Cornwall is a spit of land reaching far into the ocean. It is the only English county — or duchy for purists — that you can drive across in ten minutes, from Marazion to Hayle. To be remote is our burden, and our pleasure; the Cornish are phlegmatic like that. When the fishermen of Newlyn seek attention from government, they tend to sail to London and wait outside the Palace of Westminster on the river, waving signs detailing their wants.

The threat of the closure of Flybe, the regional airline based at Exeter, meant little to London readers, who can be in New York City within eight hours, Beijing in 12, and travel from Euston to Westminster in the time it takes to read this piece. They don’t need Flybe, which offers a mixture of holiday and business travel to the small Cornish elite, tourists and people who want to go to Spain. Transport means something different to those who live in great cities, who have such a glut of transport they come to hate it, and even watch horror films about it for pleasure.

But Cornwall needs it if it is not to be a Poldark dash Du Maurier dash pasty theme park filled with over-renovated holiday cottages and gruesome poverty. The average full-time salary is less than £25,000 a year. The average child will be priced out of its parents’ pretty village and consigned to a housing estate — if it is lucky. It is normal to work three jobs, or not at all, and the prosaic indicators of poverty — immobility, drug addiction, depression — are much discussed in the pages of The Cornishman.

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Why the Cornish must accept the tourists

By Tanya Gold

I have used Flybe only once, to fly from Newquay to a Rolls Royce press weekend in Speyside, but there are more serious people in Cornwall than I; if you do have to go to London and back in a day, then Flybe is your only answer, unless you are prepared to take the Sleeper train, on which you might have to share a berth with a Christian fundamentalist who might call the victim of the Cyprus gang rape “no better than a prostitute”. And, still, that is a luxury. The ordinary person cannot afford the £118 walk-on off-peak fare.

Transport is both expensive and irregular. When I lived in Carnyorth — you will not have heard of it — there was a bus every two hours on Sunday to Penzance for £5 return. Here, if you want to go anywhere, you must have a car. Even the committed activists of Extinction Rebellion have cars, or they could not call themselves activists, because they would be marooned at home. It’s an hour by car to Newquay, where Flybe flies, or three hours by public transport. The train from Penzance to Paddington is regular, but it takes five hours and 20 minutes to reach London.

At least the A30 is almost all dual carriageway now; but I fancy that is for the benefit of tourists. In my childhood, the journeys from London to Padstow could take ten hours or more, if you were caught behind the tractors. Cornwall has no motorway, but it is not alone. Neither does Dorset, Northumberland, Suffolk, Norfolk, East Sussex, Rutland, and the Isle of Wight.

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Left behind – life beyond the London bubble

By James Bloodworth

The weather isolates us further. It rules here; perhaps that is why paganism endures. At Christmas, so much rain fell that I couldn’t get across the Penwith Peninsula to St Just; even when it doesn’t rain, the fog hangs on the moor, and you have to drive at 20mph for self-preservation.

At night, it’s the most frightening journey I know: a series of sharp bends across a landscape so windswept there are no trees taller than six foot, and no structure taller than the engine houses of the old mines, which look like wizards’ towers. As it write, it is hailing in Newlyn, and the chimney stack is shaking. Sometimes the Coombe River rises to the top of the garden steps, but it hasn’t this year.

Wind closes the promenade in Penzance; the waves contain stones which can drop on your head. There was a famous flood in Newlyn on Valentine’s Day in 2014; further along the coast, in Dawlish, a 100-foot section of Brunel’s railway just fell into the sea and the whole duchy was cut off for months. When it snows — which is not often, but it did in 2018 — the text came instantly from the school: school is closed. Collect your child. I laughed at the time — I was an incomer — but now I know: if they had hesitated, the parents would not have made it to the school.

My friend, who lives high above Newlyn Harbour, saw the snow cloud approach the peninsula. It blotted out St Michael’s Mount. She says she dropped her coffee, grabbed the toddler, and sprinted to the car to rescue her schoolchild, as if in a film. Even so, some children were stranded until a farmer came to pick them up in a tractor. Chywoone Hill, the road to Lamorna, has a gradient of 12.4%. Cars were abandoned and children sledded down the hill instead.

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How Cornwall took back control

By Peter Franklin

It is worse for the Isles of Scilly, which can be cut off for weeks. Fog and wind stop the helicopters and the freight ship the Gry Maritha getting through. This constituency — St Ives — declared last in the general election of 2019, due to the weather and, later on the mainland, because the counting hall had to be cleared for badminton. The Isles of Scilly are feared by mariners. Four naval warships foundered in October 1707 on the Western Rocks, the Crim Rocks and Bishop’s Rock, killing almost 2000 sailors.

I don’t mean to romanticise Cornwall; there has been too much of that. It is, rather, that a culture has grown up around the isolation and the poverty: a culture of consolation, individualism and pride. We tell ourselves that we do not need a functional transport infrastructure; if we did, we would have to share Cornwall. But that is a romantic — a phlegmatic — view.

If we are to grow our economy after Brexit, we need a motorway, cheaper and more regular public transport, and we need some variant of the horribly named Flybe which the Government has saved, at least for now. Let people who are less close to poverty share the burden of reducing carbon emissions. It is easy to mock rural anxiety from London; but you know where such laughter has led before.

