About Time

How travels through Cornwall helped on my road to recovery

By Briony Benjamin

I didn’t know the question.

I just knew the answer was Cornwall.

As I finished chemotherapy in Australia I had a craving for a place. A deep longing that I couldn’t explain but possibly connected to my love of the film ‘About Time.’ Cornwall seemed healing and magical and so it became my beacon. An adventure to look forward to on the other side of this big old mess.

I had been diagnosed with stage 4 Hodgkin’s Lymphoma at 31 just as my career and life was taking off. I had thought cancer was something that only happened to people in the movies like the hot Irish guy in PS I love you. Suddenly though I was the lead character in a film I didn’t want to be in but without the cheesy love story. Cue tears, IVF, egg harvesting, chemotherapy, wig shopping, hair loss, more hospital appointments then I ever thought possible, nausea and guilt-free naps (lots and lots of naps).

But now I was there. A world away in a little Cornish village, partaking in a Beach Art session (or perhaps sand art therapy might be more apt). Using the very advanced tools of a rake and a broomstick handle, my dear friend Bill was teaching me how to create a sprawling artwork on the beach. We spent some hours carving interconnecting circles and patterns on the sandy flats and it was meditative and calming and time seemed to stand still. When we’d finished we sat on the grassy cliffs to admire our handiwork and watch strangers interact with its Sacred Geometry. A small child danced along the circles with glee. A young man busy on his phone walked right through it, oblivious until he came to a sudden stop, confused by what he’d walked into. Others came to admire from the sidelines and take photos. A moment in time to sit, observe and just watch the world go by. And I felt little pieces of me bubble back to the surface.

I spent the next two magical weeks visiting small Cornish villages with my sister Molly. Eating scones with clotted cream and jam and of course having lots of tea. We were completely in awe of the fact that you could be in a perfectly sunny day one moment and totally covered in fog the next.

We stayed with dear family friends who had been my surrogate family during my gap year many years before. They made me laugh until I couldn’t breathe and reminded me of a simpler time in my life. We went on stunning coastal walks and I sat at the spot where the famous poem was penned by Laurence Binyon: 'They shall not grow old, as we who are left grow old.’ I reflected on how lucky I was to be here and to have that chance to grow old, to get more time.

When I left Cornwall I felt replenished, like a part of me had returned. I didn’t yet realise that healing would take me a lot longer than I had scheduled. I returned to my life in Sydney and back to my job in the ‘real world,’ and I was in such a rush to reclaim the time I had lost and get my life ‘back on track.’

But I have come to realise that healing just takes time.

It’s funny how we see the process of recovery as an annoying thing that comes between us and a normal life. We just want to fast-forward through it. Even the language around recovery is so rushed! ‘Wishing you a SPEEDY recovery’; ‘You’ll smash this’; ‘You’ll be on your feet in no time’. Be it emotional or physical healing I realise now that healing cannot be rushed. Trust me I’ve tried. Sometimes you’ve just got to slow down, take life as it comes and don’t think about it too much.

It’s totally normal after a major upheaval to feel completely lost, be that the death of a loved one, a job loss, a health crisis or a global pandemic. It takes time to figure out which way you want to go next. So just be gentle with yourself and take it day by day, step by step, breathe by breathe.

Life will throw us all sorts of unexpected plot twists, and yes it can be tough. But guess what? So are you.

Briony Benjamin is author of "Life is Tough (But So Are You)" Murdoch Books

Some Notes on "About Time"

They used the lawn and house at Porthpean for the very Cornish scenes in the film "About Time". It's centrally located on St Austell Bay on the south coast of Cornwall and around 2013 was used as the Cornish setting for the very British romantic comedy-drama written and directed by Richard Curtis, and starred Domhnall Gleeson, Rachel McAdams, and Bill Nighy.

If you have not seen it, then the spoiler alert is that it is about how the male line of a Cornish family have the ability to time travel and thus change their past in the hope of improving their future. Come to think of it a bit like "Groundhog Day" which was filmed 20 years earlier where Bill Murray gets to have an awful lot of goes at getting Andie MacDowell to love him.

I worked at Porthpean one summer in 2016 as a wedding waiter, although my wedding had a Bond connection. Perhaps because nearby is The Eden Project and they used it as an ice palace in Die Another Day with Pierce Brosnan but more likely because the bridegroom was called Bond. Actually I think he really was. The pictures are from my wedding mostly but some from the "About Time" film.

Final end note. Lisa Harbour, seen here in the final photos with me on the "About Time" lawn and drawing on the beach, is now a Cornish Art Therapist and Biographical Counsellor.