For the past 40 years I've lived on the Isles of Scilly, on the tiny island of Tresco where I settled by chance (hear how this came about here), and now I couldn't imagine living anywhere else. This little cluster of islands, lying some 26 miles Southwest off the tip of West Cornwall, attract thousands of tourists every year who come to embrace the slower pace of life.
This is the view from my workplace. The gallery sits on the shoreline of New Grimsby, the main access point for our visitors.
Some of our visitors arrive under sail and moor up in the shelter between the islands; Cornwall, Ireland and France are the starting point for most of these sailors.
Every year the Isles of Scilly are featured on the itinerary of hundreds of cruise ships which bring their passengers to spend a day here. These tourists provide a vital boost to our local economy.
At the end of the day a boat load of day trippers head back to St Mary's to catch the Scillonian to return to the mainland. If you fancy visiting the islands see here or follow the link on my side bar for information on how to get here, and see the many types of accommodation available as well as details about the five inhabited islands.
My regular readers may recognise this shot from the summer when I'd spent the afternoon with my husband on Samson, one of the uninhabited islands - see the account here. I posted this on instagram which led to me being asked to take part in a photo shoot to promote the islands. I was asked by the Islands Partnership if I would play the part of a single traveller in their forthcoming campaign for 2018. The remit was to spend a few hours on the same island doing some beach yoga, reading, drawing and swimming all to be captured by a professional photographer.
Behind me are the others taking part in the shoot, a young couple who had been brought across from Cornwall to do stand-up paddle boarding. The photographer and shoot director are standing in the shallows lining up the shot. As a blogger I totally understood the need to capture that perfect moment.
As you can see, the weather couldn't have been better.
The kit for the shoot was minimal as we had to island hop on a small boat just big enough to take the six of us that made up the crew - shoot director and her assistant, photographer and three models.
We'd arrived on Samson at lunchtime, to find a row of about 10 kayaks lined up on the beach and just beyond them were the 10 castaways in row having a picnic. Goodness knows what they would have thought as we bundled out of our boat and immediately the photographer started striding about taking in all the views and finding the angles he wanted.
As luck would have it, the first shot for me was to be directly in front of these onlookers. I was to do some yoga poses. No problem. I was prepared, with my swimsuit on already and they had brought a yoga mat. No problem. Eh, maybe there was a problem. Me on a yoga mat on top of very fine soft sand. Tension is paramount for a good, strong yoga pose and there was no purchase, just a gradual sinking. Deeper and deeper. Also there was another problem; every time I was asked to strike another pose, I discovered that this, my very public and first ever profession job, was made all the more difficult by the bemused looks from the 10 onlookers. I've never done my yoga practice in front of an audience before and suddenly was aware of a complete brain vacuum. There were no other poses on my memory card; maybe I've just imagined that I can do yoga; in fact, I knew nothing about yoga at all. "What about this one?" the director shouted as she pointed skywards, "or this one?". Was there muffled laughter from the back row? Did someone just choke on their sandwich as they tried to stifle a giggle? No matter, this was me, The Lone Traveller having a serene holiday moment.
I was holding my breath, squinting into the mid-day sun, thinking about my yoga teacher, hoping she would never see these foot-sliding, soft-knee poses. The mat and my back foot have both been gobbled up by the sand. How many classes had I missed this year? Did it show?
Downward Dog aka Sinking Toes instead.
Next up was reading. Only, in a different outfit. Samson has a terrible lack of changing rooms, so we performed that well known beach ritual of two women holding towels together enabling me to wriggle out of one and into another set of beachwear - all directly in front of the spectators, of course. Cue more chuckling and pretence at averting their eyes.
If I look like a middle-aged lady lying on a beach, reading then that's cos I am.
Again, if I look like I'm enjoying sitting in the sun, drawing the view, then I am.
The tide was flooding by the time it came for my final shot. Despite taking lots of swimming shots, it was the very first one that summed up the lure of these islands.
It was a privilege to take part in this shoot as there can be no more authentic images of the islands than these. One of the onlookers did actually heckle us, calling out, "I bet you're doing a cheap photo shoot to advertise the Caribbean!" How wrong they were. Is it our fault that the Isles of Scilly look so beautiful, so unspoilt, so utterly idyllic?
Linking with -
Patti of Not Dead Yet Style
Catherine of Not Dressed As Lamb
Samantha of Fake Fabulous
Anna x
