minority report

I spent most of my childhood holidays in Cornwall.  Our family divided its patronage between the north and south coasts, so some years we dawdled among the lanes and gentle coves around Veryan, while other seasons we stayed outside Bude, within striking distance of grander and more rugged scenery.  I remember vast sandy beaches, not awfully nice public loos, learning to row on the Bude canal, where I developed a technique that had only limited application in later life when I didn't need to shed the accumulated weed from my oar at every third stroke, and drinking horlicks in steamed-up cafes while it rained.  I remember clambering across scree slopes on some hair-raising cliffs to get to the best beaches, which I believe have long since been barricaded off by the National Trust on health and safety grounds.  We visited Tintagel, and Boscastle, and stared into the slate mines of Delabole, and commented on the way that the hedgerow trees were sculpted by the wind.  One year we stayed in a bungalow instead of camping, and found little wriggly things in the private water supply, and another year the tent blew down.

We ritually asked the piskies for permission to come in as we crossed the Tamar, but I don't think we listened for the reply, and truly I was never conscious that I was in another country, or that Cornish people were different.  Perhaps I was an insensitive child.  It puzzles me, this business of minority status.  Would we get it, if we were to sell up in Essex and go and move to Cornwall, or is there an ancestry test?  Or would some minimum period of residence suffice?

If so, it would have to be a long time.  We have lived in north Essex for thirty years come December, but I'm not sure that makes us local.  Not local the way that people born here, or who went to school here, count as local.  Not like people whose parents and grandparents ran businesses or farmed here.  I used to work with somebody whose father ran the village bakery.  There was a black and white photograph of it in one of the village pubs, with him standing outside.  She was born in the village, went to school there, and in her sixties was in daily and weekly contact with at least some people whom she had known all of her life.  Another former colleague grew up in Dedham where her grandfather had been the miller.  That's local.  We would pass the Is Your Parliamentary Candidate Local? test that I heard about on R4 this morning, since we have lived here for more than five years.  We could claim a fair knowledge of local issues, after thirty years, but if we were to up sticks and decamp to Cornwall, our disappearance would make no difference except to the comparatively small number of people who know us, and the local culture would be essentially unchanged.

I rather like the idea of minority status within the UK for Essex.  Conveniently close to London yet never smart or in fashion since Tudor times, natural home of the great tribe of commuting clerks that keep the wheels of London commerce turning, and relocated Cockneys.  From the salon-tanned, hair-extended, varnished and vajazzled denizens of Towieland, to the immaculate blonde-helmeted matrons of the heights of Danbury, the chirpy retired cabbies of the coastal strip, and the assorted minor artists who settled in the north of the county where they could practically believe they were in Suffolk, it remains an endlessly amusing county.  Energetic, cheerful, go-getting, self-reliant, with the longest coastline of any English county and an astonishing dearth of stately homes, aristocrats, or Rothschilds, it is resolutely middling.  Our cathedral only achieved that status in 1914 when the Diocese of Chelmsford was created.  Chelmsford only achieved City status in 2012.  Not that we don't have a long history, Colchester being England's oldest recorded town.  Indeed, Essex is England's longest standing county name, Wessex and Mercia having been abolished before the Norman conquest.

I could see trouble ahead, though, Belgian style tensions arising between the urban south of the county, with its hustling ways and Estuarine glottal stops, and the slower paced, leafier north.  But given minority status we could all unite under our proud flag, three Saxon seaxes on a red field, and make a stand against our natural enemies, the men of Kent.  As the old bargeman's saying has it, Never give way to a Kentishman.  And for why?  Cause he'll never give way to you.