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This afternoon a very tired and slightly grumpy Herring family forced themselves to drive out of town a bit to see the Lost Gardens of Helicon. Lost? By someone very careless as they’re fucking massive. “Found them!” I said as we passed through the ticket office. This is the kind of dad joke I am looking forward to doing much more of, but Phoebe’s humour is not sophisticated enough and my wife didn’t get it. So I just looked like an idiot.
It was peaceful and calm and there weren’t too many people around. We trudged zombie-like along the path and down a pretty steep incline, that I was already thinking about having to climb back up, but I need some exercise and pushing a pram full of toddler up a steep slope is about as good a work out as you can get. I might release a DVD.
Although the advice is just to push a pram up a hill I reckon I can stretch that out. After all I’ve managed to have a career of nearly 30 years with just one joke (and that one joke is that I have no jokes).
The Lost Gardens are a good place to come if you already feel you’re in a bit of a dream. There’s a giant’s head emerging from the ground as you enter and a half buried Mud Lady further on. I enjoyed seeing some black bees working in their hive in a rare display along the route. Black bees are indigenous to the UK and adapted to our mists and conditions. All the other bees you see are immigrants (though like all creatures, everything on these isles began as an immigrant from somewhere) and have somewhat usurped and interbred with our native population. It sounds like a clumsy political allegory from the pen of the inadvertently and well-meaningly racist Pierre Boulle. The Brexit people would love this, but only it the bees were white. It must be very confusing for them.
The Cornish are trying to breed more black bees. And if I know the Cornish they will be attempting to genetically engineer the situation so that they have white crosses on their backs. Cornwall really should be a country all of its own. It doesn’t feel like part of Europe. If it had to affiliate with anyone then it should be Narnia. I’d love to live here all the time, if it wasn’t so far from everywhere else.
Phoebe did some walking once we were in the Lost Valley, oblivious to dangers from bodies of water and nettles. She walked some of the way back too, but not up the slope though. Oh no, she was happy to be pushed then, even if it nearly wiped her poor tired dad out (her mum did some of the pushing too, but she didn’t look like she would expire). I also gave Phoebe a lift on my shoulders. Being a dad is awesome and it’s just such a treat to have nothing to rip me away from my wife and baby for a few days.
We’d been anticipating a heat wave this week, but it hasn’t really come, though the weather has been largely nice, but hopefully we will get to the beach tomorrow.
Retro video RHLSTP with Jon Ronson youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJz6W6DFVF4
vimeo - https://vimeo.com/168015094
itunes - https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/richard-herrings-video-leicester/id922855595?mt=2
