Yes, I steamed that first night in The Spattered Sofa. Heat whistled out of my ears. I smoked through my nose like a gelding. And all because a young woman I didn’t know, who hadn’t, strictly speaking, invited me, was good enough to take me out and show me a good time. Naturally it was her having such a thing as a good time to show me that I resented her for. Though naturally that wasn’t how I put it to myself. I was an intellectual as well as a lover; I wanted to pin with some precision exactly what it was I didn’t like.

‘These songs,’ I whispered to Camilla during a break in the revelry – she’d been joining in many of them herself and even had some well established solo routines going – ‘they’re not all genuinely Cornish are they?’

‘Oh no, they’ll sing anything that takes their fancy here.’

I was glad Camilla was not trying to protect them, because I was pretty certain that I’d heard mention of fair Dublin and Skye and Botany Bay alongside the Lamornas and the Camborne Hills. I didn’t believe there was an Ilkley Moor in the west country either. ‘They grab their sentimentality where they find it, you mean,’ I rejoined, lightly.

Just as The Bell or The Toby Jug often have a bell or a toby jug in a prominent position, so The Spattered Sofa had a spattered sofa. Designed to be low when it was first built it was even lower now with all its springs gone. It was on to this that Camilla invited me to collapse when we first arrived while she herself sat upon a high bar stool. And it was from here, with my head below my knees, that I shaped my nice discernments. ‘There’s something about these ersatz folk songs, that kind of nasal male maritime bravado wedded to maudlin sentiment,’ I went on, ‘that I cannot abide. I suppose it’s just routine Celtic mendacity.’

Camilla regarded me from her bar stool eminence without any trace of maudlin sentiment. ‘Why don’t you get up and stretch your legs,’ she said, (she seemed to mean that literally) ‘and while you’re at it fetch me another drink.’ She watched me with a distant curiosity as I thrashed about on the sofa, trying to bring myself upright, then she offered me one of her strong brown hands. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘let me help you.’

I wandered off to the bar, braving the hostile inquisitiveness, the quizzing aloofness that I was to grow to know as typically Cornish, and ordered Camilla what she wanted. When I returned she was standing singing, her arms around men’s shoulders, her voice a fine soprano, surprisingly sweet, powerful, her accent ever so slightly burred to make the song belong to here and nowhere else.

‘Once I had a bunch of thyme,’

she sang;