Noises On?
My home town through the year
Through the Summer in Falmouth, there are festivals. Flower Festival, Sea Shanty Festival, Falmouth Week, Food Festival, Falmouth Pride, Oyster Festival (but that’s later), Falmouth Classics; this year we also had the Tall Ships calling in, and Armed Forces Day. I think I saw something about a Gin Festival next year. There are always fireworks.
From where I’m usually sitting on a Saturday morning in Summer (up the hill, outside my front door), the Sound of Falmouth is an enthusiastic but not necessarily over-rehearsed brass band leading a procession of happy, noisy people from down there on the left — Prince of Wales Pier — to over there on the right where (in Falmouth Week, not every Saturday) they start the dragon-boat races — Events Square.
Brightening up the long mural
Then it’s September and there’s the Martin Jennings Memorial Ride, which is all the motorcycles in Cornwall riding together through town and beyond, and finally, the change of season is marked by — but this isn’t a festival — parents’ weekend. The students arrive, and are unpacked into their rented rooms by parents carrying duvets, suitcases and boxes from the backs of not-quite-big-enough cars. There are new kettles, new desk lamps and occasional very old teddy-bears.
The students bring this year’s plumage — which I suspect is a combination of self-expression-at-last and not-quite-worked-out-who-I-am-yet — and by now, the local council will have painted over last year’s graffiti and (I love this) left off-white rectangles of blank wall for anybody who might want to sneak out and express themselves this year. Pretty sure that’s deliberate.
The illustration students do the long mural on the wall down the side of the Jacob’s Ladder steps. I don’t think that’s exactly a course requirement — I could be wrong — but they brighten it up every year. It’s bright. Every year.
There’s music on Church Street
Next, it’s the film crews. Groups of newly confident students with boom microphones, bulky film cameras on tripods and clip-boards making short features — dramas, I should say; there are drama students in make-up (done by make-up students) and costume (ditto — fashion students).
By now, the hair-braiding and the henna-tattooing young women have gone from their pitches on Church Street, and The Woman Who Stands Very Still has — moved on. Until next year.
But there’s music on Church Street all through the morning, afternoon and evening, and the music venues overflow into the street until about 3am. I lived for a while in the flat above the exit from the car park on Fish Strand Quay — it’s a short tunnel, with another big mural — and I got used to falling asleep to the sound of young people out at night and happy about it.
Key details that I failed to work into that last sentence: the exit was onto Church Street; the flat was opposite Mango’s; the tunnel gave shelter and a bit of privacy. Oh, and — I can sleep through just about anything. Life is for living, not for complaining about the noise. If you can sleep through just about anything. Those students were having fun.
Embracing Falmouth’s Fringes
Mid-September, the cruise ships are still coming in, so there are still middle-of-the-day crowds studying their hand-out maps and checking how long they’ve got before they have to be back on the boat. Are there any more shops up that way? Shall we look down there? Mostly Germans, actually, from my over-hearing. Some Americans, some Italians.
If you’ve ever wanted to own a small pastie-shaped neck pillow with CORNWALL printed on the side, book yourself onto a cruise that takes in Falmouth.
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Then it’s October and the Falmouth Book Festival, which is — a modern book festival. Cooks, comedians, and — oh yes — “award-winning” authors from all over. This being Falmouth, several Falmouth Fringe Festivals have sprung up around it, to feature local authors beyond the usual suspects, and this being 2023, the book festival is “embracing” the most persistent of the fringes and patting it on the head — sorry — including it in the publicity. There are workshops on creative writing.
My local friends go to dinner
By the time the book festival comes around, the weather has changed decisively (subject to climate change), and the typical holiday visitors are no longer small children and their parents heading for the beach with their buckets, wetsuits and beach-robes; they’re older couples in head-to-toe waterproofs, with walking poles and maps in plastic envelopes, heading for the coast path.
They return at the end of the day, soaked, happy, exhausted, and tell me about the table they booked weeks ago for dinner that evening. They’ve been coming to Falmouth for years; they’ve had friends (sometimes family) in the area for years; they’re more local than I am, except for the tiny detail that they don’t live here and I do. We part friends; we’ll see each other again next year.
Enough with the Coleridge references
Once or twice, I have been greeted, reunion-style, by people who knew me last year. I’m also on chatting-before-his-customers-arrive terms with the entrepreneurial young man in the tricorn hat who does the walking tours of the town.
As the years go by, I’m becoming ever more proficient myself at telling people that there are more shops up there, the procession starts over there, that flag is the Cornish flag and that tartan is the Cornish tartan. KERNOW is Cornish for CORNWALL.
Although sometimes, I just have to tell them: I’ve no idea what this event is, but we always do this on Saturday mornings in Summer, and actually, all of those people are in the band. I should carry a map and maybe a restaurant guide. Or stop one in three and tell them a story about an albatross? I’ve never been a Mariner, but I can do Ancient quite convincingly.
The King Harry Ferry Company has an ancient bus that can be hired for going away, if you want to get married here (I’ve just scrolled down that link and noticed the man in the tricorn hat)? That’ll be me stopping your guests — sorry, the Falmouth Book Festival has obviously gone to my head. Enough with the — but I’ve said that.
Free-Shampoo Season
By October, the young boys — almost always boys — aren’t jumping off Prince of Wales Pier any more, and the young seagulls have stopped bleating for their parents, so it’s definitely, undeniably no longer Summer. There are skulls and skeletons and plastic bats in shop windows, so it won’t be long before we’re all talking about shopping days to Christmas.
The year just circles round, doesn’t it? Soon, there’ll be boxes labelled Free! outside all those student houses — full of mugs, textbooks, pint glasses and half-empty bottles of shampoo — as the students migrate homewards for the holidays. Soon, we’ll be hearing news items about the big stores’ Christmas ads. We’ll be talking about where we’ll be on the day.
I should write a Christmas story — wait, I’ve done that — although my favourite Christmas poem is BC:AD by U A Fanthorpe.
And then we’re all talking about giving up drink for January (I don’t, so that’s easy), and then, at last, the quietest month. The shortest month.
Shiny, rainy streets, the log fires at Beerwolf and the Jacob’s Ladder pub, warmth indoors and cold out, breathing out clouds, rubbing our hands together, my glasses steaming up (that isn’t so good), time, reflection, conversation, the certain (subject to climate change) knowledge that soon, all of the year, all of everything, will come round again.
Subject to climate change…
