Colganology2: Normal service is resumed

My apologies for the lack of recent updates but I had to dive down to Cornwall over the weekend to speak at the Hellys Arts Festival in Helston.

However, I do have some bloggery to share with you as the result.

I grew up in the towns of Penzance and Helston and I visited both over the weekend. I have fond memories of Penzance and of family walks on the beach at nearby Marazion, where I would hunt for seashells and driftwood, sea glass and other treasures. And all against the backdrop of the fairytale castle atop St Michael's Mount.

Or we'd be out walking over the cliffs at Botallack and Geevor where the old tin mine stacks face into the Atlantic winds, or we'd visit ancient sites like the Mên-An-Tol and Lanyon Quoit, the Merry Maidens and more.

Penzance itself was a town that provided a lot of things to interest an inquisitive lad. I always enjoyed watching the trawlers come in to the harbour and into the nearby fishing ports of Newlyn and Mousehole. The good fish would all go off to the fish market where some of the really old fishermen still counted in the Cornish language: Onen, dew, tri, peswar, pymp, hwegh, seyth ... They didn't speak the language any more, sadly - the revival didn't really get going until the 1970s - but they'd learned to count crates of fish from their fathers and their grandfathers before and old habits die hard.

In a similar vein, shepherds in the North of England used to count (and may still do so) using the Yan-Tan-Tethera numbering system that probably evolved from the old Cumbric languages. Like most Celtic numbering systems, they tend to be vigesimal (based on the number twenty), but they usually lack words to describe quantities larger than that. To count a large number of sheep, a shepherd would repeatedly count to twenty, placing a mark on the ground, or move his hand to another mark on his crook, or drop a pebble into his pocket to represent each 'score' e.g. 5 score sheep = 100 sheep (the late great Jake Thackray wrote a fantastic song about it - listen here). I'm told that the older Cornish fishermen did the same with beach pebbles or limpet shells.

Meanwhile, the by-catch, which included conger eels, ling, sharks and other edible but non-commercial fish were left out on beds of ice and housewives could offer a few pence for them. Among the fish would be would be ugly brown angler fish that were little more than a huge mouth filled with horrid little sharp teeth. Back then the fishermen didn't realise that the small tails of these monkfish would one day fetch a fair price as a popular delicacy.

But the housewives knew.

Here are some photos from the 80s, 90s and noughties.

The Victorian promenade that runs from Penzance Harbour nearly all the way to Newlyn was always a fun place to hang out when I was a child, especially when there was a storm at sea. Huge waves would smash into the sea wall and rise up over the prom creating an arch of brine that we silly, carefree loons would zoom through on our bicycles before it crashed down onto us.

The houses that lined the road that ran parallel to the prom only grew palm trees as the salty water, seaweed and sand thrown up by the storms killed most everything else. On one memorable bike ride, a school chum of mine was hit by an unusual piece of storm-tossed debris - a dead cuttlefish. He crashed into a rain shelter and his front wheel buckled. He also broke his NHS specs. So we helped him home and his mother gave me a note to take into school which, I firmly believe, may be one of the greatest absentee notes ever written by a parent:

Dear Mr Luke,

John won't be at school today as he was hit by a flying octopus (sic) and broke his glasses.

Here's a photo of the prom (viewed from one of those sandblasted houses) that I took in 1985. Then a couple of photos I took recently that showcase the wonderful giant polished pebble sculptures by Ben Barrell that you can find there.

Public art makes any place look better.