The Electricity of Every Living Thing by Katherine May

Author:Katherine May [May, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2021-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

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I don’t walk the next day, either. We drive into Bodmin and take a vintage steam train out through the countryside and back again. I buy Bert a little train driver’s cap and a flag from the gift shop, and we share a scone in the carriage. Then we drive up onto Bodmin Moor to see the woolly ponies and mounds of moss. We have lunch in a pub and make an unsuccessful attempt to wander around Camelford’s shops, finding everything shut except a single charity shop, where we buy Bert a book on space exploration. We go back to our chalet, watch telly, and then go out to the camp’s social club in the evening. It’s too noisy for me, and the wine is awful, but Bert loves the children’s entertainers, and the mini disco, and the Slush Puppies, and so we’re almost content.

The next day, I don’t even pretend to think about walking. My friend Beccy is joining me tonight to walk with me for the rest of the week, and so I tell H that I don’t want to get stuck somewhere on the path and miss her arrival. I am wondering how I’ll tell her that I don’t want to walk anymore. I’ve given up. It’s too hard for me, and for everyone else around me. We’ll have to think of something else to do.

We go to the Eden Project while we’re waiting for her to arrive. We first went just after it opened, on our only other holiday to Cornwall. It was an odd time to go; Britain was in the middle of a foot-and-mouth outbreak, and all the way down to our caravan at Hayle we witnessed tall, thin columns of smoke rising from farmland, and the ominous smell of barbecue as cattle carcasses were burned. We tried to walk the South West Coast Path that week, but found much of it cordoned off so that walkers couldn’t pass through pasture and contaminate the livestock still further. We were left with little else to do but to drive from cove to cove, getting out of the car to wander on the beach before driving off again.

Amid all that, we visited the Eden Project. It was the talk of the town, a millennium project that people actually wanted. We drove across Cornwall and down into its quarry, and found a series of geodomes containing mainly bare soil. There was nothing there to see. It was desolate, pointless. We vowed never to return.

Today, though, the grey February weather has driven us back there. At least, we reason, it will be under cover. We see immediately that an astonishing change has taken place. The whole quarry is alive, and the domes are lush with plants. There are interactive automata, and enticing gift shops, and the overhead zoom of zip wires. Bert scuttles around the domes, and listens enthralled to a storyteller and a bug man, and would carry on listening if we didn’t drag him away.

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