We all arrived safely back from Cornwall yesterday, my luggage however, has taken an extended break after refusing to leave with me, remaining in the bedroom at Sally’s house until I can muster the enthusiasm to sit behind a combine harvester on the A303 for several hours on my way to picking it up. Truro is a bastard of a journey, particularly around the classic bottle neck on the A30 just east of Newquay where the dual carriageway inexplicably reverts to a single lane at the entrance of a service station, causing at best a five mile tail back and at worst utter carnage amongst a huge pile up. It really is a vintage piece of road planning, even surpassing the “Oh look there’s Stonehenge” section of the A303 for its ability to turn you in to a frothing maniac.

My friend (Alison) from Australia, suggested on Facebook yesterday that I should perhaps get grip and stop getting hysterical as she actually travels four hours just to do the shopping and to extent I agree with her sentiment. I should maybe just get it over and done with, passing the time by counting the different types of farm yard machinery on the roads, their top speeds and ability to drive you to the verge of insanity. Perhaps I could create my own game of Top Trumps featuring the farmers of South West England. As for Alison doing an eight hour round trip for her weekly shop, she has to be highly commended, one can only presume she has a well planned shopping list as I can’t imagine what it must be like getting a couple of miles from home before banging yourself on the forehead with the palm of your hand and saying “aaarrrghhh….the bloody washing powder, I knew there was something….oh well, I best go back.”  It’s bad enough doing it on the half mile trip back from Sainsburys in Hatch Warren let alone the Australian outback.

Anyway, back to the holiday where I was surrounded by three teenage boys and no adults, an experience that was a unique, entertaining, funny, infuriating and enlightening in equal measure. The last time I went away with Harry and George for a sustained period without other adults they were still innocent boys who had the ability to go to and get out of bed at a time other members of the human race would deem as being normal. If I had left George and his friend Matt in their beds they would still be asleep now, it is incredible how much of the day they were unconscious, it was like having a pair of pet cats, they even started hovering around me when they woke up hungry, falling just short of crawling in and out of my legs as a show of affection that might accelerate the arrival of food, which for the record, they ate at an alarming rate. Harry, in fairness, was slightly more alert, he even got out of bed on his own accord one morning.

However, when they were out of their slumber they wasted no time using up their masses of stored energy and all three of them spent much of the time swimming, kayaking, body boarding, drooling over and showing off to a shapely sixteen year old local girl at the harbour point. The excellent weather meant that most activities were possible, Cornwall is a fantastic place in the sunshine and we were incredibly lucky that as was the case with Swanage earlier in August, we picked a period of warm weather amongst all the other dross the great British climate has dished up this summer. There have been two weeks of good weather in July and August and I was on holiday for both of them, any poor sod who has been camping in Swanage since we left must have had a bit of a rough time.

The dark clouds rolled in yesterday as we left and today has felt like a real end of summer type day, with brief spells of luke warm sunshine and a gusty wind that sapped my enthusiasm. I don’t mind the seasons really, but the early signs of Autumn always fill me with a sense of gloom as I adjust to the fact that the evenings are drawing in and there are many wet and windy days to come.

Still, looking on the positive side, I have a VAT payment to send in morning.