Excuse me, are you a lifeguard?

This week, Porthmeor Beach sees the Greenaway Pro, a surf contest commemorating Tom Greenaway, a St Ives lifeguard who was tragically killed in a road accident two years ago.

I'm not going to write about fake lifeguard hoodies again, because I've already done it before (11 August last year, if you can be bothered to look), and anyway, although I was the first as far as I know to point out in my blog the blatant misrepresentation involved in an ten-year old from Sheffield walking around with LIFEGUARD MINXY written on her back, the national press now seem to have jumped on the bandwagon, and only this morning in McColls, I noticed on the front page of the Western Morning News that two of the shops that sell this emmet-exploiting shite in Newquay are at each other's throats over who got the idea in the first place.

One of these shops in Newquay turns out to be NO WORRIES, a very apt name I reckon for a shop which makes its money out of shamelessly selling this sort of crap which in my view devalues and exploits the status and respect, not to mention the skill and sheer humanitarian valour of lifeguards. I don't imagine for a minute that anyone in imminent danger of drowning is going to frantically wave for help at a ten year old just because she's wearing a red hoodie that says LIFEGUARD MINXY on the back (which would be particularly pointless as she'd have to have her back to the sea for the person in difficulties to read it anyway), but that's not the point. I would like to ask LIFEGUARD MINXY'S parents what lifestyle they thought they were buying young Minxy into (I would have also liked to have asked them what the fuck they thought they were doing calling a kid Minxy in the first place, but that's another thing), let alone the adults who buy these things for themselves. Whatever it is, do they look around them and see us locals walking through the streets wearing them? More to the point, do they see REAL LIFEGUARDS walking about wearing them on their day off? The real lifeguards like those who (as I see from our local paper The Cornishman only today) rescued 10 people from a rip current on Porthmeor beach last Thursday. I really hope LIFEGUARD MINXY wasn't among the people in need of being rescued, but I wonder how many of them struggled back up the beach only to contemplate their narrow escape from drowning as they put on their fake lifeguard hoodies?

Anyway, reading this thing in the Western Morning News this morning about the battle between NO WORRIES and this other shop in Newquay, I realise that NO WORRIES (which should really be called NO CONSCIENCE) is in fact a chain of shops, of which there is also one in St Ives, selling this exploitative crap. Idon't know if this makes it worse, but it certainly makes it more lucrative for the owners of Emporio No Worries. So, I would like to take this opportunity of not writing about fake lifeguard hoodies to point the finger at our local NO WORRIES and the other shop that floods St Ives with these tawdry symbols of lifestyle appropriation every summer, EXHIBIT ONE in Tregenna Place (next to the Co-Op), and say to their proprietors - next time you need a lifeguard, I hope for your sake the only person in shouting range is the likes of Tom Greenaway, and not LIFEGUARD MINXY from Sheffield (age 10).