Life changes with the small adds

Our kitchen at Ednovean Farm

Its curious isn't it how a simple thing can change your life - take the small adds for instance, the innocuous give away paper that you pick up with the petrol or find tucked into your daily paper. Opening it and flicking through ht the pages............ there is "just the thing" that you have been looking for for ages.

I set my heart on a Rayburn for our kitchen when we renovated our barn at Ednovean Farm, not just any Rayburn but a glossy racing green, a model just out, the Rayburn nouvelle. This was a pretty tall order as we were nearing the end of our renovation and shall we say a tad over budget! Enter the magic fairy in the shape of the Penwith Pirate and there it was - barely a year old and about to be discarded by a home owner with little patience with the idiosyncrasies of Rayburns.

We stored the magic Rayburn in an old Rice trailer for nearly a year until we were ready to fit it and it swung up to the first floor teetering on the fork lift of a tractor - beautiful green and shiny and I've warmed myself against it and cooked breakfast for my house guest on it, ever since.

Then again, shortly after we were married my lovely old Lurcher Maize Brown (for picture see the Ednvoean Cats) died leaving us "dogless" A very small add caught my eye - "Lonely Lurcher seeks home" I phoned the lovely forthright Doggie lady who said "Dear Dog deserves a good home" in the sort of staccato reserved for very good dogs but alas he had already been rehomed. But i don't give up quite that easily and left my name and phone number - just in case. Well they rehomed Blaze twice - the second lot of people even asked for their money back from the charity and so the battered Volvo was launched to Redruth I think (which was about the limit of the old cars range) and Blaze came home panting anxiously in the back seat.

What a dog and companion, he went everywhere with us; every shopping expedition; trip to the bank ;walk along the coastal path. He adored life, everything was an adventure to him with his optimistic enthusiasm and bright shining eyes. Towards the end of his life the beating he had suffered before he was rescued started to catch up with him and he succumbed to epilepsy and when he went he left a hole that even the small ads couldn't fill.

Blaize with my husband Charles (not found in the small adds!) at Stackhouse Cove

Blaize at Stackhouse Cove - his favourite walk, particularly with a picnik

Then the garden path of course. By the year 2000 we had more or less finished renovating the barn - must be time to landscape the courtyards then! For years I pored over the small adds "of interest to gardeners" or perhaps "building materials" looking for granite sets I had always wanted and there they were "Reclaimed granite sets" just as the landscapers were starting to think about paths. They had been pulled out of a house in Newlyn beautiful timeworn pink squares to treasure. We laid them between the car park and the house hugging a courtyard wall on one side and bordering a small herb garden on the other the final peice of our jigsaw. Walking back to the house late last night The circle of lights across Mounts Bay lay before me punctuated by the brighter lights of the ships sheltering from the storm and the moon caught the regular shapes of the granite sets leading my homeward and to the life shaped in the small ads!

The cobbles that lead into the courtyard at Ednvoean Farm