It’s Christmas Eve, it’s the last of my 12 Days of Christmas, you’ve already seen what I packed for this little trip, you’ve had a tour of my little church and now we get to the blog where I tell you about what I did. I did very little. I sat in the hot tub, I ate things I cooked in the little oven, I went to Truro to see a medieval cathedral that wasn’t actually there, I failed to find two geocaches, I read a little, I edited my book a little and I watched two or three episodes of Interview with the Vampire.
This is the post I wrote on my tablet in the hot tub on Saturday night:
One thing that perpetually causes me trouble when I’m glamping is lighting fires. I suppose the definition of “camping” within the word is tenuous enough so to make it as back-to-basics as they can, when you’re living in one tiny room smaller than but twice the price of a hotel room, everything has to wood-powered. That means the heating – you cannot glamp without a woodburner- and it also means the hot tub. If you’ve been around here any time, you know I love hot water. Glamping without a hot tub is unthinkable but for true glamping, it must be wood-fuelled. None of these modern electric hot tubs, thank you very much. And we definitely don’t want an outdoor bathtub connected to mains hot water. That would be far too easy.
It’s entirely my own fault that I pitch myself against my nemesis, firelighting. I don’t have to have a hot tub. I don’t even have to glamp. I could find a cottage with underfloor heating and a proper indoor bath and a set of taps. And yet here I am – no, really. Here’s the photo from the back of the tablet I’m writing this on right now. The water is warm but my wet hands are out of the water and they’re freezing.
The point I was meandering my way to is that I have trouble lighting fires. This is embarrassing for someone who’s sixteen years a Guide leader. But my incompetence isn’t helped by damp logs. I’ve stayed here before and eventually realised that the hot tub burner wouldn’t burn properly because the logs live outside and are damp. Fresh logs from the cupboard did the trick. The same today, after I failed to heat my hot tub yesterday for my first night. The logs are against me. I really don’t need anything against me. I’m quite enough as my own worst enemy.
But there’s nothing like a hot tub. It’s late November, it’s Sunday lunchtime – time has moved on since I started writing and here I am, sitting outside in the lightest drizzle while the wind howls and autumn leaves spiral into the hot water with me. I’ve been attempting to film this weekend and what I’m gradually realising is that most of the joy in glamping is in doing very little. I’ve made some toast in the grill. I’ve been reading The Name of the Wind, although I put it down last night because I’m too much of a chicken to read about the Chandrian in the dark. I’ve been catching up on Interview With the Vampire – also this morning in daylight because ditto, even though I read the book more than twenty years ago and I know it’s more about philosophy and psychology and the relationship between Louis and Lestat than about outright horror. To derail a little, I like the new Louis and although I’m seeing flashes of the Lestat I know and love, this one reminds me far too much of someone I know in real life who is about as far from Lestat as you can get, and that’s off-putting. Also, don’t get me started on “Uncle Les”. Anyway, I know people make and watch and love tiny home and cottagecore videos but I haven’t watched enough to know where to start. I’m a beginner at YouTube and all I’ve really tackled so far is travel vlogs. I’m simply not doing enough this weekend for one of those.
But to take it back offline where it should be, I’m living my best cottagecore life. Croissants or hot rolls for breakfast, cheese, tin mugs, log fires, listening to the wind howl, reading, editing – hoping to have a finished Iceland book by the time I get home. Refuelling body and soul ready to take four teenagers to winter camp next weekend. By this time next week, it should all be over. We should be hauling tents back to the car park. I should be getting ready to come home and fall in a hot bath. Yep, there’s that hot water. I think I will definitely deserve it after a cold, wet & muddy camp. Right now – oh, luxuriating.
But besides musing on vampires and firelighting, I did do some actual things! Not many, but I didn’t spend the whole three days sitting in the chapel! On my way on Friday, I stopped at Launceston. That’s partly to do my daily 2km walk but I was also hoping to find a geocache. The one in central Launceston is one of these puzzle ones where you have to find things to work out the final coordinates and what I learned was that Google Maps on my phone won’t accept coordinates and I can’t find anywhere to put them into the Geocaching app either. This meant I couldn’t even find the pieces of the puzzle. I had a nice stroll around the town, past the castle, around the ornate church etc, got my 2km done but left unsatisfied about the geocache.
