Summer 2015
The prospect of coming back to the UK had been hanging over us since we had arrived at the Caribbean. Decisions were made, scrapped and frequently forgotten. In the end we had made the
irrevocable agreement (because mum books the flights) that we would leave the boat at a boatyard and fly back home.
The prospect of coming back to the UK had been hanging over us since we had arrived at the Caribbean. Decisions were made, scrapped and frequently forgotten. In the end we had made the
irrevocable agreement (because mum books the flights) that we would leave the boat at a boatyard and fly back home.
But as we were slowly island-hopping south
towards Grenada (the island where we were going to leave the boat) we received
an email from Dad’s sister Miranda. My grandfather Boppa was extremely ill and
the doctors said he was too frail to operate upon. Boppa had been diagnosed
with Parkinson’s disease a few years earlier, and we had been worried about
leaving England in the first place. So now we raced across the ocean straight
to Grenada as fast as we could go.
When we arrived we checked into the boatyard, got the boat out of the water, fixed it up, got onto a re-scheduled flight and high-tailed it back to England.
After we got off the plane, we hired a car
and drove down to Cornwall. Before we got home we stopped by Nanna and Boppa’s
home to visit.
Sadly, Boppa died two days later, but it
was nice for us all to see him first.
He was 90 years old and had been ill for a
while so it wasn’t really a surprise.
However, within seven days Nanna also
passed away, this was a bit of a shock for us all. They were married for 67
years.
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| Smart boys |
It was really strange walking into the
house for the first time in 10 months. It is the longest I have ever been away
from home. It felt extremely odd to be back so suddenly, like the last 10
months had been a dream, or that I was dreaming now. I walked up to my bedroom
and turned on the light. It was like I had never been away. My older brother
Olly had tidied it up a lot, but apart from that, it was exactly how I had left
it. It was a strange feeling to be back. It was as if the last ten months had
never happened. The feeling did not disappear the next day. It was about a week until I got used to being back.
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| Special day, big brother Oliver comes to visit! |
There were quite a few very noticeable
differences between being on a boat and being in a house, as you might have guessed.
Having a bedroom is an obvious advantage to living on shore, while having a
full-size bed is luxury. Internet and electricity are also looked upon in a
different light. I really enjoyed being able to plug something in when it was
out of charge, without worrying about whether the solar panel was in the sunlight. It
felt very odd to enjoy being able to turn on a tap to get water, instead of
using a hand pump. The most unpleasant difference however was, of course, the
temperature. When we stepped off the plane the immediate thought was “let's go back!”
It was absolutely FREEZING!!!!!!!!!!!
We went swimming at Battery Rocks (our
favourite snorkeling spot in Cornwall) and when we came out 10 minutes later we
couldn’t feel our feet, hands and (in my case) nose.
At that point I really wanted to go back to
the Caribbean.
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| The beautiful Cornish coast |
Soon however, the advantages of being on
land made themselves clear, the biggest thing was the library. I didn’t realize
that you could order things from a whole network of libraries around Cornwall.
So if the Penzance branch doesn’t have my particular book then I can look on
the website to see if another one does! Since I discovered that, I have been
going nearly every day and have been reserving loads of books.
One thing we had been missing on our
travels were our rollerblades. For the first week in Penzance we searched and
searched fruitlessly and could not find them. After going all over the house
and the workshop, we found them in the kayaks, for some unfathomable reason.
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| Lunch with cousin Kesha |
When we visited we talked about a show we
are going to make together.
The Bash Street Kids’ “Interpretation of
Macbeth!” We are going to try to make it as funny as possible.
For the first time in my lifetime we were in Penzance for the annual festival, Golowan. Fin, Kesha and I did a stilt walkabout show called the Creatures. It was a lot of fun, and we even got our photo in The Cornishman newspaper.
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| Bash Street Kids performing The Creatures on Mazy Day |
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