Lawnmower Contagion

Last weekend I spent a couple of days up at Anne Cawood's place at Whiddon Valley dog sitting,. Anne has gone down to Dawlish for a few days to visit an old work mate from the Clarks shoe factory days and asked if I could look after the dug as her friend has an allergy to them and rather than put the hound in the kennels she thought I might like to spend some quality time with it; plus being the firework season, which tends to start in June up that way, she thought it would be better to have someone looking out for it at close quarters. The dog is called Tessa by the way and is a real charmer, a half collie, part spaniel with a bit of terrier thrown in. A real old farm dug. I was happy to oblige as a know from experience from my own infamous firework displays down beside the Tarka Trail that I put on for the kiddies an errant squib can cause a nervous breakdown in a sketchy dug.

Tessa in her pomp

So, Friday morning me and Tessa had a lovely walk out along Sowden Lane up over the fields to Goodliegh and then back to Westacott and along the Coney Gut back to the house. I was surprised by the amount of development up that way as I hadn't been up there for years and years. Infact,  I think the last time I actually played a proper game of football was on the pitch that is now Tesco's. I was a ringer for SWEB Sports and Social Club v Ayers & Grimshaw  Barry Tunnock signed me up for the game remembering my prowess in the Ammies Second XI championship side of the 75-76 season he believed I could help "The Sparks" obtain a crucial victory in the Paul Madeley DIY Stores North Devon Sunday League Second Division relegation battle. Turns out my best football days were at quite some distance behind me and we lost 7-1.  SWEB were relegated to the third division and were condemned to pitches like the stinky boggy quag  beside the lace factory at St Mary's Road for the following season. With a hole in my heart I hung up my boots thereafter.
          I didn't recognise the place up by the school. I could have been in a different town. If I;d just been plonked there or caught the wrong bus and fallen asleep and been awoken at the end of the line at Westacott Road I wouldn't have a clue where I was and it would take some figuring out as to how I was to get back home. I found all this ribbon development bleddy alarming and I was telling Tess how I remember when this was all fields only broken up by the tracks of the marshalling yard and how we would muck about on the railway line squashing old pennies on the rails as trains shuttled back and forth from the Junction station to Victoria Road goods yard and maybe back then on to South Molton and all points East to Taunton. As older boys we'd go out around and about Westacott picking magic mushroom to sell to the bikers down the The Tuns or Mugfords. Amazing it is to see it now, row after row of little houses, it's all quite pleasant and very, very, neat and tidy but there's hundreds and hundreds of them, and more to come no doubt, stretching all the way up the valley.
           It was a glorious day and so when us got back I thought I'd sit out in the garden and enjoy the last of the sun and quietly read the Journal and then it started..... a few gardens down someone had started cutting the grass obviously, with a spot or two of rain forecast, taking advantage of the fine weather to get a cut in.  Initially I was oblivious to this hum and then moments later another lawnmower started up behind me followed seconds later by another one a few gardens along and then another before long a riotous cacophony of all manner of lawnmowers, was crescendoing up the valley. I hadn't had such a experience since the eclipse, when up on Haytor the birds all went to sleep and the shadow of the eclipse came across the land like an old blackout curtain being unfurled and the lights of Plymouth were all turned on before us. Obviously this wasn't quite such a sublime, once in a lifetime experience as I have noticed this phenomena up at Sticklepath from time to time. However, due to being in a valley the effect was more pronounced and naturally amplified. Within a matter of minutes there were all sorts of mowers whirring and buzzing away; the national grid must have been on standby ready to throw some switches in order to cope with the surge in demand. Then, beggar me to cap it all, just beyond next door's fence the coughing and spluttering of a petrol engine fired another mower into life and at that moment all hell seemed to break loose the peace and quiet of a summers afternoon was shattered and it just kept going on. Out in the road a chainsaw was started and as I walked out to get the dog in I noticed a neighbour virtually prone across a bit of shrubbery wielding and slicing into the foliage with a bloody Husquvarna not a little electric trimmer but a fully blown branch lopper. He hadn't got a bleddy clue the thing was virtually pulling him up and over the bush and then before he knew it he had it dangling upside down to get at the lower twigs. No protective gear on or anything. Tell you what if the saw had hit a stone it could have kicked back and tore it's way right down between his eyes. It would have made an awful mess and kind of defeated the object of tidying the garden. I've took a chainsaw course and one of the things they do before letting you loose with one is to show you the kind of injuries you can sustain if you do not use them responsibility and with due caution. They weren't a pretty sight. They still give me nightmares to this day! Anyway, unsurprisingly, given he was using it upside down, the engine cut out and so for the next 20 minutes you had the sound of him trying to get it restarted. "It's bleddy flooded bey", I said by way of help as I went back out the back. I didn't offer any further assistance as by now the next door neighbour had moved on to his front lawn and was having trouble getting the thing, a Mountfield  by the look of it (As a former agricultural engineer I do know my mowers) through his front gate, his sward is about the size of a shovehappeny table and you could have got a lovely cut with a pair of clippers but no he was determined to get it in there and get mowing on.
Eventually, the sound of mowers died out and a momentary calm ensued however this was soon stirred by the sequential sound of the strimmers starting up. This went on for a while longer but soon around about 7.30pm  as the sun was getting lower in the western sky out over the town peace was restored. Thos lasted about 2 minutes as next door as no sooner was the strimmer stashed in the garage then the leaf blower was brought out and sparked up. A bleddy leaf blower!  So off he goes blowing away the grass cuttings which had strayed on to his garage forecourt. Once satisfied he'd blown the cuttings off his drive no joke he goes and gets out the Karcher Pressure Hose, the ultimate in environmentally unfriendly household tools, and starts mournfully hosing down his drive by this stage he didn't look too bright or happy shifting about looking down at this jet of water possibly remembering the days long since passed when he could use his own nozzle to power blast one fag end from the urinal to another, or perhaps that's just me.
           Why do people feel the need to buy this expensive and energy draining  kit, all the electric, the power and the water consumed all to keep a garden tidy and maintain a lawn. Don't get me started on weed killers that would start another diatribe. A tidy weed free perfectly manicured lawn has to be a true symbol, after aeons of strife of Man's glorious triumph over nature and the resources required to maintain it will surely see to the terminal vanquishing of his old foe. To my mind all these suburban lawn can be cut adequately using a hand powered mower like the lovely piece of precision engineering that is the Qualcast Panther 30. (see right)
            I remember that bloke Percy and his mate the whiskery, rheumy eyed bey with milk bottle lenses and who was as thin as one of his rakes, they cut the verges and trimmed the pavements around town for years and years. They didn't have a van they had a cart and used a hook and a rake and a scythe for bigger jobs. Leaf blower, they had a bleddy old broom and a shovel.  They always did a marvellous job and Percy ensured he did it with time to spare so he could hand out religious tracts to passers-by.

