A short stomp after work
Porthtowan, Cornwall
A short stomp after work. Something to loosen knotted muscles and knotted thoughts.
Up to the lane that runs behind our house. Down a potholed avenue lined by old bungalows and the new boxes that are slowly but surely replacing them. Along a narrow path with gorse scratching my ankles. Slalom between slugs and dog mess. And out into the freedom of the clifftop.
I like my job as an editor and I like working from home, but WFH soon becomes WTF when the sun is shining and the choughs are “cheeeowwwing” above our little garden office and I know all this – gestures expansively – is just five minutes away.
In my very much younger days I dreamed of being a professional sportsman but I just didn’t have the skillz. So instead I’m a kind of professional pedant, spending my days adding and removing commas1.
While I’m winding down on this walk, others are still busy, busy, busy. Stonechats dash in and out of the gorse, making the pebbles-tapping-together-in-your-pocket chack-chack-chack call that gives them their name.
Male stonechats look a little like a bullfinch, but smaller and less strikingly coloured – a bullfinch that’s been through a hot wash. They perch impossibly still at the very top of the tallest and thinnest of stalks. Even today when the breeze is touching 25mph. Skillz.
I move to the cliff edge and scan the sea for, ohhh, I don’t know, a basking shark2. Then a kestrel eases into view just to my right, smoothly riding the updraft as the golden haze of the setting sun turns its brown feathers a shade of burnt orange.
The kestrel climbs higher with barely a flap and slips into its signature move: the hover. Wings and tail adjust for changes in the breeze but the head remains as impossibly still as a stonechat on a stalk. Skillz.
Three or four more times the kestrel pauses in a hover but it still outpaces me along the coast path, even before it shifts gear and arrows across the beach to resume its hunt on the western cliffs.
I turn for home to rest up before another busy, busy, busy day of adding and removing commas. Skillz.
Basking sharks seen on this walk: 0
Total basking sharks seen to date: 0
The sobering reality is that if I had become a professional sportsman I would be long since retired by now and working as a pundit, publican or pu-roperty developer.
There wasn’t one of course. Although Clare wasn’t with me on this walk, so if I had seen one I wouldn’t be able to admit that I had. But I didn’t.
Or did I?
I didn’t.