Travelled across by train to St Austell on Friday, with Elaine. Then as we walked up the hill between the Cornwall Hotel & Spa and the sea, I looked back and had one of those arresting moments where life almost spools in front of your eyes, like the credits at the end (or beginning) of a film.
So what triggered that? Well, on the far horizon were a line of china clay spoil heaps, both the “old men’s tips” and the later, more industrial, spoil heaps. It was to investigate the reclamation of the latter that I had first visited the English China Clays workings back in 1977, while writing an article for New Scientist, titled ‘Restoring the Cornish Moonscape’. And from that period of writing flowed the subsequent invitation to set up and later run ENDS (Environmental Data Services) in 1978.
And while I was doing the ECC visits and interviews, Elaine, Gaia (aged but a few months) and I stayed with Teddy Goldsmith, founder-editor of The Ecologist magazine. He and I had first met earlier in 1977 in Reykjavik at a conference organised by Professor Nicholas Polunin, where Teddy and I productively shared a bedroom for a week. I met a bunch of people I wouldn’t otherwise have met – and wrote that 3-page article for New Scientist on much of that story, including my memorable breakfast with Buckminster (“Bucky”) Fuller, on the flight back to London.
Gaia’s name, in turn, linked back to James (“Jim”) Lovelock’s 1975 New Scientist article on his Gaia Hypothesis (later Theory) – and years later I had the great pleasure of coming to know him quite well. And so the connections spooled – and that was even before I got to the Eden Project, which occupies one of ECC’S former open-cast mines, and whose founder was the ultimate reason why we were back in Cornwall.
From early afternoon on Saturday through to late, we joined the celebration of Tim Smit’s wedding to Charlotte Russell in the Lost Gardens of Heligan – a pre-Eden venture of his. Wonderful to catch up with people we knew, including (Professor) Mike Depledge and his wife Juliana (who I had first met when all three of us staying with Tim a while back), former Soil Association CEO Patrick Holden and a bunch of other Eden friends, alongside some new folk.
Later, a great dance band played some of our favourite songs, including Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell” as we arrived. These two old folks certainly wished the newlyweds well – but the sound level was such that it soon had us retreating to the edges, behind a brazier in which marshmallows were to be toasted.
That’s a smell that evokes powerful memories, too, linking back to holidays in Cornwall, alongside the River Tamar. And particularly to one summer holiday with the three March girls we knew from our Cyprus days. We whirled along between the high Cornish hedgerows in the family Land Rover, all singing Troggs songs like Wild Thing and With A Girl Like You. Those were the days, my friend.
A peaceful interlude during turbulent times. Indeed, on the train, I was reading Fareed Zakaria’s extraordinary book, The Age of Revolutions. If and when I next look across that valley, there will be even more for my brain to call to mind – when, to borrow Paul McCartney’s phrasing, often feels as if it is very much at the Memory Almost Full stage.
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