who only by moving can balance

One of the things the refurbished mouldering ancestral pile contains is a wood stove.

And so, a few weeks ago, my mother was grousing to me that this meant that among all the other infinitely many things the house still somehow needed was a set of fire irons.

Aha, says I, I actually just saw a set of those get offered on the local Freecycle. Want me to ask for it?

She did. I did. It was spoken for. But the person very kindly wrote back and said that if they were a no-show, we had next refusal. Thank you very much, I said, and at least for your sake I hope it doesn't come to that!

The original claimants were a no-show.

So off I shipped Adam, into the night, and he returned with fire irons in the back of the car, and left them there on the grounds that it's not like we needed them in the London flat, and I blithely ignored them until it came time to pack the car (and even then paid them only enough attention to tangle them up in the legs of the folding garden chairs).

We got to Cornwall, and I blithely ignored them some more except insofar as necessary to move them from the boot to the hearth.

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Reading. I spent the last week on holiday, and singularly failed to take with me any of the physical books I was reading. I did, however, pack my e-reader (as well as a single solitary French horn), and even managed some reading. ( T. Kingfisher, Martha Wells, Maggie Stiefvater... )

Playing. In addition to my terrible phone games: three rounds of Scrabble! A, my mother and I won one each, which was very pleasing. Alas I did not actually manage to get in around of Splendor with A.

Cooking. So much food. Apple & mint jelly (~7 340g jars); Apfelmus (4 ~600g jars). A variant sea-spicy aubergine recipe, which I am going to be trying again tomorrow.

Eating. Courtesy of my mother: stroganoff; Apfelstrudel; a variety of other treats. Courtesy of vendors various: a vegetable pasty (Rowes); a cheese and vegetable pasty (Ann's Pasties); and a curried vegetable pasty (the National Trust, on our way back upcountry). Courtesy of the village chippy: chips! And nibbles of Adam's bits and pieces.

Exploring. We bimbled down to the beach, and also around Trelissick briefly, and also Kynance Cove. A drove the Tramper all the way down to Cornwall, and I was delighted to actually explore some with it.

(On the way back upcountry, we stopped at Castle Drogo, but didn't actually get beyond the café.)

Creating. A house sign! Chalk marker, one of the roof slates retrieved from a stack in the vegetable patch, and some poking around Art Deco fonts. We will see how it holds up to the elements before fixing it to the wall -- it might yet find itself in need of varnishing or similar...

Growing. I took the basils down to Cornwall, and then snapped one of the stems this morning while packing up. That's currently sat in a container of water to see if I can persuade it to root -- cuttings do theoretically work...

I was relieved when we got home to find that both the squash and the chilli had survived a week or so's drought.

Observing. MANY THINGS. Lots of plants, obviously, including a lot of sloes -- BUT in particular and especially, we were amazingly lucky at Kynance. We saw both a pair of choughs (screeching! doing aerobatics! displaying their wee pink feet beautifully on their way in and out of one of the less-human-accessible caves!) and A SEAL bobbing around with its nose, and occasionally the rest of its head, out of the water.

(A & my mother also saw they're-pretty-sure three choughs around the fields behind the house -- these I did not see but am Very Excited About.)

Elsewise: lots of wild snails (some white-and-black striped; some CONICAL), plus plenty of Antics inside our tank; lots of amazing sunsets; fluid dynamics in action at the beach. ETA: OH! AND! On the beach at home! A very pretty blue-and-purple-and- fragment of a Portuguese man-o-war!

I have had a really lovely week. <3

from a historical perspective: a clothing ration book from 1947/1948, front filled in, still almost entirely full of coupons.

From Adam's perspective it's probably beaten by one of Papa's plumbing tools, the details of which I have forgotten excepting that it's adjustable. From my own perspective I've come away with a replacement water butt (some engineering and a lot of cleaning required, but it's definitely more functional than my existing one) and some Aspen bowls, of which I have fond memories.

It's lovely to be home, and there's still work to be done unpacking at this end, and I started missing it as soon as we came past the end of the road that always feels like a thrumming of nearly home nearly home nearly home.

I'm most taken by my grandfather's 21st birthday present: a gorgeous slide rule in a lovely leather case, still all working smoothly and beautifully.

My mother was most taken with his parking permit for Brocklesby Park Golf Course, signed by the then-estate manager, about whom we were told many stories.

