I was standing at the kitchen sink scalding a chopping board when my partner said the nine words that gladdened my heart: “I can’t face going abroad this year, can you?” I felt as if I’d won the lottery.
It wasn’t just the money. It was the blissful thought of no airport queues, no filthy looks from fellow passengers as you fail to pacify a crying child at 30,000ft, no holding down slippery infants to apply sunblock, no travel reps. We would get a cottage in Cornwall, breathe fresh air, keep life simple and congratulate ourselves on cash and sanity saved.
Mmmm. As we crawled in first gear along the boiling tarmac of the M6 and M5 for hour after interminable hour there was time to reflect on this assessment. Our overheated daughter, aged 1, wriggled like an otter in her car seat screaming that everything was “nasthy”. My partner’s two children, aged 12 and 15, looked up from their iPods each time we headbutted the windscreen in frustration. Then they said, quite accurately: “But couldn’t we have flown to Florida in half this time, Dad?”
There are things you forget when you haven’t taken a proper English holiday for more than ten years. The traffic, the rip-off motorway service stations, the seaside restaurants that still treat children like lepers despite this being the 21st century. The traffic.
At Bristol we gave up and checked in to a hotel to break up the monster journey, which was a masterstroke. I can happily recommend the Bristol City Inn mainly because the rooms have flat-screen TVs and CD players, which, as we know, make all people under 16 very happy.
But the next day, when we finally arrived at Chapel Cottage in the village of Nanstallon, near Bodmin, it was so lovely and so spotlessly clean that the agony of the journey quickly subsided. The cottage had original oak beams, cream sofas, black slate kitchen floor, and a big garden with a barbecue. The rural idyll was completed by two white ducks in a pond just over the garden fence. It was the sort of place where if it rained (which it did, twice) it was quite nice staying in all afternoon.
My spirits lifted further when the neighbour told us that we were within spitting distance of Cornwall’s biggest vineyard. We took a short walk down the sun-dappled lane, past the riding stables, and found the Camel Valley Vineyard, which is on the Camel Trail, a 17-mile traffic-free trek through some of Cornwall’s most beautiful countryside between Padstow and Wadebridge.
The vineyard has tours and a terrace, where you can sit outside and sample its wares. Jackpot. A chance to get half cut while telling the children that it’s all “educashional”. It all felt very French gazing over the vines while sipping (well, glugging, actually) its rather fabulous sparkling wine (the vineyard won the 2005 International Wine Challenge Gold Award for best sparkling wine outside Champagne). The idea of staying in Blighty started to feel a good one.
The next day we went to Newquay. Parking was a nightmare, and much time was spent circling narrow Cornish streets. But just as it felt when I was a child, when the journey was even longer in a non-airconditioned car, the landscape of Cornwall is always worth it somehow. Maybe it’s my memory, but the beaches seemed cleaner and the sea clearer than they did back then. And maybe we chanced on a good spot, but it also seemed to have resisted the temptation to go all Blackpool, which is commendable. There was only one bucket and spade shop, one ice-cream kiosk, one amusement arcade. The children spent the day building old-fashioned sandcastles on the windy beach instead of demanding another ice lolly from their sunlounger around the pool bar as they would undoubtedly have done in some foreign hotel. It all felt very wholesome.
This is where Cornwall rises so effortlessly above many British seaside destinations. Its coastline is so rugged and its coves and bays so plentiful that you can always find somewhere secluded. It also offers millions of things for children to do without being too in-your-face. A water park here, a wildlife sanctuary there.
But here’s my biggest tip. If you are thinking about a summer holiday in Cornwall, book early. Very early. A lot of people are tiring of the airport slog and every hotel we tried seemed to be full by about June. So make your plans for next year now. We went at peak time — mid-August — and probably managed to get this cottage (booked through the efficient Cornish Cottage Holidays) only because it was new on the rental market.
Each day was spent at a relaxed pace pottering around different nearby resorts — St Austell, Mevagissey, Polperro — doing obvious things such as having scones with clotted cream, buying pointless Cornish piskies and finding crabs in tiny rock pools (in case the RSPCA is reading, we always put them back). My daughter’s favourite trip was to the donkey sanctuary, half an hour’s drive away in Gunnislake, mainly because she got a free donkey ride and you can buy bags of chopped carrots to feed to the sheep, goats and donkeys. I must have been relaxed because when my partner left the handbrake off the car outside the cottage and it rolled down the hill into a hedge, I didn’t even scream.
We went to Chelsea-on-Sea, aka Rock, just out of interest to see if it’s as hoorayish as it’s made out to be. It is. Gorgeous little place, but never have I seen so many four-wheel-drive and sports cars on one strip of seaside road. Having lived in Fulham for 14 years that was just too much like a busman’s holiday so we caught the boat over to Padstow to feel more at home with our fellow plebs. We didn’t bother with Rick Stein’s Seafood Restaurant because we assumed it would have been booked up since about 2003.
