In Cornwall

My old friend Morag who I worked with about four years ago invited me to visit her in Cornwall before I leave. Morag's from New Zealand and we sat side by side for two and a half years. During that last year she fell pregnant to her Cornish husband and her maternity coincided with Dodge and I taking some time off to visit Mexico, LA, New Zealand, Fiji and Canada.

Morag knew she was having a boy so we called him Spartacus, 'Sparty' for short. As Matt and I ate ceviche and downed Modelo at Playa del Carmen, Sparty was born in a hospital in Reading. They named him Piran. I saw him at five months and again at around one, then Morag and Dorian moved to Cornwall to start an online television business. Now he is three and a half.

I'd been to Cornwall for the first time last year - we went to see Calvin Harris at the Eden Project - but Momo and family live right at the end of the country at Marazion beside St Michaels Mount, on the opposite side of the bay from Penzance, and I'd never been there before.

I arrived on a small plane from Gatwick. Cornwall is awash with yellow in spring as it is a major growing region for the UK's daffodils. There are also huge china clay pits and abandoned mines. Cornwall's mining history is everywhere - from the lack of trees (burned to fuel the mines) to the smoke stacks of the engine houses punctuating the landscape.

Piran chats away, hatching plans to take me to the water park, to see Thomas The Tank Engine, to eat ice-creams and to go to the rocket museum, every so often pointing out buses and tractors and helicopters. I tell Morag that he is like a cartoon kid. He has a mop of bright red hair that sticks out in all directions, a little button nose with a scattering of freckles across the bridge, a cheeky smile and an endearing giggle. Someone should write children's books with Piran cast as the hero.

It's getting dark when we arrive at Marazion, the small village on the edge of the sea - a full moon gleams above us. Morag's husband Dorian tells us that it's a 'super moon', the closest the moon's been to the earth in 18 years. We go to Amelie's at Porthleven for dinner and I have delicious Cornish pollock with mussels. We all eat ice-cream for dessert. There is so much Cornish ice-cream that we try at least four varieties during the weekend.

The next morning, I wake to Piran shouting at the top of his lungs outside my room. It is seven o'clock and clearly it's time to get up. Piran grabs his bike and we walk out to St Michaels Mount, a small island with a medieval castle which connects to Marazion at low tide and is surrounded by water at high tide.

We spend the weekend whizzing around the countryside, through the fields of daffodils and 'earlies' (new season potatoes, force grown under plastic), from village to village, walking, talking and eating ice-cream. Dorian and Morag are hugely knowledgeable about the local area and tell me all sorts of stories.

They tell me about a mad festival that's held once a year where all the villagers dance through every house to cast out the devil. They tell me about how miners jumped from swinging beam to beam (called a 'man engine') to make their way down to work, that they worked naked because it was so hot and how Dorian's great grandfather was killed in the Levant mining disaster in 1919. In Penzance, they point out the roughest pub in the UK, the quaint Swordfish Inn. They also tell me that there are lots of mental health issues in Penzance not only because it is the end of the line - apparently people try to get away as far as they possibly can when they lose it so there are large concentrations of loons at either end of the British Isles - but also because the houses are built from granite, which is a natural source of radiation.

We visit Land's End and the Minack Theatre, a Greco-Roman-style theatre built in the 1930s on a cliff overlooking the spectacular Porthcurno Bay. In summer tourists flock to this open-air theatre, the somewhat wacky masterstroke of a local who thought that her garden, with its breath-taking view across the sea, would make a good stage for productions of Shakespeare.

On Sunday, before my flight, we have lunch at a wonderful beach-side restaurant in St Ives. Run by an Australian chef, the highly-rated Porthminster Cafe serves up fresh, delectable food. I opt for the fish and chips with tartare sauce and white Balsamic. It is excellent. Morag has the same and Dorian, who is vegetarian, chooses the haloumi and beetroot salad. Piran is content to eat chips, more chips and ice-cream.

The Porthminster is known for its imaginative and delicious desserts and for £5.95, I order the rhubarb and apple taste plate. It includes several small lengths of poached rhubarb wrapped in apple, a multi-layered serving of apple jelly, rhubarb jelly and pannacotta, a spoonful of apple granita and a shot of rhubarb infused vodka. What a bargain.

Morag and Dorian share a beautifully presented banana plate which includes a crescent of banana topped with a thin layer of toffee, a cinnamon-dusted meringue with clotted cream, pistachio ice-cream with shortbread, and a banana sponge.