been a movement to revive it, and now about two hundred people speak it. I got a book called Teach Yourself Cornish from the Penzance library, and the librarian said, ‘Would you like book two as well?’ which seemed a bit optimistic Anyway, even a militant Cornishman only needs a few essential phrases, like ‘Ogh! Ni re settyas an gempenoryon-gols gans tan dre wall,’ which translates as, ‘Oh no, we’ve set the hair-dressers on fire by mistake.’
Cornish is a Gaelic language, similar to Welsh and Irish and Breton, and now there’s an English-Cornish dictionary, a novel’s been written in Cornish, and there’s a weekly Cornish radio show, which is impressive for two hundred people. I imagine the radio show must have dialogue such as:
‘And now our mystery voice competition: “Myttin da.”’
‘Is it Stan from the Cornish class again?’
‘Yes, you’ve won £4.’
To make it more complicated, a row broke out because some people wanted to speak the old historic Cornish, which I’m sure was lovely but which died out three hundred years ago. Not only would it have no words for Twitter or Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes, it would only have words for things that were around before 1760, so the lessons must go: ‘Repeat after me: “Yth esov vy ow merwel dres an pla” – I’m dying of the plague.’
So some people added modern words, and the two factions split apart, then someone tried to solve the problem by merging the two Cornish languages and calling the result ‘Unified Cornish’. This was rejected as unspeakable heresy by both the other sides.
Maybe more pertinently, as you leave the railway station there’s a large stone sign on which ‘Welcome to Penzance’ is inscribed in Cornish, and while few people speak the language, they all know there is one, and that it makes them just a bit different. This sense of slight difference seems to have been around for a while. For example, Cornwall’s early trade unions were part socialist and part Cornish nationalist. So according to the book on Mebyon Kernow by Bernard Deacon, in 1847 the quarrymen went on demonstrations carrying the red flag, but with a pasty stuck on the end of each flagpole. (Perhaps their anthem went ‘The workers’ flag is highly priced, with onions, beef and carrots diced.’)
The pasty is a symbol of Cornish pride, to the extent that the Cornish rugby team still begins each game by booting a symbolic inflated pasty through the posts.
But recently the town has become divided over a modern issue. In 2009 the government offered money for a new terminal for the Scilly ferry. Some people said it would destroy the town, especially the harbour, so they set up a group called ‘Friends of Penzance Harbour’. In opposition, those in favour of the new terminal set up ‘True Friends of Penzance Harbour’. Presumably the first lot were tempted to retaliate with ‘Passionate Lovers of the Harbour Who Plan to MARRY the Harbour’, to which the other lot would come back with ‘Mistresses of the Harbour Who the Harbour Turns to for Comfort and Dirty Filthy Sex Between the Boats Because You Can’t Give it What it NEEDS’.
Each group had demonstrations and Facebook pages and protest songs on YouTube, and wrote millions of furious letters, and there were hundreds of websites, and then the local MP proposed a compromise called Option PZ that was hated by both groups. If you think this is all an exaggeration, here’s an extract from a letter written to the local paper by a councillor who supported the new terminal: ‘The claim that the vast majority have opposed option A reminds me of those extraordinary claims by Soviet and Nazi propagandists. It is a colossal untruth, in the tradition of Dr Joseph Goebbels.’
Exactly. Goebbels always began his speeches: ‘Jews and Communists are plotting to prevent the building of terminals so that Aryans are left stranded, unable to dock.’ Equally measured from the other side was this: ‘John the Baptist, you will remember, foretold the coming of Christ. He spoke fearlessly against the politically powerful of the time and lost his head in the process. Some things in life must be spoken against and resisted. The council’s tawdry decision to desecrate the harbour wall is one of them.’
It seems that someone in that council must have been cackling, ‘Bring me the head of the designer of the Friends of Penzance Harbour Facebook page.’ Council meetings here must be fantastic. In most areas they just go, ‘With regard to the proposed bus shelter, a document is to be submitted,’ but in Penzance it’s, ‘I suppose next you’ll be invading Poland,’ and ‘It’s people like me who saw Christ was coming.’
As an outsider you have to wonder whether this is the best use of everyone’s campaigning resources, and if they put that energy into other issues, they might at least get themselves a dentist.
But maybe it’s right that this gloriously overblown internal row should be about an issue that seems minor to anyone outside. This is a town in which the High Street chain stores like Boots and Clinton Cards are punctuated by a shop that sells juggling sticks and playing cards, and in which there’s a building, between a pub and a second-hand bookshop, that for no apparent reason is designed like an Egyptian palace, and by the sea is an oval art-deco outdoor swimming pool that had a cannon built into one side to fire at German ships during the war.
So Penzance is the ideal place to do something off-centre, like setting up a pagan snooker club or a nudist butterfly-collecting society. It’s as if you can do whatever you fancy, because the authorities will say, ‘They can’t do that. Oh, bloody hell, I’m not going all the way down there, let them do what they bloody well want.’
New Towns: Basingstoke, Crawley, Milton Keynes
The proof that every town retains a soul, no matter how concrete, corporate, shopping-malled, retail-parked and Tescoed it becomes, is in Basingstoke. Because Basingstoke is a new town, plonked somewhere in the south, though no one seems exactly sure where to say it is, even if they live there. It’s renowned as the classic modern commuter town, strangled by regional headquarters for insurance companies and hundreds and hundreds of roundabouts, some of which you can only drive round and then straight on, so you wonder whether the roads were laid by a gang of workmen with an obsessive compulsive disorder, who if they go more than an hour without building a roundabout start rocking backward and forward and making deep groaning noises.
Amongst the organisations who’ve established their head offices there are the AA, which might be because it’s the place they’re most often called out to, where their mechanics arrive at the broken-down vehicle and say, ‘Ah, I see what’s happened. You’ve got so frustrated with the roundabouts you’ve abandoned the car and set fire to it.’
The centre of Basingstoke is the Festival Shopping Mall. As you leave the train station, it seems there’s nowhere to go except be poured through the Festival Mall’s automatic doors, into a city of New Look, H&M and Monsoon units in which you try to keep moving forward in the belief that eventually you must come out into open Basingstoke. After a while it occurs to you that perhaps this is open Basingstoke, and that when you finally reach the other side you’ll pass one last W.H. Smith and emerge into countryside and past a sign that says ‘Thank you for visiting Basingstoke’.
Its image isn’t helped by the fact that on Wikipedia, under ‘Cultural Impact’, it says: ‘An episode of Top Gear was filmed there in 2008.’
So I was surprised to find a book called Basingstoke and its Contribution to World Culture. I thought, ‘Maybe there’s some stuff I’ve missed, like Jimi Hendrix started there, singing, “There’s got to be some way outta here, but every roundabout takes me to another fucking one”.’ Or Jackson Pollock’s most famous painting was called If You can Make Your Way Through Basingstoke’s One-Way System, Joining these Red Dots Should be a Piece of Piss.