The Greatest Cornish Myth

A few weeks later I was fortunately given the opportunity to present my research and formulate my argument with greater clarity. Coincidentally, at he time of the Scottish referendum I was down in the Pays Basque once more I’m glad to say Farm Swap is in the can as they say ( LINK HERE more on this later) and Jonty and of Taw Tarka Film and Video services thought they’d have a wrap party down with the Marsauds the French farmers involved in the programme. Of course the Basques have a great sense of historical, geographical and cultural identity so they were all very interested in the Scottish debate and it as it turned out appeared very disappointed with the outcome.They evidently saw it as some sort of benchmark. Over dinner one evening outside on the patio as the sun set in the Western skies beyond the Pyrennees I had the opportunity to give my thoughts on such matters an airing before a more discerning audience than the Lunch Club, Monsieur Marsaud had bought along Inaki his neighbour. This fella is a Spanish Basque a small dark gruff bloke  who has been exiled in France, or more exactly the Pays Basque, the Northern Basque country or Ipparalde in their language for what became increasingly obvious but never stated reasons for many years. I'd met him on my previous visits but he’d viewed me with suspicion and we didn’t get on.

Never ever say "Atletico"

I gather from young Jean Paul Marsaud it was all to do with me calling Athletic Bilbao Atletico as in Atletico Madrid and I hadn't realised the error of my ways until the emphatic difference was pointed out later. Anyway this Inaki turns up primed to have a good go at the English and after a discussion on Scottish nationalism which became increasingly lively as the patxaran got passed around. Inaki spoke English with a Irish accent and had married an Irish girl and lived in Ireland for few years until he had to leave. Infact, he spent honeymoon on a tour of Cornwall and seemed particularly fond of Looe. So given his innate nationalistic tendencies it was inevitable that the Cornish question would arise. He thought that Cornish independence was nigh, the Cornish as a distinct people had been too long under the yoke of the English Imperialists and that they’d had enough of being ruled by a hegemonic elite governing from an alien city state 300 miles away. I don’t know how he’d picked this up  from a few nights in Looe but evidently Inaki was extremely convinced of his own opinions and his notions of Cornish sovereignty became more and more insane. He's a madman, mazed.

His boggled eyed views, and a couple more sniffs of patxaran, made my bleddy blood boil and I couldn’t hold back. I couldn't let him get away with it. I'd done with was trying to be polite and humour him but I soon found myself giving it to him with both barrels.

Firstly, I had to point out to him that the notion of a separate Cornish people, a distinct racial “Celtic" type was a nonsense as DNA evidence shows that people who have antecedents in the West Of Britain and up North (basically you draw a line from the Tyne down to Bournemouth) share the same markers which they share chromosone to chromosone with those from Ireland, the West of Scotland, Brittany and Wales. Infact it has been claimed recently there was no Celtic racial type these folk were Ancient Britons, people who first settled Britain 10,000 years ago, later beaker people who migrated up through Spain and France to our damp largely uninhabited Isle who had taken on board a Celtic culture which had crossed Europe during the Bronze age and Iron age. This culture became more prevalent and more enduring on the fringes, lasting as it did in these outer limits until the medieval times as they became cut off from the East of Europe by the Romans, who incidentally didn’t colonise anything West of Exeter but traded for tin with the Britons and then even more so by the barbarian hordes and the Anglo Saxon invader. In ancient history the West of Britain as a whole shared a sophisticated culture derived from a knowledge of the Mediterranean civilisations due to trading links with the Pheonecians  who came up from Gadir Cadiz and the Algarve to trade tin at a place they called Cassiteredes the Tin Islands. Previously The Beaker People, also Iberians, even built a wall across Stonehenge to keep the lumpen invaders from the East at arms length. Of course by now I was on automatic pilot and was not really that convinced of my own historical veracity but it all sounded bleddy plausible. I told the Basque that during the dark ages the whole of Southwest England was inhabited by the Dumnomii tribe who in the face of invasion from the east retreated back to the furthest reaches of the peninsular establishing themselves in North west Somerset, North and West Devon and Cornwall.In North Devon, which was never a part of Wessex, the Anglo Saxons didn’t arrive until a generation before the Norman Conquest. and didn't get around to renaming many settlements in their alien tongue,  to such an extent that place names with origins in our indigenous Southwestern Brittonic language

were inscribed in the first records ie. the Doomesday book. Ilfracombe, Combe Martin, Petrockstowe, Braunton, Parracombe, Woolacombe, Tawton; the rivers Taw and Torridge amoung many other place names are all derived from Celtic, Devonian/Welsh topographical terms or Celtic saints, St Brannock and St Petroc. I then triumphantly stressed that Devon is actually the only county in England that has a strictly Celtic language name coming as it does from Dumnom after the Dumnomii. Infact place names with a celtic toponomy are more frequent in Devon than they are in Cornwall!

