" You mean you actually live in the village all year round ?"

I had occasion to be wondering around Mousehole a few months back. I was on a mission to buy some postcards for a thing. 

Mousehole, the darling fishing village of lifestyle magazines. Home of The Mousehole Cat and Tom Bawcock. The real life home of the tragically heroic Penlee lifeboat crew - lost with all hands at Christmas. Christmas illuminations! Starry Gazey Pie! A place you may have read about, where you wake in your holiday cottage overlooking the picturesque harbour, crammed with boats, and watch the local fisher-folk starting their days work. A hand roasted coffee perhaps, before you throw back the Egyptian cotton sheets and pop out to pick up some artisanal bread and olives for brunch. I'm told that you'll see local artists at work en plein air. Later you can go to one of the fabulously appointed restaurants and dine on the fruits of those fisher-folk's labours. No mention of what "fresh local produce" actually means, of course, but you can assuage any residual guilt about food miles by not asking. Any tell-tale accent is lost when the lobster hits a boiling pan.

You'll be hard pressed to get a sliced loaf and a pint of milk, but trips to an out of town Sainsburys is what the four-by-four is for. You could pick up some premium-priced Cornish butter while you're there. Nice on tomorrow's hand-formed croissants. 

You, the visitor peering in the estate agents window, won't know the agent's office used to be the Post Office. Wandering back to your cottage, you won't know that place on the left used to be Kneebones the butchers. You won't know that where you buy your souvenirs was once a thriving general stores and how could you know those new looking places there used to be Warrens cafe where we'd have cheap breakfasts as 16 year olds while camping on the cliffs, two miles from home,  picking spuds in Ben Pearce's handful of fields? 

But this was January month and apart from a few elderly locals and one or two out of season, mildly underwhelmed visitors finding the posh places shut and the boats out of the water for winter, the streets were mine. 

I say "mine", they weren't. That's a poor choice of words in this situation. The thriving village I recall from my youth is very definitely, clearly "owned" now, but not by the old Mousehole faces I remember. Now whole chunks appear owned by people who don't live here at all. Some whose dream has been to own a piece of it, but maybe can only visit for a week now and again. People who pay for their dream homes by selling that dream to other holidaying folk, a week or two at a time.

Until the last few years the "winter let" was an integral part of the local housing scene. Many of us made our first steps to independence with a six month let for the winter. A winter let served the tourism industry by providing homes between live-in seasonal jobs and was also a life-line for people in housing difficulties. Now the burgeoning holiday home market doesn't even provide that.

Almost everywhere I went that morning, back lanes, streets, smelt of fresh plaster and concrete. Everywhere a sort of modern petrichor. the smell after rain, but cement. No exaggeration. It was in the air along with the scaffolding. I've never actually smelled change before. The sound of power tools rising above the seagulls. I realised that the few greetings I'd exchanged whilst wandering around had been with mates who are builders. Money has arrived. Compared to the economy it displaces, big money. To whose advantage is moot, but, suffice to say, someone is selling the old places. Because of that, resentment towards "incomers" is hugely misplaced. We're selling the place by the metric tonne. It's one of the many paradoxes afflicting not just Mousehole, but any place like it.

I mentioned postcards. A friend of mine is a teacher in one of the most deprived areas in the UK. Most of her students families don't have a pot to piss in. They arrive with her, behind in attainment and often struggling with lessons, behaviour, authority. Everything that goes hand in hand with inter-generational impoverishment. As a class project, and being an easy read, she introduced them to the story of The Mousehole Cat. As I'm kind of local to it, I was approached to be their resident "expert". The plan was for me to send some postcards and information about the place to go on the class wall and for lessons. I was ages in Mousehole trying to find somewhere I could buy them. Apart from a few artists galleries, all the shops were closed bar the newsagents and I ended up buying most in neighbouring Newlyn and a few in Penzance.   

 The students wrote me letters asking engaged questions about Mowser the cat, Tom Bawcock, the weather (which some imagined had mystical properties) and the village where the story is set. I wrote back, answering their questions in detail and lying that I am related to Tom Bawcock. In their own way, their questions were as enlightening to me as my answers turned out to be for them. They saw the place from a distance, I think, in a way those life style magazines can't. By asking basic, upfront questions about life here and 'how it is'.

It strikes me that most of those 11 and 12 year olds will probably never visit Mousehole, yet in some respects understand more about it than some of the people who now own bits of it. Which is rather sad. Though it also occurs to me that if they don't visit they'll never uncover the fact that I don't live there and nor am I related to Cap'n Tom.  

Swings and roundabouts, really.