WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE..

Went to Port Isaac last week, just on a whim really.  Because it was there.  Not too many years ago, Port Isaac was the quintessential Cornish fishing village, all narrow streets and alleyways such as Squeezy Belly Alley, cottages tumbling down the hillside towards  the harbour known locally as The Platt.   It was always busy with visitors, of course, but they used to come to enjoy its beauty, its genuineness, its integrity as a working community engaged in the  fishing industry off the hazardous North Cornwall coast.

What struck me last week was the transformation from all of that to little more than a filming location for the successful Doc Martin tv series, with all of the commercialisation and superficiality that that implies.   `Ooh look - there`s Doc Martin`s house.`   `Ooh look, there`s Portwenn school.`  `Ooh look, that`s where Bert Large has his restaurant.`   And so on and so on.   Visitors seemed more interested in the Doc Martin business (for that is what it has become) than they were in trying to discover the timeless qualities that Port Isaac used to have.

The old world of traditional Cornwall has collided with the world of today`s celebrity culture, perhaps exemplified by the photo I took (above) of a notice outside a Port Isaac shop.  And when worlds collide, things shatter and nothing is ever the same again.  Now on one level Port Isaac seems to be benefitting from its new found fame and fortune  having left its traditional past largely behind and who can blame them for that?   I guess it`s called progress but it does seem a high price to pay to go the way of Polperro, Mousehole, Boscastle and all the other fishing villages which have become `attractions` rather than the communities they once were.

I doubt I`ll be going back.