orwellianTwo

That was the last day of the trip. As I write, the train home is making its way out of a rain-sodden Plymouth on its way to a rain-sodden London

Well at least the speed of the train is no longer a surprise. I’ve got used to that now. And, slowly but surely all the other things I like doing on my travels – seeing interesting sights and understanding their stories, writing about it, travel itself – I’m getting back to as well. And you also get used to the face covering and just get on with it. The current moment is all about accommodation, making normality out of abnormality, hoping for the best while helping out by doing the right things.

Soon I’ll be back to my old life in an abnormal moment. It’s impossible to say where we’ll all be in the autumn, let alone the winter, let alone next year. So I’m not going to predict where I’ll be going next, or when, or even if.

But I’ll end with this; would I consider a longer trip through this fascinating, beautiful, infuriating, rain-sodden island? Yes. Because it is fascinating, beautiful, infuriating and rain-sodden. And it has one advantage over all the other wonderful places I’ve been lucky enough to see.

It’s home. And there’s no place like home.

You know, once I’d got back from Truro I noticed I was becoming more taken by the monumental sweep of Plymouth’s city centre. But not enough to move hotels and stay in the middle of it. Give it a day or so and I’ll think I’d start seeing the dreary monotony in it.

But it turns out that not all of the old town was destroyed in the Plymouth Blitz after all.

Just off the main avenues running through the centre of town we find peace and quiet on the corner of the Minster Church of St Andrew and the 15th-century Prysten House, the oldest building in the city.

St Andrew’s was actually bombed. As an act of defiance a local headmistress nailed a wooden sign over the door. “I will rise again”. The old sign has been replaced, but the Church did rise again, and so did Plymouth.

But round the corner, the Charles Church didn’t.

It’s left as a memorial to the 1172 civilians who were killed here over the course of the war.

A couple of streets away we find another piece of unspoilt historic Plymouth hiding amongst the modern offices that predominate here.

The Merchants House, a charming Elizabethan house belonging to one William Parker. So the city centre does retain its old delightful character after all!

Oh dear.

A few streets away lies a much more popular area of town. Old port, new marina, rabbit warren of old houses and warehouses turned into vibrant pubs, restaurants and cheesy craft shops, the Barbican is the oldest part of Plymouth and one of its most exciting. During Plymouth’s maritime heyday, many famous voyages set off from hereabouts, and voyagers such as Drake, Charles Darwin and Sir Francis Chichester clambered aboard here. As did a notable collection of religious refugees.

In 1620, a Puritan leader called William Bradford received an email from “AllTheNativeAmericans@gmail.com”. It read “Hi. We heard about the trouble you’re having with the established church in England. Here’s an idea. Why don’t you come over here and take over our land? We were kind of getting bored with the whole freedom thing and some of us are itching to find out what subjugation felt like. Don’t worry, it’ll all work out just fine. Just go easy on the genocide. See you soon!” Bradford dropped everything and got his congregation together, and soon they were in Plymouth descending these very steps to board the Mayflower, the ship that was to take them to a new life in the New World.

Now you may have your suspicions about what I’ve just said, and you’d be right. The Mayflower Steps aren’t authentic! They were created in the 20th century to commemorate the Pilgrim Fathers’ voyage and were placed here because the Mayflower would have been boarded somewhere around here, and this spot was as good as any.

Never mind. A number of other important colonising voyages started out from Plymouth, and they each have their own commemorative plaque on the wall and their own stone in the ground.

(It only feels that long since they’ve been in.)

Another treat offered in the Barbican is the sightseeing boat trip. Plymouth is one of the biggest working harbours in the world and there’s quite a variety of places you can ride over to for visits to sights, hiking, or other fun. We’re just going to do the one-hour trip into the naval dockyard and point out interesting information along the way.

But the real reason is just to take some nice snaps on the water.

And so on.

Coming back round again, we pass the Royal Citadel. An important naval asset such as Devonport (where the dockyard actually is) itself needs defending. The 17th-century Citadel was – and still is – a redoubtable fort with impressive seaward defences. You can see one of the old guns on the wall to the right. To this day an Army detachment is still based here.

I wonder what 17th-century Dutch is for “phew, we’d better not mess with these guys!”

Ah, here comes the jetty again and we’re docking. It’s time to go back to our room, so let’s avoid the crowds by using the narrow residential back streets of the Barbican.

And, oh look, here now are the landward walls of the Citadel. Commissioned by King Charles II himself, you know.

Awkward.

Plymouth was Parliamentarian during the recent Civil War. Parliament cut Daddy’s head off.

So some of the guns point towards the city.

I wonder what 17th-century Devonian is for “phew, we’d better not mess with these Royalists again, guys!”

Well, hotel beckons and it’s time for a break.

That was fun.

Plymouth lies on the Devon side of the Tamar as it slides out into the Sound. On the other side lies Cornwall.

There’s something strangely magical about getting on a train here and crossing Brunel’s famous bridge over to the Celtic mysteries of Cornwall, England-but-not-quite, even if Cornish is not as prevalent here as Welsh is in the valleys over the Bristol Channel.

