OK – I know people have thought we’d dropped off the planet and that’s my fault. We were away on holiday (hence the mad dashing around fencing in chickens yesterday) and I (sensibly or otherwise) didn’t want to let on before we went that we’d be away.

This came about because, if truth be told, I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather more-or-less constantly since Christmas. Nothing major, just not quite well. Since then, I’ve been cutting out all my vices just in case but I still feel rough basically. So I came up with what I thought was a peach of an idea – we (I) need a holiday. I approached DM with this gem. There followed a period of ‘negotiation’ which went …..

DM – New Zealand?
LA – No way
DM – Australia?
LA – No way
DM – USA?
LA – No way
DM – Canada?
LA – look you might as well forget it, I’m not going anywhere we can’t take the dogs…..

So, we thought about what we liked from a holiday and came up with the fact that we liked being somewhere exactly like Cornwall. We thought about Scotland and dismissed it on the basis that it would take us two days to get there and two to get back and after doing half of the distance to Scotland to go to meet Bill, David and Pat, I thought I’d end up even more stir crazy sitting in a passenger seat of a car for four days topping and tailing the holiday.

We thought about Wales but David has an irrational dislike of Wales following his time at Art College in Cardiff!

So, what did we do? We pointed the car towards the sea and drove….to Penzance, where, if you drive any further you end up swimming! There is basically no more of the UK left after Penzance though I’m sure David who is the world’s biggest pedant will tell you that there is another ten miles or so to Land’s End but there are no boats there so we stopped where the boats go from, left the car behind, climbed aboard and went to the only place in England more remote than where we are already – Scilly!

The Isles of Scilly were once part of Cornwall (not that it was Cornwall then) and they are part of the great fist of granite that pokes up out of the core of the earth like a massive salute stretching from Dartmoor, through Bodmin Moor (home) and out to Scilly. For the last ten thousand or more years, the Isles of Scilly have been separated from the mainland by a stretch of sea some 28 miles or so wide.

It truly is remote here – almost no cars – the islanders don’t have more than twenty miles or so of road spread across the five inhabited islands so there’s not much need for them other than to collect supplies and to ferry tourists’ luggage about! There is no signal for mobile phones and although there is internet, our home for this week is a seventeenth century building without even an indoor toilet so to be honest we didn’t even pack our laptops!

We’ve arrived after a two and a half hour ferry crossing, during which, I, white knuckled and drugged up to the eyeballs with travel sickness pills, sat on deck, manfully staring at the horizon with Archie shaking and quaking at my feet, Rosie on my lap trying to get inside me for comfort and DM opposite grinning like a demented thing at his family’s fear of boats! I am, at this stage, thinking I must be clinically insane as someone whose seasickness extends to pedallos, to go to Scilly where you HAVE to go by boat to get around.

We’ve both been caught out and have lobster red faces already because it didn’t occur to us that the sunshine in the early morning of a spring day would be strong enough to burn us so we didn’t ‘factor up’!

The shot is our first bit of exploration around the Garrison on St Mary’s – built in the 16th Century by Elizabeth I – for me it’s symbolic because it’s a bloody great big granite wall with a wild pink thrift ‘escaping’ over it and out towards the sea……is that a cheesy/corny/crap analogy – yeah – alright it is – but tough – it’s how I feel!

The Eurovision Song Contest was on my mind last year.....sad git that I am!