I told him that I thought that this notion of Cornwall as a separate, defined Celtic nation was invented by 18/19th Century antiquarians, Romantic writers and in recent times Daphne bleddy Dumaurier, that Mary Wesley and her Camomile Lawn and John Betjeman, lovely bloke though, and other members of the cultural elite going on about finding their own unique magical corner of Britain while broadcasting it to the world. The middle classes yapping on about secret coves in Cornwall and getting all misty eyed about golden memories of Cornish childhood holidays all butterfly catching, lemonade on the veranda and colourful but smelly local characters. The Sunday Supplements articles propagate these myths and commodify them, Cornish porn, puffing out guff with phrases like celtic charm usually accompanied with a picture of St. Michael's mount a former Benedictine monastery or summoning up allusions to the mythical land of Lyonese which  features in Arthurian legend but actually probably a land bridge sunk into the sea about 10,000 years ago. All bleddy utter rubbish. Today New Age type blow ins and the tourist industry both of whom have had their own agenda to serve persevere with this nonsense. These new agers seem to place King Arthur in about 500BC and if evidence from contemporary Launceston, Totnes and Glastonbury is anything to go by, he believed in faeries, crystal healing and took lessons from a reiki master. All a bit confused in my book given that he was a Romano Briton so more than likely a good Catholic with a dash of the old ways thrown 

The once and future King - a good Catholic boy.

This evidently tickled Inaki as he laughed and spat pout "bloody hippies"

It's all bleddy daft in the end. And we headed off sort out our differences in the time honoured Basque tradition of a tree trunk chopping contest or Aizkolaritza. I didn't want to offend the bey too much so I let him win even though he kept falling off his log. Ultimately I respected his deeply held beliefs formed as they were from many years of repression and exile
So, I had to compromise and amicably explained that all these things are relative, but the Scots and Cornish bandying about terms like freedom really did get my goat. This led to a quizzical expression the Basques have a lot of maxims proverbs involving goats but this obviously wasn't one of them

A miracle of the Sands

Wes's van - up for sale

A while back now I was down in France for a couple of weeks staying with the Marsauds my fellow my other half in Reality TV's Farm Swap so I'd been out of the loop for a bit. However, Wes Twardo turned up as he had also gone down there to Jonty of Taw and Tarka Video Services mother's place which is across the valley from the Marsaud's. They have always extended an invitation to all and sundry to come down and stay so he thought he might just take 'em up on the offer.  From what I could gather something happened with Jonty's mother and he was asked to leave so he rattles along in the old Fiat and turns up in the Marsaud's yard. You could tell he was on the way as the van runs on vegetable oil and it smelt like the Silver Cod in Bear Street was coming down the lane. I was glad to see that he'd brought a copy of the Journal with him. So later, with the evening drawing in I sat down by the fire to digest the latest news from home. I was taken by one story in particular. Something didn't quite ring true in the way the Journal tells it or at least if it did happen that way then it was a bleddy miracle and the story should be trending far and wide.

It tells the tale of a surfer, more likely a floater or a man who went surfing, who lost his wedding ring in the waves but was reunited with it after a metal detecting enthusiast spent six hours searching the beach. This chap Darren was on holiday with his wife Michell and he forgot to take the ring off before hitting the water.( Any foool knows you loose rings like this all your digits shrink in cold water. Any true surfer is well aware of this fact! So to my mind this confirms the fact that he wasn't an actual surfer rather a bloke who happened to give surfing a go on his holiday. Anyway, as he was paddling out to meet the sets, or more likely in this fella's case sticking his ass out to meet an oncoming wavelet, the ring slipped off his finger and vanished into the sea. Yeah, bleddy likely story, Wes and I concluded, knowingly looking at each other, more likely he'd slipped it off in order to appear single and unattached, a free spirit of the waves, to the surfer girls and other weekend warriors. Payback time as legend has it that Neptune always takes what he think he is owed, snaffling away his prize deep down into the briny depths, or in this case the shallows. The couple then claimed to have launched a three hour search for the ring. If, as the reader is led to believe, he was in the depths  this really would be a remarkable feat of strength and endurance and since he didn't appear to be a Polynesian pearl diver but actually a rep for a vending machine company from Berkshire this would have been a truly superhuman endeavour!

The extensive and ever shifting sands of Saunton

“Emotions were running high,” said Darren. I bleddy bet they were! Turns out it was Michelle's birthday and the couple had booked a meal in a nice restaurant to celebrate but this mishap had put them in two minds as to whether to go or not as poor Michelle was distraught. This conjures up an image of the maid on hers knees in the shallows flailing around in the waters, throwing handfuls of sand all around and screaming up into the heavens, " why oh why Lord? Why must it always be me!" A wild look in her eyes as she is dragged away from the perilous incoming tide by concerned day trippers who settle her down above the tideline and stand about looking at her shivering and muttering under a huddle of beach towels. It was a lovely day ruined.
Wes and I tried to think where they would have booked to go for dinner and whether, if we found ourselves in a similar dilemma, we would turn down the chance of a slap up dinner there. In such circumstances you'd probably think twice if it was The Sands or The Boardwalk, although personally speaking I quite like both those establishments,  as you really wouldn't want want to look out at the sea and be constantly reminded of your los,s even if you faced the appetising prospect of a surf and turf platter. It obviously must have been a somewhere a bit more special than Wetherspoons as they'd made a booking and I don't think a Squires' Fish and Chip supper would have sufficed. You have to imagine that they would have pushed the boat out a bit. So maybe it was The Thyme Restaurant at Trimstone Manor and, we agreed, you really wouldn't want to give up a  table at The Watersmeet nor at Kentisbury Grange. In the end Wes and I settled on the Blue Groove down at Croyde which, "oozes unique personality and refuses to be put in a box". That seemed more like it. Then again your getting into Kings Arms Georgeham territory if you head down that road. Nope the Blue Groove it had to be. Of course, The Journal failed to mention where they were going.

