It must have been around there that the shimmering on the water made it ever more hard for us to pick out the channel and the muddy riverbed appeared closer and closer as we looked over the side of the boat.”

“Did you all see that?” I wondered about Geoff.

“Yes, except for Geoff!”, Roly laughed. “Through his expert navigation the propeller started churning up the mud… which reminded me of my own experience of running out of water in my boat a few years ago…!

“Oh no,” I said, remembering that same incident.

“Yes, we could all feel the shallowness of the water and James said to Geoff, ‘Granddad, tilt the motor forward to raise the prop,’ but it was too late; by the time he’d finished his sentence we’d hit the mud full on. We couldn’t go anywhere so Chris, James and I got out to push the boat back into deeper water.”

“Did Geoff laugh too?” I asked, considering that Roland was laughing while talking.

“He couldn’t understand how it had happened and suggested we push the boat into deeper water,” our friend from Australia chuckled. “Young James, being an Oxford rower, said, ‘Hold on, I’ll row us out into deeper water!’ We got back into the boat and this time James took up position in the middle and put the giant oars into the rowlocks. James’ arms criss-crossed as he attempted to row and he complained, ‘Granddad, these oars are too long and need adjusting’. Geoff said, ‘I’ll just saw them off then when we get home!'”

I laughed.

“James started rowing, pulling for all he was worth,” Roland continued, relishing the memory, “and we were going nowhere. We looked over the sides of the boat into the water and saw that we were stranded; inadvertently, we had pushed the boat directly onto a submerged tree trunk! But the ultra long oar came in handy when James used it, gondolier-like, to push the boat off the tree trunk.

Geoff started the motor but let James take over. ‘You see if you can do any better!’ Geoff told him. James negotiated his way into the right channel and headed toward Passage House Inn (where we sometimes stop for Chris to read Mum my blogs). The river was too low for us to disembark at the jetty so we pulled onto the mud and Geoff struck anchor on the grassy bank. Being safety conscious, Geoff covered the anchor with his high vis jacket to prevent people from tripping over it.

Two beers and pleasant chats later we re-boarded and set off to advance further into Newton Abbot. The channel became smaller and smaller and the foliage greater and greater until we ran out of navigable water – it was like a jungle.” Roland paused as he reminisced.

The crew go upriver to Newton Abbot

“Like the ‘African Queen’?” I saw it in my mind’s eye.

“We did mention that,” Roland agreed, “also when were pushing the boat.”

I thought of Humphrey Bogart and the leeches.

“Two hours after we’d set out we headed back,” Roland wanted to finish his story. “The sun was lower in the sky and the tide was almost full, so no more running aground. We passed The Passage House Inn – didn’t go in – and went on to the boardwalk wharf jetty at Coombe Cellars. It was about eight o’clock. The air was cooling as the sun went down and lots of people had finished their dinners. We enjoyed our one drink as watched the ripples on the water, the long shadows and the lovely reflections of the trees on the river. It was absolutely beautiful.”

The sun going down at Coombe Cellars

“Any more mishaps in the homeward leg of your journey?” I had to ask.

“There was no heading peacefully back to Polly Steps, as you know Sally,” Roland chuckled. “Geoff shut the motor off as we reached the boat ramp and Chris, James and I jumped into the water to secure the boat and prevent it from bashing into the ramp. Geoff stabilised the motor, pushing it forward to stop the propeller from scraping the corrugated concrete surface. So the three of us deckhands were all wet in water up past our knees while Captain Geoff was nice and dry still in the stern of his boat. Young James observed, ‘Granddad, you haven’t even got your feet wet during this trip!’

At the same instant Geoff was disembarking from the boat, one leg over the side and in the process of bringing the other leg over, when his remaining foot became entangled in the conglomeration of ropes, plastic bags and over-sized oars… Suddenly, breaking free from the restricting anchor rope – and with his mobile phone in his hand – Geoff fell sideways into the water!”

“And was he completely submerged?” I asked with devilment.

“Completely,” laughed Roland, “and the funniest thing was that his hand came out of the water first! ‘My phone! My phone!’ he called out as he raised his head.”

“Did you have a wonderful time?” I asked.

“It was absolutely brilliant!” our old friend enthused. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world… and no doubt the couple of beers made it even merrier!”

“Thank you Roly.” 

Now don’t feel too sorry for my brother-in-law because his lovely new Samsung Galaxy 6 Edge mobile phone arrived today and he vastly pleased. Every cloud has a silver lining!

Water, water everywhere but never a drop to drink!