Soggy Six-month Sojourn

Week Twenty-six: Sunday 25 – Saturday 31 March

Six months. Just like that. Cliche, cliche, cliche; but it does, doesn't it? Time flies, whizzes by, disappears before your eyes. Ah, but time is also a relative thing. An hour spent with a cold bore could easily feel like a day; a day spent with a warm interesting person could seem like an hour.

Not that I ever feel time dragging these days. There never seems to be enough of it in any one day, and I don't get much chance to fritter it away either. Oh, for the life of the idle rich.

So six months have flashed by and I am half-way through my MA at University College Falmouth. The sun is beginning to shine and Cornwall is feeling like a wise choice for a British location. It will fill up with tourists in the summer, but at least it doesn't feel congested the rest of the year - like the rest of the British Isles!

To stay beyond the course would be nice; can't think where else on this sceptred isle I want to stay. But house prices are beyond a joke, rent is high and council accommodation non-existent. Council tax and other utilities are reputed to be the highest in the British Isles, salaries the lowest. Go figure!

Cornwall is a little serfdom; a place where the idle rich, mainly from London, come to relax in their second homes for a few days a few times a year. Then there are the wealthy retirees, who move down here for the slower pace of life and better weather. Then you have the Cornish who cash in on the tourist season as much as possible and make a few quid; enough to see them through the year, if they are lucky. Beyond them you have a mass of poorly paid, poorly housed, poorly educated, culturally deprived: the underclass.

The dream stands: go and live somewhere warm, away from the masses; commune with nature and fill your days gardening and undertaking creative endeavour. The British Isles, cities, the modern world, people - you can keep them, I don't want them.