She spends the rest of the afternoon thinking of her nom de plume. Outside, the evening traffic is approaching its stately climax. It is no big deal, but the locals love to complain about it: it is caused almost entirely by rich outsiders – the grockles – who all have a second home, and by rich farmers in Land-Rovers, who receive enormous EU subsidies. If the letter pages are anything to go by, the traditional Cornishman (and woman) thrives on bitter envy. She considers ‘Cornish Lass’ but it sounds like a brand of ice cream and far too twee. ‘I tell you that which you yourselves do know,’ Shakespeare. It has the right idea, but is way too serious for a blog. The truth is nobody gives a rat’s arse about Cornwall, except as a place for the impoverished young to surf and get stoned when it’s raining, which it often is, or as a place where the oldies want to recapture a mythical time when as children they went around in flannel shorts and sun hats picking up shells or sea glass or diverting streams to make doomed lakes or having their toes pinched by crabs. Good, cheap, wholesome fun. She toys with the idea of calling herself ‘CornishPasty.com’, but actually she is a little too fat around the middle – many Cornish girls are – and the irony might be lost on her readers. They haven’t yet reached modern, let alone postmodern. Then she suddenly decides to call her blog It’s-all-out-there-somewhere.com. It’s good. It’s got a little bit of conspiracy; it’s got a little hint of mystery. It’s-all-out-there-somewhere.com from Melissa Tregarthen. She can see the typeface and a little byline picture of her, from above the waist.

Next morning she’s driving over to the Camel in her mother’s car. There is no time to catch the bus, which involves three changes and takes ninety minutes. Cars can only be charged to expenses on urgent news stories – Lifeboat rescues windsurfer, Sewage escapes into the Tamar, Oldest woman in Cornwall celebrates a hundred and two years young, Sheep loose on A30 after lorry overturns – but not on features and definitely not on arts, unless some wasted old star collapses on stage while singing ‘Moon River’. As she drives she wonders how to tell her mother that she has lost her job. Her mother has an old-fashioned idea of the job market: start work, work hard, get promoted, gold watch, die. It’s no good trying to explain to her the new realities, what the prescient Max Weber (sociology, module 3) described as the move to a value-neutral rational society. The new realities have taken some time to reach Cornwall: Weber wrote that in about 1870.