Cool The Blue Groove - It's not of the box

At some point Michelle recovered some mental clarity and had the brilliant idea of going online to a metal detecting forum and getting in touch with a dectectorist from Fremington who upon hearing the story was glad to be of assistance and eager to take up the challenge and he could empathise with their situation as he had faced a similar predicament having recently found his wife's ring. Doesn't say whether it was lost at sea or not as it could of course just been down the back of the sofa. So off he goes, in the early hours of the morning, in the dark. amid an Atlantic gale down to Saunton and undertakes a methodological search using his extincts and skills. The first search proved to be fruitless. Although, amazingly, they just keep coming. he did find a ring! Bleddy hell it jgets better and better, However, this one was engraved with "Vinny and Toni 4eva X" Sounds like it washed up from the shores of New Jersey, Oh we had a laugh. Wes knows a bloke called Vinny who for a time was the barman at the Dolphin Inn down at Combe Martin and he happens to be of Italian extraction, but his wife is called Barbara. I told Wes he should have a discreet word with him next time he's out that way. There cold be a reward. Mind you you he might open a right can of worms. As this Vinny happens to being of Italian extraction and it does say "Toni" Well, you never know. Stranger things have happened; like this old yarn for a start!
Anyway, As we all know time and tide wait for no man so undeterred, Paul launched a second search.
“The bigger swell predicted for the following day would move the sand and the ring would have sunk too deep to be found.” So once more he took bearings from where the ring had been lost, marking a search area with little flags and digging furiously in the worsening elements and as he was about to abandon the search, on his penultimate sweep of the zone, he only goes and finds the ring. Ten days after it was lost or to put it in starkly oceanographic terms twenty tormentuous tides later and given  that it it was also dark and in the middle of the night, a true miracle in all senses of the word, defying as it does the laws of nature and physics. A happy end to a slightly skewrd and rather inconsistent tale although none of us were able quite fit the Journal's account squarely with any sort of reality. Incredulous. Wes and I reckoned that if it this really was the case the talents of the Fremington detectorist were wasted beachcombing and mudlarking along the coastline and estuaries of North Devon as he must possess some sort of power of divination to find precious metal in the dark and in the perpetually shifting sands of our beaches. Mysterious, archetypal powers which would be best employed by professional treasure hunters searching for sunken Spanish galleons in the warm waters of the Caribbean, not mudlarking down at Yelland. He could make a fortune.

A hermit crab

Of course miracles can happen and I must confess to a similar happening in my own family. It was a baking day in the summer of 1976, Whitsun weekend or early summer at any rate and us lot had all gone on a trip down to Croyde. Of course us blokes swiftly took ourselves off down to The Carpenters Arms where we  slaked our thirst with a few pints of cool dry cider. It really was bleddy baking but lovely and cool in the pub. So we made the most of it at closing time. 2.00pm back then we all waddled back down the path to the beach to join the rest of the family and a leeky pie lunch. As we trudged across the burning sands Granfer Furse starts taking off his shoes and socks shirt and trousers. stripping off down to his vest and long johns he then dashes down to the sea and dives straight in. Of course although the air temperature was in the eighties and being early in the season the sea was still bleddy freezing he immediately came thrashing out up of the water in shock, coughing and spluttering before wheezing and gasping for air and in doing so his dentures came flying out of his mouth, before plopping into the swell and a rip must have carried them away as for love or money we had no luck finding them on an initial search. The lifeguards knowing as they do the prevailing currents suggested that they could have been swept towards the rocks down at the Baggy end. So we put out a hue and cry and Granfer offered 50p to anyone who could find the errant false teeth. On hearing of this kids swarmed down to the water and began searching all sorts of waifs and strays turned up like Victorian urchins down on the banks of the banks of the Thames. 50p that would have got you two bottles of Corona. At the time there was a scout jamboree going on in the fields behind the beach and they turned up and undertook a more methodological investigation, organising themselves into packs and setting up a central command point. It wasn't bob a job week so the y must have seen this as a keen opportunity to get their beachcombing badges. Luckily. the tide was on the way out and after an hour or two and just as the Thermos's were being uncorked and the rock cakes were coming out. a cry went up from a lad over on the rocks. We all hurried to the spot where he was pointing excitedly into a rockpool and there they were grandfer's teeth looking like some mutant hermit crab or deeply flawed yellowing pearls poking out between some sea anemones.
The little boy didn't want to touch them so I fished it out with his net and returned them to Grandfer bearing them on the end of a bamboo stick as I wasn't too keen on touching them either. So Granfer was able to enjoy his cake hungrily gobbling it down while slurping his tea of course this set him to coughing and spluttering so much so that the teeth came flying out once again. This time they fortunately landed in the sand so all we had to do was to get the stick out and send one of the kids off over to the stream and rinse 'em out. Oh happy jolly days out down at Croyde



Thinking about it  I also lost some surfer beads down there in 1972 and Wes told us how he always keeps an eye open for his cousin's sovereign medallion three hundred quids worth that. I remember when he lost that. That cut him down a peg or two, Cor he fancied himself that bloke, A real seventies man he was, a right flash harry. He worked on the oil rigs in the early days and when he was home he liked to flash the cash a bit and he'd drive up the high street day in day out in a yellow Triumph Stag with a couple of dolly birds, a seventies thing that, sitting up on the back seat. His girlfriend at the time was rumoured to be a page three model and had been a centrefold in Penthouse. So they say. Looking back, I think she was just a model for Codd's Auto Parts calender or Edes nuts and raisins. You removed the packets to reveal her ample self underneath, Although I have to say she was very attractive but I can't really imagine anyone sitting at a bar eating packet after packet just to get a peak of her bosoms. Perhaps there were people like that back then who got some sort of thrill out of eating all the nuts. They wouldn't have done it otherwise, would they. Anyway Shane when he wasn't tearing about the town would be down the Beach Club sitting on the wall with all the local fast kids, you had to graduate to the wall above the beach and once you got there you were really in with the in crowd. He rarely ventured down to the water as it would play havoc with his perm and he'd have to reapply coconut oil to his glistening hairy chest. However, one maid was able to tempt him down there and after frolicking in the waves and as they patted a beach ball gayly between each other Shane noticed that the pendant was missing. He dived around trying to find it pretending to show of his prowess as he had to keep up his act but all to know avail, Back up at the Beach Club it was all, "What comes around goes around", " It was only money. Plenty more what that come from". But inside it was killing him. He furtively sidled up to our gang as we were playing pinball and offered a tenner to anyone willing to search for it. We gave it a go but found nothing. Seeing him about these days, now he's lost some of his lustre, he looks haunted by his past.  I told Wes when we got back we should get in touch with Paul out at from Yelland as he was bound to bring his superhuman powers to bear upon it and as well as recovering the treasured coin we could also recover some of Shane's former glory. "Bugger that" said Wes, "I'm having it".

