County Flag

What Courtesy flag would you fly if you were sailing the middle of up the Tamar?

Today I have the Cornish flag up my flagpole!
 
Twister_Ken said:
None. The red ensign is sufficient.
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Quite right, first it started with the Cornish with their flag, then a Devonian variation, now Somerset is pushing one! I really wish Devon didn't do it because it makes us look as daft as the Cornish.

What the cornish don't realise is that if you look closely at the population, they really do look..... not right. Obviously I remind my cornish girlfriend all the time that she had to go to Devon to find a decent enough man. :D
 
I suppose if you're dead set on playing the stupid game, you'd have to have Devon at the stbd x-trees and Cornwall on port going up the Tamar, then swap them over as you come down.

(I once played rugby for Sussex, but no way would I sail around with the Martlets up the mast.)
 
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monkfish24 said:
, now Somerset is pushing one!
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I'm pleased to say that the Somerset campaign seems to have fizzled out. According to Wikipaedia the website and campaign stopped in December 09....and if it says so on Wikipaedia it must be true.:rolleyes:

I've certainly heard nothing about it in sunny Somerset.
 
Reminds me when I went down for a week with 3 school friends over 40 years ago in a place called Pentewan near Mevagissey and, whilst driving on a day trip down some tiny one-way roads, we had a puncture so I called into a tiny local garage in the middle of nowhere and asked the old chap if he could fix the puncture whilst we waited (we had already changed the spare as we had an earlier puncture on the way down - in the old days of crossply tyres and tubes punctures were a regular occurence!).

Anyway, I couldn't understand a word he was saying so I called over my 3 mates and none of them could understand either. However, we pointed at the tyre and the spare and he fixed them both and didn't charge us much.

The whole exchange was conducted in sign language and I've no idea to this day whether the very helpful chap was speaking English with an extremely strong accent or was perhaps speaking Cornish? :o

On a sailing theme, I had been to the same part of Cornwall with my parents about 10 years earlier (so 50 years ago). Each day at some point the sea would turn completely white as far as you could see, just like milk, as the China clay works released all their processing water into the sea. If you stayed in the water you ended up sticky and white! By the time I went with my school friends the practice seemed to have been stopped.

I wonder what that part of the coast was like to sail in and what that effluent did to the sea life? Presumably, it had killed everything up to a mile or two offshore and several miles along the coast and that no antifouling was ever required if your boat was kept in those waters?

Richard
 
RichardS said:
The whole exchange was conducted in sign language and I've no idea to this day whether the very helpful chap was speaking English with an extremely strong accent or was perhaps speaking Cornish?
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The last speaker of Cornish was Dolly Pentreath of Mousehole died in 1768. For a few years afterwards there were a few who could still speak it as a second language but it is an extinct language that has been re-created largely as an academic project. There are several versions in use and it is impossible to say how much resemblance any of the contenders bear to the original spoken language. So no, it is extremely unlikely that your mechanic could have been speaking Cornish.

In addition to silt from the china clay workings we also get algal blooms forming in the sea in summer turning the sea a milky colour. When they die off they fall to the sea bed and will ultimately form beds of chalk like the Dover cliffs. If there is anything in the waters round here killing things off it could be arsenic from the mine waste.
 
I have a Cornish flag on board. As I don't have spreaders I sometimes fly it from the radio antenna above the red ensign. Probably not strictly legal but no one has ever complained. I sometimes wear it in Brittany for the same reason as I fly the Breton flag rather than the tricolour as a courtesy flag over there. Similarly I have never had any complaints over there.

While on the subject, I was parked next to a newly-arrived British boat in St Peter Port last year. He had a French courtesy flag at the starboard spreaders so I asked him if he was lost. He explained they had had a difficult passage from the French coast and had forgotten to take it down. I had read,probably in YM, of some old Colonel Blimp type seeing a similar thing and yelling 'Where the b****y hell do you think you are?' I hope I didn't come across as that pompous.
 
I also fly a Cornish Flag. I was asked, by an Englishman from Devon, one day last year why I flew it rather than the red ensign. I explained to him that many of the Cornish consider themselves 'not English' because the history of the the wars between English & Cornish and the butchery carried out etc.
Myself, I tend to use my own life experiences. I was the employ of of a company that paid a wage 50% higher in Plymouth than for the same job in Cornwall ! There has always been and probably always will be a discrepancy between wages in Cornwall and the other side of the Tamar. To me, how then can we be considered to be English.
I jokingly remarked to the gentleman that I did keep the red ensign aboard that was left by the previous owner - after all one day, one may run out of toilet paper.
 
Well, at least I am not alone in being puzzled by regional accents.
I remember many years ago putting into Bideford.
It was lovely weather. I sat on a wall looking out to the estuary.
Presently, an old boy wearing a faded fisherman's cap came and sat beside me and began to speak.
I just could not undertand a word of what he was saying, so I nodded.
It was very tricky. If I nodded in agreement he seemed to get into a huff. If I disagreed he smiled. I did not know whether to nod in agreement or disageement. This went on for a few minutes.
At that time I used to smoke a pipe.
The old boy also smoked a pipe. He tapped his empty pipe against the wall.
I opened my tobacco pouch and gave him a generous pinch. He smiled. I patted him on the shoulder and left. But the whole experience was a riddle, and remains so with me to this day.:D
 
VO5 said:
Well, at least I am not alone in being puzzled by regional accents.
I remember many years ago putting into Bideford.
It was lovely weather. I sat on a wall looking out to the estuary.
Presently, an old boy wearing a faded fisherman's cap came and sat beside me and began to speak.
I just could not undertand a word of what he was saying, so I nodded.
It was very tricky. If I nodded in agreement he seemed to get into a huff. If I disagreed he smiled. I did not know whether to nod in agreement or disageement. This went on for a few minutes.
At that time I used to smoke a pipe.
The old boy also smoked a pipe. He tapped his empty pipe against the wall.
I opened my tobacco pouch and gave him a generous pinch. He smiled. I patted him on the shoulder and left. But the whole experience was a riddle, and remains so with me to this day.:D
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Well, at least you learned an important lesson ... it's not worth the effort trying to speak to people who live east of the Tamar
 
Doghousekeeper said:
Well, at least you learned an important lesson ... it's not worth the effort trying to speak to people who live east of the Tamar
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:D

I had another baffling experience connected with regional accents....

The following occured to me in childhood:~

We were a group of little boys who used to meet in a yard to kick a football about.

This yard had a wall against which we would repeatedly kick it.
Occasionally the ball would end up on the other side of the wall, and into the Vicar's garden.

So we used to take it in turns to recover the ball....not a problem.

But the Vicar (an Irishman) passed away and was replaced by a West Countryman..

So the next time the ball fell into his garden, it was my turn to retrieve it...

So I rang his dorrbell. He came to the door looking very flustered...I very politely asked:~

"Excuse me, but please can we have our ball back ?"

He stood on his doorstep, adjusted his white collar and blurted out in a loud voice "is he very ill ? Is he really very ill ?"

Without giving me a chance to reply...he pounced on his motorbike...kick started it with the loudest of roars...and rode off at great speed...:(
...leaving me standing there, stunned.:eek:

Now I had to go back to the others to explain...

Of course it was very difficult to explain, because it was very difficult to understand...:confused:

So we got a ladder and climbed over the wall and retrieved it.

To this day, nearly sixty years after the event, a couple of us sometimes meet and discuss that event and wonder what it is that he understood that caused him to do what he did.:D
 
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