Minack in the Rain with Hungarian Cushion

The outing was planned months ago, the tickets bought, the travel and dining arrangements made - all that we couldn't control was the weather.

The Minack Theatre at Porthcurno www.minack.com bills itself as "Cornwall's Theatre Under the Stars", but it can also, of course, be Cornwall's Theatre Inside a Raincloud, as it was last night. Still, it had been raining most of the day so we were all prepared with waterproofs and warm things, just the thing for a midsummer evening. It was the actors I felt sorry for, but they put up a splendid show, making a bit of business out of tipping water off the chairs before they sat down, etc.

As well as waterproofs, of course, padding is required to sit on. The seating is basically tiers of stone steps, although they seem to have been turfed. I thought we had some vinyl cushions about the place, but they all seem to be on an Elsewhere, and I didn't really want to take a dinky velvet scatter cushion off the sofa. Emergency racking of brain during a grocery shopping expedition on Friday morning brought up a vague memory of cushion covers in my mother's old sewing box among some old silk scarves, crocheted doilies and other things I haven't looked at for years. When I finally got down through the piles of books, lamps, fuel pumps and other stuff on top of the sewing box I found not one but three large cushion covers, brand new and unused, made of a furnishing weight cotton cloth, two of them geometric red white and black, the third mustard yellow and black. "Ugly", I thought. But good enough for an outdoor theatre seat cushion.

On closer inspection I discovered that they still had their original labels - in Hungarian, and dated 4th September 1963. I can only guess that my father brought them back from one of his business trips, and my mother could not find a colour scheme in her tastefully decorated home they would go with. He always brought stuff back from trips - here a Daum vase, there an 'ethnic' cushion cover, often some exotic alcoholic beverage or confectionery, the very first pocket size transistor radios ever seen in England... Anyway, 46 years later, stuffed with an old pillow and wrapped in an official Council Recycling bag, one of his souvenirs made my evening at the Minack very comfortable indeed, and they'll make very good boat or camper cushions when I get round to doing the other two. Thanks, Dad!