What about the North Devonians? NSFC (Not safe for Cornishmen)

In recent months there has been a hang of al lot of talk about national identity, devolved government and independence bought on by the granting of minority status to the Cornish, the rise of bleddy UKIP in the Euro elections and the Scottish independence referendum. I have found this all very interesting and the ructions caused by such events have certainly livened up the debates at the Reform Thursday Lunch club. Now I like to get me facts straight so I have been doing quite a bit of reading up on these matters in order to give a certain perspicacity to my arguments. Luckily, as a lot of it involves national and local identity based upon historical precedents, I was able to bring my studies on the Celtic Saints and  Celtic culture in the Southwest of Britain during the dark ages or the early medieval era as they would have you call it these days as it turns out there was nothing dark about them specially down here in the South West, to the debate. 

Jamaica Inn - Implausible location

The topic that proved to be most lively and stirred up a fiery although rather one-sided debate was that of the Cornish minority status. It had been only a matter of weeks previous when Cornwall had been a subject of debate as we had been discussing the accents in the BBC TV adaptation of Jamaica Inn and the gaping historical and geographical inaccuracies in the plot of both the programme and Daphne bleddy Dumaurier's, original novel. Anne Cawood had read it but most of us based our argument on the Hitchcock film which had been screened at school by the history master Mr Battersby at the end of every other term, I reckon he must have had a thing for Maureen O'Hara.  However, as the minority status decree had come out of the blue and had provoked such controversy we slated our original topic on the future of the Civic Centre and decided to open an extraordinary debate. If Cornwall can have it why not North Devon? 
The ensuing furore was unsurprising given that many of our members see Cornwall as like "home" and it turned out on a show of hands most people had at least a couple of Cornish folk in their family. Although this is probably best not to be regarded as overly conclusive poll as most of us also couldn't exactly say where it starts or begins. For one thing you don't have to cross the Tamar, or at least no so you'd notice, to get to Cornwall if you are up here in North Devon. at Barnstaple Town F,C, they refer to Bideford as being "the cornish" and also at Exeter City, Plymouth Argyle are rather more vituperatively called the same thing. Mind you, I don’t even know exactly where it is. Somewhere or perhaps that should be, anywhere, West of Bideford, Horns Cross way, down towards Kilkhampton. Is that in Devon or Cornwall? I don't know. Bude's in Cornwall. Although it's local news turns up in The Journal and weddings are covered from couples down that way and babies from Bude are delivered at the NDDH For instance that proud Cornishman, rugby star and celebrity Masterchef winner Phil Vickery being a case in point. Thinking about it I suppose that what makes him vociferously Cornish. He's unsure of his identity, always got to keep stating it, having been born in Devon or worse, England! Bude is the Berwick on Tweed of the Westcountry. This puts me in mind of one of my cousins, whose father funnily enough is actually Cornish, who happened to be born in London by a quirk of fate, he never lived there because as soon as my Auntie was able to leave the Hospital up there she was on the Royal Blue coach, babe in arms, back down to Combe Martin. However, to this day we still call him a Cockney bastard, this makes him bleddy livid and he goes out of his way to stress his Devonian roots and heritage, that is to affirm his identity. The mere whisper of a cockney accent within his earshot accent propels him into paroxysms of muttering and gurning. I digress. 

Hartland Point despite TV's Coast still in Devon.

As I was saying it turns out  even the BBC has trouble pinpointing it's exact location as a while back they gave Harland Quay for being in Cornwall on such a venerable programme as Coast no less! I tell you that had me spluttering into me Horlicks and I called up them up but I suppose as I was watching it late in the Signing Zone I only managed to get onto a security guard who said he'd log my complaint and pass it on to the relative department. I don't reckon he did as just the other evening on Autumnwatch during a piece on the immigration and subsequent dispersal of Ivy Bees( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colletes_hederae ) they said that these hardy little apoids had come over from the continent and had established a colony in an area of Cornwall only to illustrate this fact by putting a shaded area over what looked like North Tawton. You'd think they'd get it right as they all look like Geography teachers and Nick Crane himself is a bleddy Cartographer. Wes Twardo went on to tell us how he'd been listening to Radio Cornwall when he was down in his caravan at Welcombe and there was this woman who had phoned in from Wales, evidently they get both Radio Devon and Cornwall over there, same as we used to get Welsh TV here, who had called to express her solidarity with the Cornish. The caller was a Welsh bard who during the course of her bardic activities had visited Cornwall on many occasions and said she'd always felt a great affinity with the Cornish people she could tell they were fellow Celts and she went on to say that it gave her great comfort to look out over the sea from her South Wales coastal home and see the cliffs of Cornwall looming sublimely on the horizon. Wes paused a moment here for effect....Eh? we questioned in unison. How did sheee manage thaaat? Mazed old fool wasn't looking at bleddy Cornwall! No she got that wrong as their coast faces the wrong way so she was more than likely looking at Morte Point, Hangman in North Devon. She'd need a strange old telescope to see Cornwall or perhaps, I added, she only had one of Nicholas Crane's maps. Also on the same show was Jethro and it turns out he lives in Lewdown.... Devon. Oh we had a laugh.  Annie Cawood then went on to say once again that there is no physical border.It’s an arbitrary line like many borders. She went on to say how her Auntie who lives in Lifton told her that local legend has it that at some point in the Victorian era the border was drawn up by a group of local dignitaries after a lengthy liquid lunch in Launceston convened to verify such matters of delineation where the River Ottery was mistaken for the Tamar and so thats where the border lay for a time. 
Basically, the criteria that give Cornwall it's "separateness" and have been partly used to justify it's minority status can be applied to Devon and parts of Somerset. For instance, the Prayer Book rebellion and the Poll Tax rebellion started in Cornwall but picked up people all the way along so it wasn't exclusively Cornish and subsequently they were joined by other rebels from all other the country. So by way of conclusion we were all happy to agree that the Cornish appropriate everything and claim it for their own. They have even nabbed St Piran who was once considered to be the patron saint of the whole of the Westcountry and they tried to do the same with St Petroc until it was pointed out that there are only two dedications to him in Cornwall and seventeen in Devon. By my reckoning the symbolic bird of Cornwall shouldn't be the chough it should be the bleddy magpie!. They've even claimed this bird, the red billed chough which actually has breeding populations up and down the British Isles and is actually more likely to be found in Spain, as their own and bestowed upon it up some Arthurian mystique. Apparently, King Arthur turned into one when he passed away. From pasties, recently proved to be a Devonian invention, and clotted cream, fudge, cream teas, cheese with nettles in it, Cornish sardines i.e pilchards, lobsters to rugby naive art, smugglers tales and sea shanties you can go on and on.You name it, they take credit for the lot. You'd probably find someone down in Newquay who would be prepared to claim in the West Briton that they'd invented surfing and exported it to the polynesians! Tin mining that's another one. I once read in a copy of the Metal Bulletin which I found lying around in the surgery an article on mining in the South West and it said that over the aeons more tin had been extracted from Dartmoor than anywhere else.Plus, you also get tinner's hares in churches all over the south west. Morwhellham Quay sounds nicely Cornish... in Devon. 
The Tamar has two banks, one of which is in Devon but you wouldn't know it the way the Cornish tell it!

