Mr Bell, the outgoing chief executive of Visit Cornwall, is under fire for bemoaning “f***ing emmets” – an antiquated term meaning ‘ants’ – during an interview offering his thoughts on the future of the county’s tourism industry.
“In my mind, visitors fall into five unofficial categories,” Mr Bell said. “At one level you have friends, then you have guests, then you have tourists, then you have bloody tourists, then you have f***ing emmets. You can quote me on that.
A county and more the other side of the Tamar we call them “grockles”. Same problem.
Only solution we’ve ever come up with tho’ is to reassure ourselves that at least they’ve not Welsh.
The rest of the UK owes a great debt of gratitude to the people of Devon for separating us from the English Welshmen.
50 years ago at university I asked a friend from the SW whether he called tourists emmets or grockles. His reply was neither, we call them haemorrhoids because they’re inflamed red in colour and a pain in the arse.
That’s interesting.
I always that grockles were just the ones with caravans.
Although I expect that there is a fruitier term for them.
In Dorset we’re equal opportunity. They’re either emmets or grockles.
In Guernsey they’re grockles.
What would drive the Cornish economy if not tourism?
In the Isle of Wight they’re Overners (cos they come over the Solent).
In Cornwall we call emmetts with caravans shed-draggers
Cornwall hasn’t changed since I was last there (’76), then. Screwing every coin they can out of the punters & whining as they do it. I’ll never forget the house we rented. It was during the drought & the farm had a pumped well supply. So they cut off the water supply to the house to benefit their horses. Didn’t find that out until we’d got there. It was grubby from the previous visitors. Lucky we’d brought sheets. No way to wash those on the beds, no way to clean up. Couldn’t cook, even make a cup of tea.
Cornwall? You can keep it.
@Bloke in Spain
Never a good idea to make generalisations about tens of thousands of people from a limited experience some time ago!