coast COLUMNIST
This month our columnist MARTIN DOREY wonders if you’ve got what it takes to be part of the winter community
By the time this magazine hits the news-stands or flops majestically onto your doormat, we’ll be slap-bang in the middle of a Cornish winter here in Bude, when our lives are governed by the increasingly erratic and bad tempered Atlantic.
It’s not for everyone. Many stay to keep our community alive, while some, who can’t find work outside of the tourist season, fly like wild geese to sunnier climes. Others simply shut up shop after the October half term and head home.
With little shelter, those who remain have no choice but to take the full force of everything the weather can throw at us. It’s a busy time for people like the Widemouth Task Force, who patrol the edges of the ocean for litter, lost fishing gear and stricken seal pups.
Walking on the beach, facing down the elements and then dashing into the Widemouth Cafe for a hot chocolate might sound like a romantic idyll. It might even be on your bucket list. For some it’s the very reason they choose to retire here or move down. The search for a better life, even in the face of the most atrocious Atlantic storms, goes on. I’m the same. I blew in to surf in the mid-1990s and never left because, February aside, the highs generally outweigh the lows.
However windswept and interesting it may sound, coastal life can still grind. Even though we live in a beautiful bubble reality can still bite, especially when you have grown up stuff to do.
The rain that lashes whimsically against the cafe window as you cradle that hot choc is the same rain that you’ll have to drive through for more than an hour to get
