By night, in your cottage in the shadow of a remote lighthouse, it's best to play invented games and watch videos culled from charity shops between Brighton and Penzance. Early one morning you can take the torrential two-hour boat trip to the Scilly Isles, biting your cup and listening to The Birth Of Ska as people of all ages turn perceptibly green around you. We went to the biggest island and stayed until dusk after being informed that a day trip leaves you too little time to cross to the sub-tropical gardens on Tresco. Tresco. Other islands not visited included Srainsbury, Arsda and Cro-op*.

* Joke may not travel outside United Kingdom.

***

There's been no tin mining in Cornwall since the 1980s, as it's cheaper to harvest tin from the surface in China and elsewhere. I'm quite keen on a little light protectionism in some fields - it's the only reason why the busiest streets in Brussels or Barcelona still have hopeless, charming shops that sell nothing but combs or gloves, after all - but it's hard to mourn the demise of an industry that left most of its workers stunted, filthy and underpaid now that it's gone for good. The Levant Mine has become the The Levant Mine Museum, and is pretty clear on this subject.

It's my very favourite sort of museum: no computerised interactivity, plenty of glass cabinets crammed with bizarre donated objects and bent photographs. The surface-level areas of the mine works are presented Mary Celeste style, with biros, open notebooks and roll-ups in ashtrays lying about as if the workforce stepped out 25 years ago and collectively didn't feel like coming back. You can walk about, sit in the chairs, pick things up, smell them, put them down again.

Pompadour Trevithick?
He was billed as a Tribute to the Cornish Miner. He seems suspiciously dainty.
Possibly an early work by the sculptor of that campy firemen's memorial opposite St Paul's.


I'm one of these uncomplicated guys who likes his gaily-coloured, suggestive machinery.