St Ives Tourists.

We've had a lot of sun today combined with overcast spells with a general autumnal coolness. I've had an admin day sorting out the piles of 'important papers' which accumulate in my study and generally tidying up. I did some shredding but our shredder keeps jamming up on the heavy paper the bank sends out and I resorted to cutting them with up scissors which was quicker than having to prise out jammed strips of paper. I don't even have a suitable container to burn the papers in.

Looking at yesterday's photos I can see that my preference not to have random people in my photos makes it look as if St Ives was almost deserted so today I'm showing some of my 'simply for the record' photos. 

When we were making our way through town after our very long lunch with friends we encountered what seemed to be a strange phenomenon. Everybody in town was walking in the opposite direction. It felt as though there had been an order to evacuate the place which the people were obeying calmly. The more plausible reason would be that they were day trippers making their way back to coaches parked in the long-stay car park on the higher outskirts of St Ives. The sunny photos were taken after this mass exodus so don't truly convey how crowded the place gets.

Fore Street runs parallel to the harbour and every shop is geared towards extracting money from tourists. In this short street alone are 6 fudge shops including a Roly's which I hadn't realised was a franchise chain and 7 places where you could buy cakes and pasties. Some were cafés and others just bakeries. As I take a keen interest in cakes etc. it didn't take me too long to realise something strange about some of the bakeries in the area. First, for those who aren't familiar with the UK I'll explain that Warren's is a typical High Street bakers found in every town catering for 'ordinary' folk. In St Ives there were 2 branches of Warren's. That's fine but then there were; The Cornish Baker, The St Ives Bakery and The Bakehouse. Nothing strange at first glance until you see that the goods on sale are the same as Warren's (I'd know their meringues anywhere) and that the décor, grey and orange and font style are all the same. In other words they are all the same shop but with a variety of names to appeal to those who are either too posh to visit a High street chain or want something a little special. (Tomorrow I'll show the really local bakery we found.)

I took the above photo of what is now the Mountain Warehouse which used to be Woolworths. Very popular as you could enter from Fore Street and emerge on the other side half a level down on the harbour. 

The seagulls used to be notorious for swooping down to steal food from people's hands but people are more aware of the problem and nobody is silly enough to feed them. Most of the seagulls I saw were the mottled brown youngsters, fully grown but still begging for food from their parents. You could see an adult being constantly followed and squawked at by a youngster until the adult flew right away.