A fat pigeon patrols the seafront at Teignmouth. He is eyeing my chips, but I have waited a long time to get a good serve of chips, so he will not be adding to his winter cushioning. Teignmouth is a pleasant Regency resort, well kept and attractive. I cannot help thinking though how impossible it would be to live in a place like this, where nearly everyone is somehow left behind. Those educated enough move away to Exeter, or London even, just as we left our home towns when we were younger.
Yesterday, I was in Seaford, also a resort of sorts. It is one of the places I might live in if I return to the UK. It's a nice enough town, although its seafront is not very nice. I think it would be a decent place for kids though, and Brighton is close enough to be exciting for them when they become teens. But I don't know; in some ways, England is a foreign country for me now, hard to interpret, and I will, as always, be limited by money and by the desire to make my family happy.
We stopped over for the night in Dorchester, and had a (very decent) Indian, served to us by a taciturn man, who it seemed to me was not at all Indian but perhaps an Afghan or the like. He did not seem to like my sister, J, although she is perfectly likeable and wasn't impolite to him. Perhaps he was just shy. Dorchester is, literary types will know, the Casterbridge of the Hardy books. I doubt it has changed much since his day, except for the traffic that clogs its high street.
We squabble a little in the car: she thinks that I speed up when approaching danger; I think that she is a bad passenger, always creating drama out of nothing. Well, I suppose it is difficult to accept that someone who has never driven you anywhere, and is new to the country, knows what they are doing, but it's just unfamiliar, not difficult.
Still, we are mostly companionable, sighing at the beautiful countryside of Dorset and Devon, and finally of Cornwall, which shades from the quintessential Englishness of the Fowey valley near Liskeard -- picture postcard pretty -- into the wild moorland of West Cornwall, our end of the county. Almost as soon as we cross the Tamar, the sky clears, and autumn sun sets the countryside aglow, the leaves burnished, russet and gold.
My heart aches with the knowledge that I have this short time here, and then must go back to the moist oven of Brisbane's summer. I was an autumn child and have always loved it: the mists, the failing light as the season turns, the crisp mornings, the damp that you can never quite shake -- all the things that people say they go to Australia to escape!
