Love Sunshine

Another mist opportunity: the curse continues

I have always wanted to see St Ives, and for two main reasons: the famous light upon which an artistic school was founded; and the famous Lighthouse which Virginia Woolf used as the central motif of her novel To the Lighthouse. A book partly about the disappointments of the unpredictable British climate, whose opening passage I use as the epigraph to my first chapter. The first of many cruel ironies.

And so I finally got to St Ives this weekend, using my appearance at the Daphne du Maurier Festival in Fowey, and the hottest, sunniest weekend of the year so far as the perfect opportunity to see both light and Lighthouse in their elements. As the whole of the country blazed under cloudless skies, as London saw 26 degrees, Brighton 27, other parts of Cornwall around the same, St Ives remained in a sepulchral sea mist which meant I was lucky to see my hand in front of my face. Light, famous or otherwise, was in scarce supply. Two items of news were repeatedly vouchsafed me throughout my increasingly hopeless day: that it had been lovely there yesterday; and that few had seen the like of such fog before in spring time. It was all down to the hot weather reacting with the sea. Strangely enough, none of this offered me much consolation. Nor did the news that back in London, indeed other parts of the county, were having a fine day of it; nor that it would be lovely there tomorrow. Today I was in St Ives, tomorrow I wouldn't be. No doubt I would be somewhere that would be experiencing snow of such profusion that the saltiest old sea dog among had n'ere seen the like, man and boy, while the rest of the county sweltered.

Why did I stick around? Because like a berk I believed some of the other folk who told me it would clear by 1.00 ... 3.00... 4.00... an ever retreating horizon of delusional hope. And there was my long-anticipated trip to the Lighthouse. About 4.00, the sun did try to peep through, so we got in the car and headed off to Godrevy, to see the Lighthouse close up. Don't get me wrong. I quite like fog. It's so rare in London now I rather regret it, and often wish we could have a good old-fashioned pea-souper. But there is a time and a place for everything, and the time for fog is not May, when the rest of the country is in bikinis, and you are stumbling perilously close to a cliff edge staring forlornly into a bank of swirling stuff and half expecting an enormous Hound with flashing eyes to come bounding towards you and rip your flippin throat out. I know I'm a hopeless land lubber, but correct me if I'm wrong, i thought the whole point of a lighthouse is that you can see it. In any conditions. I kid you not, I couldn't see a bloody thing, and muttered a silent prayer for those in peril on the sea along with my curses for the merry dance I'd been led on that day. And to cap it all, the chirpy twonk of a DJ based in London played sunshine records for the next hour on our drive out and wouldn't shut his trap about the glorious day we'd all been having.

I had not had my vision.