Sometimes, it’s all about timing. When I went down to Cornwall, I knew I was intending to meet up with Tris, and that we’d been planning to do a truly epic photo-shoot. I also knew that it was happening right at the beginning of February, and Cornwall is hardly a place where you can be guaranteed decent weather at the best of times. When I got down to Cornwall, it was lashing it down with rain. It then continued to be pretty damn unpleasent for several days, and I crossed my fingers, hoping against hope that Monday the 2nd would be okay, that we’d at least be able to get some shots done.

As it turns out, we got a window. I woke up on Monday to find blazing blue skies, and barely a cloud to be seen. We’d already sorted an 8.30am start (we really weren’t messing around), and proceeded to voyage across various areas of Cornwall, from St. Austell to Truro to Redruth to Portreath, taking an absurd number of photos along the way and having a ridiculous amount of fun. And yes, there were a few flakes of snow along the way, but thankfully they didn’t last long. At least, that was the case until about 3.30 pm, when we were taking some shots in and around Portreath Harbour. There was a light dusting of flakes happening, we were up by an old Watch-Hut at the end of the Harbour, we were just talking about heading back to Tris’ place for a while – and then we blinked, and suddenly we’d gone from a light dusting to a full on blizzard. In Portreath. This kind of weather happens very rarely in Cornwall, and it just kept on going – we retreated giggling to the car, and were amazed by how deep it was getting by the time we got to Tris’s abode. By the time we’d decided that our hopes of getting out again for some landscape light-painting shots, it was so deep that we had to call up my Dad and ask him to pick me up in the car-park of Camborne Tescos, as there was no way Tris’ non-4×4 car was going to get up or down the hills near where he lived while still remaining in one piece. During the icy walk to Tesco, I had what would have been a very nasty fall in the snow if I hadn’t been carrying a large and thankfully rather shock-absorbent rucksack on my back, and the whole thing was rather surreal, with nearly two inches of snow having arrived in an absurdly short amount of time. An odd end to a fantastic day – it was simply wonderful to hang out with Tris again. We’ve had our ups and downs over the years, but I’m exceptionally glad to have him as a friend, and that we can still snap back into our familiar patterns of bizarre humour, while he’s also turned out to be a rather fine photographer – you can check out his Flickr photo stream here, including some pictures from the shoot. In total, we took nearly 500 shots, resulting in a 4 GB DVD rom almost completely full of photos of me. Gulp…

Of course, the snow also filled me with general fears that my flight would be massively delayed – but as it turned out, after plenty of suspense and some unhelpful calls to a customer information line, the actual flight went pretty damn smoothly. I had a 90 minute delay at Bristol, and that was that. My sojourn in Cornwall was over, after having had a lovely and very relaxing time, and I’ve spent the last couple of days getting back into the swing of things. Getting up at 6am this morning didn’t exactly help me with some of my recent sleep problems, but it did mean that I got heaps done today, and I’ve also recommenced my determination to keep writing. I am, however, way too tired at the moment to make too much sense. Some more in-depth analysis soon, once I’ve got my current burst of proofreading out of the way…