Diary – 10 March 2012

Some time in the olden days, an Irishman called St Piran took the trouble to float over the ocean on a millstone and land in Cornwall, with the purpose of introducing the natives to tin-mining and Christianity. Today, the mines are closed and the inhabitants under the age of 75 are indifferent to the saint’s religious legacy. But it is St Piran’s Day in Penzance. (Or Pensans, as the nationalists call it. One remembers Kingsley Amis’s Old Devils, emerging from Swansea station to see a rank labelled Tacsi, ‘for those who could not understand the word “taxi” ’.) The St Piran’s Day procession is led by Jan Ruhrmund, who used to be a librarian at the Morrab Library and is now the Lib Dem mayor. She is followed by a band of flower-decked musicians and dancers. And then all the schools of the district have amassed, each with their own band.