Cornish pastiche

Still the letters come – thanks – but in the meantime there’s been a diversionary holiday in Cornwall and the cream may thus seem a little more clotted.

Since faithful correspondents have also been drawing attention to other little curiosities, there’ll have to be more on the great Donnini next week.

CORNWALL’S glories include its place names. There’s Mousehole and there’s Readymoney, Minions and London Apprentice – perhaps synonymous – more Saints than an annual meeting in Paradise.

Buckland-tout-Saints is perhaps the repose of the Anglo-French blessed.

Bowling Green, not a mile from our cottage, proved as flat as a corncrake.

Bugle, a mile the other way, was host the day after we left to the West of England bandsman’s championship.

There was Red Cross and Rose by whatever name, Probus – perhaps home to a retired businessman’s club – and Tregurthy, which the lady thought might be a disease affecting English opening batsmen (and everyone else supposed it depression).

The favourite, however, was Biscovery.

So that, after all these years, is where mum hid the Jammy Dodgers.

LIKE many other places, the Grand Duchy needs tourists.

His job title half the length of the M5, the county council wallah who last week proposed a £1-a-night tax on every one of them may have scored a spectacular own goal.

In St Ives, they depend upon sharks, officially the piscine sort.

When a local fisherman reported two weeks ago that his boat had been rammed by an oceanic white tip – the sort of creature that makes Jaws appear vegetarian – the national media reacted with sabretoothed scepticism.

It was an annual occurence, they hinted, an early dorsal event like Barnard Castle Meet for grockels.

Jaws and effect, The Times sent to Cornwall a reporter called Tom Whipple. Mr Whipple found a fisherman called Rodney Sid. “Twentyseven years I’ve worked here,” said Mr Sid, “and the scariest thing I’ve seen is the harbourmaster.”

UP here they do things differently.

David Kelly forwards the two leading headlines from BBC North-East’s website on Sunday. The first read “Tourists driving into North Sea”, the second “County tourist service shake-up”.

Clearly no problem with pulling them in at last week’s Ladies’ Day at York Racecourse, however. Colin Mills in Darlington spots the ad: “Pink champagne and canopies from 9.30am.” They must have been expecting a sunny day, he says.

SATURDAY’S Times carried a story about the upcoming Cornish pasty festival in the Mexican town of El Real, twinned with Redruth. El Real has 12,000 inhabitants and 30 commercial pasty makers.

The Cornish-Mexican Cultural Society now plans a trip to October’s extravaganza, though it could all fall foul of February’s EU ruling that only pasties made in the county may be called Cornish. El Real thing?

Only time will tell.

THE Sunday Times, meanwhile, notes that Beach Break Live – chiefly involving lots of students and a commensurate amount of alcohol – is reviving the economy at the nation’s seaside resorts. In Newquay, Cornwall, a fortnight ago they had a competition to see who could clip the most clothes pegs to his face. The winner had 65. He won a pint of bitter.

MUCH closer to home, Langton’s a hamlet between Gainford and Ingleton in south-west Durham. When we strolled through last year, the parish council minutes on the notice board revealed that someone had pinched the bairns’ Wendy house. When we ambled past last week, the minutes disclosed that that the solar panel and battery from Gainford’s solarheated bus shelter had been stolen.

Durham Constabulary are looking for a solar-heated Wendy house.

ALREADY promoted to the rank of National Treasure, the Duke of Edinburgh finds yet greater advancement in a flyer – headed “So many surprises” – from Peter Jones China in Wakefield.

“Happy 90th birthday Your Majesty,” it says.

Among thousands of recipients, an east Cleveland reader wrote to the company. “HRH Prince Philip will indeed be surprised to find himself elevated to Your Majesty. Off to the Tower and off with the head of whoever is responsible.”

The china shop admitted a big embarrassment.

“I think the person responsible would probably prefer the Tower,” its reply added, “to the repercussions going on here.”

HIS email headed “Photo opportunity”, Paul Dobson in Bishop Auckland spots this closing down notice outside a Newgate Street shop. “It does T-shirts and other printing. Little wonder that it’s shutting,” he says. Besides, who wants to buy a hole?

WITHOUT threat, for he is a top bloke, John Winterburn in Darlington forwards a many-linked chain letter pointing out that next month, July, will have three Fridays, three Saturdays, and three Sundays – for the first time in 823 years.

“This is the only time we will see and live this event,” it insists, perhaps forgetting that it happened in 2005 and will again a few years hence.

There are hundreds of other recipients in this thread alone. “This is called money bags,” it’s explained.

“Forward this to your friends and your money will arrive within four days.”

It’s known, it’s said, as feng shui.

Feng shui, as everybody also knows, is Chinese for bollocks.

ONE little oddity, however. The chain email also claims that anyone who takes the last two digits of his birth year and adds the age he will be this year will always get the total 111 – Nelson, as cricketers would have it.

It appears true. In simple English – and this probably means you, Knocker – can anyone explain why?

…and finally back to Cornwall, to a little holiday reading and to the unexplained etymology of the word camp – as in effeminate, camp as a row of pink tents.

We’d contemplated this back in January 2007, when the familiar label of the Camp Coffee bottle underwent an historic change. After 100 years of standing beside his kilted, colonial master, the Indian servant was suddenly seated, level pegging, beside him.

“Political correctness gone mad,” protested North-East Scotland MSP David Davidson, though there’d been a less publicised change in the Eighties. The “servant” was suddenly without his tray.

But how had “camp” come to suggest gayness? The dictionaries were unhelpful, save for the agreement that it could be traced back to the early 20th Century. “It is a subject,” said the column on January 24, 2007, “to which we shall return...”

Now a railway book, about which more in tomorrow’s John North, offers a fascinating theory. Above Dingwall, it notes, is a statue to Sir Hector MacDonald, a Scottish hero known thereabouts as Fighting Mac, but who shot himself in a Paris hotel in 1903 after allegations of homosexuality.

Camp Coffee had first been made in Scotland in 1885. “Was Sir Hector the model for the iconic kilted soldier?” wonders Michael Williams in On the Slow Train Again and certainly there is a marked likeness.

Was it, indeed, the limp-wristed route by which “camp” came to have rather less heroic connotations? It is a subject to which we shall return.