The contrast between the native – average income £20,602 – and the emmet – they shop at Waitrose so who knows? – is satirical. They lay waste to whole districts with Range Rovers (which are ant-coloured), occupying holiday cottages, which are decorated offensively in quasi-nautical style. It is nautical style for people who have never been on a boat; the fisherman I know decorate their boat-houses with discarded snack wrappings and tobacco leaves. There is an entire soliloquy about faux nautical soft furnishings in BAIT – Mark Jenkin’s forthcoming film about gentrification in fishing villages, a masterpiece that I fear only emmets will watch – and a short homage to Cornish cheese.

Even so, the decline of Cornish industry – fishing, agriculture, tin mining – is known, by the emmet, to be part of the duchy’s charm. What they consider, and fetishize, as the simple life, is really the kind of poverty that led Catrina Davies, author of the recent memoir Homesick, to live in a shed near Lands’ End, because she can afford nothing else. They will not admit it, but they find the contrast between poverty and affluence charming.

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Don't call it poverty porn

By Jenny McCartney

The decline is everywhere. Only a few boats fish out of the cove of Porthgwarra, where Poldark flashed his arse; instead, the Poldark tours come to gawp at the patch of water where the arse was flashed. The loveliest houses at Porthgwarra – owned by the St Aubyn family, who live at Michael’s Mount – are holiday cottages now. Mousehole is no longer a fishing village, even if it is still called that. It is a holiday park, and in winter – but not at Christmas – every window along the harbourside is dark.

The famous story of Mousehole is of Tom Bawcock, who went to sea in a winter storm with his cat to feed the village children. Now there would be no lights to bring him home. He would die, and the cat would die, and the children would die.

The tin mine at Geevor closed in 1990. A few miners remain to tell tales to tourists, who like to frighten themselves by going down the mines. In St Ives, tourists complain about fishermen – those who survive – driving to work across the beach. It spoils the view.

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The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

If the only sensible course is to be grateful – what else is there for Cornwall now? – August is a month of moaning. We moan about the traffic jams to Porthcurno, which were 90 minutes long last year because the emmets do not know how to use passing places. It requires good manners, and fatalism to use a passing place – fatalism is the Cornish inheritance, for no help is coming.

Emmets do not know how to park either, and clog up the lanes. They impale themselves on granite walls disguised with wild flowers, which are very Cornish: lovely but hard. The local buses are expensive and irregular; on Sundays in winter, they feel like imaginary, or even mythical, buses.

Newlyn, where I live, is newly-gentrified because the housing bubble at Mousehole –£850,000 for a semi-detached cottage in an area where most people work three minimum wage jobs – can grow no bigger. We have an arthouse cinema, a wine bar and two famous sea-food restaurants. It is a truism that, in emmet season, you cannot park near your own home.

The children’s playground in Marazion, an emmet village, is a fairyland. The one in Newlyn, used by locals, is shabby. It feels offensive, but if you hate the emmet pound, you are worse than them. You would have Cornwall be poorer; you would fetishize the Cornish past more than they do.

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Daphne du Maurier's Brexit fantasy

By Sneha Alexander

At least the summer tourists leave at the end of August. They go back to Muswell Hill. The affluent retirees, who own holiday cottages or worse, motor homes, do not leave.

The affluent retiree loves the west country; the population has increased by almost 50,000 in twenty years. He has, then, almost by himself, reversed the trend that emptied Cornwall of people, who left to seek work elsewhere, and seems determined to make you conscious of his happiness. He hounds you with his presence. He follows you. He is always seeking your company – for teas, coffees, suppers and matinees.

Among other things, he upholds the late-flowering career of Judi Dench all by himself. She has a holiday home at Zennor, from which she opposed the building of a mobile telephone mast which would have benefitted the locals. (Typical emmet behaviour: gild the myth, ignore the living). He turns up at your gate, just as you are sitting down to work. He is a time thief, because, at least subconsciously, he knows he has none.

The Cornish retiree is competing for space with young children. Retirees and young children like very similar things: cream teas; sand; good service; dogs. (Dogs will approve anything).

Last summer I went to a performance of Peter and the Wolf at a local church. The retirees arrived early – so early I wondered if they had been there all night. The natives arrived either on time, or, if in possession of more than two children, late. It would never occur to the retiree to move so a person only three feet high could see over them, and so I watched a concert for children at which none of the children could see anything, because the stage was obscured by retirees, who presumably long for children to be cultured, and yet, given the chance, will literally block them from culture with their own bodies.

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Introducing Charles III

By Tanya Gold

The young mothers of Newlyn – doughty, sweary, and fiercely tattooed – fear no one. And yet, as they curse their lovers over morning coffee, they are almost drowned out by a chorus of retirees tutting at their language. The tut is, essentially, their whole speech; they have an arsenal of tuts, and money.

They are a monstrous force of conservatism, policing good manners in areas of outstanding natural beauty while showing very few themselves. They hold up the patriarchy almost by themselves, stuffed into Leave rallies and church pews and the car parks at garden centres (they like flowers because they are obedient). They also hold up traffic, with their ponderous motor homes that signal, though obliviously, the retiree world view, which tends towards Lebensraum: everywhere is their home.

But the mature truth is, he that hates the emmet, hates Cornwall. We must accept. Fatalism, the Cornish inheritance, remains useful.