From Cornwall to the Middle East, by accident

When our son was about 7 years old we went for a family holiday to Dorset. The whole family went, three generations, and we all stayed in chalets by the seaside. One day some of us went by car to visit the Cerne Abbas Giant.   This is a huge 55-metre erect male figure carved into the chalk of a green hillside, dating between 700 and 1100 AD, whose origins and purpose—from fertility symbol to pagan survival—remain a mystery My brother and I parked our cars in the car park at the foot of the hill and we all trekked our way upwards to see the figure up close. When we returned to our cars they had both been broken into. In addition to the damage, our sons holiday money had been stolen, and my sister-in-law’s handbag had vanished. After reporting the loss to the police and making our cars as safe as possible we returned to the family and resumed our seaside holiday. Several weeks went by before one weekend during the regular phone catch-up, my mother told us in a worried voice tha...

  I met David Penhaligon in Holman’s R and D department. David Penhaligon — the Liberal MP with the trademark grin, the motorbike, and the ability to talk to absolutely anyone without a hint of pretension. Holman’s was where the clever tinkerers, the practical inventors, and the quietly brilliant engineers lived. David always had a soft spot for that world — the real Cornish economy, not the postcard version. He worked there before his parliamentary existence and I did a stint in R and D during my apprenticeship Holman’s R&D in those days was a proper crucible: bright young apprentices, old‑hand engineers who could machine a part to a tenth by feel alone, and the odd future parliamentarian quietly absorbing how real industry worked. Penhaligon having been one of the lads there before politics explains so much about why he resonated with people — he’d actually lived the graft, not just toured it. Me doing a stint in R&D during my apprenticeship helped I think with the...

My father worked as a fisherman out of Osmington Mills for the Miller family and met the love of his life in the Picnic Inn. This is for him. The seagull swoops, banks, dives and disappears into a misty haze cast by the sea. He watches, lids low, the bird a slipping stitch in the fleeting morning, until its cry fades and memory drifts He sits where the cliff crumbles, the familiar bay before him, fisherman’s knot fingers play the old pot rope like prayer beads of salt and hemp. The wind is a whisper of old skippers' tales, and in the hush between waves, he counts the catches of time the ones of renown, the ones that got away, the one that kissed his cheek in Osmington then danced with him through life.