1. Family News
Jake has just heard that he has won an open public art competition in Sydney, Vancouver Island not Australia. He submitted designs for two life-size sculptures to stand in a park near the sea, one of a pirate and the other a dog-walker. He was one of three artists to be short-listed and, after a further interview and a tense wait, he heard the other day that his designs have been chosen.
As you can imagine, the whole family is thrilled to bits – we are waiting for copies of his sketches!
Ellie is hard at work in the Ship Inn in Brisbane, loving the life, the climate and her work out there. We are now trying to work out when we can get out to see her, and what is the best way to travel. It does help that there are many Australians visiting Cornwall though sometimes there is a confusion of advice.
Sitting in the window of The Count House the other day, Philippa became aware of a man waving a piece of paper at her. She signalled for him to come in and he asked if she knew any of the people in an old photo he was holding. ‘Yes. That’s my mother; he’s my grandfather; that’s my father …’ and ran through two generations of Trahairs photographed outside that same window in the 1930’s.
It turned out that he was yet another cousin – she has hundreds – Paul Trahair, from Melbourne, over here with his wife Gail, exploring his Cornish roots.
It turns out that Paul is a direct descendant of great-grandfather Trahair, who wrote ‘a description of three year’s rambles in the republic of Chile.‘ We found it in a drawer when clearing the home of an ancient and much-loved aunt and didn’t know who he was.
The first page started: On the 2nd day of April 1849 I left St Just, to find my way to far off South America; I was almost the first to leave for a foreign land, so a great many came to see me off, to say ‘good-bye, for they thought I should never come back again.
On the top of Treguney, I turned, like a soldier, to take a last fond look of the old place, with a tear in my eye. I shall never forget it, for I was leaving all that was near and dear to me, to seek a strange land, where no familiar face would meet my eye, where a strange language should fall on my ear, not understood …’
Who he was had been a mystery to us until a few weeks ago.
2. Art at The Cook Book
We are delighted that Sally Corbet has agreed to hold an exhibition of her beautiful etchings and screen prints from now until the end of July. Entitled ‘Cornish Flowers’ it is a remarkable display of the flowers we see in hedges, on the cliffs and in Cornish gardens. Each print is a delicate masterpiece, such that we are having great difficulty in refraining from buying most of them.
Cornish Flowers exhibition by Sally Corbet
3. Conserving fish
At last the world is waking up to the perils of over-fishing. Readers of our book, ‘An Uncommon Place’ will know that we stopped serving tuna when we considered how most of it is caught; that David witnessed the destruction of the huge shoals of mackerel that once ran off these coasts, fished out by Scottish purse-seiners supplying Russian factory ships in the 1970’s; that we have known for centuries about the damage to fish-breeding grounds caused by beam-trawlers.
Those gentle basking sharks at present feeding off our beaches are threatened by the demand for Shark’s Fin soup.
Six basking shark are in this photo, taken in early June
Each of us has a choice. If we only buy fish from genuinely sustainable sources, accept that we are responsible for the consequences of what we eat, what we feed our families, then perhaps it won’t be too late to stop what seems to be a spiralling decline in the number of fish in our oceans.
4. Along the cliffs
We are in the purple phase of summer. Foxgloves in abundance, growing out of the heather, alive with feeding bees;
Foxgloves
the heady scent of wild honeysuckle buried among brambles and bracken; early morning walks on over-grown footpaths scatter clouds of grass-seeds; strange plants growing out of the gorse;
Detail of strange plant
Strange plant covering gorse
We’d love to know what it is!
5. Recipe of the Month
We were asked for this recipe after the wonderful article about The Cook Book in the Western Morning News. It was written by Carol Trewin on Saturday 16 May and has some fabulous photographs, especially of Aggie!
One couple who came into the café that day had read about us in Dorset in the morning, then driven all the way down to St Just.
Coffee & Walnut Cake
175g (6oz) margarine
175g (6oz) caster sugar
175g (6oz) self-raising flour
3 eggs
½ tsp baking powder
85g (3oz) chopped walnuts
½ small cup of strong black coffee (espresso)
Icing
55g (2oz) margarine
3 tbsp milk
225g (8oz) icing sugar sieved
½ small cup of strong black coffee (espresso)
Pre-heat the oven to 160C (325F, gas mark 3)
Place all the cake ingredients into a bowl and beat with a wooden spoon until well mixed (1 ½-2 minutes)
Place the mixture into two greased and lined 18cm (7 inch) cake tins
Bake for 30-40 minutes
To make the icing, place all ingredients into a bowl over a saucepan of hot water
Stir until mixture is glossy
Remove from heat and leave until cool
Beat well until thick
Sandwich cakes together with half the icing and spread the remainder on top
Decorate with walnut halves
