I HAVE just been to a place so weird and wonderful that returning home from it is like waking from a particularly lucid and unbelievable dream.

You have probably heard of it, and you may even have visited it yourself. It’s called Cornwall.

Centuries ago, when British people were trying to think up names for places in our fair islands, they tried to warn us about Cornwall.

Whereas counties usually have ‘shire’ on the ends of their names, which is an old Saxon word for ‘normal’, things slowly become less familiar as you venture south-westward, Wiltshire being the last outpost of complete normality.

After dodgy Dorset or surreal Somerset, you pass through devilish Devon and then you reach the edge of the world, or Bodmin as it is often marked on maps. Beyond it lies deepest Cornwall.

We all know there are essentially three types of community in Britain. There are urban types and rural types, but no matter how strange the people in these two categories get, they are always comparatively bog-standard compared with those who live by the sea.

On the coast and especially in Cornwall they have a tendency for wearing thick jumpers, smoking pipes and growing beards – and that’s only the ladies – but worst of all is their willingness to try to earn a living by venturing out to sea, which any land-lubber knows is a special kind of madness.

With more than 19,000 miles of coastline there is plenty of potential for such people to exist in the UK, but even the most eccentric coastal dwellers are common-all-garden compared with their Cornish cousins.

Whereas most coastal communities have adapted to become sea-farers, in Cornwall I believe they evolved from sea creatures, so if you have Cornish ancestry, then I am sure that at some time in your family history, one of your kin walked out of the sea and up on to the beach.

If you have been to Cornwall in the summer you will have noticed that while visitors are often seen peeling off their clothing, the locals never do. Not even the young girls.

This is because, somewhere under all those layers of clothing, they still have traces of gills and scales that they don’t want us to see.

If they were to take off their boots, you would see that they still have the remnants of webbed feet and flippers.

I came up with all these theories on the last evening of a week-long winter break at St Ives.

It was the night for testing the town’s lifeboat and training up the latest, in an endless supply of otherwise normal, young local men who queue up to man it.

There are few things more impressive in the whole of humanity than a lifeboat and its crew, and as I watched them in the cold wind and the drizzle, I could think of nothing more alien, and which I would like to do less than climb on board and join them as they ventured through and beyond the piers, into the terrifying darkness.

Perhaps because I was born and brought up so far from it, I find the sea endlessly fascinating, even if I have absolutely no desire to be in it, on it or even to eat anything that comes out of it.

Some people say that whenever they are called out on an emergency, the men of the RNLI are heroic, but that’s wrong.

In my book, just volunteering for a training exercise is an act of supreme heroism.

So - joking apart - if you have so much as a single drop of Cornish blood in you, I take my hat off to you, my lovely.