Nobody mention Ch****mas!!

Short and to the point:  It's 12 December. The decorations are up.  The cards have been sent off.  The presents have been wrapped.  There's only one last shopping trip to do before the day.  Now.....can I just forget about all of it until Christmas Eve and for now just get on with real life?  Please???

Time Gentlemen Please

I've taken an interest lately in this debate over British Summer Time and Double Summer Time, that seems to come up every autumn when the clocks change.  Apparently the idea is that by keeping the country on BST in the winter and then moving forward (back? never can remember...) the following spring we would have an extra hour of light in the evening which would be "good for tourism" and, er, not much else as far as I can see. 

Speaking from my vantage point here in Cornwall and imagining what it would be like, especially on gloomy extra-dark rainy days like today, if eight o'clock had been nine...for a start full daylight would have arrived sometime around nine o'clock - and this is with another six weeks until the shortest day. Kids would be walking to school in total darkness with the rain pouring down, everyone would be more miserable that usual, the workmen putting a new roof on the building opposite me would have to wait until about ten o'clock before starting to work...Need I go on?

And in the summer we would gain...what?  Daylight until about eleven pm instead of ten.  Big deal.  It would knacker the fireworks at Glastonbury for a start.

I went on holiday to the west coast of Ireland once.  If they went along with us and moved that hour, just to make, like, crossing the border from Ulster sensible, it would have been daylight until about 1 am. 

Now that's just silly.

And this is me...

For anyone who can't work it out....that's "An Expat In Cornwall". I know it sounds a bit "An Englishman In New York" (Sting, you know) but it think it sums up my life at this moment. A moment that's lasted nearly five years now, but that's by the bye.
The thing is that I moved to the Duchy in 2007 at the ripe old age of fifty-one and, despite having visited on a pretty regular basis since I was about six, having met the love of my life and married since I moved here (gaining a vast new extended Cornish family in the process), and never ever intending to live anywhere else....I know I'll never be Cornish.
Not that I'm whinging or anything, I never expected to find my name changing to Trelovegrove and start calling everyone My Beauty or My Luvver, or something like that. I just know that I'll always be someone from up-country even if I live to be two hundred and fifty and get voted Most Popular Man In Cornwall for every one of my remaining one hundred and ninety-five years.  And that's fine, that's the way it works.  That's part of what make Cornwall, well, Cornwall. It's not so much a sense of insularity as much as knowing this is the best part of the country and eventually the rest of Britain will come to understand that.
So I think I can use this blog to chat about some of the ways things have changed for me over the past few years and tell them through the eyes of a Berkshire Lad (Berkshire born and Berkshire bred; thick in the arm and thick in the...well, you know).
I have to finish off now, my pasty's getting cold.  I'll finish by saying; I love Cornwall, I love the Cornish - I even love the weather! - and I can't imagine I could live anywhere else. I haven't missed Reading in the slightest, despite having lived there most of my life, and I bless every waking moment I find myself in Penryn.
There, that's the prologue. Hope you liked it. Coming soon - Chapter One!