Here's Johnny

Thing with a lot of the houses in Downalong, right (that's what they call the old part of St Ives where I live) is that when they were built nobody cared about how they looked. They didn't think of them as houses even, just as a space that they threw four walls round and called a room, then proceeded to pile more and more rooms on top until they had what they wanted. And what they wanted was a place to keep things, a place to fix things, a place to do things with the things they'd caught using the things they'd fixed, oh, and a place to sleep. So typically you got these dingy spaces all heaped on on top of another, where these old fishermen guys used to press a few pilchards in the cellar, stash their fishing gear and mend their nets on the next floor that opened out on the street, bring up their eighteen children in two rooms on the next floor and take it in turns to sleep in one bed probably on the floor about that.

There's a granite channel that runs down our street that used to be full of offal and oil from the pilchards, which just got sluiced away down into the harbour. There are holes in the walls of our basement that according to my dad are where the big beams, that had weights on the end to press the pilchards, used to slot in.

When the pilchards stopped coming, the visitors started. At first they were posh people, and artists and that, who liked the look of Downalong but didn't like the smell, the streets full of fish heads, or the living conditions, or the fishermen's kids, who used to throw stones at them. So the artist's 'colony' did what colonisers do, they built their own bit of town from which they could look down on the locals without actually having to get their posh shoes covering in fish guts or risk getting cholera from the bad sanitation, and paint the quaint fishermen without the risk of having stones thrown at them. It's called Upalong (obviously), and that's where all the hotels and terraces of big guesthouses got built when the railway made it easier for people from up-country to get here.

Downalong turned into a bit of a slum, most of the fishermen did what the fish had done and went somewhere else, loads of them going off abroad to dig for gold and that, and those who were left did what most people do down here, a bit of this and a bit of that. Like Alfred Wallis, this mad old rag and bone man who hung around the end of the Digey painting bits of cardboard and waiting to be discovered by Jack Nicholson.

Then somebody had the bright idea of doing up some of the old rickety houses and before you know where you are Downalong becomes full of places the locals can't afford any more. Builders like my dad do OK out of it at first, but (not just because my dad's a crap builder) the work starts going up-country, and they're putting Smallbone kitchens and AGAs the size of a small town's crematorium into these tiny little fishermen's house (the houses are tiny I mean, not the fishermen, although they had to be, because the beams in these places are so low). And all the plaster gets chipped off the walls revealing the bare granite, and internal walls get knocked out to open up the rooms, and before you know where you are there are no LOCALS left and Downalong has been colonised by the sort of colour supplement reading twats from London who don't see any irony in framing an Alfred Wallis print to hang it on their whitewashed exposed granite wall.