Morwellham Quay a fun day out for all the family - in Devon!

If it's only geography that has earned the Cornish their minority status we had to ask ourselves what about the North Devonians? Bleddy Cornish. Not that we were particularly bothered for ourselves as we know who we are but we just didn't like the idea of the Cornish getting one over on everyone else as they tend to do. We grumbled on into our pints of Doombar lovely drop of Cornish beer, it was on offer were not not going eat Cornish pasties or drink cornish beer.  I don't even deny their right to feel a minority in a rather ill informed romantic sense but what they use to justify this is actually all a part of a shared history and culture for the whole of the Southwest and therefore a part of British culture as a whole. It serves to legitimate in one specific area and not another a cultural and historical heritage. None of it is exclusively Cornish other than the geography and the lines drawn there at times can be rather hazy Of course, it ain't all about location and pasties is it?. There is the question of a separate Cornish Celtic people which raises thorny issues about race and ethnicity, This had to be left alone down the Reform as from bitter experience such questions of race are now banned as a subject for debate, they are taboo. 

To be continued.........

Here's a photo of Jamaica Inn before they diverted the A30 around it
This is how I remember it on trips down "home" to see Cornish relatives.

Two Haiku

                                                              Dozing and dreaming      
                                                              in the benefit office
                                                              a rubber plant wilts

                                                              Swigging sweet cider
                                                              in a cemetery glade
                                                              old cold bones warmed

Instow - The pearl of the North Devon Riviera

The other Sunday morning I took myself off down to Instow a place I haven’t been to in some time living as I do these days over the other side of the delta at Ashford Strand but lately, I have been spending a lot of time up  top in Sticklepath as mother has been off her legs with spondyitus and I've been taken up with attending to her needs, basically going down to the Co-op buying  reams of no 8 scratchcards, Buckfast Tonic Wine, she won’t have Sanatogen, and Lambert and Butlers. Feels like I’ve gone back to being a kid going down to Cox’s stores except these days she doesn’t let me keep the change. I stayed up there the previous evening and spent some time with the Old Boy looking for parts for the Datsun Sunny on the internet as I really must get it going again. Unfortunately not much luck with Datsun parts but we did end up with a quick and easy recipe for making mead. Next morning I decided to take advantage of the fine weather and dazzled by the sun which has made a more than welcome return, after several tempestuous Winter months of Atlantic storms, to our cold and damp and grey and miserable Western skies. Spring seems to have sprung with a vengeance and it must be infectious as half of town seemed to have decamped down to the beach for the day, the 21a Atlantic Wave bus was packed full and everyone seemed very jolly, youngsters and small families and old ones all out on a beano.

I took a stroll along the beach and standing at the waters edge looking out over the confluence of the mighty Taw and Torridge rivers and I cleared out the ventricles in the clean crisp air by doing a few of the breathing exercises I have been recommended by Dr Dos Santos up at the NDI to ease the Farmer’s Lung.  From this side of the water you get a totally different aspect, geographically speaking, of the great course, it seems less like a delta or an estuary and more like a gentle mouth out to the sea. However, in the distance, the white horses galloping over the bar, throwing spume into the sunlight and creating a spectral mist soon minded me that looks can be deceiving when it comes to wild water and the ocean. Looking over at Crow Point I could clearly see the devastation wreaked by the storms as a great gap has appeared between the dunes marooning one of them in the bay, making it look like a cartoon desert island all you'd need to do was stick a potted palm on it and you’d have the full effect. Now there's an idea. In the summer you could stick someone in pirate garb complete with parrot and treasure chest on it, I don't think it'll be necessary for him to have a peg-leg, then you see at high tide visitors could go out on a boat trip out to take a look at the unfortunate castaway. The Robinson Crusoe Experience. Not so daft as it sounds since Daniel Defoe and Stevenson both used this stretch of water, the Bristol Channel as a source n their adventures. Infact, from my reading of Treasure Island I've deduced that Long John Silver must have set himself off from The Hispaniola at some point between Hartland Point and Watchet. Also the location of the Admiral Benbow is on this coast somewhere between here and Bristol. 

After mulling over this unique proposition while walking down to the cricket club I turned round and went back the other way over the dunes which again were showing the effects of the storms, in places tangled, knotty heaps of driftwood was piled high like an ancient form of defence against invasion. I made note of this bounty as I got the sense ttha he Old boy was chomping at the bit, raring to get down here and chop up a few bits for the wood burner. Down on the beach there were dogs of all shapes and sizes and breeds hurling themselves about and tearing around in circles fetching balls and sticks and 

Up on The Front a queue was snaking away from a Hockings Ice Cream van, if snakes had five tails that is! I’d seen a notice that it was the van’s first day out for the season and after a long winter it's always a fine sight to behold, the Hocking’s fleet out on the road. I spied Mr Selkirk Metalbostos  in the queue but fortunately he was with his wife and he barely acknowledges you when they are out and about together. He gave me a sheepish look and a shrug to indicate that he was at pains to go and get his wife a Dairy Cream Ice ’99 which is just as well as it meant I avoided a monotonic Black Counry monologue  on industrial relations in North Devon in the 1970,s  the fact that he was at Kenny Hibbert’s, him of Wolverhampton Wanderers fame, wedding  and his views on the current set up down at Town which as we all know changes by the week.. He’s a lovely bloke, I’ve got a lot of time for him, he doesn't just half  go on a bleddy bit.

