Truro and St. Agnes

We start our tour of Cornwall in Truro at the Wig and Pen. I can’t tell what kind of town it is, but it sure seems sleepy.

After showcasing the band’s rock moves, we’re off to find our accommodation in the milky darkness. The plan- we’re following the guy that booked our gig out into the unknown, where we’ll met some dude at a shuttered gas station, at which point we’ll start following him back to his place to crash for the night. And so we sit in the car, under a sky clear of light pollution, listening to our friends’ band Charles on the stereo. I need to re-listen to the Charles demos, cause I think they unfairly became the soundtrack to my brain imagining creepy and psychologically disturbing things about to happen.

Of course, everything turns out to be perfectly legit and uneventful. Our host’s place turns out to be a quaint retreat tucked between the hills of Truro, which is also known as the middle of absolutely nowhere. He’s a producer extraordinaire, and his recording studio is a converted chicken coop. In the morning, the neighbors ride by on horses. I lace up my boots and tromp of down the gravel road into the hills. The faint echoes of lilac and honeydew fill my nose, and I enjoy the fresh, cool sweetness of the air as I meander along. It seems like Cornwall is a good place to get some thinking done.

We jump in the car and make it all the way to St. Agnes, which is almost the farthest West and South you can travel in the UK. It’s the type of place where cell phone signals fear to tread, or at least decide that they’re on holiday just as much as everyone else in this vacation town, and they’ll work when they damn well feel like it.

The show is being held at the Driftwood Spars, a full service vacation destination. The inside of the inn is done up in all sorts of knick-knacks, from ropes and taxidermied birds to old globes and tchotchke steel drums.

A sign about the door alerts us that our proprietress means business. The wood beams lining the ceiling make me feel we’re in a ship. The way things stand, we’re nearly close enough to the ocean that you could cast a long line and catch a meal.

We let the hotel feed us instead and take advantage of our free time to explore all the parts of the beach the signs tell us not to. I imagine there’s some pretty good creature stories tell their kids around here to keep them off the cliffs.