We've just arrived home from an extremely relaxing long weekend spent at Mousehole in Cornwall. It was absolutely perfect, with fine weather, a relatively remote location (which was nonetheless serviced by a couple of pubs), a massive local population of cats (plus an entirely unrelated bird hospital), and a beautifully desolate beach. We spent Saturday wandering along the seafront, accompanied by a local guide of the feline variety, dipping into rock-pools occasionally or just watching the sea. Living in Brighton I tend to take beaches for granted, but Mousehole, and the drive along the seafront at Penzance, both gave my beach preconceptions a healthy kicking.

There's a legend associated with Mousehole, of course - documented in this beautiful childrens book, which Esther gave me a copy of a couple of Christmases back, and documented here. The Ship Inn, where we ate a couple of times, has a poem on its wall commemorating the event which I can't find online anywhere.

On Sunday, we wandered along to the Eden Project in Bodelva. Fantastic stuff - apparently the largest conservatories in the world, inside which various environments have been created to support a huge variety of plant life. The tropical dome was swelteringly humid, though I couldn't work out whether it was the fauna or the structure of the biomes which impressed me most.

And on the way home, a 6-hour car journey was interrupted by a visit to my grandfather in Dorset. It was quite stirring to hear recollections of both world wars from someone who was actually alive during them...