Contentment is catching 🎣

A week in Cornwall with an old friend

Hi lovely, I’m Aimée, a soulful copywriter . Here, on my Substack, I share seasonal tales from my little corner of the Cotswolds. I write about food, heritage, books, travel, creative living, and whimsical musings. Come on in, take off your boots, and cosy up by the fire. I’ll pop the kettle on.

January stretched on like a hallway of closed doors, each one leading nowhere I wanted to go. The month felt long and grey, and I moved about in an endless fog. I needed a change of scene, a sharp sea breeze to cut through the heaviness.

Whenever I feel untethered or disgruntled with the world, Cornwall always calls me. I love Cornwall in wintertime, it is quieter, softer. The cobbled streets t, the beaches, and the cliffs exhale after a torrent of summer visitors. The air is salt-tinged and peaty. The ice-cream parlours and paddle board shops are boarded up for the season and everywhere, and there is a gentle lull - like when the tide goes out.

I spent my days there with an old friend—one of those rare people who make the world feel steadier just by existing. We lived together during my third year of university, and I remember how she'd cut out our much-neglected lawn with a pair of kitchen scissors or lock herself away in her room to paint.

She’s Cornish through and through, and now, at thirty, she’s restoring a house in North Cornwall that dates back to the Battle of Waterloo. She’s filled it with treasure:, old ship parts for beams, Cornish slate for alcoves, a herringbone floor she found on Facebook marketplace. and laid herself. Layers upon layers of history peeled back by her wildly capable hands.

Spending time with my friend, I noticed how contented she seemed. She restored her house, walked her dog along the shore, spent slow weekends with books or making cocktails for her parents.

Contentment is a strange thing in today’s world. We’re told to chase more—climb the ladder, get the 100k salary, buy the house, find the great love, have neurotypical children, shape the perfect life. The expectation hums in the background, always.

For someone like me, who leans towards a slower life, balancing ambition and contentment feels like a delicate thing. How do you hold both at once—wanting more while still living in your fullness?

My friend wasn’t caught up in what she didn’t have. Instead, she paid attention to what she did. There was something beautiful in that.

And that’s when I realised: contentment is catching.

It’s a state of being rather than a finish line. But spend enough time with someone who has it, and you start to absorb it. Although you can catch contentment, it is also something you can cultivate. It’s a quiet choice, made over and over, to notice the good, to settle into the present, to let what you have be enough.

Here are the moments that filled me with that feeling this week:

~ Eating crab linguine in a cosy bistro in Port Isaac.
~ Playing a game of drafts over a cocktail.
~ Riding a bus across Bodmin Moor in the lashing rain while reading Daphne du Maurier.
~ Eating heart-shaped waffles with pistachio spread and watching Clarkson’s Farm.
~ Stomping across February fields and ending up by the fire in a pub.
~ Washing my hands in the sea.
~ Eating prunes in earl grey syrup.
~ Finding the perfect pink hat in Boscastle.
~ Driving through Cornwall with Fisherman’s Friends playing on the radio.
~ Falling asleep to church bells ringing every quarter hour.
~ Buying a perfectly formed oyster knife.
~ Eating Rick Stein fish and chips on a little silver tray.
~ Walking around the harbour by night in the glow of the street lamps.
~ Pulling on my wellies and letting the wind tangle my hair.
~ Tucking into crab and saffron sandwiches on the train ride home.

Maybe contentment is about finding pockets of stillness and joy and staying close to people who feel like sunshine.