This image forms part of a series of 20 grandly titled Personal Cornwall. It’s probably about six months worth of submissions for me, but what the hell. Those of you that have been there will know how beautiful the place is, and it’s certainly a place I love as my friends know. I managed to get lost several times, especially at night down little lanes. It’s properly dark with no poisonous, toxic orange sodium glare from a hundred thousand street lights to hide the stars. Just the wind, and the rain and the night. I loved it. As always, I didn’t want to leave, but at least the drive back is quicker in the early hours of the morning. I know now too how much work I’m going to have to put into my portfolio wherever I study, but I also know that I’m at least as good as anybody I’m up against, and a damn site better and more motivated than most.

I make no claims of huge artistic merit for the set. They’re not posed or set up, or overly manipulated – what you see is substantially what I shot as I spent a day randomly driving a couple of hundred miles down little back roads so narrow that both wing mirrors were buried three inches deep in foliage some of the time, waiting to see what was around the next corner. Which is fine until you meet somebody coming the other way. Nor do they necessarily portray any of the tourist attractions that litter the place (although it’s hard to avoid sometimes pointing your lens at something that’s appeared in half a hundred tourist guides).

No, what they are, are a selection of digital memories. And like all memories they’re personal. Sometimes the place itself has meaning; sometimes it’s something that happened there, or on the way there, or the way back from there. And sometimes it’s just something that makes me want to stop, pause and look. These are my memories. Personal memories from my personal Kernow.


Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
For he's a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity.
You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in the square -
But when a crime's discovered, then Macavity's not there!

Thomas Stearns Eliot

Portreath