Item the first: a letter from my great-great-grandmother Spain, to Papa as a young man, informing him of various familial goings-on relating to his younger siblings (at that point in her care, because reasons) and to various aunts and cousins going fishing. This is the first actual written artefact of Grandma Spain, rather than simply references to and stories about her, that my mother has ever encountered; it was lurking (of course) in a sturdy leather bag we'd assumed to be Yet More Photographic Equipment on top of Lord Whoever's Mahogany Wardrobe, where we unearthed also the commissions yesterday.

Item the second: it transpires that one of the Spinster Aunts Who Lost Their Fortune In The Australian Gold Rush and Lived Out Their Days In The Convent As Paupers... pseudonymously wrote a book of literary criticism. Of Dante. That's still in print.

• there is now 4G signal downstairs at the mouldering ancestral pile. Four bars of it! This is astonishing; for a long long time you could just about get half a bar of signal for making phone calls in a couple of spots in the attic if the weather was fine. So that's instantly added to the property value without us even having to do anything...
  
• abstracted from the m.a.p.: an icing-spreading implement, a hopefully-competent bread knife, an ice-cream scoop, a tiny fork, and two butter curlers. (One of them is steel-handled and larger and probably more usable; the other is smaller and wood-handled and very emphatically from West Germany.)
  
• after a quick triage (and unloading the Phormium tenax from the car, I now no longer have three clumps of P. tenax cluttering the place up, the car is Very Muddy but it's a hire car so that is FINE) we pottered off to Roskilly's for lunch and a little grockleism, via Goonhilly and an introduction to Arthur, because A had not been before. Apparently they're moving the Jersey herd onto a New Zealand-style once-a-day milking regime (rather than the standard British twice-a-day option) so we didn't get to see the milking (AND health-and-safety means you're no longer allowed on the dairy floor to cuddle the calves, boo) but we went up to the gallery anyway and showed A all the explanatory signs and pointed out the high-tech milking stations to him. (The once-a-day milking is from around 10 to around 11:30, so given that I'm intending to commandeer A for another visit to the Hepworth museum and sculpture garden at St Ive's, we might have another go at saying hi to the cows on our way out one day.) We DID, however, meet quails (smol round angry borbs!), and Long Ducks, and a guinea fowl, and some turkeys, and A Lot of chickens, and some very enthusiastic goats, and a Tamworth pig (which A bought food for -- 50p -- and then fed delightedly).
  
• In the course of my afternoon it became rapidly apparent that the Pile in the cellar, which I'd assumed was mostly empty cardboard boxes and disintegrating plastic bags and the leads cut off expired toasters... was, once upon a time, Papa's work area, such that underneath a thin veneer of soggy cardboard boxes and disintegrating plastic bags (and expired medication) is, in fact, an incomprehensible jumble of rusty pipe wrenches and even rustier tins of paint and brand-new still-in-packaging tools misc. from Coopers of Stortford (a curse upon their house). The thing is, it also contained Grandpa B's Billy Hooks (these are apparently A Thing) -- and at the back of the second cutlery drawer (do not, gentle reader, be fooled into believing that there are only two cutlery drawers) we also found some miscellaneous silver napkin rings and more importantly Grandpa B's service napkin ring (with his WWI ships and deployment dates engraved on it), and Papa's equivalent (off the Royal Engineers). The other thing is that we have house clearance people coming next week and we... really can't! just let them do their thing! without losing stuff like that! so we have to sort it ourselves anyway first.

... it is An Adventure.

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hahahahahaha terrible trite sonnets to get me used to the form you do not want to know how many times I had to rewrite this so that it managed to actually contain quatrains INSTEAD OF ENDLESS ENJAMBEMENT

Honestly? I live in a sedimentary pseudo-basin, so to me the most exciting things are the building stones. Which -- don't get me wrong! There's some lovely ones! There's a garnetiferous marble used to face this one building, which has streaks of tiny garnets pressed into waves and curls and it's great. There are also My Favourite Kerbstones, full of great big semi-aligned plagioclase laths; and lots of nice labradorite granites.

Much more interesting is the coast around the Mouldering Ancestral Pile: the beach a five minute walk away (Polurrian) features an outcropping of the Lizard Boundary Fault - the join between continental and oceanic crust. And then there's the Lizard complex as a whole, wherein what-used-to-be-the-mantle is actually exposed at the surface - over a few miles of coast you can actually walk from the base of old oceanic crust up to the surface, through gabbroic cumulates and sheeted dykes and pillow basalts; you can literally stand on an exposure of the Moho-that-was, the boundary between crust and mantle, and it's really cool. SO: for these purposes, Cornwall is home much more than London is. ;)