Mousehole

It is the nature of the idyll to be episodic. The perfect day cannot help but describe its limit. The best you can ever hope is that in the film frame illusion of your life, you have enough flawless moments of joy coming at you to make it appear whole tranches of time seem blessed.

Usually, knowing you are experiencing a patch of perfection generates enough by-product sadness to end it. Insight can be a bugger like that. Yet today crumples that rule.

I stay in bed till 2pm. Wrapped in the warmth of cotton sheets, strong sun and my lover’s skin. Wandering the ill-defined border between sleep and waking, my only certainty is that I am safe.

Eventually we tumble down the stairs, then Chapel Hill. We walk towards Newlyn. The sun polishes a green bottle sea as wind teases mermaid banners and the black and white hopes of St. Piran.

Chance and the shortened gap between idea and action that comes so easily on holiday, help push us further to Mousehole. For an hour or so, we experience the purest distillation of a childhood’s worth of glorious English seaside holidays. Everything delights, from discovering the best new ice cream flavour in the world – apple pie and clotted cream – to realising when you close your eyes, the only sound you hear above wave and gull is laughter.

We sit on the harbour wall, backs enjoying a bench that has stored the joys of a full afternoon of sun. Down bellow, children shout with the emphatic glee of knowing they have the perfect mix of sand and water for castle building. The subtle rhythmic creak as moored boats test the limit of chain and rope is almost hidden by sudden the chaotic splashes and shrieks of people having undiluted fun. Painters tickle and scratch canvas; drinkers at the Star Inn bring their pints outside to keep company with the rest of the town. Nothing is wrong with this picture.

True Knowledge of the City

London is an obsession. Even in Penzance, I cannot escape it. Drifting into bookshops in search of local writing on megaliths and Cornish saints, vintage Geoffrey Fletcher falls into my hands. Opened at random, the first page scanned yields a description of St. Mary’s on Paddington Green – the church where exactly a week ago I was wedded. Taking this as a beneficial bit of bilbiomancy, I buy the book.

My city is not exactly an uncommon idée fixe. For me, the attraction may be down to the fact that the more I learn about it, the more I have to acknowledge it is ultimately unknowable. However many books read, regardless of how many streets are pounded, true knowledge of the city is an endless quest. London expands infinitely in the imagination.

At least I am not alone in this. London is ever changing, but remains an ever muse. All of us caught by it – even masters such as Fletcher – find that when you chase it up along its own streets and alleys, it will always be dancing just ahead of you.

A Foreign Country

Pick up most guide books and you will see Cornwall described as the pincer, toe or tail of England. This is of course mildly offensive propaganda. It is not the anything of England. Cornwall is a foreign country.

Crossing the Tamar by Brunel’s casually stunning bridge is an unapologetically liminal journey. Rolling high across a border active since the Neolithic, the river and gulp of its estuary is glimpsed in flickers between cable and girder. The flowing line of water is pure interzone uncertainty. Till you reach the other side, you are suspended, belonging to neither county, neither country.

I remember the first time I made this train journey aged 10. A Devonian ticket inspector joked: “Have your passports ready when we cross the Tamar.” Not understanding, I shot my mother a worried stare and hoped she could talk her way out of not having packed them. She tried to make me see what was funny. I did not get it. Two weeks spent on the Lizard peninsula explained it perfectly.

We push passed the Wivel – the shire of strangers – and keep going west. West to the end of the line. West to Penzance and Penwith Hundred. The name might mean last promontory or end-district, but to me it is the first of Cornwall.

London Hoodoo – AKA The Wedding Speech

As a writer, words are my life, so you would think putting together a wedding speech would be easy. However, I have come against up a very common problem for hacks like me, another writer who once lived in Little Venice – Robert Browning – has already nicked the best line I could have ever come up with: ‘Oh to be in England, now that April’s there.’

My other problem, is that although I am ridiculously English, my native language is now Ozlish. Sweets are now lollies, thongs are worn on the feet and a crude word that should only be used by shepherds – dag – is now a term of endearment. Of course, being Ozlish does have one benefit. If England get beaten by the Yanks tonight, I can always cheer on the Socceroos tomorrow.

One part of this speech is easy though – the thank yous. Thank you to everyone who has travelled to be with us today. Thank you for coming from the wilds of Wiltshire, Wessex and Yorkshire. Thank you for braving London traffic or journeying north of the river. Thank you most of all to those who have flown thousands of miles.

Thank you to Matt, my best man. It is a title well earned. You have been brilliant – not just in this role, but in all the others you have ever played for me, most notably that as friend and brother.

Before I move on, I would also like to toast absent family and friends. Ian my new brother-in-law, my brother and Japanese family and to those across the Atlantic who I regard as brothers. Most of all, I want to toast our three absent grandmothers, with more than 250 years of wisdom and love between them, they are a blessing on our family.

London is a magical city, full of the most wonderful opportunities for colliding with people, ideas and things from across the globe. Since very early days it has always been this way, a hoodoo city where cultures rubbed against each other to create new forms. When this town was called Londinium, citizens from every Roman territory and beyond came up the Thames to trade and mix. This hoodoo is what London does, what it has always done. It brings the globe to England and mixes it in its streets and villages to create the opportunity for magical meetings.

Without London playing this role, I would probably have never had the chance to meet many of the people in this room today and I would certainly have never had the chance to meet April. So if anyone wants to blame anyone or anything for this marriage, blame London. It is what London does whilst you are living and working in it. It happily collides you with a girl from the other side of the world who you would have never have had a chance to meet in a million years in Essex and BANG – you fall in love.

While London hoodoo might be responsible for us meeting, there was an awful lot of courting that was down to me. During the early days of this courting, when April would only ever describe me as her 'sort of boyfriend’ my grandfather asked: “If your lass was a Beatles’ song, what Beatles’ song would she be?” That is not an easy question to answer. However, it strikes me that any relationship will go through many Beatles’ songs. From starting with I Want To Hold Your Hand and I Got To Get You Into My Life to Come Together and if you are very lucky, to a moment like this where aside from the obvious When I’m 64, the Beatle’s song April is to me is In My Life.

There are places I remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places had their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I've loved them all

Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more
In my life I love you more

So, please, if you will, can you raise you glasses to April Southwell – to the woman who is my sunshine, my atomic sun smile, my best friend and who not only makes everyday an adventure, but everyday feel like I am dancing through raindrops.