On Saturday, I went to Truro. Truro is a long way but it’s got a cathedral and it turns out it’s only an hour or so from Launceston. I don’t often go deeper into Cornwall than three miles from the Tamar so this seemed a good opportunity to cross off the cathedral. I parked at the park & ride, took the bus into town, put the cathedral into my phone, fathomed out how many roads I had to walk up and turn left and right at – and then looked up. Twin spires right above me. Ok, I can find this.
I did. I walked up the road, around the corner and into a small square with a cathedral in it. First thought, this is a very small space to squish a cathedral into. This is like when you walk around the corner and unexpectedly find WH Smith, not a majestic cathedral. Second thought, Gothic. Third third… I see brick. Brick. This is not medieval. I’ve come all this way and this is not medieval Gothic.
No, it is not. There was no Bishop of Cornwall, they came under Exeter, which does have an excellent medieval Gothic cathedral. Truro’s cathedral came into being in 1880 and was completed in 1910. The nice guide who saw me staring at the nave and came over to hand me a leaflet and talk about it all seemed quite apologetic that it had taken so long to build. Even for relatively modern Victorian architecture, thirty years is pretty quick to build an entire cathedral! And it’s a good-looking cathedral in its way. It’s wonky in the crossing, because after they’d built the east end, they realised they didn’t have the room for the nave unless they turned it just a bit – or unless the bishop would give up ten feet of his garden (he wouldn’t). I like the wonkiness, it’s characterful in the same way that my beloved Winchester Cathedral is really wonky, although for a very different reason. But still, it’s brick. I like Liverpool Cathedral, which is very new and also brick and I guess the only real difference is that I knew Liverpool is absolutely not medieval before I got there. I didn’t do the reading. That’s my own fault. Glad I’ve crossed it off but… not what I was expecting.
I spent Sunday morning heating my hot tub, Sunday lunchtime in the hot tub and finally went out about 3.30pm for my daily walk. Spring Park is just a bit too rural to stroll down to the village. I don’t walk down single-track country lanes, which is all there is. That’s how you get hit by cars driven by city-types. So I went to Launceston. It’s free to park by the big shops, by B&M and M&S and the edge-of-town retail park. It’s also spectacularly uninspiring. I walked through Tesco car park, crossed the A30 dual carriageway twice, turned round at a roundabout and walked back. It gave me my daily 2km without paying to park and without getting hit by tourists but it was probably the most uninspiring walk I’ve ever done. Back home, relight the hot tub, heat it up, jump in for the evening. I don’t think I’ve mentioned that I gave up in frustration on Friday, having wasted half a dozen logs and half my kindling and still never really got the fire to wake up. But on Saturday, I hauled in the firewood I bought here two years ago and which has been in my car ever since, so it’s nice and dry. It’s amazing the difference between dry firewood and wood that’s been left out specially for you and has had a day or two to get damp.
The joy of winter glamping trips like this is in taking a few days to not do anything in particular. Not be at work, not be at Rangers, not feel like I have to cross off important sights. I love Iceland but imagine if this summer I’d pitched my tent at Selfoss and just stayed there for three days. No, you have to go around and see all the things and do all the things. But in winter in a shepherd’s hut, I can just be. Can’t switch off altogether, hence writing the blog post in the bath and editing the book but at least I can do both of those things either from a hot tub or while lying on a bed, with a fire crackling and a plate of toast spread with real butter and a cup of full-milk hot chocolate. I wish this post could be more exciting but there we are.
That’s the thing about being a travel blogger. Even when I’m on holiday, I still feel like I have to be doing things to write about. I still feel like I have to come home with enough photos to drip-feed on Instagram for a couple of weeks. Of course, it’s still a holiday but it’s also research and in its way, it’s also work (even though I’m not getting paid – I can see my first ad payments coming through in the next year, maybe, but I’ve had ads on for three years now and still haven’t made enough to receive my first payment!). So a holiday where I genuinely don’t do much and spend half the obligatory blog post talking about how I don’t have anything to say… well, it’s a good thing for me. I get to go back to work on Tuesday and tell my boss “Yeah, it was nice, I did absolutely nothing” before I plunge back into real life.
Happy Christmas. See you soon.