Week 28

Cornish seas and Carnival

Hello! I hope you are coping with the heat. I am, afraid I am going to drive you mad with pictures of beautiful blue Cornish seas…

This is our weekly community post in which we track the changes of the seasons week by week, tumbling them all together into a big poem of the month. Thank you for joining in. We want your minutiae, the little things you have spotted that make this week particular and special.

Here’s mine:

Cornish seas

We went on holiday! This is the view from our actual chalet, and that is the actual south west coast path right there. We sat and sipped coffee in our little porch and watched the dog walkers and the beach goers going past, and then every now and then the walkers, with their back packs and serious faces.

This is our beach, and that is St Ives off across the way. It’s so big that it never really gets crowded and the dogs think they’re in heaven.

This was the day the beach got the busiest, and we were just on our way home after body boarding and then stopping for coffees and ice creams at the beach cafe. Lush.

St Paul’s Not Carnival

Jerk chicken barbecue haze…

St Paul’s Carnival was cancelled this year. I was planning to meet a couple of friends for a quick afternoon drink down there and one of them said ‘oh it’s unofficial St Paul’s Carnival, so it might be a bit busy.’ We agreed that we could always go somewhere else if it was…

Then we got there and…well basically no one seemed to have TOLD Carnival that is was cancelled. We had a little drink and then wandered in and before we knew it we had cans of Red Stripe in our hands and were dancing in the street and eating jerk chicken and samosas like we were twenty again.

Fun!

I love St Paul’s and Notting Hill partly because they are just fun of course but also because they are rooted in the sort of ancient calendar stuff that I love including in the almanac. Both are descended from Trinidadian and Barbadian Carnival, which usually falls in February and is itself descended from the former slave owners’ pre-Lent Carnival celebration, which on emancipation the Trinidadians and Tobagodians took and turned on its head to make their own celebration, and which then got carried to Britain by the Windrush Generation. As such Carnival in St Paul’s and Notting Hill comes from exactly the same root as the Venice Carnival, the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Carnival in Rio de Janeiro and more (even, arguably, Pancake Day…) - a great pre-Lent party. Transposed into cold, rainy Britain though, February no longer made sense, but July and August really did, especially perhaps this one…hence why our Carnivals fall in summer.

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That’s it from me, now over to you, what have you done, seen, eaten, spotted, smelt etc…that felt very ‘this week of the year’? Answers in the comments please.