The Shipwright's Arms was tucked away up a back street in Newlyn. It was an ancient pub, awash with history, right at the top of one of the steepest streets of tiny terraced houses that led up and away from the bustling fishing harbor. By rights it should have attracted every tourist in town, being seventeenth-century with low beamed ceilings and ringing with fiercely Cornish authenticity. Due to the fiercely Cornish authenticity of its owner, Gordon Pascoe, however, it didn't. Absolutely no concessions to the twenty-first century were made in here. No mobile phones were allowed, and Gordon had eyes like a hawk. He'd turf out anyone he saw even receiving a text on one. The food was filthy. Really filthy. It was cooked by his wife, Linda, who'd been serving up the same chili con carne or shepherd's pie — it alternated daily — since I was a teenager. Both dishes looked like Labrador sick and tasted accordingly. Other than that it was a Ploughman's lunch, which should have been safe, but the butter was margarine, the bread Mother's Pride, and the cheese cheap and processed.

And yet. Up on the walls, yellow with tobacco stains, were banks of framed photographs, mostly of local heroes: lifeboat men, generations of fishermen who'd trawled these seas for hundreds of years, the most salty dogs imaginable. But also, weirdly, Michael Caine, Dirk Bogarde and even David Niven. Some were posing with Gordon or Linda, some just perched at the bar in the little room below. Not the front bar, no one ever sat there. Hence, if a brave tourist ever did glance in curiously, to be glared at fiercely by Gordon as he kept watch, pretending to polish glasses, but actually, indulging in his favorite pastime of scaring customers away, they wouldn't know anyone was in there at all. Gordon only survived because he owned the pub outright and didn't pay rent. It was what you might call a niche destination, and an extremely private place, which only someone like Shona, or me, not even the Bellingdons, I'd hazard, would know about.

I parked easily enough, right at the bottom of the hill. Then I walked to the top of the precipitous, narrow — so narrow only one car could pass — cobbled street. Crampons were virtually required to navigate it, another effective deterrent. Obviously there was no parking outside, or indeed for a good quarter of a mile, and no pub sign hung gaily, either. Instead, painted green letters, just below the upstairs window sill, bore the legend: ‘Pascoes’. Gordon was Cornish but referred to himself as Celtic, and in many respects his establishment resembled an Irish pub. I could have been pushing open someone's front door now, leading into a front parlour in a private house, albeit that of a run-down terraced cottage.