WASHED AND READY TO EAT

That's how the letter is marked. Important stuff. 'Dear Homeowner,' it reads, 'Great News! The housing market is busier than many people think...' Remember, this information is absolutely confidential between the estate agent and me, so please don't pass it on.

There were two attractions I had to bypass on my recent holiday in Cornwall. The first was The National Lobster Hatchery in Padstow, which advertises among those quaint racks of tourist leaflets you still see in hotels. The promotional material shows a little kid holding a baby lobster on his finger and suggests families might while away a happy hour staring through glass portholes at giant specimens. The immediate reaction of the female contingent of the Woodford clan was no, NO, NOOOOOO!! What? You don't want to meet the 'resident giant lobster' and lots of his other 'crab pot friends'? You're not interested in adopting a lobster? The fact that the Hatchery had featured on The One Show , Autumn Watch and Three Men in a Boat didn't cut any ice, I'm afraid. We headed off to sunny St Ives instead. As we arrived on the beach, we were greeted by uniformed staff who were handing out sweets and magazines to kids and teenagers. There was a whole ...

If I’m certain about one thing following my recent family holiday in Cornwall, it’s this: The Lost Gardens of Heligan are a lot easier to find than the Eden Project. I’ve read that Eden – an extraordinary ecological experiment, which houses rainforests and Mediterranean flora in big glass domes – has attracted several million visitors since it first opened. All I can say is that it’s a bloody miracle, because the signposting is truly atrocious. Once you’re there, however, there’s no doubt you’re bowled over by the scale of thing. It would probably take a few days to go around if you were David Bellamy and interested in the names of the plants and stuff like that. For me, one Astrocaryum murumuru looks much like another, so I was focusing more on getting jungle-style selfies from great heights. The Eden Project has been in the news over the past year, which I suppose makes it a topical rainforest.  Unfortunately, it’s been hitting the headlines for the wrong reasons, a...