Fifty-one years after it opened, Calder & Daughter prints wedding invitations for couples who were not born when its press was cast.
The press in the back room of Calder & Daughter weighs a little over a tonne and was cast in 1958. Elspeth Calder, who is seventy-three, can tell from the sound of it whether the ink is too thick. Her father opened the shop in 1975, printing raffle tickets, menus and the order of service for half the funerals in the parish. When the copy shops arrived in the nineties, most of that work left. Calder kept the press because, she says, it was too heavy to move. Now the work has come back, for a reason her father would not have believed: people want to feel the letters. The type bites into thick cotton paper and leaves a dent you can run your thumb across. The shop prints about sixty sets of wedding invitations a year and has stopped taking bookings for next summer. Each card goes through the press once per colour. A set of a hundred and…
Continued on p. 5 →Penhaligon's on Harbour Street, before the boats come in. AI-generated
She kept the fishermen's tabs in a school exercise book and never once asked for the money.
For forty-one years, if you were on Harbour Street before six in the morning, the only light on was at Penhaligon's. Ruth Penhaligon, who has died aged eighty-four, opened the café at half past four for the boats and closed it at two, when she said the tea went stale and so did the conversation. She was born in a house on Chapel Row, the daughter of a crab fisherman, and took over the café from an aunt in 1979 with, she said, "a tea urn, eleven tables and a debt". She paid off the debt in six years and never changed the tables. Fishermen ran up tabs that lasted whole seasons. She kept them in a school exercise book and never once, according to her son Mark, asked for the money. "She knew everybody would pay when the fish came in," he said. "And they did. Mostly." She knew everybody would pay when the fish came in. And they…
Continued on p. 5 →The reading room at the central library on Wren Square. AI-generated
From next month the central library on Wren Square will stay open until ten on weekdays, in a two-year trial paid for by a local trust. The reading room was full most evenings last winter.
Continued on p. 5 →The pears on the Kestrel estate. Take what you can carry. AI-generated
Forty pear trees on the edge of the Kestrel estate were left behind by a nursery that closed in 1987. Now the whole street picks them.
Nobody on the Kestrel estate remembers who planted the pear trees, because nobody did. They were nursery stock, left in the ground when the Hollins nursery closed in 1987 and the land was forgotten. The trees grew anyway. For years their fruit fell and rotted in the long grass. Then, four autumns ago, a retired teacher called Win Abbott put up a ladder and a hand-written sign: Take what you can carry. This year the street picked more than a tonne.
Rock pools, a ferry ride, a film on the library carpet and a tram that will tell you about its brakes.
Half-term starts on Friday. Here are twelve things to do in Port Avery that cost nothing, tested by the Courier's own children, who were not asked. 1. Count the bubbles. The Merrow Field Station runs a free family morning at the lake on Saturday: nets, trays and a microscope that shows what lives in a drop of marsh water. 2. Ride the ferry and back. Under-twelves travel at no charge with an adult, and the view of the harbour from halfway across is the best in town. 3. The library's Monday matinee. A film, a carpet and no talking, at two. 4. The tram depot. The volunteers restoring Tram 11 let visitors watch on Wednesday afternoons, and will explain the brakes at length. 5. Rock pools at Gull Point, two hours either side of low tide. Put the rocks back the way you found them. The other seven, from the climbing wall's free taster hour to the bakery on Mill…
