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When the family headed off for lunch with Grandpa Joe on Sunday, I settled down to a rare child-free day of work. I turned on the laptop, summoned up the demons that power the interweb, and poised the two fingers over the quivering keys.

Nothing. Nada. No broadband. Again. A-fucking-gain. I could barely muster the will to draw breath, let alone phone British Telecom to await the pleasure of the appalling uselessness of the line provider we all have no choice but to share, the national scandalous disgrace that is BT Open Reach.

(Line fault, I was subsequently told. Actually, it wasn’t. Line flickered on and off all day until this morning, and has been on since. I don’t know what was going on, but more to the point, neither did British Telecom and you can bet your entire family that BT Open Reach didn’t know and didn’t care. Christ.)

Anyway, Sunday. So I thought I’d make myself useful and head out to the garden.

Now, we have temporary custody of my father’s dachshund while he recovers from a hospital visit.

My collie, like many collies, prefers privacy and seclusion for her ablutions, and will go to the loo in the garden only as a last resort.

The dachshund, on the other hand, seems to do little else but go to the loo in my garden.

So for my first job I collected dachshund droppings and ladled them carefully into an old plant pot. It is quite extraordinary how much one tiny dog can produce. I left this to one side while I walked to the bottom of our field and laboriously dug a big hole, into which I proposed to insert the dachshund’s doings, which would then be buried.

The second I stepped out of the door, of course, there had been a cataclysmic clap of thunder and a bolt of lightning, and the ensuing labour, carried out throughout in front of a miserable dachshund and a miserable collie glowering at me from under the apple trees, was conducted in a downpour.

I returned from the bottom of the field, collected my plant pot full of shit, and headed squelchily and smellily back to the grave I had prepared.

It was still raining and conditions underfoot were very swampy. So yes, of course: to a crisp comedy drumroll-and-cymbal-clash and the sad honk of a clown’s klaxon horn, my wellies shot out from under me and I plunged face first into the mud, scattering dachshund droppings over a wide zone. Looking up, I swear both dogs had a paw held in front of their mouth and shaking shoulders.

At this point, I went to the pub. Actually, first I showered to get rid of the stink of dachshund. Then I went to the pub.

Minority report

So the Cornish are a cultural minority. And what does this change for those of us who live in Cornwall? Nothing.

Will it bring more money to our cash-strapped local council so it can fix the lousy roads? No. Will it get superfast broadband into every home, even mine? No. Will it subsidise rural businesses – pubs, shops – to assist their survival? No. Will it ensure our majority of rural primary schools with low pupil numbers can operate on an equal financial playing field? No. Will it mean the diversion of some of the HS2 billions to improve our rail services? No. Will we have more public transport? No.

It’s lovely that some suits in Westminster agree that Cornish people have an ethnicity as different and as important as the Scots and the Welsh. The trouble is, those of us who live here have known that for centuries. We don’t need a suit’s agreement to know that Cornwall’s culture, countryside, traditions, language, arts, accent, approach are different.

It’s a very English thing to need official sanction, to require a bureaucratic statement. It’s not very Cornish at all.

But I’m not entirely unimpressed. I like difference; difference is what makes life interesting. I used to like travelling because of the different sights and sounds, I used to love having to change currency, I used to love the little drama of showing your passport at the border of a new country where food, music, clothes, culture would all be different.

Now that we live in the bland homogenised world of a corporate suit’s wet dreams – the same products, the same food, the same values, the same movies – having somebody recognise the difference of Cornwall, and agree that it’s worth preserving that difference, has great value.

Jamaica mumblemumblemumble 

Funny that in the same week London finally agreed the Cornish mattered, the young, affluent Oxbridge arts students who populate the BBC drama department gave us something which thought the Cornish mattered so little it wasn’t even worth hearing them.

I didn’t mind the poor soundtrack and the mumbling. Given that the visual aspect of Jamaica Inn plumbed every cliché in the book and then some more, I imagine the dialogue was just as dull.

BBC2 has been looking back at some of its highlights from decades of broadcasting and it’s made me think with awe of what this country has in its archives. What a rich, wonderful heritage of the most outstanding television drama! Poliakoff, Our Friends in the North, Bleasdale… And now? Now we have big-budget soap opera (The Crimson Field) or endless remakes (Jamaica Inn) which offer nothing new, or crime soaps (choose any one of a million new dramas, all of which, by law, now have to feature policemen or women, crimes, murders and misery).

Mucho macho 

Jamaica Inn seemed to feature a lot of macho posturing from the few scenes I saw. How our Government must have loved it. The lying liar Iain Duncan Smith, with no sense of how ridiculous he looks, is posturing in as macho a fashion as he can manage as he sends the long-term unemployed out to sweep the streets in return for their benefits.

We can afford to send the Duchess of Cambridge and her lovely frocks to Australia; we can afford to wage wars in foreign countries; we can afford to spend the country’s money telling the Scots how to vote in their independence referendum; we can afford tax cuts for top earners; we can afford to pay barristers to fight the European Community in order to protect bankers’ rights to earn large bonuses; we can afford to lose millions and millions selling the Royal Mail to our Cabinet’s business chums; but we can’t afford to pay to keep our streets clean or our war memorials polished or our walls graffiti-free.

What a revealing set of priorities from a Government so dim it doesn’t realise that with nice surroundings and decent earnings come self-respect, dignity and improvement; with unrewarded, unmotivated toil come anger, frustration, envy and a very, very poor standard of work.

Talking of a very, very poor standard of work, at least it enables Iain Duncan Smith to pretend he’s tough and useful, which, given what a useless lying loser of a failure political history shows he has been, must count as a compassionate act. More compassion than he’s likely to show anybody, admittedly, but who wants to stoop to his level?