We're entertaining again tonight - two friends who live locally are coming to the cottage for supper so we needed to go to town for supplies! Liskeard is a fascinating place. It's a small market town that seems sleepy even by Cornish standards. When we popped into town on Saturday afternoon, we discovered to our amusement that many of the shops shut on Saturday afternoon, even in the peak of summer, when tourists abound in the county. After writing this, I came across a reference to shops closing on Saturday afternoon in Frith's Cornwall. Apparently an act of parliament was passed in around 1870 enforcing shops closing on Saturday afternoon to give shop workers some time off. Our commercial instincts tell us that businesses that must find it tough to make a decent living should be open on Saturday afternoon these days, but our quality of life filters tell us that it's good that the Cornish have a much better sense of work:life balance than any of us from the South East.

One of the big projects I have been involved in at work is a massive study of the propensity to suffer serious illness, especially cardio-vascular disease. One of the key findings is that there is a much higher propensity to suffer from such illnesses if you live in areas like Devon and Cornwall or the Suffolk or Norfolk coastal areas. We had an article published in the Times a few weeks ago with a much more detailed analysis of the health of the nation. It was quite a shock to me to see the stats as I'd have guessed the propensity to suffer cardio-vascular disease would be much higher in the South East because of the stresses and strains of London life and commuting. Not so! One theory is that people from the South East move to these areas to retire so they bring the bad health from their careers in London with them.

The town has a real mix of architecture, telling its story clearly. There are some amazingly opulent buildings, with carved stone and wrought iron decorations and interspersed are workmen's cottages, similar in size and structure to ours. You can see the way the town prospered in the nineteenth century from the wealth the mines brought in and how the local community lived quite clearly. Much of the town is completely unspoiled by concrete from the 1960s or 1970s. The pavements are made from granite and the buildings are the original buildings albeit with some modern shop fronts fitted.

There was an amazing photographer working in England in the late nineteenth century called Francis Frith. He travelled the country photographing street scenes and the photos provide a good chronicle of those times. Although Frith himself died in 1898, other photographers continued his work through the first half of the twentieth century. There are many in the Frith Collection of this area, including several shot in Liskeard. We have been able to use these photos and compare them with ones taken by us to see the changes to the streets. I will put up a gallery of my pics and link them to the Frith Collection photos in a couple of weeks when I get back to Sandhurst and have a bit of time to process them.

The shop in this photo has been here since the mid-nineteenth century and I'd say is probably much unchanged (although we don't have a Frith of this part of the town). Oughs sells a curious mix of the very local and the very cosmopolitan these days, although it used to be a 'chemist and grocer' these days there are no chemist items for sale. It has cheeses from two miles away and those from a thousand miles away. Wine from the Camel Valley (Nanstallion, just north of Bodmin) and from France and Spain too. It sells all things Cornish and a wide selection of delicacies from around the globe. Today they supplied us with Cornish Sparkling Wine from Camel Valley Vineyard (another blissful part of this county, where I spent one of the happiest afternoons of my life with my dear friend Colin, sampling the wines and hearing of the varieties of grape they grow and how they process the grapes into wine), cider from Duloe (about six miles from here, capers from Sittingbourne, just a stone's throw from my Mum's birthplace, Aylesham in Kent and olives from Spain! There is a quote on the wall from the original Ough, who said 'if you give great service, profit will follow'. His theory clearly worked or his shop wouldn't have survived for well over a hundred years. What a cool thought.

I know I'm back on my favourite hobby horse but I do so love the fact that this place isn't crawling with the big name shops. I love being able to buy my veggies in a traditional greengrocer. I hope Alan and Dee like their supper tonight!