It is holiday season in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, which means ice cream, pasties and social anxiety. There are Facebook posts about parking infractions; laughter at cars left on beaches to drown (curiously not everyone seems to understand tides); the annual appearance of a basking shark at Porthcurno, as if it is booked in advance like Morecombe and Wise.
It is tempting to analyse this simply: locals versus incomers; the righteous versus the appalling. The longer I live here, the more self-serving this feels. There are many tribes in Cornwall, and the most defensive — the most passive-aggressive, the most anti-tourist — are wealthy incomers like myself. It’s a hunger to identify which segues into entitlement and denial. We are as much to blame for the housing crisis as anyone, but you wouldn’t know it from listening to us. Like Daphne du Maurier and Virginia Woolf, we invent a fake Cornish aesthetic (they were from Hampstead and Kensington) and call it real.
