Say “Cornwall” to an uncontacted pygmy brave deep in a New Zealand forest and his bamboo flute will swiftly carve the shape of the Cornish pasty into the Shotover riverbank sands. “Oggy, oggy, oggy,” he will cry, as he mimes pushing a too-hot Cornish pasty into his unambiguously delighted face. “Oggy, oggy, oggy!”
But last Monday, the feast day of Cornwall’s proud Saint Piran, American food industry lobbyists revealed plans to exploit the end of our protection by the EU’s regional foods scheme. American “Cornish” pasties could be on their way into Britain. And yet Arthur, who swore to return if his land was imperilled, sleeps soundly still in his Tintagel cave.
American Cornish pasties? Say the horrible words and savour their bitter taste. Was this desecration what Leave-voting Cornwall voted for? Did proud Cornwall want the crusty foodstuff that has made Kernow beloved worldwide replaced by a foul foreign fake? Did Arthur die on adulterous Mordred’s lance to see the sacred pasty cuckolded so? Did Henry Jenner, bard of Boscawen-Un, strive to revive Cornwall’s lost language for his cultural inheritors to ask the man in Pengenna Pasties for a King Size American? Did the noble Cornish folk want nothing more than to be Donald Trump’s Brexit pasty whores? Because that is all they are! Especially the people from London who own cottages there!! And Rick Stein!!!
The Leave-voting Cornish comedian Jethro Tull has appeared twice on the Leave-voting comedian Jim Davidson’s Generation Game show, demonstrating how to make Cornish pasties. During one sequence, Tull mocked the interfering EU for insisting pasty preparers wear gloves. Now he and Davidson will be able to fly to America and see Cornish pasties being made by Hispanic slave labour from factory-farmed, hormone-ridden cattle, doused in petroleum, reduced to pulp and squeezed from automatic tubes into pre-molded pasty pastry Hot Cornwall Pockets™®. Doubtless they are delighted.
If he could see the meat and potato atrocities about to be enacted in the name of his beloved Cornish pasties, Cornwall’s holy Saint Piran would turn in his grave, had his remains not been split up and sent all around the country in the 14th century. As it is, one of Saint Piran’s arms revolves in Exeter Cathedral, the other in Waltham Abbey, while his missing head spins somewhere undisclosed in St Piran’s Old Church, Perranzabuloe.
In the Mad Max dystopia of our post-Brexit nation, it is unlikely hungry Britannia will have the luxury of rejecting Donald Trump’s food regulation-relaxing advances, no matter how many times she slaps his tiny hands away from her cool thigh. Scotch whiskies, Melton Mowbray pork pies, Jersey Royal potatoes, Solihull stickleback slices and Cumberland sausages, all sourced from the finest American processing plants, will soon foul our patriotic British palates. First they came for the West Cornwall Pasty Company. And then they came for me.
I will miss the West Cornwall Pasty Company’s cheery wayside retail outlets, a Greggs for road-worn wayfarers who fear not the harsh crust or the hot steak steam. Doubtless they are soon to close when cheap American imports undercut the business, sending hundreds of gainfully employed Cornish pasty-makers back to their old ancestral ways of piracy, smuggling and wrecking. The West Cornwall Pasty Company’s honest fayre is one of the comforts of the road to an endlessly touring comedian and last week I needed my Cornish culinary compensation.
During these last, final weeks of my 18-month standup comedy tour around broken Brexit Britain, I have been reading the 1967 novel Ice by the science-fiction pioneer and heroin enthusiast Anna Kavan, newly rescued from oblivion by Peter Owen Publishers. Ice eerily depicts a man travelling through a Kafkaesque collapsing society, beset by an encroaching ice age, against the backdrop of some imminent but unspecified political catastrophe. What ghostly forces of guidance compelled me to read this prophetic novel at this exact moment in time? Mother? Are you there? Is that you?
On Thursday night, I and my tour manager were trapped in Bristol by the Beast from the East and I was denied two days back with my resentful family in London, as we remained there until Sunday and a date in Plymouth. An audience member’s ice-skidding car had crashed into the loading doors of the Bristol theatre, where it remained for days, blocking our exit, closing the Overton window of our departure and tripling our hotel bill. I missed the kids and sat in reading Ice, worrying about their futures until my heart ached.
On Sunday we set off toward Plymouth. Though the sudden snow was thawing, all along the A386 abandoned cars lay shipwrecked in laybys, ditched during Thursday’s snowstorm and now stripped clean of parts and fabrics, the Devonshire locals reverting to type at the first sign of a social breakdown.
At the Fox Tor cafe in Princetown, high on Dartmoor, above the prehistoric stone rows of Merrivale, I suspended my diet to stand and scoff a Cornish pasty, looking out across the ancient, frost-flecked landscape of the nation that made me. The pasty was good eating, and authentically Cornish too, but there was a bitter aftertaste not of its own making. As I ate into the pasty, I felt the very notion of Britain itself being eaten away, like some kind of enormous metaphor.
On his Cornish deathbed in 1934, the last Cornish words of the Cornish language revivalist Henry Jenner were: “Here in Cornwall, we do not need other meat and pastry products. The whole object of my life has been to inculcate into the Cornish people, and the Cornish pasties, a sense of their Cornishness. Either that chicken and mushroom slice goes or I do. Aaaagh!”
How sad that Brexit befouls Jenner’s legacy and turns his Cornish pasty to cows’ dungs in our mouths. Wake, proud Arthur! Wake and bake!!
Stewart Lee’s Content Provider continues to tour until April, when it is abandoned over three nights at the Royal Festival Hall in London
