Onen Hag Oll - Being proud of our hometown

The beauty of being home is too often colliding with the tragedy of what is happening to our little Cornish towns. And yet we forget how overwhelmingly 'before it's time' Cornwall was...

We revisit places we grew up. Those homelands where shops were once busting with locals jabbering on about their day to day lives. Picking up their bread and newspaper, sharing stories about their day and their families and who knows who and who knows what.  And now? The middle class division. Where people think that Cornwall is "cute" and "rustic" and order their food from Waitrose so that they can enjoy peace away from the commercial, corporate technological beast of the city. Where holiday-makers escape all the problems that existed in their modernised homeland yet systematically lick the melting ice-cream of neoliberalism.

Cornwall is reduced to a holiday destination. Which is nice, right? But is it really? Are we not just enabling this mentality of people continuing cut-throat, ostentatious livelihoods in cities where they don't know their neighbors and they don't know themselves so that they can come and return to Cornwall once a year to call it "cute" and "rustic."

After returning home to my family village after four years away at university, I have realised that, truly, underneath the skin, Cornwall is not cute and rustic, it is far more than that. Cornwall is a pure melting pot of profound flavours, of people with pain and beauty etched into their working hands, stories pour out of the serpentine pores. Hardy, wholesome villagers, who see the poetry of the eroding cliffs and the eroding past are now silenced behind the elaborate façade of exploitative commercialism.

There is nothing "cute" about the labour of men who have worked in near death conditions down tin mines to buy a loaf of bread, or the women who have worked tirelessly in fishing and farming to bring up families with little financial reward. And yet, when I write these cliches, isn't that an old fashioned view, isn't it time that we embraced the new, that we moved on?

Yes, transformation is an important part of life, evolving out of the old ways and welcoming in new ways of thinking, of being. Mining is no longer part of Cornish culture anyway and we should be grateful for tourism as it sustains the majority of our industries. But it seems that tangential to this evolution, the spirit of Kernow is being crushed and consumed.

​When tourists go to Spain they are embraced by the vivacious, exuberant colours and sing-song of Latin cultures that once shaped the land. But the culture is an act, displayed for the entertainment of the British ex-pats who pay the money to see the expected rhythm of the siesta and 'Benidorm fiesta'.

Unfortunately, the organic, traditional customs of rural lands are dying out. In my village of the Lizard, tourists arrive and are met by pasties, cream teas and postcard pictures of a village that was. Yet deep below there is a sigh, for when they have packed up their suitcases and left, the pubs, the villages, the shops are empty. The buses are expensive and empty. The old stories are only heard nostalgically, coincidentally, ironically perhaps.

We are more than that, we are a culture to be preserved, maintained, lived. We are not a Kynance get-away from London, so that instagrammers can take a quick pic and fly back up the country saying that they have visited Cornwall. We are not a get-away in a cottage in St Ives. We are a people, a living, breathing network of communities.

It is not a lifestyle down here, it is a livelihood, a solid solidarity, a way of being. In these beautiful cavernous Crofts, Coves and Carns, we should rebuild our identity.