OK – this isn’t actually depicting the insanity of anyone Cornish – it’s just a stooge for my story. In fact, the complete idiot who put an entirely inappropriate bulb into this lamp is me. I have only myself to blame. I did it. Moi. The bulb should, of course, be in a much bigger lamp and this lamp should have one of those teeny golf ball bulbs but I needed a replacement quickly and of course as with all of these things, it has never been sorted properly since.
Anyway, the insanity of the Cornish.
I don’t think all Cornish folks are insane – far from it. In fact, I have met more nice, sorted, ORDINARY (in the nice sense of the word) people here than anywhere I have ever been. However, we seem to have a fair proportion of complete dingbat fruitcakes knocking on our door since we moved here in January.
The first seemed innocuous enough and could almost have been seen as a moment of temporary insanity that anyone could have suffered….. Picture the scene. It’s a Saturday morning, a few weeks after we moved in when an articulated lorry pulls up outside the house. Its driver gets out and marches purposefully up our drive. He rings the bell. We answer and his opening gambit is ‘does my cousin live here?’. Er no, we reply. We live here. ‘I’m looking for my cousin, do you know where he lives?’ was his response. ‘I’m afraid not’, we said. Off he went, down the drive, back into his cab and off. I have no idea how he got a truck of that size down our lane but there you go. In fact, it wasn’t until several minutes later we realised that he’d not even mentioned his cousin’s name so how on earth could we have known where he lived, even if we’d been locals.
The second occurred last week. In fact it has unsettled me rather. An elderly man knocked on the door in the middle of the day. I answered to find him say – with a lot of complicated arm waving as though to be sure I really got his point ‘I’m looking for deaf people’. He had no ID and, although smartly dressed, seemed a bit fishy to put it mildly. He went on to ask if we knew any deaf people that he could go and see. BOY, was that a weird one!
The latest happened today. A man rang the doorbell with a fully-uniformed ambulance man standing behind him. He asked ‘do you own the car that’s usually parked over there’ (he did say the make and model of a car that is regularly parked where he waved to). ‘No’ we said. ‘I think the owner is my friend’ he said. ‘Well he lives two doors along there’ we said…..’but he’s not there now, the car’s not there’. Off he trotted, ambulance man in tow, disappeared up the path of the relevant house and a few minutes later he reappeared, climbed into his car and left. The ambulance driver climbed into his ambulance and drove off too.
What’s particularly odd about this one is that if he thought the owner was his friend, why did he ask if DM owned it?
We’re beginning to think that Mad Maureen was a front for an MI5 safe house and these strange people turning up and asking daft questions are looking for a secret code to tell them that this is, indeed the place they are seeking. You know ‘I’m looking for deaf people’ to which the response is ‘they’re only available by the pound’. He then says ‘there was a time when oranges were not the only fruit’ and you say ‘life is a bowl of cherries.’ We’re expecting Ouzi’s soon!!!
What's strangest is that I doubt we ever had a conversation of this sort in Sandhurst. The doorstep 'challenges' there were telling kids to get lost who'd come along, ring the bell, sing a half-hearted single line of 'we wish you a merry christmas' then hold out their hands for money. The same faces would be back at Halloween and any other occasion where they thought they'd get doled out cash for begging.
Ah well, I suppose we’ll go a long way before one of them tops our very own Colin’s comment while sitting in the garden last time he came here. He said ‘You don’t need to worry about the paratroopers here’. We have NO idea what was on his mind that day and we needed to be mopped up off the garden after an extended period of hysterical laughing.
Once again I was stuck for inspiration tonight and this popped into view as I stared into the blue yonder seeking a subject. DM sneered as I passed him on my way into the studio clutching the camera, my macro lens (Todd, it’s the Canon 100mm macro) and the lamp. He said ‘trouble with chrome is you never get a good shot’. I don’t reckon this is too bad at all me-self!!!!! (Though I suspect some bright spark will link me to one just like it in another gallery....not with the badly fitting bulb though, eh?)
Last year I was made up because 'is nibs' was 'ome...
