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Somewhere to come from

Gool Peran Lowen, chaps. That is to say, happy St Piran's Day. The day when the Cornish diaspora gets a bit of a lump in the throat for the old country, and dreams longingly of sheltered coves, forbidding moors and frankly ludicrous hills; as well as precise rules about what goes first on a scone, an interest in rugby that borders on the unhealthy and a good old dose of casual racism (okay, not quite as nostalgic about the last bit).

I have lived in Ormskirk, Lancashire, for over twenty years now. I lived in Cornwall for about seven. But when asked where I'm from (which happens quite a lot, a southern accent, amazingly, still being something of a source of wonder in these parts, even if I do find myself saying "lad" at the end of sentences), the answer is immediate. Cornwall. Followed immediately by the question, what are you doing up here, then?

Well, I'm not about to go into the reasons behind that (largely because they would require a degree of navel-gazing which would be grossly inappropriate even for a personal blog). But it is an interesting question that I often ask myself, why do I identify as Cornish? I wasn't born there, I was born in Essex, and brought up in Hertfordshire for the first part of my childhood, but beyond a lifelong love of Tottenham Hotspur and a few vowel sounds, there's nothing of me to say that's where I'm from. I've lived the bulk of my life in Lancashire, but my voice is still a southern one, and I've never felt "from" here. It's somewhere I live. Somewhere I'm very fond of, of course, as my first chapbook L39 will attest. But not where I'm from.

I'm from Cornwall. Why am I from Cornwall? A trite answer would be that it's a more interesting place to come from than the Home Counties. Which is, of course, entirely unfair. There are as many beautiful, fascinating and captivating parts of Essex and Hertfordshire as anywhere else (though you may need to look a bit harder). Likewise there are some spectacularly awful parts of Kernow, as there are of any post-industrial region gutted by the collapse of the UKs manufacturing base. A slightly more accurate answer would be that it was the last place I was before I ended up here, so if we read the question as "You're clearly not from here originally, where were you before you were here?" the truthful answer is "Cornwall."

But this in itself doesn't explain my attachment to Kernow, why, in my heart, I'm always a boy from Boscastle. It's not that I felt any particular sense of belonging there in terms of community, I've always been a fairly unclubbable sort, I don't really belong anywhere, or rather, I belong everywhere (depending on my mood), and get me drunk enough and I'll have some fairly scathing things to say about the people. The place though, that's another thing entirely.

I lived in Cornwall at an impressionable age, my secondary school years, the years which, if you're not careful, can frame the narrative of the rest of your life. And the landscape impressed itself upon me to an extent that I'm getting goosebumps sat here just thinking about it. The wildly, recklessly beautiful coast, the impossibly steep river valleys, the ravishing bleakness of Bodmin Moor. I was a runner then, as I am now, and countless hours of my adolescence and young adulthood were spent climbing yet another ridiculous hill, before giddily careering down the other side. I felt the country through the soles of my feet. I fell in love with the woozy, hazy heat of high summer, even more with the incredible drama of a Cornish winter, watching an Atlantic swell breaking over cliffs. It is an unforgiving landscape, particularly in my patch, North Cornwall, hard work, but rewarding, a combination of romance and austerity which imprinted itself on my impressionable young mind to a degree which I still don't fully comprehend.

There is also the question of a person's need to feel they're from somewhere. I am from a somewhat peripatetic family, the maternal side were RAF kids, moving from base to base (I must, one day, ask my Mum where she thinks she's "from", though I suspect I will get an incredulous stare and a "who fucking cares?"). I myself have shifted round the country without too many qualms. Home is where you make it. I laughed heartily at Theresa May's "citizen of nowhere" jibe. I have no problem with immigrants describing themselves as British, and no problem with them not. The idea that your birthplace defines you as a person is so patently the refuge of racists that it's not worth bothering with. But it's telling that I still get the question: where are you from? with its implicit you're not from round here, are you? And it's entirely true to say that whilst in my head I shrug at the idea of it mattering, in my soul, I will always feel that I'm from Cornwall. Maybe everyone just needs somewhere to come from, if only to answer the question (in a similar vein to absentmindedly saying "Goodfellas" when asked what my favourite film is, it probably isn't, I can think of thirty or so off the top of my head that could fit the bill, but it's such a dull question that you need a default answer just so you can go about your day).


I'm sure that some unsmiling Kernewek whose roots go back generations would look askance upon my claims, but fuck them. I think I dealt with that in the paragraph above. There will always be people whose sense of self is threatened by others sharing their geography. They're called bigots. If you ask, I'm from Cornwall. I wasn't always, but I always will be.

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