Q: Where can you buy curry powder, a bass guitar, a carpet and a pair of rubber wellies, all under one roof?
A: Trago Mills.
Trago’s has been around since I was a kid. Nothing has quite the same longevity or timeless appeal as discounted old tat.
Whereas many of the shops along Falmouth’s main street have succumbed to the forces of time, Trago’s is still going, and going stronger than ever, it would appear.
The weather has kept us from doing any major sightseeing over the last few days, so we’ve more or less shuttled between Falmouth and Truro, with excursions as far afield as Ponsanooth., Helston and even lovely little Helford.
Tim took us onto Culdrose helicopter base last Friday for an hour on the Merlin simulator. That was a lot of fun.
I managed to land the thing on an aircraft-carrier, but unfortunately only by crashing into its deck. Sarah crashed, too, so we won’t be put in charge of one of these things any time soon.
Today is our last day in Cornwall. Tomorrow, we drive back along the route we came in on, to get to the Welsh capital of Cardiff. Strange as it may seem, I’ve never been to Wales before, so this will actually notch up another country.
After two nights in Cardiff, we’ll drive to Fishguard, take the ferry to Rosslare in Ireland and then head north to Kilquade in County Wicklow (Contae Chill Mhantáin).
Our time in Cornwall has been great, in spite of the weather. If we’d been here merely as tourists, it wouldn’t have been much fun, but we came mainly to see Fenella and the family, so it hasn’t really mattered how bad the weather got (and it’s been pretty bad).
It’s always thought-provoking to visit this county, the place where I grew up. It’s at once familiar, yet now so far removed from my life as to be essentially a strange, new place to visit.
And that’s how it feels to be here: strange; genuinely foreign. There’s no sense of having come home; just a peculiar feeling of powerful déjà vu; as if I’m looking at buildings and scenes from a vividly recalled dream. None of it feels very real to me; it’s just a strange apparition of a life lived long ago.
We’ve driven past two houses in Falmouth that I used to live in, plus one in Penryn, one in Flushing and one in Truro. We could have gone to another in Redruth, but didn’t. There are yet more of my former homes, in Portreath, Threemilestone, Goran Haven and Mevagissey, but I have no idea of the addresses. Eloïse has been very interested in her papa’s old homes, bless her.
My family certainly did move around a lot.
The traffic is horrendous these days, especially in Truro. Parking has become difficult, with demand far outstripping supply; and very expensive, too. On top of that, the ticket machines don’t accept credit cards and many car parks are of the pay-and-display variety, which means that you almost always end up paying for more time than you actually use. £4.80, I had to pay yesterday for a couple of hours in a multi-storey in Truro. Times have changed.
Most of all, it’s odd to retread cobblestones and pavement that I once trod underfoot whilst holding my grandmother’s hand, or whilst accompanying my grandfather on an errand. One almost expects them to emerge at any moment from one of the shops, frozen in time, looking just the way they did in the late seventies or early eighties.
Yes, being here really prickles the senses in ways that are not quite predictable or communicable. It’ll obviously always be part of me, even though I long since ceased to be part of it.