Black Head is the site of a night’s camp beside a memorial to poet A. L. Rowse. Its inscription, “This was the land of my content,” gives the scene a pointed contrast: the travellers can claim contentment in spirit while eating noodles outdoors, with fat gulls watching from the rocks for something better.

Camp and memorial

The tent is pitched near the memorial, whose inscription lends the place an intimate association with contentment. The travellers’ own state is more qualified: they are content in mind, if not in body, as they eat noodles on the exposed rock ledges. The words on the memorial and the practical conditions of the camp meet in that distinction between inward ease and physical comfort.

Gulls and the meal

Fat gulls settle on the ledges, stuffed with chips, while the travellers eat noodles. Their exchange turns the difference in appetites into a dry joke: the birds have shown no interest in the noodles, and the reply is that they are “not that stupid.” The moment gives Black Head a small, comic domesticity, as the meal and the gulls’ preference for chips puncture the solemnity of the memorial without erasing it.