I walked on down to John’s as I was fast developing a craving for one of their steak pasties and after elbowing my way through the gaggle of weekenders gawping down at his delicatessen offerings and honking and braying over their shoulders at each other the price of Cornish yarg cheese the n stuff with the stinging nettles in it, I was able to make a quick escape. Pasty in hand and crossed over the road and sat on the wall and ate it. It wasn’t really up to much, which was a huge disappointment as in the past they were one of my favourites,  So, I was not only left with a deep sense of regret but also a claggy, greasy palate. There was only one way to remedy that: a nice cold pint of scrumpy with an orange in it that they serve down at The Quay and I was glad to see that, despite recent renovations and a name change it’s now called The Bar a clever pun which I eventually got after a few minutes they still serve. After standing at the bar for an eternity and exchanging sneers with the usual blow in bar fixture bores I took my pint outside and sat down next to a fat, hairless and brazenly semi-nude copper toned man, basking in the sun, a Buddha in speedos as that was all he was wearing who like me was enjoying  pint of apple and orange. He turned and raised his glass and low and behold I recognised him, bleddy hell it was none other than Rowley Barton. I hadn’t seen him for years. Last time was with the Hawkwind lot out at Sheepwash where he’d been spray painting an old bus and they’d got me out there to do a spot of welding.  Blimey he’d put on a few pounds and looks like he’s lost all he’s tousled hair but I recognised that rather insouciant leer anywhere. Blimey, we spent a lot of time together back in the day, I grew up with him but Rowley had a gift for drawing and had gone to the grammar school and then up to the art school in Taunton and then onto London where he’d fallen in with a fast crowd and ended up designing book jackets and LP covers for heavy metal bands. He’d also published a few comics. Or graphic novels as he calls them about a phantom biker gang, piston head Robin Hoods, who righted the wrongs heaped on stoners, surfers, hippies, babes, rastas, grafittos wandering troubadours and such like by the forces of law and order. They were very successful and as it turns out still are as they are now a computer game and a pilot for a TV series was made which Rowley assured me can be viewed on Netflix. Rowley told me he’d been living in the woods in North Bulgaria as he’d married a Bulgarian woman but she’d chucked him out after he’d met an Estonian woman on a trip to Tallin so he decided to come home and he was now living in Yelland.  His current girlfriend it transpires had also left him and gone and set up a house with an old schoolfriend over from the baltic states of in Landkey. That was what Rowley said although I find it difficult to believe. Anyway us two old boys sat out the front of the Quay with our scrumpy and soon we just fell into talking as if time had stood still. We both came to the conclusion that Instow was the North Devon Riviera, the boat hulls shimmering on the water, the pinging of their pennants in the breeze which when it’s sunny and you squint a bit can't be too far off the mark. All you need now is a fishing boat to tie up at the Quay haul up a large tuna and start slicing up big bloody chunks of it and you could be in the vieux port in Marseille, a smashing spot  as I recall. Rowley reckoned Instow was a real community beach where you get a real cross section of the true North Devonian constituency.

It is a town beach like one of those ones you see in National Geographic, folk sunbathing and playing games with all sorts of paraphernalia spread out around them posed amid an urban or industrial backdrop say an airport or an oil refinery or fish processing plant. At Instow you’ve got the rusty hulks over at Richmond Dock the cranes beside the Shipyard, the biggest covered yard in Europe at one time, and the span of the Torridge bridge which to my mind all adds to it’s charm.
 Over another pint we agreed that it lacked the pretensions of other beaches in the area a fact made evident from the total absence of VW Transporter vans  along The Front.  No one organised a beach clean at Instow and went on-line or in the Journal to give it the big "I AM"  and going on about how they love the beach and mutually congratulating each other on such a mighty community effort,  uploading their photo’s to the friends up country to show them what a charmed life they are leading and how really involved they are and inclusive they feel before all piling into their vans and causing a monumental tailback in the lanes around Georgeham and Croyde. I was off on one but Rowley seemed more than happy to indulge me!
Oh we had a laugh. Of course it wasn’t long before I was telling him how as kids we would head down here and go cockling and wrack mussels from the rocks but onlyin the months with an r in them. Back then the Taw /Torridge Estuary was reasonably polluted  and you had to squelch through stinking oily black mud which had the sickly sheen of a large bluebottle and would suck your wellies off as often as not leaving you stranded, virtually cemented into the quagmire and you wouldn’t want to be doing that on an incoming tide primed as we were by cautionary tales of poor unfortunates who’d come to a sorry end subsumed by the incoming waters. Thinking about it, back then the mortuary must have been crammed full of  crab nibbled human remains as we all claimed to know somebody who’d  met this fate. Rowley had a laugh when he reminded me of the time that we came down along the railway line from town carrying our forks to dig some bait and to prang some flooks in the shallows as he tells it we got plenty of ragworm but all we pranged on the  prongs of our forks was toilet paper and used condoms. I went on to tell him how I thought the people of North Devon probably cause havoc at airports throughout the world due to the amount of heavy metals we must have ingested over the years eating molluscs and shellfish out of the estuary especially after it came to light that Gales Electroplating down at Pottington had just ben pouring their residuals into the river for donkeys years.

Before long we were both regaling a coupe of visitors, up from Kilkhampton with our youthful escapades and the scrumpy kept coming. At some point Rowley decided to take his leave and cycle back to Yelland and he was the cause of much merriment as he waddled over to his bike precariously mounted it as not to show of his meat and two veg under his budgie smugglers as one passing lad had called his trunks and wobble along the road before falling off as he  attempted to pull in between some parked cars to avoid an oncoming Atantic Wave. He picked himself up turned and waved to one and all before deciding the best course of action was to walk.

