Self apartment v hotel

The pros and cons of self-catering apartments are fairly obvious. The benefits are it’s cheaper, more spacious, less tied to a hotel regime. The drawbacks are it’s less of a holiday with cooking, cleaning and washing and you’re less likely to meet people.

I was disappointed on arrival at Menabilly by the greeting at the main house. Daphne got out to collect the keys from the owners, the Rashleigh family to see a post-it note that as they were out the keys were in a box. It may have been a senior moment or something more wily but Daphne opened the door to the wrong car, one of the owner’s. At this point a lady appeared at the door saying “Can we help you?” “So, there is someone here after all” retorted the imperious Daphne. I noted that we were left to our own devices to discover how everything worked. We still cannot figure the shower and where is the hairdryer?

This said its a cosy cottage, not with the views over the cove of the bigger one. With its seclusion, and lack of any mobile service, Daffers observed that it’s great place for an affaire – “Even if someone was listening to my coital shrieking they might assume it’s a woodland animal”. What, I suggested, a beaver ?

Yesterday we went into Fowey. It was a wet day and various holidaymakers were trudging around its narrow streets. We saw one such family where the mum was telling off the child: “If you don’t stop whinging, you’re going home. I’m fed up with it. “

It seemed to me the holiday was not going well with bad weather and the mum was taking it out on her boy. Over lunch we discussed, mothers all, the assumptions that a young child makes that’s he had done wrong when it can be an unreasonable mother at fault.

We took lunch in a pub . Fowey is a working port, by the river flowing into the harbour. China clay is manufactured so you see tourists and locals in equal measure. Two local ladies strolled into the pub, mother and daughter. The daughter was complaining of the length of the vicar’s sermon. She confessed that all she could think of during it was her lamb roast. I reflected that life has not changed that much in a 1000 years in rural life – the church, inn and maritime life still dominate the town. As for the food, my scallops were delicious but the seafood salad was from the freezer except for the White crab.

We returned to base to watch Djokovic beat Federer. We all rooted for the more graceful Fed especially after the Serb upset the ball girl. The second set seemed to take too much out of the Swiss and as the game swung Djokovic’s way we became bored of it and were reading the Sunday papers.

In the evening I suggested we watched the dvd of Rebecca. It’s celebrated for the sinister Mrs Danvers whose welcome to the second Mrs de Winter was as cold as that of the owners to us but I thought the acting of Maxim de Winter, played by Lawrence Olivier, was more subtle. The film and novel have a clever structure with the central character dead but still dominating events which subsume the hapless second wife English films and tv have done the master/mistress/servant relationship rather well and it always seems popular from The Forsyth Saga to Downton Abbey.

I tend to retire early especially after too much red wine with the cheese board over supper but somehow the long day had me all done by ten.