Unfortunately photos through a train window struggle to do justice to the rolling bucolic landscape, the steep green valleys and hidden estuaries, the old tin mines and overgrown slagheaps. You’ll have to come and see for yourself. As it’s one of the country’s most-visited counties, you probably already have.

An hour or so later, we’re there.

Once a port that made its money from tin, until the river silted up and the tin ran out, Truro turns out to be a delightful little big town that claims to be the southernmost city on the British mainland (Penzance doesn’t have a cathedral).

Truro’s cathedral, neo-Gothic, triple-spired, local rock, was built between 1880 and 1910. The town was incorporated as a city in 1876 so maybe someone just went, oops, we’d better have a cathedral then.

The first bishop of the new diocese which came with city status was one E F Benson and, if you like your Christmases traditional and choral, you have much to thank him for. For the Christmas of 1880, in the temporary wooden structure that was in place during the building of the cathedral, Bishop Benson came up with the idea of a service featuring nine lessons and carols, a format brought to glorious life by Kings College Cambridge at 3pm every Christmas Eve (at time of writing only God knows what will happen in 2020).

For many people that boy soloist’s shaky but tender delivery of the first verse of Once In Royal David’s City marks the beginning of the festive season. But back in Truro in 1880, Bishop Benson’s motives were much more blunt.

We leave the Cathedral, and it’s time for a relaxed stroll around town as we head back to the station. A couple more pics from earlier as we make our way.

Ah, one moment. This is Cornwall so we need a pasty.

Oh, and a local beer.

Don’t tell Bishop Benson.

Well the train carried on and I got used to the speed in the end. Which was fortunate because it was a three-hour journey down to Devon.

Travelling at home this summer presents a double whammy. Millions of Brits who would normally have gone abroad can’t this year and so are taking staycation holidays. And all the uncertainty about where the next outbreak is going to happen makes it risky to plan ahead too far. So, many of the nicer West Country bolt-holes I was interested in were booked out by the time I pinned my colours to the mast and decided to go.

In the end I settled on taking a short stay in Plymouth, a fascinating place in itself with a rich maritime history and a base for further exploration into Cornwall if I fancied it.

And so it was that I arrived on a slightly murky afternoon on the Hoe, with a storm on its way and ominous clouds across the Sound.

Plymouth Hoe. You’re probably already thinking about a game of bowls in 1588, Sir Francis Drake looking to win the match and go through to the next round to face the well-fancied Spanish Armada. The story is probably not true, but Drake’s association with Plymouth, from where he sailed out on his great missions of Spain-bothering derring-do, is indisputable. Drake is Plymouth and Plymouth is Drake.

And for some people, that’s a problem.

There he stands, proudly looking out over the Hoe, probably miffed at being represented in this blog by such a poor blurry photo. No, that won’t do for the ebullient figure of the one and only Sir Francis Drake – naval hero, explorer, master sailor – and slaver?

If you’ve read my posts from earlier this year on the Dominican Republic (you can find them in the Menu under – you’ll like this – “Dominican Republic”) you will know that we spent a great deal of time discussing the memorialisation of figures such as Christopher Columbus and Nicolas de Ovando, men who were crucial to the making of that nation but who inflicted much cruelty on the native populations and left a brutal legacy of slavery and colonialism to subsequent generations. Little did I know that, a few months later, the horrible death of a black man at the hands of US police would galvanise the Black Lives Matter movement and transform it into a global campaign against systemic racism in all its forms. And that it would train a laser focus on just these topics – history, memorials, statues, who is commemorated, who isn’t, and why.

Drake had an equally notable seafaring cousin, another local man called Sir John Hawkins. Together they got involved in the profitable new business of taking slaves from West Africa and sailing them across the Atlantic to be traded in Spanish colonies. It’s estimated that Drake was responsible for about a thousand people being enslaved and traded. And if it’s not clear to you already how bizarrely 2020 is working out right now, one of their main customers was the colony of Santo Domingo.

We are back where we started. Same argument, same sides. I don’t know about that statue of Columbus and Anacoana we talked about in DR, but there was talk of taking Drake down from the Hoe. And there then followed the equally predictable reaction. There’s a storm rolling in across the Sound alright, and the Met Office have called it Storm Francis. They think it will blow out in a day or so.

I’m not so sure…

Let’s get back to doing what we’re here to do, walk around a bit, take some more bad pictures, generally chill out and learn stuff.

Going back to old rascal Drake, behind him you see another memorial but this time there’s no drama. The Plymouth Naval Memorial commemorates over 20000 naval personnel based at Plymouth or from other Commonwealth nations, who were lost in the world wars. The seemingly endless bronze panels are sobering enough, and that’s before you realise that there are two other memorials of the same design elsewhere. You may have seen them if you’ve been to those other historic dockyards, Portsmouth and Chatham.

The obelisk was raised after the First World War, the sunken garden commemorates the second. And it was in the 1939-1945 conflict that a cable holding a barrage balloon broke free and its shackle struck the sphere at the top of the obelisk. You can see the dent to this day.

