Here are my reflections on a September week spent in Cornwall:
Postcards from Cornwall: the pack
Postcards from Cornwall: the text
Blue Sea
Impossible blueness. From ultramarine to aquamarine. Cornwall was making a more than passable impression of the Mediterranean when I arrived. It continued in the same mode all week.
Childhood memories drifted back: long days on the beach, scrambling across rocks, sand in hair, picnics, wet dogs.
An imagined world reconfigured as memory. Was it true? Some days the blue seemed frozen in its stillness, the surface broken only by diving gannets and the wake of fishing boats.
It was in Cornwall that I first fell in love…a girl from Newbury. I still have my drawings from that holiday fortnight, her letters and photo long since lost.
White Light
According to Cornish writer Michael Bird, there was a brief moment, in the 1950s, when Cornwall, St Ives to be exact, was at the centre of the international art world. As Paris’ star declined and New York’s was yet to rise, Cornwall bathed for a moment in a white light.
The whiteness that dapples the sea, that bleaches the rocks, that washes the clouds, that shines in your eyes.
It was white that Nicholson, Hepworth and the others saw, the big skies that hung brightly overhead, the white paint coated thickly on boats, white gulls with their matching guano, breaking waves and their attendant white surf. It’s all in the light.
Grey Rocks
Even those who know nothing about geology, or care even less, can fail to see that Cornwall is a bit different when it comes to rock.
Grey, striated granite with glints of mica; dark, slithery, flaky slate: a spectrum of greys with every shade between.
On their own rocks can be monumental enough, but man long ago mysteriously removed, re-formed and re-erected stones that still stand: upright, alone, in groups, in circles.
Their unknown purposes inspire conjecture, fire Celtic imaginings, help us dream other worlds. Who knows their significance, the magic they wrought? These rocks embed Cornwall’s past, as they stand unmoved by its present.
Yellow lines
In some places the streets are so narrow that double yellow lines double up to become four, divided by tarmac, sets or cobbles.
Urban signifiers of traffic control they imprint their stamp on ancient thoroughfares. 4×4s fight with overweight tourists on foot to command these narrow spaces. Like a snake swallowing a large mammal Cornwall’s coastal villages have digestion problems.
Clinging to cliff edges, wrapped around coves and inlets, guarded by sea walls, Cornish coastal life was once spare, modest and tough. Now bloated by tourism and cream teas, crammed with cars and delivery trucks bringing pasties from industrial estates near Bude, they struggle to retain their former identity.
Black Flag
The black flag of Kernow is flown from burger vans, on bumper stickers, at caravan sites and on blog sites. Symbol of independence and otherness, the white cross on a black ground is Cornwall’s newly revived marker.
From a past of tin mining, fishing and wrecking Cornwall now survives as a tourist economy. Its new unitary council, its new arts university in the making, its selection for the Design Council’s DOTT 09 initiative: Cornwall is in the spotlight for creativity, regeneration and innovation. All overlaid on a stubborn resistance to conform: culturally, linguistically, politically, spiritually.
Cornwall, sometimes like a latter-day hippie, sometimes like an old fogey, continues on its own way, every now and then looking up to see which way the wind is blowing.
