On Wednesday World leaders should take a fishing lesson
Read Philip’s column every week in the Western Morning News
IF Joe, Angela, Emmanuel and the rest of the G7 visitors find themselves at a loose end during their June summit in Cornwall, they could do a lot worse than take a trip up the coast to Newquay harbour and have a chat with lobster fisherman Buck, his wife Nicola and their son Freddy.
The family are among the stars of the new series of Cornwall: This Fishing Life, which started on BBC Two on Monday night. Half an hour with the innovative and industrious Buck, his enterprising wife and their confident and hard-working son will tell them more than three days of summit debate ever can about the potential to get the world back on track after a global pandemic has knocked it for six.
Before Covid struck, Buck sold most of his shellfish to Newquay restaurants. When lockdown forced them to shut, he became a retailer as well as a fisherman, selling directly to grateful customers and taking a larger and well-deserved chunk of the profit from his fishing efforts.
Nicola, meanwhile, forced by Covid restrictions to shut her nail bar, joined Buck in the business.
When the couple found they could boost their income by selling picked crab meat instead of whole live crabs, she and other family members got stuck in.
And when the restrictions lifted and Nicola could re-start the nail painting business, she picked crab meat in the morning and worked on customers’ nails until late in the evening. Young Freddy, meanwhile, learned the ropes – literally – joining his Dad at sea shooting and hauling the pots.
Devon and Cornwall’s coast and countryside is all over TV at the moment. But this documentary, now in its second series, is a world away from the sugar-coated “isn’t the view wonderful” material that most programme makers seem to fall victim to whenever they point their cameras anywhere in the Westcountry.
Fishing is a unique industry and in series one we had a warts-and-allview of it, with bad weather, see-sawing prices, conservation pressures and Brexit all thrown into the mix. This time the fishing communities covered are also coping with coronavirus – which has devastated the
Cornish hospitality and tourism economy – as well as the end of the Brexit transition period, which has made it more difficult to get fish into the all-important European markets.
Despite these pressures, the sheer determination of the Newquay fishermen shone through. If anyone needed confirmation that it is the self-employed small business owner who holds the key to the wealth-generating potential of a region like the Westcountry, then they will find it in this show.
From the canny restaurateur who sees the value in providing a space for pop-up enterprises offering tasty street food to the former Royal Navy officer who has returned to his fishing roots and is targeting in-demand species like “Cornish calamari”, it is all here in this fishing town-turned tourist Mecca desperately trying to bounce back from coronavirus.
With the arrival of the G7 entourage this summer, Cornwall has a great opportunity to demonstrate that it is not just a coastal county of breathtaking vistas, pasties and buckets and spades. And nor should the big corporations innovating in the offshore wind energy or rare metal mining industries get all the limelight when the leaders of the free world arrive in Carbis Bay.
The fishermen and those working in farming and other small businesses at the sharp end of the production process need to be given the chance to show off their skills, too. Cornwall has not been well-served in recent years, misrepresented in many ways, denied the investment that has come to other regions and increasingly seen – through the Poldark factor – as a chocolate box kind of place; lovely but without much substance.
That is patently not the case and the best people to tell a more real and richer story are people like Buck, Nicola and young Freddy, making a go of fishing and Nicola’s nail bar, despite the challenges.
Let’s hope Joe, Angela and Emmanuel like lobster. They could do a lot worse than go and buy a nice big one direct from the producer – for a very fair price – and ask him for a few ideas about how to fix the world. They might even find someone in Newquay ready to cook it and serve it up to them.
‘Despite the pressures the sheer determination of Newquay fishermen shines through’