Skip to main content

Lobsters and religious volleyball

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 raft of free entertainment on offer on the beach. In the distance, we could see groups of youngsters playing volleyball, ably supervised by red-shirted youth workers.

It all appeared to be highly sophisticated and looked as if it were probably sponsored by the local authority or regional tourist board or something.

It was only later - while having a sandwich in a local tearoom - that I glanced at the magazine we'd been given. Beach Special 2014 was actually produced by a Christian missionary organisation, which is dedicated to sharing the good news of Jesus among the sandcastles. According to the blurb, the project is over 60 years old, although I have to admit that I had never heard of it.

Flicking through the pages, we learn of people giving up their jobs as doctors to become missionaries in Papua New Guinea, kids who have died contented knowing that they've found Jesus and offers of free DVDs covering topics such as 'Life and Death', 'Right and Wrong' and 'Miracles and Faith'.

Funny how the girl who gave out the sweets didn't mention anything about the religious angle, isn't it? But a beach volleyball court with no players would probably take up too much space on the sand.







Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Fawlty Towers script? Si, senor!

Ok, so I gave ChatGPT the following scenario: "Imagine a theatrical script for a situation comedy set in a hotel in Torquay, England. The proprietor is called Basil, an eccentric man who believes the calibre of guests to be low. His wife, Sybil, is often frustrated by Basil's incompetence. They employ a Spanish waiter called Manuel, who struggles to understand English. Basil suspects that two guests, who claim to be married, may be lying." Here's what our favourite AI came up with: Scene: The hotel lobby in Torquay, England. Basil is standing behind the reception desk, looking at a piece of paper. Sybil is standing next to him, looking annoyed. Manuel is hovering nearby, trying to look busy. Basil: (to Sybil) I don't know why we get such low-calibre guests at this hotel. Look at these two - Mr. and Mrs. Smith. They claim to be married, but I suspect they might be lying. Sybil: (sighing) Basil, it's not our job to judge the marital status of our guests. Just m...

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.

It's been a tough year. Let's give ourselves a clap.

If something didn’t smell right about the UK handling of the pandemic, the British public was never going to notice. But they knew that if they couldn’t smell something, they really ought to get a Covid test sent to them in the post. There has been something incredibly British about the DIY swabs and their delivery via the gig-economy workers of Amazon, hasn’t there? Touch of corona? I’ll pop something in the post to you. Should be with you tomorrow. I suppose it was inevitable that we’d need some new kind of system. After all, the coronavirus outbreak was the first thing in the history of the NHS that couldn’t be cured by paracetamol, rest and plenty of fluids. This understandably left GPs flummoxed and anxious. The UK decided pretty early on that if you were ill with a novel pathogen – which proved deadly in maybe 1% of cases – you really shouldn’t go to the doctor. You should STAY AT HOME and spread it quickly to your flatmates or family members. And because they were now at ...