don’t feed the seagulls!

We’re all used to the signs around most of our harbours put up by our local council urging us not to feed the seagulls as it makes them aggressive and I agree wholeheartedly with them.  The gulls have their place on the cliffs and on the water but they really do get quite nasty around town.

I do, though, have another reason for adding my voice to the council’s for an altogether different reason - whatever food they are begging / stealing appears to be making them incontinent!  One managed to get my car and Danni’s in the same assault recently.  I must admit I’m not a natural car washer so it did stay dirty for a while, despite the abuse I was getting from my family. I nearly cleaned it while I was up wth them on their caravan holiday on Monday but I’m glad I didn’t as I was “got” by another one on the way home from my meeting in Torquay on Tuesday!

I am now feeling fairly virtuous as I’ve done the washing up, on my second load of washing and have even cleaned the car!!

Today Padstow had a visit from the Duke of Kent.  He arrived on the lifeboat and was then due to go on a brief tour of the town.  As with most royal visits this wasn’t well publicised so we only found out about it from a couple of residents who were down by the harbour at the time.

What makes this story a little different is that the Police looking after the duke managed to lose him!  They had turned around to see wht was in town and he was off and away!  I haven’t heard the helicopter so am presuming they have found him by now.

Saturday’s are usually an early start for me and since i’ve been cheating and using the car rather than my bike I’ve been getting in that bit earlier, which was a good thing today!  Earlier in the week we had to call in our engineer to look at a leak on our hot water boiler and as ever it needed a part which should have been here yesterday.  We have a back up system with a burco type hot water boiler which we keep topped up from a couple of pans on the stove.  This morning’s problem was that the boiler just wasn’t getting hot, even after a couple of hours!

Move on to plan C!  All we could do was to keep 3 big and 2 small pans boiling on the spare stove and keep them all heating at different stages so we didn’t run out of water while doing almost 100 breakfasts.  We managed it and no-one had to wait at all but couldn’t things have been so much easier!

I’ve been trying to buy an extra one to have as a spare and also to use for tomorrow breakfast when we will have even more people to feed but all the shops and wholesalers have been very willing to help but nothing is in stock anywhere in north Cornwall!  I have now managed to locate one I can borrow from about 6 this evening which will do us over the week end but I just hope John can get the boiler back up and running early next week.

This afternoon I wandered into the bar to see how the team was doing, especially as we had such a busy time in there yesterday.  Rachael told me that she wasn’t feeling quite right and that she’s had a stiff neck for a few days, I asked if she’d had a headache and if was feeling any better.  While talking to her I noticed a red mark on her arm - I casually reached over for a glass to roll on the rash to see if it would disappear or not and asked her if this mark was a rash or a scratch.

I was very relieved when she told me that it was neither a rash or a scratch but tomato sauce!  I think we can therefore put the stiff neck down to sleeping with the window open rather than anything more serious!

This is one of those cultural hot potatoes that divides communities, much like do you put the jam or the clotted cream on your scone first.  The generally acepted way now is to eat it from one end out of a paper bag though the traditional miners’ way was to hold the crust and eat through to this bit which they then threw away to avoid the arsenic poisoning from the mineworkings.  We have had some new interpretations recently.

Danni from the restaurant is looking after the residents lounge today and we have taken pity on a few people who needed somewhere else to sit while the bar is full.  These people have ordered pasties amongst other things and Danni was just checking on what cutlery to give them.  What she actually said was “shall I give the emmetts knives and forks for the pasties?”  I told her she ought to and the feedback later, with great indignation, was that they had actually used the cutlery to eat the pasties with!

The moral of the story is that if you don’t want to stand out use your hands!

What a day!  We started with bright sunshine which was quite a surprise for us as we were expecting a dull and damp day.  By 7.30 the teenagers ‘oss came in, they danced and played out in the car park and then came through to the restaurant where they put on a great show for the early risers, the younger kids’ ‘oss came in next, around 8.30 and that was fun too.

Our big difference for May Day this year was not having the marquee for the bar and BBQ out on the car park - we re-created the old Met Bar from years ago which has proved to be a huge success.  We were pretty busy about 10.30 when the Blue ‘Oss came through on it’s way to Trevor’s house over the road and then once we got to lunchtime the weather closed in and we have had hordes of people taking advantage of our chairs and tables inside. This is in fact a real luxury on this day as everywhere else gets rid of all their furniture, even though we are off the beaten track plenty of people have made their way up here and we have a real buzz in the bar, we’ll definitely do this again next year!