My post-lockdown trip to Cornwall was not indulgent – it was a necessity
He who becomes the slave of habit, who follows the same routes every day, who never changes pace, who does not risk and change the colour of his clothes, who does not speak and does not experience, dies slowly.
These are not my words, but rather those of Brazilian poet Martha Medeiros. Twenty years after she wrote A Morte Devagar (A Slow Death), her words have floated through the tendrils of time – primarily in the way of inspirational quote memes, wrongly attributed to Pablo Neruda – and have found particular poignancy in 2020, the year the world stopped.
Everyone has their own Covid-19 story. Mine had three acts. The first was set in my (now ex) girlfriend’s flat in Dulwich. In late March we returned from a holiday in Rio de Janeiro to a very different UK, and we decided to lock down together. I’m pretty sure it was the right decision, since the alternative would have meant months apart, or breaking the rules. There were moments of joy and lightness amid the darkness – the claps, the puzzles, the walks in the woods – but the premature move of living together just six months into our relationship was what, ultimately, catalysed its demise.
The second act took place in my Brixton flat after the break up, where I was reunited with my housemate, one of my oldest friends, for the first time in months. Somehow, our time inside this 450-square-foot flat didn’t tear us apart; if anything it brought us closer together. We ended up delivering intricate postmortems of each other’s unfunny jokes and even gained a third housemate in the way of a marauding neighbourhood cat, ‘Jinxy’.
We were lucky in that we and our families were unaffected by the wretched virus itself – for those who have been, I can’t imagine the difficulty of the last few months. But for me, the challenge of lockdown became something captured by this verse of Medeiros’ poem: that lack of human experience, that plodding march of existence, the same route to Brockwell Park each day, the formulation of habits that you so quickly become enslaved by.
Wake. Shower. Open laptop. Coffee with oat milk. Fig roll? Go on then. Work. Lunch. A game of Kerby. Work. Crossword with mum. Beer. Sleep.
Which is why I knew action was required. I bought a scratched-up old 2002 Peugeot from a Portuguese family, who emerged one-by-one from a front door in a way that suggested the whole of Lisbon had, in fact, not gone into lockdown but rather relocated to this house in Tulse Hill. I kicked the tyres, made sure the drop-down roof worked, and drove it down to Cornwall with my housemate on July 4, the first permissible day, creating a bubble with friends from another household.
With a spirit greyed by lockdown, a lower back twisted like an ancient oak after working on a sofa, and a heart anchored by question marks over the break up, this escape to Cornwall wasn’t an indulgence, it was a necessity.
Ironically, for a trip designed to clear the mind, we arrived in fog in a village called Porthcurno, right on the tip of Cornwall’s big toe. The seagulls squawked excitably, as if they knew our arrival signalled the return of their furloughed day jobs as chip-snatchers. And we received a similar warm welcome from the locals we encountered. The woman in a corner shop smiled and said “finally – it starts here” as she scanned through the items of our shop. It’s been a difficult time, she said. For many Cornish businesses, our arrival also represented the return of a necessity: tourism.
That night, while settling in to the old Granary house where we were staying, we identified a pub on Google Maps, seemingly a short walk across a field. So we set off, a small group of old friends, on a wander that brought me back to the kind of aimless, Stand By Me (but without the dead body) summer evenings that we spent together as teenagers in the farms that fringe Harpenden.
The track we landed upon, tucked between two hedgerows, went from traversable, to slimming, to problematic when the thorny branches lengthened and the stingers licked our bare legs. After the sun disappeared the dimmer switch of light turned, imperceptibly anticlockwise, and we arrived in the deep blue of dusk when trees, humans and houses became nothing but undetailed, shapely absences of light.
Our end point was a bleak old boozer called the Cable Station Inn, with thick carpets that smelt of lock-ins, and locals who had occupied the very same seats for 62 years. But this didn’t matter, for we were inside a pub for the first time in months. The pint could have been wrung out of the carpets, for all I cared.
The next day we cycled down to Sennen Cove Beach, where we hired some surfboards from a dude who took energy from pointing at something in the distance, only to then take you by surprise by pretending to jab you in the ribs. After repeating this ritual a few times, he sized us up and sent us on our way, with wetsuits and beginner’s boards, and some tips on when the surf would be best.
The sand was a dark bronze, and peppered with little blue jellyfish – too many to count – that had been brought in by the choppy seas the night before. The last time my feet had touched sand, and indeed the last time I saw the sea, was on the other side of the Atlantic in Brazil four months prior, just before the rip tide of Covid had pulled the world out to sea. We dumped our bags in a heap, squeezed into our wetsuits and with our surf boards under our armpits made the pilgrimage to the water’s edge, a couple of hundred metres away.
The freezing water numbed my ankles, which were shredded up from the night before. But I waded on, grimacing when the water reached my waist, before lowering my knees and submerging my body in the sea, my hands flat on the top of the board as I directed it nose first. Cold water trickled into my wetsuit sleeves. A wave hit and filled my nostrils and eyes with vinegar. I heard a friend, not far behind me, honk from the water hitting his own nethers. I smiled. We were, once again, living.