Along with Portsmouth, Plymouth was the centre of Royal Navy operations during WW2. Which made the port particularly interesting to the Luftwaffe. A few errant balloons weren’t going to get in the way of the German desire to flatten the place. And, unfortunately for Plymouth and its people, they didn’t.

So if you’re after a little olde-world Devonian charm in your town centres, try Exeter. But if you like your grand Art-Deco-meets-restrained-Brutalism, the 50’s rebuild of the city centre might just do it for you, if you don’t mind the wind. Me? Well I sort of got the point of the grand unified styling of those broad avenues and the general clean-cut feel of the buildings with their Deco flourishes, but I could also understand why there were still rooms free in Plymouth hotels while Falmouth and Dartmouth seemed to be all booked out. Don’t get me started on St Ives.

There’s plenty more to see and do nearer the shoreline, and I won’t be able to fit it all in on this trip. For now we’re going for a little walk up into town…

…do the steepish climb into the wide expanse of Central Park, the version of Central Park where you actually get a decent view out…

…before heading back down to the station. We’re off to spend the afternoon in Cornwall!

At first, the train edged gracefully away from platform 2 at London Paddington, a stately roll-out befitting a grand express service heading out onto an iconic route. Gradually it sped up as it glided through West London, and accelerated a little more, and more, imperceptibly, until you couldn’t avoid the fact this thing was absolutely flying! The whole carriage, the whole train, recklessly shooting along the narrow iron tracks below at an insane speed. Could they contain this bullet? Was this safe?

Down the years, I’d been on too many high-speed trains to count. If I’d ever even noticed how fast they were going it was only as subconscious reassurance that I’d be getting to where I was going in good time. Today, I needed reacquaintance with the experience. Over the last five months, I had only been taking suburban train journeys. And there had only been ten of them. All in the last two months. One long car journey, and maybe one bus. The rest of my world, suddenly constrained to the three or four miles I could comfortably walk until I could turn back and make for the safety of my own home, a refuge from an outside world that had suddenly, shockingly, turned deadly…

As I write this, it may still be too early to definitively assess how the Covid-19 pandemic has broken our world. We can count the bodies, think of the millions still struggling with the disease and its aftermath, feel for the millions more who have been ruined financially and psychologically, the lost businesses, the lost futures. But we are currently still in the middle of this thing. And it even seems trivial to fuss about travel and blogging while a global catastrophe continues to unfold, especially as the world of travel itself lies in ashes. We should at this point and in this place consider above all, what is going to become of all those fabulous tour guides, hotel staff, bar staff, etc, without whom none of us could meet the world with such ease and joy, without whom none of these posts could exist.

For now, the best we can do is rehearse the old lesson; take nothing, nothing, for granted. And look with a keener eye at those fundamental components of your life when they eventually reappear. What had you missed before through overfamiliarity, what had you overlooked, like the dawn chorus you never noticed on the way to work until the competition from the daily hubbub was taken away?

One thing I had become overfamiliar with, was Britain. In the summer of 2020, the pandemic had essentially made foreign travel impossible or impractical. As much as I could have sat the whole thing out at home, home was virtually the only place I’d been for months and it was time for a change of scenery. But if I was going anywhere I would have to take on the risk I had gone out of my way to avoid before, that I would find myself somewhere that felt too much like home, while all around was grey and bucketing down with rain.

I knew, of course, that I lived on a stunning island, with an almost unmatched resource of rich green landscape, tumultuous seascape, and a place that was a witness to centuries of stories that shape and shake the world. And now, with nowhere else to go, I had the opportunity to explore some of it. So off I went to Paddington, on my way to the West Country. And why not join me, socially-distanced of course, just grab your face mask, find your seat..there you go, strap yourself in nice and tight please – these things are fast!

I’ll let you into a secret. I had not been overexcited about doing that last trip to Dominican Republic. For all the tropical beauty and the ancient colonial history, DR had always seemed to be the home of the all-inclusive. The idea of spending virtually your whole holiday trapped inside one great sanitised all-you-can-eat restaurant complex had never appealed before, and although it had its moments (like not being the office) I missed the local touch of staying somewhere more amenable near the main drag.

It hadn’t helped, I guess, that I was beginning to wonder whether I’d seen all the places I wanted to see, had gorged on all the travel excitement I wanted to indulge in, sat in all the departure lounges I ever wanted to sit in (easy really, because there’s only one departure lounge. And it’s in every airport. Ever built.)

So why did I go? Well, the original plan at the beginning of the year was Vietnam, but the beginning of the year is far too late to start planning for a trip there near the beginning of the year. I’d had a hankering to see the bigger Hispanic islands of the Caribbean, but Southeast Asia is one place I do still find endlessly beguiling and going back to Thailand was a strong and achievable backup plan.

But in the end it came down to reducing risk. At the time I was looking to book, January 2020, it appeared that a new variant of the SARS coronavirus of 2002 had reappeared in the region and cases were being reported in Thailand. So DR it was.

Far better to stay safe and keep yourself well away from something like that.