Big 'F' day...

Some days you just have to label under ‘F’ for fail and today has been one of those days.

Of course the fact that it was raining when we got up this morning didn’t help. But being ever the optimist I imagined that it would soon pass over and give way, if not to some sunshine, to at least a cessation of the pissing down rain. It didn’t, it continued to get worse, but by then we were in the car and on our way to St Ives.

Remember that old nursery rhyme riddle?

As I was going to St Ives I met a man with seven wives. Each wife had seven sacks, each sack had seven cats, each cat had seven kits: Kits, cats, sacks, and wives. How many were there going to St Ives?

Well on this occasion just two, me and my wife, and as we drove along squabbling about the best route it occurred to me that just what was that man thinking of with his seven wives? Surely one wife is more than enough? At least it is for me. Particularly on a day labelled ‘F’ for fail. God the moaning and nagging must have been unbearable, and the mewling and meowing of the kits and cats would have driven me to drink.

After a few false starts we eventually arrived in St Ives. Well when I say ‘in’ we were actually ‘in’ a queue of traffic waiting to get ‘in’. After crawling three miles into the centre and realising that the ‘town’ car park was actually a mile away high on a hill, we gave up looking for a car parking space in the middle of town. Still, St Ives looked very nice, pretty much as I remembered it more or less - apart from the parking. The glimpses I got of it as I drove out and up the hill were great, so once we’d parked up and taken the bus back into the centre of town all would be fine. It might even stop raining.

I was already looking forward to a nice fishy lunch by the sea.

We arrived at the car park to find it full. The overspill, a muddy field criss-crossed with deep muddy ruts, was also full. The queues for the bus stretched back down the hill and disappeared around the corner. So after an hour of following other waiting cars around the car park we gave up and eventually managed to get out of the gridlocked car park and escape.

As we drove away that big ‘F’ got bigger and the rain began to fall even harder.

We did manage a reasonable lunch and a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc down the road in Haile, but it wasn’t quite the same and the rain continued to bucket down so we went back to our cottage defeated.

'F'

Parking, what a curse. Perhaps that’s why that poor man with the seven wives was hightailing it out of St Ives with the cats and kits and sacks. Maybe he just gave up too. I hope that he had plenty of beer to drown his disappointment – I do.

Cheers!