Whatever It Is, I Don't Like It (2011) - Plot & Excerpts
Maybe something to do with those poor Greek flower-pickers reported rescued last week from the horticultural hell of Hayle. Or BBC2’s A Seaside Parish, transmitted concurrently with its series about the National Trust. The Seaside Parish in question is Boscastle in north Cornwall, itself a National Trust village, in which, on and off, I spent twelve years of my life. What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore? Not my question, but Thomas Hardy’s, Boscastle’s presiding ghost, and part of the reason I stayed so long. Funny the difference words make to a place. Though it has to be said that his were not just any words. Boscastle was where Hardy met his first wife, and it was to Boscastle he returned, long after she was dead, to mourn her, find her, discover whether the bitterness that overtook their marriage was written in it all along, or could be undone in memory. The greatest poems of regret ever written. And impossible to imagine the place without him once you’ve read them – an old man faltering forward, leaves around him falling, ‘Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward / And the woman calling.’ A local Hardy scholar called Kenneth Phelps wrote an affectionate book about Hardy’s Boscastle connection – The Wormwood Cup.
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