After the event

pp. 190-202

in: Simon Bayly, A pathognomy of performance, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Abstract

These images were taken during a school half-term family holiday to the Cornish coast in England in 2006. Without really understanding the set-up, we had booked into a converted farm that turned out to be regularly used as a holiday retreat for a dozen or so extended families with children aged from 2 to around 16. These families return to the place every year, with some parents continuing a tradition they entered themselves as children decades earlier. For this kind of English holiday destination, though fairly homogeneous in comparison to the typical metropolitan mix of ethnicities, this is a very mixed bunch in terms of class, economic and professional backgrounds. In conversation, they appreciate its rough and ready simplicity and the opportunity to temporarily gather as a community of sorts, who, on the face of it, have very little in common. However, this history appeared to be drawing to a close. The owners of the farm, then in their seventies and needing to downscale, were planning to sell it off piecemeal at market rates, with regular visitors getting first call. But, given Cornwall's rising status as the second-home location of choice for the affluent from elsewhere in the country, very few of the families visiting that week could even contemplate the gigantic sums involved and so faced the loss of this amenity.