Kernow

Something strange happens when you go to Cornwall, it's as if crossing the border from Devon transports you back forty or possibly fifty years to a calmer, happier, more laid back place. Of course you have to get there first and that is a journey designed to test the patience of anybody who normal possesses a lot of it (patience that is).

The journey from permanent home to holiday home was 171 miles door to door going the quickest most direct route possible. Of those 171 miles only 4 were on a motorway. Having to cross the entire width of only one of the five English counties that doesn't possess a single inch of motorway grade roads before crossing Devon and then entering another of the five counties that doesn't have a single inch of motorway turned from being 'part of the holiday experience' to being the Saturday drive to hell. Three and a half hours to Honiton at an average speed of 26 m.p.h, followed by another hour and a half was beyond a joke. Seeing the sign for 'Services' on the A30 just west of Exeter was like hearing a siren's call beckoning me with the promise of good things, the ten minute wait to get off the slip road followed by the ten minutes in the car park meant that even Daryl Hannah wearing her mermaid outfit would have had me responding with a "Not now love, I'm starving and completely shagged."

Cornwall the vibe, is like the rest of England was when I was growing up: no kids screaming or being shouted at, no replica football shirts, no mobile phones (there's no signal in Port Isaac where we stayed), little attention paid to licensing or shop trading laws, traditional folk music on the beach, kids crabbing and not a single person for whom English wasn't their native tongue. Of course it wasn't all like the cover of an old issue of Health & Efficiency, natives frolicking naked on the beach. Port Isaac is a television set for five months of the year and to live in that setting for a week was slightly surreal. Hundreds of people would walk down Fore Street from the car parks, through the harbour area and up the other side of the village to visit the on screen home of Doc Martin. Problem is that being a naturally curious bunch some tourists wanted to look in every house on the way so it wasn't unusual on the occassions we were actually in the cottage we were renting to look up and find a pair of strangers eyes meeting yours through the sash windows. If you happened to be pushing open the front door from the street people would stop and watch hoping to get a glimpse of what lay beyond the door.