After bidding farewell to  he folk at the bar I meandered back along the beach to the foot of the dunes where I laid down for a knap in front of me two rather thin and pale odd looking children, moon kids we used to call this type who were building some sort of arcane diabolic structure out of driftwood. 

I dozed off and awoke with a start it was bloody freezing and the sun was setting I looked down at the totem beneath me and was troubled to see what looked like a pigs head had been place on top of it. My mind was playing tricks and I must have been having some sort of waking dream as on closer inspection after I had slid down the dune it turned out to be a punctured plastic football. However, I was still unsetttled as many ears before I had come across a pigs head almost in this very spot that must have been washed down river from the abattoir at Fremington Quay. Cold and out of sorts I hobbled into the Wayfarer for a restorative rum and a jar of cockles before catching the 21A Atlantic Wave all the way back to The Strand and Antiques Roadshow. 

Ghost Ship Crewed by Cannibal Rats Runs Aground Off Lundy Island

This was the kind of headline I was expecting to see at some point due to the media frenzy that followed the story of the ghost ship adrift somewhere in the Atlantic that, driven by hurricane force winds of recent weeks, is navigating phantasmically towards our shores.

The Lyubov Orlova navigating the Arctic seas

The Lyubov Orlova, a rather dingy looking former Russian cruise ship, was impounded by the maritime authorities in Canada owing to financial irregularities and subsequently abandoned by it's unpaid crew. I have experience of this myself as I must of mentioned that time us lads were marooned in Buenos Aires after the dredging incident in the River Plate and the unfortunate incident with ordnance  left over from the Graaf Spee and I can tell you it's no fun stuck in a foreign land having lost your boat. The aforementioned cruise ship was then towed off to the Dominican Republic where during a storm it broke it's mooring an floated off out into the Atlantic never to be seen again. That is until a beacon was set off and picked up by the Irish Marine Agency. So it turns out that it is still out there bobbing about upon the high seas and is heading this way and could potentially, as some of the media would have it, crash into the North Devon coast.
This story has caught the attention of people up and down the Western Atlantic as reports from as far afield as Casablanca, Galicia, Britanny and Scotland all fear that the ship is about to scuttle itself on their shores along with it's hideous cargo of cannibal rats. Anne Cawood has just got back from a spot of winter sun in the Canaries and she said that they were on full alert down there for the blighted vessel entering their waters and potentially causing a hang of a muddle and caper as it beaches itself on the Playa de Americas to the consternation of hundreds of British and German pensioners.

A new addition to the fleet?

Now if I was a younger man I would have got together a crew and took out one of the tugs and go and have a look for it as it must be worth a bob or two in scrap and it does surprise me that there has been no concerted effort by enterprising folk to go out after the salvage rights as here in North Devon we have the facilities to break up such a ship; cut it in half and stick it in Richmond Dock down at Appledore or beach it down at Yelland and break it up there just like they did with the Severn Star.To my mind, it wouldn't look too out of place down at Chivenor alongside the rather motley looking fleet of houseboats. Or if you really want a laugh you could suggest it get's towed up to Vellator Quay that'll get them going down at Braunton! You could turn it in to a tourist attraction. Come see the cannibal rats. The Big Rat or such like.

Cannibal rats the stuff of nightmares

I don't know about these here "cannibal rats" are they some sort of different species to normal rats? Given that the ships last port of call was the Dominican Republic I assume that they could be voodoo rats. Cannibal voodoo rats gives the whole yarn a more chilling and petrifying aire. I can picture them now with their little dead eyes, drooling and slathering as they gnaw away at each other. Of course in such desperate nautical circumstances humans have been known to do the same thing although I doubt rats draw lots.

I was just thinking the people of Ilfracombe had better watch out in a few months time as they are eagerly and rather avariciously anticipating a cruise ship to pay a visit to the town. They'd better make sure that they get the right one. Otherwise they'd all be stood in their finery on the quayside looking out at this stagnant ship just floating outside the harbour and rather than seeing a party of affluent Americans manning the tenders to come ashore they are unable to discern no signs of life other the barely audible squeaking and mewing of a savage colony of mutated rodents. A ghost ship. I can see it now The harbour master is sent out in a boat by the mayor to investigate and climbs aboard moments later the calm of a summers afternoon is shattered by hideous screaming as he is carried down into the bowels of the vessel. Mind you from what I've seen of cruise ships they seem to carry a cargo of the living dead anyway. That's their raison d'etre. They are God's waiting room on the high seas and often as not plague ridden with the dreaded norovirus!

Ilfracombe expecting visit from cruise ship carrying the living dead

Cor that would make a good horror film, worthy of the late James Herbert. This reminds me of the story of another spectral vessel that turned up in British waters, this time off Whitby and this one was Russian and all. The Demeter out of the Finnish port of Varma went aground off Whitby with no sign of the crew other than the dead Captain lashed to the wheel and a rather strange cargo of boxes containing nothing but earth and mould and I tell you not much good came of that after the local dockers salvaged it and unwittingly disembarked Count Dracula.  As a former seaman we were always on the look out for the Flying Dutchman a ship that was condemned to sail, shrouded in it's own bank of fog, the oceans of the world for eternity.
Should the ship ever turn up in the waters of the Bideford Bay without a pilot on board it would no doubt founder on the rocks off Hartland or run aground on the bar. It wouldn't surprise me if this was seen as divine retribution by some of them Torridgeside UKIP councillors and God fearing souls , a portentous biblical plague sent from above to show displeasure at the furore caused by the suspension of Christian prayers before Bideford Council meetings. On a secular level questions would be asked how all this came to pass and Philip Milton would fire off a letter to the Journal blaming Nick Harvey or Councillor Ricky Knight. Let's not forget Rodney Cann he would be pictured in the Gazette framed by the rotting, god-forsaken hulk asking for more money to spent on something or another.

For those of a nautical bent, read about the Orlov here.