It’s rare that you come to the end of a holiday and genuinely feel that you got it all right.  It helps, of course, that whoever is in charge of weather-based karma decided that we’d earned seven days of The Good Stuff.  But we also made some first class decisions.

Special mention has to go to the delicious goodies we ordered from The Handpicked Foodstore (a whole side of smoked salmon and two pots each of smoked salmon paté and smoked mackerel paté), which made for a fabulously decadent breakfast and a few highly tasty lunches / snacks.  Yum.

Having fuelled ourselves with such an incredible breakfast, we hot-footed down to the beach to make the most of the sunshine.  After a slice of left-over birthday cake (more on that later), the pleasing sight of two usually desk-bound Londoners conquering the waves with the help of body-boards, and some slightly disappointing sandcastle/sandpenguin attempts, we broke open the cheapo cricket set and played French Cricket on the sand.  It’s no secret that my interests are far more inclined towards making (and eating) baked goods than partaking in sporting endeavours, but this was smashing giggly fun, regardless of my sporting ineptitude.  (Sadly, there’s no photographic evidence of the cricket, but I rather enjoy this shot of the pre-cricket gathering, and the following one of the body-boarders.)

Though our calorie intake was fairly extreme throughout our seven-day Cornish jaunt, I like to think we burned a handful of these with some breathtaking belly laughs, regularly resulting in tears and substantial abdominal pain.  Recounting these moments here would only result in the gross overuse of the line “I guess you had to be there”, so I shan’t even try, but many of them popped up in the unlikely setting of the game “Who’s in the Hat?”.  If you aren’t familiar, this is a team game in which each player writes famous names on 3-5 small pieces of paper and throws them in the hat, then takes it in turns to help their teammates guess as many as they can in a minute.  You go through the entire hat’s worth of names three times in total: in the first round you can describe or act as much as necessary; in the second, you may use only three words; in the third, you may only mime.  It turns out that I’m unexpectedly good at this game and I found my friends clamouring to be on my team – as my previous statement regarding my sporting prowess will attest, this was a novel experience!